Daily Archives: February 13, 2004

Visual Spoofing And The Art of The Sting

Here’s a potential scam that raises the bar — and alarum bells — for everyone. It’s already got a name: Visual Spoofing. It works like this (I think): Instead of ne’er-do-wells concealing addresses to make you think you’re at a legit website (say your bank, or PayPal) rather than at their sleazy password-grabbing site —… Read More »

Subject Fields – A Way To Foil Spam?

What to put in the Subject field these days to avoid spam filters? Clive of collision detection (who, incidentally, wrote a first class piece about European virus writers for the NYT) points out that the spam “battle has now claimed its first linguistic casualty. It occurred to me yesterday that you can no longer send… Read More »

This week’s column – Wikipedia

This week’s Loose Wire column is about Wikipedia: Wouldn’t it be great if there was a place on the Internet where educated folk pooled their knowledge for nothing, conscientiously building up a huge, orderly and free database on subjects as varied as wind gradients and the yellow-wattled lapwing? Actually, it’s already happened. It’s an on-line… Read More »

‘Say ‘Five’ After The Tone If You Want To Curse One Of Our Customer Service Computers’

The good news: We don’t have to use those silly touch-tone menus anymore when we call our friendly utility. Now we can speak to a real computer. A report by Chartwell, an industry research service, says that more and more utilities “are implementing or investigating speech recognition for their interactive voice response units, and advocates say… Read More »

Windows’ Gaping, Seven Month Hole

Quite a big hooha over this latest Microsoft vulnerability, and I readily ‘fess up to the fact that I didn’t really take this seriously. Seems like I wasn’t the only one. But folk like Shawna McAlearney of SearchSecurity.com points out that the delay of 200 days between Microsoft being notified and their coming out with… Read More »