The User

thx 2 zoso

The first recognizable e-mail marketing message was sent via Arpanet on 3 May, 1978 to 400 people on behalf of DEC – a now-defunct computer-maker.
In 1993 it was named spam by Joel Furr – an administrator on the Usenet chat system. the inspiration came from a Monty Python sketch set in a restaurant. The sketch ended with everyone in the restaurant, encouraged by a troupe of chanting Vikings, shouting: “Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam.”

Statistics suggest that more than 80%-85% of all e-mail is spam or junk and more than 100 billion spam messages are sent every day.

Read an interesting article about this topic on BBC here.

BBC exposes Facebook identity security breach with the help of a team of experts from Click. By developing a software that would steal the users identity and the identity of their friends, like name, personal address, date of birth, employer and other. The application could be disguised as a game or a quiz and can be innocently sent from one user to another.

Check out the story here.
video here

“A computer hacker testified on Wednesday that a News Corp unit hired him to develop pirating software, but denied using it to penetrate the security system of a rival satellite television service. Christopher Tarnovsky — who said his first payment was $20,000 in cash hidden in electronic devices mailed from Canada — testified in a corporate-spying lawsuit brought against News Corp’s NDS Groupby DISH Network Corp.[...]

Tarnovsky told the court that he was paid on a regular basis by Harper Collins, a publishing arm of News Corp, for 10 years. Tarnovsky said one of his first projects was to develop a pirating program to make DirectTV more secure. ”

You can read the whole article here.

Piracy funds terrorism, says U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, and the Department of Justice is going to do something about it. “While we celebrate the positive contributions of technology, we can’t forget that there’s a dark side to almost every innovation,” said Mukasey at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose.” posts a hot news on arstehnica. He also said “criminal syndicates, and in some cases even terrorist groups, view IP crime as a lucrative business, and see it as a low-risk way to fund other activities.”

The most interesting moment in the speech was when discussed about US commitment to rooting out hackers long considered untouchable. These are people from places like Russia and Romania, where education remains good but law enforcement can be lacking, especially when it comes to prosecuting crimes that don’t affect other Russians or Romanians.;) Exactly what I was saying earlier in my post about Internet crime.Why should I pay for some other people’s crimes?

“For example,” he said, “based on close cooperation between the Department, the FBI, and Romanian authorities, prosecutors [...] arrested eleven Romanian citizens on fraud and identity theft charges last November. They were part of a criminal organization that specialized in ‘phishing’ information from computer users, imprinting credit and debit card information onto counterfeit cards, and then using those cards to obtain cash from ATMs and Western Union locations. Romanian police officers executed 21 search warrants and seized computers, card reading and writing devices, blank cards, and other equipment.”