September 22, 2008
Phishing is the (Brad) Pitts
At a time when unemployment lines are longer than they’ve been for decades, some of the world’s largest financial institutions are filing for bankruptcy and billions have been wiped off stock market valuations, news reaches us that Brad Pitt is the most dangerous celebrity to search for on the Internet.
Security company McAfee have revealed that searching for Brad Pitt online paraphernalia such as wallpaper or pictures will result in an 18 per cent chance of you being attacked by horrible Internety things like spyware, malware, spam, phishing and so on.
(Link)
Jeff Green of McAfee said:
“Cybercriminals employ numerous methods, yet one of the simplest but most effective ways is to trick consumers into infecting themselves by capitalising on Americans' interest in celebrity gossip.”
But it’s not just the star of high-grade movies like “Cool World” and “Cutting Class” who has been dangled on the hook of a cyber-fishing rod manned by malicious programmers and criminals. Other popular celebrities used to lure unsuspecting victims include Beyoncé, Lindsay Lohan and Katherine Heigl. George Clooney will no doubt be getting a ribbing on the set of “Oceans Fourteen” for his lowly number nine position.
Thankfully, being a big fan of Joyce DeWitt, I don’t have such problems.
Hit me with your privacy stick
Everyone used to like Google with its little white page of joy and colourful, ever-changing logo. But now they are a behemoth, a monstrous mass of mutilated entrepreneurism that has to deal with occasional consumer backlash and cynical blog writers.
One of the popular sticks used to beat them is “privacy” – or the 18-month binary digit voyeurism that Google like to perform on your personal data. Now they have caved in following pressure from privacy watchdogs and reduced the amount of time it holds data about you from 18 months to 9.
(Link)
Peter Fleischer from Google explained:
“We have had literally hundreds of discussions with data protection officials, government leaders and privacy advocates around the world to explain our privacy practices and to work together to develop ways to improve privacy.”
Google claim their sole reason for keeping the data for such a long period of time was in order to best tailor search results for an individual. They previously cut the retention period from two years to 18 months in 2007.
However, the company admitted that it hasn't figured out how to anonymise the IP address while still providing tailored search after nine months.
Peter continued:
"We haven't sorted out all of the implementation details, and we may not be able to use precisely the same methods for anonymising as we do after 18 months, but we are committed to making it work.”
Spam Kingpin goes free
Oh, boy. You see those pigeons? Well here comes the cat. And he’s made of spam.
Jeremy Jaynes, who was given a nine year prison term for spamming in 2004, has been released on appeal after the Virginia Supreme Court in the United States considered the state spam statute that imprisoned him to be “unconstitutional”. (Link)
Jaynes, who sent more than 19,000 emails in an 11 day period in July 2003 to AOL subscribers, was in breach of Virginia’s anti-spam statute. But this ruling found that the Virginia law is "unconstitutionally overbroad because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mails including those containing political, religious, or other speech protected by the First Amendment."
Good grief.
Attorney General Bob McDonnell was rather annoyed:
“We will take this issue directly to the Supreme Court of the United States. The Supreme Court of Virginia erroneously ruled that one has a right to deceptively enter somebody else's private property for purposes of distributing his unsolicited fraudulent e-mails.”
The Virginia Supreme Court is hardly a hot bed of online activity. It is home to Senior Justice Charles S. Russell (81), Senior Justice Roscoe Bolar Stephenson, Jr (85) and Senior Justice Harry Lee Carrico (91) – none are likely to Skype or subscribe to RSS feeds.
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