Michael Gracie

Safe mode is the solution every computer technician tells you to employ right after you started deleting, just for shits and giggles, arbitrary lines in your Windows system registry. It lets you boot minimal features so you can fix your mistakes. It used to be a good avenue for cleaning pesky bugs too, but that “window” is shutting quickly.

Spammers are thwarting filters by putting their target email addresses in the sender line, and pushing the emails to invalid addresses, according to The Register.

I’ve received about a half dozen bounced messages that may be related, and recollect they were coming from Postfix servers. If you see one, you will notice all the generic “this is a message from the Postfix server” bit, and the “returned” spam message will be at the very bottom.

I’ll post a sample here next time one comes my way.

PS: Yes, that title needs work.

You’ve heard it numerous times (and more than once at Spamroll too) - a laptop full of personal data was just stolen. It is just plain ridiculous.

Laptops are hardly the place to store hundreds of thousands of sensitive records, and leaving said laptop in a parked car, on table in a crowded coffee shop, or on a pedestal in the middle of Penn Station, doesn’t help. Laptop theft is a growing trend. And all the locks and alarms and other security gadgets aren’t going to alleviate the biggest issue with laptop theft - the carelessness stupidity of the laptop owner.

The Data Accountability and Trust Act could be going to a House vote soon.

Somehow, someway, I smell “CAN-SPAM 2,” only much more serious. The legislation provides for consumer notice in the event of a breach, but only if there is “reasonable risk of identity theft to the individual to whom the personal information relates, fraud or other lawful conduct.”

First, who the hell determines what a “reasonable risk” is? The FTC, after a breach? Second, consumers would be allowed access to their data, and a chance to correct inaccurate information. Isn’t that issue covered by the Fair Credit Reporting Act already?

The problem with notice is the speed in which it is executed. If data brokers had statutory liability for each breach, say tied to actual damages their breach caused, plus mitigation costs, they would spend a lot more money on internal security procedures, and be a lot more likely to notify affected consumers with speed and efficiency.

Right now, it sounds like they are being given incentives to cooperated with some governmental body, which thereby covers their own butts. And not much more.
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The Symbian part means phones like the Nokia 6682 I’m holding in my hand. The flexible part means the grip you have on it. If it is really flexible, someone could take that phone, install a spy program on it, and track all your mobile activity. FlexiSpy is being touted as a “tool to monitor kids and unfaithful spouses”, while F-Secure says it is a trojan plain and simple. Of course the company distributing the program denies the trojan label..

“FlexiSpy requires to be consciously installed and configured by someone, unlike a Virus or Trojan which spreads automatically without any action.”

Purposefully installing a keylogger on someone else’s computer is illegal, it is not? Technically a trojan or not, this sounds no different.
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A successful spammer can eat lots of fines and settlements, the magnitude of which may be subject to debate. But I would be hard pressed to find someone that disagrees with this: getting pushed into a supermax prison for spam related activities (notwithstanding attempting to arrange having a witness snuffed out) has got to be a disincentive to spam.

Any takers?

I thought I was dead, and looking down at myself reading the laptop screen. There is a pretty carefully crafted post on US economic uncertainties lying here - it almost seems out of place. Even the comments are uncharacteristic, and I have to say I agree with most of it.

Debt at all levels, no savings. And funky numbers being reported everywhere.

These issues are not going to just disappear, and I’d be hard pressed to think it can just be “worked out.” The problems run deeper than even the face value numbers suggest.

As for solutions, well that is anyone’s guess. But if you could encapsulate the situation into a corporate entity, I might start by taking a walk down to US Bankruptcy Court (and hopefully I was doing some business in New York so I could file in the Southern District).

While one guy was insinuating that network neutrality was going the way of the horsedrawn carriage, in the wrong forum at that, another was saying bandwidth utlization from apps like P2P was not really a big a deal right now.

Quest CTO Peter Poll noted:

“I… found that the traffic is well under what some in that industry say is happening. I mean, you hear claims of significant double-digit penetration of peer-to-peer traffic, and it was not near there.”

Some will pass this off as a stray in the “we just can’t recover our costs” argument.

I say so much for unity in the bullshitting department.

..when you hear news like this.

I don’t suspect that someone with a 10,000+ positive rating at eBay would ever fall for a phishing exploit, but you never know. Someone did, and the pilfered account information was being hocked on a Russian website. Sunbelt found the site, and eBay got it knocked down. According to an eBay spokesperson, nobody knows how many accounts may have been misused - that generally means nobody’s talking.