It’ll Soon Be Firewall Day

By | November 24, 2011
0 Comment

This Thursday, in case you didn’t know, Personal Firewall Day. I was pretty excited about the idea too until I realised there were no parades and opportunities to dress up. Still, it’s a great way of trying to persuade people that having a firewall in place on your computer is no longer a luxury, or something that nerdy types do. Everyone needs a firewall. ZoneLabs, who make probably the best (and free) firewall on the market, point out that

— Vast numbers of home and business computers are unprotected while on the Internet. In fact, many consumers upgraded to new computers over the holidays–they need to be quickly protected with the latest patches and security updates, or they’ll be vulnerable right out of the box.
— The FTC reports 9.9 million cases of identity theft in the U.S. last year, making it the fastest growing crime in America, affecting an estimated 500,000 to 700,000 people per year.

The bottom line is that it’s very easy to get infected — within seconds, literally, of connecting to the Internet — and it’s very hard to get uninfected. Future versions of WIndows — including the next XP ‘service pack’, which ships this year — will have a firewall activated by default, so this problem may not be around that long, but it pays to be safe.

Another Spamming Record

By | November 24, 2011
0 Comment

You’re probably getting bored of spam statistics by now, and I wouldn’t blame you. But here’s another milestone, courtesy of MessageLabs, who monitor this kind of thing: December was a new record, they say, for the ratio of spam to ordinary email. In that month, MessageLabs scanned some 463 million emails and found that 1 in every 1.6, or 62.7% of them, was spam. They don’t give a comparative figure, but their PR says that’s a new record.

Of course, it may just have been the holiday season, although spam this month shows no sign of easing up, either for that reason or for new laws. MessageLabs also do a breakdown by industry, to show which are most vulnerable to getting spam (useful, I guess, if you’re in those industries and you need to measure how big a problem it is for your staff). It turns out the public sector has the smallest problem — only 1 in every 3.65 emails your average civil servant gets is spam — whereas if you’re a healthcare worker, chances are that every 1 in 1.21 emails you get is junk. Go figure.

Here’s another weird statistic. MessageLabs also monitor viruses, and their figures seem to show that, depending on what country and sector you’re in, your chances of a getting an email vary wildly. In U.S. real estate? Relax, only 1 in 439 emails is going to be a virus. In the UK leisure and recreation industry? The likelihood rises to 1 in less than 50. Why would that be?

Bill’s Vision Of Our Home Future

By | November 24, 2011
0 Comment

Bill Gates gave his big speech at the 2004 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) yesterday, and there’s been plenty of commentary on it. Here’s a view from WinNetMag’s by Paul Thurrott, that helps explain why the computer is more likely this year to make its way out of the den and into the living room. It all revolves around the Media Center PC, a PC running a new version of XP that works as a kind of hub for all your other entertainment devices. (Yes I know this doesn’t sound new, but it seems more likely to happen this than before, apparently):

With a Media Center PC connected to a TV signal in the home office, you’ll soon be able to pump content to other devices around the home. These devices will include set-top boxes that look and act like stereo components and be able to connect to a home network through a wired or wireless connection, a new generation of portable media devices, shipping this year from several companies, playing music, running movies, downloaded material, that are “small enough to fit in your pocket, has a big enough screen to enjoy movies, and is about the same weight as a wallet”, according to one of the Microsoft guys.

As Paul points out, a lot of this could actually happen because Microsoft has involved a vast number of partners to build the machines, make content, sell the stuff to you, movie companies to make the specially formatted DVD movies you could download. Concludes Paul: “The level of cooperation Microsoft engenders with its partners stands in sharp contrast to the digital-hub strategies that some of the company’s competitors have proposed and highlights the true diversity and choices we expect from the PC industry. Seeing this business model coming to the consumer electronics industry is exciting. If Gates’s keynote address is any indication, 2004 is going to be a milestone year for home computing.”

I’m more conservative: I haven’t seen this stuff in action, and given past experience I’m not 100% convinced that folk can be persuaded to buy new hardware that is not compellingly better (folk will buy a DVD player because it’s clearly better than VHS; the same was true with CDs and vinyl; tape Walkmans and MP3.) But buying a lot of new hardware just so you can beam material from your PC to the rest of your house? Are we really going to do that? I’m skeptical, but ready to stand corrected.

The USB Pen

By | November 24, 2011
0 Comment

Not a bad idea this: A pen with a built-in USB drive. PNY Technologies have just launched a line of Executive Attaché ballpoint pens with attached USB 2.0 flash drives that hold up to 512 MB of stuff.

The pens look chunky — and very executive-looking, ‘made with -quality materials similar to those of high-end writing instruments’, and in colours ranging from blue and black marble to black and red herringbone to brushed silver — but not unpleasantly so. The USB bit is basically the top half of the pen, which when removed reveals the USB plug. They cost between $80 and $100.

No Sign Of Letup On Spam So Far

By | November 24, 2011
1 Comment

Unsurprisingly, the new U.S. anti-spam law has had no effect whatsoever.

Commtouch, a provider of anti-spam solutions, said it saw no significant change in the number of spam attacks in the first week of 2004, and that less than 1% of all bulk email complied with the new CAN-SPAM regulations.

Although Commtouch notes it is too early to tell, as spammers are still on holiday, I’ve noticed no slowdown at all. This is not unexpected, since most spammers operate outside the law – when was the last time you had a legitimate-looking junk email that was not trying to disguise itself?

But it’s not just the really sleazy guys still doing it. MX Logic, another anti-spam provider, looked at a random sample of over 1,000 unsolicited commercial emails during the course of a seven day period beginning New Year’s Day and found only three of the messages complied with the CAN-SPAM Act. “Calling this a high rate of non-compliance would be a gross understatement,” said Scott Chasin, MX Logic’s chief technology officer. “It is no surprise that rogue spammers would fail to comply, but the non-compliant messages we saw appeared to be from all types of companies.”

This could be just reputable (I use the term loosely) email marketers not getting up to speed on something that was only signed into law on December 16. If you are an email marketer and you do want to comply, here’s a checklist of what you should do, courtesy of Intermark Media, itself a an email marketer (the list is somewhat revealing to us normal folk, in that it shows what kind of tricks spammers tend to do to give the impression everything is hunky dory and that, at some point of personal weakness, we actually agreed to receive spam from them):

— Collect this information on every member of your opt-in database: IP address, date and time of opt-in, and source URL of sign-up.
— Be wary of any list managers who do not require this sensitive information from you as it is of crucial importance that all parties involved have it.
— Provide a clear opt-in process for the consumer.
— State your intentions in your privacy policy.
— Make your privacy policy easily accessible to the consumer.
— Upon receiving a customer’s permission to send offers you should notify them of their consent. This also allows the consumer to become double opt-in or unsubscribe from receiving any offers.
— Upon receiving a database to manage always run a permission email to the database in order to notify the consumers that you are the source of the emails they will be receiving and this will allow them to unsubscribe from your mailings or become double or even triple opt-in.
— Never change the headers that you send emails from.
— Use valid and relevant from and subject lines for all campaigns.
— Do not use misleading subject lines for any purposes, including creating new responsive lists from recipients that open or click on a campaign.
— If you receive a subject line you feel is questionable ask the advertiser to provide another one.
— Make sure the email address you are sending campaigns from is valid and working.
— In the footer, provide an explanation of why the consumer is receiving the ad.
— In the footer, provide your company’s valid postal address. If you are managing a client’s list, make sure their address appears as well.
— Make sure every campaign has a valid, working and obvious unsubscribe mechanism that easily removes the consumer from your database.
— Keep a real-time update of unsubscribes and remove them from your database and the databases of all parties involved.
— Do not email to consumers who unsubscribe from your database.
— Do not allow others to email to consumers who have unsubscribed from your database.