Cyber Info Never Dies

It’s official: anything you ever email at work will be stored for evermore and, should the circumstance ever arise, will be used against you! AP business writer Christopher Rugaber, observes that “U.S. companies will need to know more about where they store e-mails, instant messages and other electronic documents generated by their employees in the event they are sued, thanks to changes in federal rules that took effect Friday,” according to legal experts.

“The changes, approved by the Supreme Court's administrative arm in April after a five-year review, require companies and other parties involved in federal litigation to produce ‘electronically stored information’ as part of discovery, the process by which both sides share evidence before a trial.”

There you have it: if you write it and send it, your message will live on and on and on…

Blackberry = Freedom?

How telling! Fours year ago this observation appeared in Men's Health: “You rush out and buy a Blackberry thinking that you'll be able to email and phone people from wherever you happen to be. Suddenly, everywhere will be your office. Within about a week the reality sets in. You're fiddling with the thing all day long, including right before you go to bed. It would be a useful device if you'd turn it off at about 6 p.m. and didn't turn it on again until about 8 a.m., but that's never going to happen.”

Twelve Years of Inundation

"The average Fortune 1000 worker already is sending and receiving approximately 178 messages and documents each day, according to a study, "Managing Corporate Communications in the Information Age." (Boles, 1997 “Help! Information overload.” Workforce Magazine)

Clean My Mailbox

Check out www.cleanmymailbox.com/whitelist.html which offers a "free tool to generate specific instructions on how to whitelist your publication(s) within a variety of popular fitering solutions in use today."

By filling in and submitting a form they supply, and you'll be presented with the custom HTML code to use in developing your own customized Whitelisting Instructions web page.

The Spam Plague Heightens

“Spam is back – in e-mail in-boxes and on everyone's minds. Of late, the problem has gotten measurably worse. Worldwide, spam volumes have doubled from last year,” according to Ironport, a spam-filtering firm, and unsolicited junk mail now accounts for more than nine out of every 10 e-mails sent over the Internet.

“Much of that flood is made up of a nettlesome new breed of junk e-mail called image spam, in which the words of the advertisement are part of a picture, often fooling traditional spam detectors that look for telltale phrases. Image spam increased fourfold from last year and now represents 25 percent to 45 percent of all junk e-mail, depending on the day,” Ironport says.

Is Your PC a Spam Slave?

The website ThisIsLondon.co.uk reports that “image spam” could bring the internet to a standstill. “At first, they seem like your average junk email, containing share tips or an advertisement for Viagra, along with a small, slightly garbled picture.But this, experts say, is the spam that could bring the internet to a virtual standstill this year. To bypass anti-spam software, the emails use an image instead of text.”

“In the past six months, this image spam has seen a massive increase and now represents 35 per cent of all junk email, according to security software firm F-Secure and image spam is taking up 70 per cent of the bandwidth bulge. The emails, generally containing stock tips, come from gangs and even bored teenagers in the United States and Russia trying to inflate prices in a swindle called ‘pump-and-dump’".

“They promise that a cheap, usually American, stock will take off. The perpetrator then dumps his stock as buyers leap in before it collapses. Dmitri Allperovitch of computer security company CipherTrust said: ‘They're niche companies with no profit and no products, so when you see a spike from almost no trades to two or three million when the spam is sent out, you know there were a lot of people who fell for it.’”

Is your PC a slave unit to such schemes. Are you unwittingly passing bogus information to millions of other people?

Spam is Now 90% of All Emails

A Reuters report out of London says that “criminal gangs using hijacked computers are behind a surge in unwanted e-mails peddling sex, drugs and stock tips.”

According to Postini, a U.S. email security company, “The number of spam messages has tripled since June and now accounts for as many as nine out of 10 e-mails sent worldwide.”

"E-mail systems are overloaded or melting down trying to keep up with all the spam," said Dan Druker, a vice president at Postini.

The Reuters report observes that “as Christmas approaches, the daily trawl through in-boxes clogged with offers of fake Viagra, loans and sex aids is tipped to take even longer.”

Postini has detected a staggering 7 billion spam e-mails worldwide in November compared to 2.5 billion in June.

According to Spamhaus, an agency that tracks the problem, “About 200 illegal gangs are behind 80 percent of unwanted e-mails.

Reuters: Experts blame the rise in spam on computer programs that hijack millions of home computers to send e-mails. These "zombie networks", also called "botnets", can link 100,000 home computers without their owners' knowledge. They are leased to gangs who use their huge "free" computing power to send millions of e-mails with relative anonymity.

Info that Nobody Wants

A study by conducted Commtouch indicates that most spam originates from websites hosted in countries outside the U.S. Pharmaceutical drugs are most advertised, with Viagra the leading the way.

The recipients of these largely unwanted messages are nearly all in the U.S. Meanwhile, despite filters and spaminators, the pace of spam is accelerating . The aggregate number of unique spam outbreaks per day has been rising for for more than five years.

Advice from a Fellow Speaker

Have you noticed that your productivity is down because you're constantly checking email? If so, consider using a spare computer or laptop that is not connected to the Web. Your productivity will be amazing.

Terminated for Email Violations

What type of information are you sending? In 2003, 22 percent of employers reported they had terminated an employee for violating e-mail rules, according to an e-mail survey from the ePolicy Institute and American Management Association.

E-Mail: Something's Gotta Give

Each day, wordwide, 50 billion e-mail messages are sent. This is equal to seven messages for everyone on the planet, although the vast majority of people are not online. In 2001, e-mail traffic was less than 12 billion.

More than 88% cent of e-mails are spam including about 1 per cent which are virus-infected. So that means at least 44 billion spam messages are sent EACH day and 4.4 billion of them contain viruses. Has junk email become an issue for you? You’re not alone!

An annotated Webliography

Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov says “In Greek mythology, Sisyphus, an evil king, was condemned to Hades to forever roll a big rock to the top of a mountain, and then the rock always rolled back down again. A similar version of Hell is suffered every day by people with forever full e-email boxes. At his website Dr. Bezroukov provides an “Information and Work Overload” annotated Webliography.

News Alert Services

Here is a new book that has got me thinking. Perhaps i need to look into news alert services instead of be buffeted by whatever news comes my way:

Choosing and Using a News Alert Service
by Robert Berkman

In the age of the Internet, 24-hour cable news, and globalization, what counts the most for many researchers and news users, particularly business news users, is how quickly they are alerted to important breaking news. There are dozens of competing firms that offer an e-mail-based news alert service. But how to know which one is best?

This comprehensive new guide explains how these tools work and then identifies, compares, and evaluates more than two dozen free, inexpensive, and fee-based alert services. It helps you pick the right one, and advises how to get the most out of the news alert once you begin the service. A detailed appendix also compares specific news source coverage for the major news alert vendors.