Friday, January 15, 2010
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… Labels: email, government regulation, internet, privacy, security, surveillance, work
Monday, February 26, 2007
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Surveillance: Good or Bad?
Here are five issues about surveillance posed by Eugene Volokh, Professor of Law at UCLA, and author of “The First Amendment” who observes that “surveillance is not inherently good or bad.” In any given surveillance situation, he says, one has first has to determine: * What concrete security benefits will the proposal likely provide? * Exactly how might it be abused? * Might it decrease the risk of policed abuse rather than increase it? * What control mechanisms can be set up to help diminish the risk of abuse? * What other surveillance is this proposal likely to lead to? “Such analysis suggests that traffic cameras are a good idea at least as an experiment. Cameras at public places from ATM machines to convenience stores are probably worth trying.” Each situation needs to be evaluated independently to determine whether Breathing Space is curtailed or enhanced. Labels: crime, freedom, monitoring, police, privacy, safety, security, surveillance, traffic cameras
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
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? Labels: computer, crime, email, false information, filter, image spam, internet, junk mail, marketing, pc, security, spam
Friday, November 24, 2006
Junk Mail May Never Die
Louise Story, writing in the New York Times, sheds light on why in the age of the Internet and email, junk mail is proliferating: “United States Postal Service says marketers sent more than 114 billion pieces of direct mail, increase of about 15 percent from five years ago; volume of bulk mail, which is all direct mail, exceeded first class in last year; advertisers like it that mail ads, which do not get snagged in spam filters, can be aimed at just right customers and be monitored for effectiveness; those traits are increasingly important to companies as they target American public into finer and finer categories; some advertising executives comments.” Labels: advertising, filters, internet, junk email, junk mail, marketing, security, spam, web
Thursday, November 02, 2006
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. Labels: advertising, email, filters, internet, junk email, marketing, security, spam
Friday, October 06, 2006
Getting Your Name off of Lists!
Here’s a website titled “How Consumers Can Opt Out of Directory Assistance and Non-public Information, which explains that “there are many websites that sell or provide for free, personal information about individuals. This information is gathered from many sources including white pages listings (directory assistance), publicly-available sources and public records.” Labels: directory assistance, junk mail, privacy, security, spam
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
And this was Before 9-11
“Biggest U.S. spy agency choking on too much information” By Correspondent David Ensor, 07/01
FORT MEADE, Maryland (CNN) -- The largest U.S. spy agency, the National Security Agency, is in crisis, overwhelmed by too many targets, too much information and the challenges created by increasingly sophisticated technologies. The NSA is headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland, about halfway between Washington and Baltimore. With its 38,000 employees, it is more than twice the size of the CIA, and at least twice as secretive. "It produces, probably produces, 80 percent of the intelligence the United States uses," said James Bamford, author of "The Puzzle Palace." The agency's mission is to listen for threats to U.S. national security and it faces an increasingly daunting task. Labels: information overload, news, security, technology, threats
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