First email, then biotech? Are our technologies hostage to the few? Good piece from the MIT Technology Review on spam. Apart from the stuff we know — that hackers have created computer worms and viruses that break into computers and then turn those compromised machines into launching pads for spam — there are some other … Read more
The problem with spam filters that work on the server level is that you end up missing literary gems. I was pretty excited when I found out a few weeks back that spammers were using literary works in their subject fields. I wrote a few weeks back in the Far Eastern Economic Review (sorry, subscription only; … Read more
As feared, MyDoom seems to come from Russia. Or does it? The Moscow Times quotes Kaspersky Labs as saying they used location-sensing software to trace the first e-mails infected with MyDoom back to addresses with Russian Internet providers. “It’s scary, but most serious viruses are written in Russia,” said Denis Zenkov, spokesman for Kaspersky, the … Read more
This is likely to be the last exchange on Plaxo: Hopefully some of the issues that have concerned me and readers have been cleared up by this and other recent posts. Plaxo have kindly added a comment in reply to my posting on how to avoid Plaxo, in which they’ve pointed out that they have … Read more
Queue trumpets. The security software folk have started congratulating themselves for saving us from MyDoom. Here’s DeepNines Technologies, “the only company to offer a security platform that includes firewall, intrusion prevention and gateway anti-virus functionality in front of the router”, which says: “Companies that have Sleuth9 deployed in front of the router, are finding that … Read more