News: Klez Is Still So Big

By | November 24, 2011
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 Viruses, worms, whatever, don’t have to be new to be a pain. Bill Fallon, Vice President of Product Marketing at EasyLink Services Corporation, the company that offers and operates MailWatch (“a leading Spam-blocking, virus-scanning and content-filtering service protecting corporate networks worldwide!”) : “The Klez worm, which debuted back in October 2001, continues to be the most widely circulating threat among corporate networks almost two years later. Just last month we intercepted it over 95,000 times.” That baby just seems to run and run. There are three times as many Klezes running around as the next most popular worm, Sobig (32,000).

News: Is Windows About To Be Defenestrated?

By | November 24, 2011
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 Interesting story about how Linux seems to be catching up with Windows in its user friendliness, at least among Germans. According to an article from ComputerWorld’s IDG News Service, “study findings suggest that it’s almost as easy to perform most major office tasks using Linux as it is using Windows”.  The study was conducted by Relevantive AG, a Berlin-based company that specializes in consulting businesses on the usability of software and Web services.
 
 
Linux users, for example, needed 44.5 minutes to perform a set of tasks, compared with 41.2 minutes required by the XP users. Furthermore, 80% of the Linux users believed that they needed only one week to become as competent with the new system as with their existing one, compared with 85% of the XP users. But when it comes to the design of the desktop interface and programs, Windows XP still has a strong edge: 83% of the Linux users said they liked the design of the desktop and the programs, compared with 100% of the Windows XP users.

News: A Spam Blocker Throws in the Towel

By | November 24, 2011
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  Trustic, an anti-spam blocker which used recommendations from its users to identify and block spammers, has bitten the dust after about six months of live use. Its website rather poignantly declares: “We remain confident that the problem of spam is a solvable problem. Thank you for your help with this great experiment.”
 
Trustic, which was really just one guy, would assign each user a level of trust, according to an article on the O’Reilly Network. “Users build their trust by making accurate recommendations over time. In order for a host to become untrusted, the cumulative trust level of the recommendations has to be above a certain threshold.” If you’re interested, trawl through the debate on Slashdot. Is this a dark day for anti-spam?

News: Get Off Your RSS And Sort It Out

By | November 24, 2011
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 From the Just When You Thought You’d Found A Corner Of The Net That Was Touchy Feely Dept  comes a story of egos, politics and money. Paul Festa of CNET News.com writes a great piece about an increasingly acrimonius dispute about blogging, or more accurately Really Simple Syndication (RSS), a technology widely used to syndicate blogs and other Web content.
The dispute, Paul writes, “pits Harvard Law School fellow Dave Winer, the blogging pioneer who is the key gatekeeper of RSS, against advocates of a different format. The most notable of these advocates are Blogger owner Google and Sam Ruby, an influential IBM developer who is now shepherding an RSS alternative through its early stages of development.
 
“The dispute offers a glimpse into the byzantine and highly politicized world of industry standards, where individuals without legal authority over a protocol may nonetheless exercise control over it and where, consequently, personal attacks can become the norm. Despite the apparent pettiness of developers’ sniping, their arguments over digital minutia may carry enormous consequences, and corporate interests remain poised to capitalize on the conflicts if they are not resolved. ” Yikes. Get it sorted out, guys, I kinda like RSS.

News: It’s Monday, the Worms Are Out

By | November 24, 2011
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 Sophos, a British anti-virus company, is getting worried about the new Mimail worm (W32/Mimail-A), a mass-mailing worm which first struck in
the United States on Friday 1st August.  Sophos says it “has received many reports of Mimail infections and anticipates the worm could be one of
the biggest of 2003″.
 
 
The Mimail worm arrives in an email claiming to be from the network administrator. Cunningly, it can even spoof the domain name of the business’s email address.  For instance, if the recipient’s email address is John.Smith@ABCLimited.com the email would appear to come from admin@ABCLimited.com.
The message suggests that the recipient’s email account will soon expire and urges them to read the attached information. The attachment, called
‘message.zip’, contains an HTML file which is not a message at all – it is a copy of the worm, which scours the user’s hard disk looking for email addresses for its next round of victims.  
 
More information about the Mimail worm can be found at http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/analyses/w32mimaila.html.