Slate: What's "Port 25," and what does it have to do with e-mail spam?
Seth's Blog: The statesman, the lawyer and the marketer -
Is a marketer’s job always to promote their product, no matter how much damage it does to society?
“This attitude leads to spam (hey, it’s not against the law and it helps my client) and to dicey product claims and to awful side effects like obesity, shoddy products and massive debt. If your job is to represent a product and ensure its short-term sales, that’s exactly what you’re sworn to do.
…What happens when marketers stop arguing on behalf of their corporate or organizational client and start arguing on behalf of the customer instead? What happens when marketers become statesmen?”
— your non-anonoymous pal J.D.
Intellectual Intercourse: ESPC: Simplicity is so complicated -
Trevor Hughes of the ESPC is earning his lobbying paycheck by insisting that the new CAN-SPAM rules are bad because they make it too easy to unsubscribe.
It’s a shame there’s no money in lobbying for the recipient.
Washington Post Security Fix: Amazon: Hey Spammers, Get Off My Cloud! -
Amazon’s EC2 is a new favorite with spammers, who enjoy the computing power and anonymity.
Question: why is Amazon allowing outbound SMTP connections from the cloud in the first place?
Washington Post Security Fix: Forty Percent of Web Users Surf With Unsafe Browsers - “…researchers from Google, IBM and the Communication Systems Group in Switzerland…found that of the 1.4 billion Internet users worldwide at the end of March 2008, 576 million surfed with outdated versions of Web browsers.”
“This drawing was made for the centerfold of the Vancouver Review, and is created verbatim from a spam email (you know the kind).”
(via metafilter, which has some interesting comments)
Return Path: MAAWG's Latest Documents Improve Accuracy of Reputation Systems - J.D. explains what MAAWG’s freshly documented best common practices actually mean for email
ZDnet: ICANN and IANA’s domains hijacked by Turkish hacking group -
“The official domains of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority were hijacked earlier today…”
David Cawley explains how this attack could used for bad email, too.
Freakonomics (New York Times): Why Do You Lie? The Perils of Self-Reporting - “Not only does it deliver a surprising insight into why we lie, but it is also a sobering reminder to naturally distrust self-reported data…”