If anyone has been hit by the recent wave of ‘brand-spoofing’ spam or viruses — particularly those that appear to be from a bank, or from Paypal or eBay — could they please drop me a line? I’m very interested in following up on some of these cases for a future column. Reach me here. Anonymity preserved if you’d prefer it.
News: Blogging For Politicians, Iranian Style
If you need convincing that blogging is not some nerdy fringe activity, here’s some: Iranian vice-president Mohammad Ali Abtahi is a blogger.
It’s in Persian, iranFilter (a collective news blog) says, and is the first blog by a major Iranian politician. It’s personal rather than political, but has some nice surprises, such as secret photos of Eduard Shevardnadze, and accounts of personal and unofficial conversations with government ministers.
News: Spam Warfare, Dutch Style
If you wonder why people don’t just go after spammers, vigilante-style, here’s why. Three Dutch blogging websites launched an online war against a U.S. spammer, Customerblast.com late last week, and found they’d bitten off more than they could chew. The weblogs, according to The Register, tried to push Customerblast off the web with sustained distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks (basically trying to overload their system with requests for data).
Customerblast fought back. On Friday, all three weblogs were inundated with mail bombs, floods and DDOS attacks, forcing them to go offline temporarily. Late Friday afternoon, the weblogs began a second attack. By Monday the spammer had still not recuperated from the attacks. But there’s been a downside. One of the Dutch attackers says he was cut off by his Internet Service Provider and now faces ?legal action?.
Update: More Office Woes
My latest column (subscription only; very sorry) was about Microsoft Office 2003 and how, despite all the upgrades, a lot of old bugs never get fixed. That and why does every new feature appear to be more of a money spinning operation than a time saver?Anyway, I’m not the only grumbler: Chris Pirillo, of Lockergnome fame, is also having problems, with Outlook 2003. “If you rely on POP3 or IMAP, you’ll be just as disappointed with the lame UI bugs and inconsistencies that plague Microsoft’s latest client”.
News: Computers Are Not Helping
More grim reports about how computers aren’t doing what they’re supposed to. BBC quotes new research that says computer systems at work are not working as they should, mainly because workers do not have enough guidance about technology, support staff are cut off from other staff and managers are “naive”.The problem is there is a built-in negativity about technology. When it works well, it becomes invisible, but people only notice it when it goes wrong. In the end, technology seems to create more work than it saves. Hear, hear.