July 2009
57 posts
Emails From Crazy People →
A new site from the folks behind fail blog, collecting and presenting crazy emails. I’m sure you have a few….
Washington Post Security Fix: Weaponizing Web 2.0 →
“Imagine simply visiting a Web forum and finding that doing so forced your browser to post an embarrassing Twitter message to all of your contacts, or caused you to admit a stranger to your online social network. Now consider the same dynamic being used to move money out of your online auction account or delete the contents of your e-mail inbox.”
Consumerist: Company Apologizes, Hilariously, For... →
“If this bugs you and you don’t like being referred to as *|FNAME|*, you can unsubscribe, because we totally *|COMPASSION_WORD|*.”
Washington Post Security Fix: Network Solutions... →
“Hackers have broken into Web servers owned by domain registrar and hosting provider Network Solutions, planting rogue code that resulted in the compromise of more than 573,000 debit and credit card accounts over the past three months….”
Deliverability.com: Respect in email →
“Would you call up a prospect EVERY single day and pitch them over the phone. Better yet..would you do it to a friend? Would you call them up 3 days a week to sell them something?”
The Scrappy Email Marketer: e-Blast Subscribers... →
“I am not your e-Blast subscriber. I am a human being who just so happens to subscribe to your email.”
Return Path: DKIM: Not Shiny, But Very Important →
“Why would I want that? My 8-track player still works perfectly.”
Internet Evolution: Beyond Censorware: Teaching... →
Cory Doctorow discusses teaching kids to keep themselves safe online, rather than trying (and failing) to hide the bad stuff from them forever.
Anti-Social Twitter Marketing Practices & San...
I live in Denver, and don’t mind saying so. A few weeks ago, though, I removed Denver from my personal Twitter account’s profile because I was tired of being followed by Denver newspapers I don’t read or TV stations I don’t watch. It’s pretty clear that they were following the bad advice of self-proclaimed Twitter marketing experts by following a lot of random...
Persona Prime: how to make your data useless –... →
“As much as you might be annoyed by their inclusive disgruntled nature. It is there for a reason. The only generation that has been marketed to more is the next one.”
Boing Boing: Flashback to 1933: US ad industry... →
“[Hitler] has depended almost entirely upon slogans made effective by reiteration, made general by American advertising methods…[S]logans on billboards and newspapers and in publications of national circulation have made a new Germany which has raised much excitement, made many changes.”
Obviously, Germany has changed dramatically since then. Has the U.S. advertising industry?
Apptism: Amazing Girlfriend Manager →
“With this application you can improve your relationships by applying concepts of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) on your girlfriends. Think about your girlfriend as a client! What information and tools you need to improve your relationship?”
How would your sweetie feel about being “managed” like this?
Do you think your clients feel any different?
All Things Digital: Yahoo to Acquire Xoopit for... →
“…sources said it was a done deal to buy the San Francisco-based social email start-up that finds photos, video, links and other files in email, so users can surface and then share them on many sites. [Xoopit] also has other products that essentially enliven email.”
paidContent.org: MySpace Mail Slated To Launch... →
‘The…social network…will give [its users] their own [email] addresses “@myspace.com”….’
No details yet on whether they’ll follow the traditional email model where anyone can send mail to anyone, or apply the social messaging model where recipients only see mail from their friends.
SearchFinancialSecurity: Proposed expansion of... →
“Financial industry representatives have argued, in their filings with ICANN, that financial-related gTLDs — if created without necessary security — would produce a false sense of security to financial customers. They also said such gTLDs could lead to consumer confusion and more fraud while making it nearly cost prohibitive for financial institutions to protect their brand and...
One Degree: Where Oh Where Have Your Manners... →
‘My first thought was “I don’t know any Nick Longo”. My second thought was “How did this person get my email address?”’
TechCrunch: The Anatomy Of The Twitter Attack →
“This post isn’t about the confidential information taken from Twitter. It’s about exactly how Hacker Croll was able to get such deep access to Twitter in the first place.”
Seth's Blog: Walter's lesson →
“At every turn, [Walter Cronkite] acted as if he had a responsibility to his audience. He didn’t do the right thing because he thought it would help him get ahead and then one day he’d get his share. Instead, he always did the right thing because that’s who he was.”
Evgeny Morozov in the New York Times: The 0s and... →
“Yet for all the brouhaha, no classified information was lost, no significant economic damage was done, and no new cyberweapons were deployed (the virus that made the attack possible was discovered in 2004).
The theory that the attacks were launched from North Korea, advanced by some South Korean media and politicians, has not been confirmed. In fact, the amount of effort expended trying to...
Return Path: MAAWG Consumer Survey: Deeper in the... →
“To read the press and blog response, it sounds like they’ve concluded that spam is a complete success and everyone should start spamming to get rich — but…the data tells a much richer story than a 140-character Twitter paraphrase of the press release ever could.”
Computerworld: Stupid users respond to spam?... →
Richi Jennings watches as bloggers and journalists “feign shock and horror that people are a bit dim sometimes” in response to MAAWG’s latest paper, which doesn’t say what a lot of people appear to think it says.
ExactTarget: Annoying Consumers with Too Many... →
‘When one interviewee was asked if he had ever signed up to receive email newsletters he responded, “Yes, and I usually regret it.”’
(It all starts with thinking of them as “consumers” rather than fellow human beings.)
TechCrunch: Another Security Tip For Twitter:... →
you laugh, but…are you sure you don’t have equally bad passwords in important places in your network?
Twitter Blog: Twitter, Even More Open Than We... →
“About a month ago, an administrative employee here at Twitter was targeted and her personal email account was hacked. From the personal account, we believe the hacker was able to gain information which allowed access to this employee’s Google Apps account which contained Docs, Calendars, and other Google Apps Twitter relies on for sharing notes, spreadsheets, ideas, financial details...
The Email Wars: How Many Inboxes Do You Have →
“…as a marketer do I need to know and have access to all of these? Nope, you just need access to the right ones where people have asked to hear from you at.”
Seth's Blog: The CPM gap →
“As long as your site is about something else and the ads are a distraction, you’ll see CPM rates drop. As soon as you (or the advertisers) figure out that creating online communities aligned with the advertising, where attendance is a choice by the consumer, then you’re creating genuine value.”
New York Times: The Paradox of Privacy →
“While attitudes toward privacy can appear paradoxical, the seeming contradiction is really about something else: control. When people bare their bodies on Facebook or their souls in the digital confessional of Google’s search engine, they feel as if they are in charge. Not so, when the private embarrassments come to light unexpectedly.”
(via pogowasright)
CDT PolicyBeta: Yahoo! protects user privacy — and... →
“The court…found that the availability of Yahoo! Mail to Belgian residents, combined with what it believed to be the use of Mail in connection with criminal purposes within Belgium, was sufficient to find that Yahoo!…was subject to Belgian laws, and thus in violation of a telecommunications statute that compelled disclosure of the requested data.”
VentureBeat: Has enterprise software always been... →
“…the tools that we use at home for productivity, for communication, and for social networking are suddenly so much better than what we use at work. And that, in turn, means companies and their employees are demanding better products at work.”
Washington Post Security Fix: Stopgap Fix for... →
in about:config, set javascript.options.jit.content to false.
Meetup HQ: Marcia, Marcia, Marcia the Spambot... →
“Most folks on Meetup are totally real, super awesome people. But every now and again, a spammer sneaks into the mix. Which is what happened this weekend.”
Gizmodo: The North Korea Cyberattack Aftermath: We... →
“…the U.S. Government ignored the attack warnings and has admitted that they didn’t handle the successful Distributed Denial of Service attacks properly. They assumed our defenses were going to work perfectly against a bunch of North Korean bozos. They were wrong….”
These are the exact same denial of service techniques that spammers & such launch against ISPs...
A VC: The Fine Line Between Informing and Spamming... →
Twitter is a hyperactive distillation of the problems we’ve been dealing with in email — and, indeed, in the American culture of advertising uber alles.
Consumerist: Dramatically Reduce Junk Mail in 3... →
Links to the leading legitimate sites that help you opt out of paper spam.
(I’m still hoping the green movement will take on making paper spam fully opt-in, to reduce the amount of often unrecyclable waste paper.)
InfoWorld: Twitter suspends accounts of users with... →
“The malware, Koobface, is designed to spread itself by checking to see if person is logged into a social network. It will then post fraudulent messages on the person’s Twitter account trying to entice friends to click the link, which then leads to a malicious Web site that tries to infect the PC.”
(via fergdawg, who calls it “a step in the right direction”)
Mickey Chandler's Spamtacular: The Email... →
Mickey explains the deeply damaging mistake inherent in assumptions such as ‘There are tens of thousands of people in our database with whom we communicate and who clearly want to receive our mailings, as the number of people who “opt out” or “unsubscribe” is quite small.’
Also, Laura piles on.
Pogo Was Right: Consumer activism produces... →
Update to the story linked from Box of Meat earlier: the iDrive Lite developers respond “…if we were to implement this now, we would do this differently and entirely get rid of the referral part…. Also, this referral was run only for a few users, and has been stopped.”
Hooray! Someone learned from their mistake! Now, how do we make sure everyone else learns from that...
Consumerist: Warning, iDrive Lite Spams All Your... →
“Don’t install the iPhone app iDrive Lite if you value the privacy of your contact list.”
Or other data, presumably.
ABC News: Tagged.com Under Scrutiny by New York... →
“…the New York attorney general’s office says the site did more than just annoy the e-mail recipients: The office is investigating claims the company stole personal contact information from millions of unsuspecting people.”
More from Time and the NY AG; see also Tagged’s response.
I suspect that the core of this will be the vast difference between pre-checked...
Washington Post Security Fix: PCs Used in Korean... →
“New evidence suggests that the malicious code responsible for spreading this attack includes instructions to overwrite the infected PC’s hard drive.”
Well, that’s one way to get people to upgrade.
techPresident: Weekend-Long Cyber Attack Targets... →
“…distributed denial-of-service attacks were launched against dozens of major American websites, including those of the White House, State Department, Nasdaq, New York Stock Exchange, Federal Trade Commission, Secret Service, Department of Transportation, and the Washington Post.”
Journal of Neurosurgery: Neurosecurity: security... →
“An increasing number of neural implantable devices will become available in the near future due to advances in neural engineering. …The use of standard engineering practices, medical trials, and neuroethical evaluations during the design process can create systems that are safe and that follow ethical guidelines; unfortunately, none of these disciplines currently ensure that neural...
Wisconsin State Journal: Madison locksmiths fight... →
“A battle between the established locksmiths of Madison and a brash new locksmith company that uses many names and several phony addresses, is being fought on the Internet and via dueling complaints. It has driven one small business to near bankruptcy and it has also caused a push by long-established businesses to license locksmiths in the state.
For consumers, it has exposed a confusing...
Deliverability.com: Stop sending email....... →
John R. Levine: Three myths about DKIM →
John debunks three of the biggest:
A DKIM signature means a message isn’t spam
A DKIM signature means the header information is “real”
DKIM doesn’t work with mailing lists
Seth's Blog: What should I do on your birthday? →
“…the idea of sending people cards and presents on their birthday seems both selfish and small-minded. It seems to me that we could think bigger.”
Boxes of meat, perhaps?
Actually, Seth has some good ideas.
Zbot Trojan is Harvesting FTP Credentials From... →
“…the ZBot Trojan harvested the FTP credentials of over 68,000 websites including Bank of America, the BBC, Amazon, Cisco, Monster.com and most of the major anti-spam software makers…within the past 2 weeks and most are still valid.”
Why is anyone still using the FTP protocol for anything important? The security limitations have been fully understood for decades, and...
Jack Goldsmith in the New York Times: Defend... →
“…the private sector owns and controls most of the networks the government must protect. …the firms that build and run computer and communications networks focus on increasing profits, not protecting national security. They invest in levels of safety that satisfy their own purposes, and tend not to worry when they contribute to insecure networks that jeopardize national security....