Michael Gracie

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of the venerable Daily Kos blog, is pleading with his followers: Don’t spam me, please.

I am not sure if this is self-aggrandization or what, but..

If I was an infamous political blogger getting hammered by email from people looking for money and favors, just a few weeks before an election, the last thing I would do is beg for mercy on the internet.

PS: You have to love the whole “irrelevant crap” bit too.

UPDATE: Almost forgot - I did like his book, but, didn’t I say you’d have a hard time controlling the crew?

Rather than ignore a court ruling that requires they lay down, Spamhaus has decided to fight back in court.

They are appealing the $11.7 million judgement by an Illinois court against them, threat of domain name seizure notwithstanding.

I hope they just raised some money - it is going to cost them at least $11.7 million to fight this with whatever U.S. lawyers they just hired.

Bob Sullivan imagines the day..

Someday a stranger will read your e-mail, rummage through your instant messages without your permission or scan the Web sites you%u2019ve visited %u2014 maybe even find out that you read this story.

As if that isn’t already happening. Of course, the whole “political consultant might select you for special attention based on personal data purchased from a vendor” part really makes me cringe.

Or maybe that’s bring email to a screaching halt, depending on your perspective. A Slashdotter notes the sheer enormity of the spam that Spamhaus blacklists block, and even if the estimates are overblown this will make an interesting case study.

My personal email address targets roughly a dozen lists, and many others are probably in the same boat. But imagine a big one like Spamhaus’s falling - that would certainly shift the burden to others.

The spammers may wind up getting what they don’t want, no email at all. Unfortunately, consumers get the worst deal - either no email whatsoever, or a flood of biblical proportions.

The most secure browser is still as weak as the operating system it runs on (or something like that).

All Web browsers are insecure to some degree, though, because they all must work with flawed code in the operating systems. There are some indications of progress, such as frequent patches from Microsoft and Mozilla to close security holes. Still, these actions may be too little too late if a zero-day exploit is the attack weapon.

I think you still have choices, as some browsers are more prone to hammering than others. Firefox doesn’t get it like IE, and Safari gets it even less. Still, some argue that certain browsers are simply built better. Anyone have an answer for that?
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Phishers were headed the smart route, attacking financial institution customers. I guess they’ve either been unsuccessful or just gotten board. Now, they are chasing teen gossip by phishing on MySpace.

Boy I am glad I’m not there.

Joe Budzinski noted he had to take “draconian” measures to block comment spam on his weblog.

I’d hardly call keyword blocking “cool site” draconian, but I even missed that one myself. I’m going to miss all the compliments though.

Brian Krebs note that no soon had Microsoft issued a record 26 security patches, then hackers decided to call the company out on a few others.

Yes, it is a game of cat and mouse. But when the low blow is a flaw in Powerpoint, I’d say the bad guys are running out of ammunition.

CIO News Alerts noted Google’s Blogger service was hit by an outage.

Yea, Google’s blog was hacked, and someone posted a message that they had to remove. Now living in the world of free software, they say shit happens (and it happens a lot). So every now and then you need to patch stuff - I suspect that was what Google was doing, so it didn’t happen again.

But, to the outside world it is big news, an outage. Bloggers loose perspective:

Mark Nolan began using Blogger to host a personal blog about soccer about two months ago, and is disappointed with the platform’s reliability so far. “This isn’t what you’d expect from an operation like Google. It’s embarrassing in my opinion,” Nolan said in a phone interview.

If the availability problems persist on Blogger, Nolan will consider switching the blog to another platform.

Nolan, who lives in Manchester, United Kingdom, and posts under the pseudonym James Ryddel in the soccer blog, hosts other websites he publishes with British providers.

Although all hosting providers experience downtime, the Blogger situation is reaching unacceptable levels, said Nolan, who works as director of TXT Media. “Google should concentrate on improving Blogger’s reliability and not on adding new features,” Nolan said.

I say Google should start concentrating all right - on specifically charging Mr. Nolan hard currency for use of their service.

That is the question eWeek asks, as Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child project swings into high gear (despite the objections of one wealthy purveyor of perpetually insecure products).

The answer is half in-hand already..

Half the crap on the internet is useless for this project, who’s objective is getting information into the hands of those who could greatly benefit from it. The machines are already using a hardened Linux version which blocks random code execution and memory writes. And the machines will be open, meaning user ids and passwords are a non-issue as well.

I think the biggest challenge here will be physical, not technical, security. How long until these things are being stolen and sold on the black market?