Like most web users, you probably registered a Facebook account at one point or another. We all know how it goes: You create an account, start searching for some friends, and once you’ve got a few, you start getting flooded by people wanting you to install their crappy Facebook apps. I really, really hate that part of the service. Fortunately, there’s a way to auto-ignore all those stupid requests.
Anyways, to get back to our post…
Have you ever thought about what your life would be like if making friends would be just like in Facebook? Pretty nightmarish right? The guys from “Idiots of Ants” seem to think so too because they filmed a short sketch to illustrate a real-life Facebook-like “friending” experience, from the initial poke to the app installation request. Check it out.
Break out the bubbly: Spam is celebrating its 30th anniversary this weekend. And my oh my, three decades later, how the annoyances of the internet have changed.
Where it all started
The message considered the first unsolicited mass e-mail went out to unsuspecting inboxes on May 3, 1978. A marketing employee at a company called Digital Equipment Corporation (now owned by HP) sent the message to 393 users of the government-run network Arpanet, the predecessor to the internet we know today.
“DIGITAL WILL BE GIVING A PRODUCT PRESENTATION OF THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY; THE DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T…”
Typed in all caps for extra irritation, the email touted two new products being demonstrated in California and invited recipients to see them in action. The guy behind the message, Gary Thuerk, reported immediate negative response to his ad — but also immediate results. He told the Wall Street Journal this week that the email led to $12 million in sales.
How it’s transformed
Nowadays, spam takes up anywhere from 80 to 95 percent of all emails sent. And here’s the amazing part: There are actually idiots out there clicking these ads and sending their money. Internet security firm Sophos was recently quoted as estimating about 10 percent of spam recipients purchase products from the mass mails.
And guess what? Their clicks are costing all of us. Research companies say the wasted bandwidth from spam will add up to $140 billion worldwide this year alone. What’s more, with increasingly sophisticated spamming techniques, tracking and stopping those unwanted ads is proving to be a tricky feat.
In honor of this week’s anniversary, McAfee decided to conduct a little experiment to see just how severe the problem really has become. The anti-virus giant had volunteers spend 30 days surfing the net on completely unprotected computers, with all personal guards down. They answered every email, filled out every form, and responded to every ad. The result? More than 126,000 unsolicited emails, and a lot of problems.
“We started with a brand new computer that was lightning fast. We end with a computer that takes a long time to open even the simplest of webpages and I fear may be tracking every keystroke and page we visit,” one participant wrote in her diary of the experience.
“It multiplies like crazy – like a virus. And it just keeps coming,” noted another participant.
Going beyond spam
Spam’s not the only thing multiplying like a virus on the net. The number of annoying trends trying to take advantage of users has actually become an FBI concern.
The government’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, or IC3, tracks all sorts of schemes and scams moving throughout cyberspace, spam included. Some of the other current hot issues on the watchlist:
Auction fraud: Ripping people off with phony sales on sites like eBay. Be wary of sellers using multiple names, using addresses outside of your country, or asking for direct wire transfers of money.
Debt elimination: Convincing people to send cash to eliminate all their debt. The IC3 looks for web sites that advertise “legal ways to dispose of mortgage loans and credit card debts.”
Work-at-home scams: Getting people to sign up for seemingly easy employment. The IC3 keeps an eye on offers that involve “reselling or reshipping merchandise to destinations outside the United States.” Basically, they’ve found many of these services use a series of fake checks to get you to wire them money – money you’ll never get back.
The list goes on and on and will probably keep growing longer by the year. So is good ol’ Gary Thuerk really to blame for all of this? Depends who you ask. I’ve gotta believe that if he didn’t send that ill-fated message, someone else would have had the idea before long.
His defense, as told to the Wall Street Journal: “If the airline loses your luggage, do you blame the Wright brothers?”
Touché, Thuerk. Touché. Still, someone has to be the scapegoat for this sea of annoyance, to act as a recipient of our spam-induced rage. If I could just find that guy’s email address…
This has got a lot of civil liberties groups up in arms (or as South Park likes to put it, “rabble! rabble! rabble!”), as obviously the contents of your laptop are private. You could have sensitive business information on there. For example, what if you’re a lawyer and you have confidential client information that you can’t reveal to a third party? Or on a personal level, perhaps embarrassing stuff like kinky porn which technically may be legal under the US constitution to own and look at but obviously you don’t want a border guard finding it on your computer? You might even have something REALLY downright embarrassing and reputation destroying like some Britney Spears music from iTunes.
So are there any legal ways or crafty dodges to get around this obvious violation to your privacy and civil liberties? Plus is this court ruling right? Could it be open to an appeal?
Before going any further, I want you guys to listen to the following video.
I personally think that we should not let young kids play these games, and that’s exactly why there is an age rating on them. But once someone is old enough to make the difference between “right” and “wrong” and that their sense of morality has properly matured, I don’t think a video game could really have an influence on the way they act in society. what do YOU think? Let us know in the comments section below.
Anti-virus products from large corporations are becoming so bloated. With features like backup solutions, password managers, anti-phishing, anti-spam, and application scanning firewalls, products that were intended to protect your system only tends to bog down it down. Even as a security professional, I would prefer to not run an Anti-Virus product that is all-encompassing like that on my personal system because of the performance degradation it causes. Of course, this is highly a risky behavior and is not recommended in today’s threat environment of buffer overflows and drive-by malware downloads.
But F-Secure has had a long history of being a slimmed-down, fast product with excellent detection and protection capabilities. And unlike other companies like McAfee and Symantec, corporate giants who gobble up other companies, and then inject new products into a protection suite whether you want it or not, F-Secure has remained dedicated to honing their AV solution.
If you want to give the product a test drive or if you are tired of the usual bloated AV products, click here to signup for the beta.
On May 1st, 1964, in the early morning, the world’s first BASIC compiler began to run. The “Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code” was designed to sit on the opposite end of the programming spectrum from the more complex, scientifically based languages of the time, such as Fortran. It really was the first effective programming language designed for simplicity, and was easier to understand.
Not content with torturing us with Tom Cruise bouncing up and down on Oprah’s couch and also lecturing us on what manic depression is REALLY about (thanks Tom for giving me the “truth” about my illness), the Church of Scientology has apparently decided it now needs a bigger platform and so it has set up shop on YouTube. Oh dear God.
But it seems that the Scientologists don’t tolerate free speech because they have disabled commenting on ALL their YouTube videos. They also don’t seem to want their content to be spread around the net because they have also disabled the “embed” feature for most of their videos. A damn shame. I wonder what they’re afraid of? People’s real opinions of them perhaps?
The Neocube is an interesting little device that can keep your mind busy for hours of non-thinking fun. It is composed of 216 individual high-energy neodymium magnets, which can be formed into BILLIONS of shapes and patterns. Check it out in the following video.
The message considered the first unsolicited mass e-mail went out to unsuspecting inboxes on May 3, 1978. A marketing employee at a company called Digital Equipment Corporation (now owned by HP) sent the message to 393 users of the government-run network Arpanet, the predecessor to the internet we know today.
But F-Secure has had a long history of being a slimmed-down, fast product with excellent detection and protection capabilities. And unlike other companies like McAfee and Symantec, corporate giants who gobble up other companies, and then inject new products into a protection suite whether you want it or not, F-Secure has remained dedicated to honing their AV solution.
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