Michael Gracie

Here’s a nice post on how to thwart email harvesting. Most of the suggestions revolve around using images in place of text address, obfuscating addresses, using forms in place of text and links…you know the drill.

I take a more simplistic view - don’t post email address at all.

Email is turning into a pretty ineffective form of communication, if for no other reason than you transfer the value of the communication to the recipient (meaning they reply when they want to, if they even want to). The fact that email has such a low variable cost makes the proposition even more one sided.

How about picking up the phone instead?

Here’s another view of stock spam, with some nice detail on the who’s, what’s and why’s of CANA Petroleum.

You know CANA - its the company you’ve been receiving all those reports on lately (or at least I have).
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Some think the firewall provider is ripe to be acquired.

Thoughts?

Not really, but that was a pretty catchy header, eh?

No real surprises - the US is still ranked numero uno in spam relaying.

China still can’t touch us. Ha!

Either people are getting dumber, or phishers are getting smarter - phishing losses grew to $28 billion during 2006.

The average loss per scam grew roughly 500%, so I am going to guess targeted (or “spear phishing”) is the reason.
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Spam levels are up by roughly 80% over the past few months, and experts say don’t worry. It is only going to get worse.

All I can say is that I have been receiving increasing levels of stock spam, all plain text with a simple “hi” subject line. It usually comes in bundles, all promoting the same dead issue.

If it isn’t going to stop, so be it. Maybe I’ll find a gem in the rough for my portfolio.
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I didn’t see any, but it was supposedly a problem. Political spam, that is.

Guess my filters still work. Good.

They posted some videos to their group blog, infected with the Kama Sutra worm.

At least they are having fun.

Zango (formerly 180Solutions), the spyware distributor on everyones mind now that they are sneaking around MySpace and YouTube, has settled for a purported $3 million.

Drop in the bucket, or precursor to another reformation/restructuring…renaming?

So they asked the court if they could peruse the claimant’s hard drive.

Only problem - the emails in question were from Yahoo and Hotmail webmail services.

Maybe they should subpoena those hard drives.

UPDATE: According to Techdirt, the litigant did have to hand over the hard drive.