The things that some people do for money - David Blaine impersonated a bat for 60 hours, Dustin Diamond sold t-shirts (and his last remaining scrap of self-respect) to prevent foreclosure of his home and 60% of people will hand over their computer password to get their hands on a £5 department store voucher.
Symantec lured naive passers-by to reveal their personal details by offering them the princely sum of £5 for Marks and Spencer – just about enough to afford a Chicken Korma ready-meal and a litre bottle of diluted orange squash.
(Link)
John Brigden, senior VP of Symantec, said:
"People are willing to give a lot away about their personal information. I don't think they realise how easy it is to make connections and how little information is really needed to have a big impact on someone's financial situation."
When you consider that the black market could pay as little as 50p for your personal details, the fiver doesn’t look like bad value now.
He continued:
“Manage your personal details online like you would any other safe asset that you have in your home."
I totally agree. First person to send me their online banking details will get a mention in the blog next week – although I may at that point be celebrating a windfall in Aruba.
Timber!
Did you hear that sound? That was a $7m tree falling in Timberland. The clothing store - popular with those well-dressed rappers who bore us with endless, exaggerated stories about their partying - are targets of a spam class-action suit for violating the US Telephone Consumer Protection Act.
(Link)
The lawsuit concerns unauthorised SMS messages received by mobile phone users between 2003 and this year. Timberland and e-commerce provider GSI deny any wrong-doing, saying that a marketing firm called Airit2me were supposed to seek permission before sending them out.
At this point I’d usually have an indented, italic quote from someone but nobody seems to have spoken publically on the lawsuit.
The great news is that people who had to endure the stress and expense of receiving an unsolicited text message will be suitably compensated to the tune of $150 each.
Really?
I want a piece of that action. Text me! Text me!
DEFCON1 for Palin’s webmail
Three weeks ago it all looked so rosy for the Republican Party, led by friendly septuagenarian John McCain and small-town pit bull Sarah Palin. Unfortunately it’s all gone a bit wrong as lovely Sarah - who half of America is willing to entrust with nuclear launch codes – was found unable to protect her Yahoo webmail.
The vice-president contender had her webmail hacked by a group calling themselves “anonymous” who simply used the password retrieval function of Yahoo Mail to gain access to her account. The problem with the function is that the set security questions (where did you go to school, where did you meet your spouse, what is your pet’s name?) exposes famous people whose email addresses are known, as the relevant information can be often found on the Internet. (Link)
While the above scenario is common enough and a certain amount of sympathy can be felt for Palin, justified criticism has been directed at her for conducting government business through her webmail account. She might as well have dumped a government file in the middle of the street and walked off, leaving it protected by just a two-digit combination lock.
After someone explained what email was, John McCain said:
"This is a shocking invasion of the governor's privacy and a violation of law."
The problem now for Republicans is that any potentially politically-damaging information could be sitting on the hackers servers right now, ready to release at a time when it could cause maximum damage to the Presidential campaign. They were probably hoping the hackers were deer-hunting evangelists. Unfortunately latest rumours suggest that the main suspect is the son of a Democratic State Representative.
So what was the most damaging piece of information released so far? Was it the presence of targeted advertising for “Christian singles”?
Nope. Perhaps the most embarrassing piece of information released was that she knows someone called “Chuck”. What is this? The 1960s?
