If you want information about the earthquake in China get it from a news site and not from a link to a video that arrives in your e-mail inbox.
That's the message from the US-CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team) on Thursday.
The group has received reports of a new variant of the Storm worm that targets people interested in the May 12 earthquake that killed nearly 70,000 people and left 5 million homeless. Some of the e-mails also have subject lines that deal with the Olympic Games that China is hosting.
In the e-mail is a link that sends a recipient to a malicious Web site, US-CERT says. Opening the purported video link on the site runs executable code that infects the computer with malicious code that can be used to turn the machine into a zombie on a spam botnet.
Previous versions have used April Fools' Day and Valentine's Day themes, as well as masqueraded as a fix for another worm to lure victims to sites.
As always, computer owners and administrators are urged to install and update antivirus software and to not follow unsolicited Web links received in e-mail messages.
JetBlue passengers, rejoice. Now there is yet another way to pass the time during flights. JetBlue's free in-flight Wi-Fi will no longer require Yahoo or BlackBerry accounts to check e-mail and chat with friends.
Starting Wednesday, JetBlue's plane equipped with in-flight Wi-Fi will let users with Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, and Windows Live Mail addresses check their e-mail while onboard. It also will offer Microsoft Exchange so travelers can communicate with their office on the ground. No Web surfing is available, but thanks to a deal with Amazon, passengers on the so-called BetaBlue plane can log on to the mobile version of Amazon.com's site and shop.
The BetaBlue plane, which often flies transcontinental routes, has been equipped with Wi-Fi since December. Several other airlines, including Southwest, American Airlines and Virgin, have plans to connect to the Web in the near future.
If you were thinking of using your work e-mail for job hunting or online dating, think twice.
A new survey finds that 41 percent of large companies (those with 20,000 or more employees) are paying staffers to read or otherwise analyze the contents of employees' outbound e-mail.
In the study, which was commissioned by e-mail security provider Proofpoint and conducted by Forrester Research, 44 percent of the companies surveyed said they investigated an e-mail leak of confidential data in the past year and 26 percent said they fired an employee for violating e-mail policies, according to security portal Help Net Security.
The companies also said they are worried about employees leaking company information on their blogs, message boards, and media-sharing sites like YouTube.
Eleven percent of the U.S. companies surveyed took disciplinary action against employees for improper use of blogs or message boards in the past year, and slightly more than that disciplined workers for social-network violations and for improper use of media-sharing sites.
And 14 percent of publicly traded companies investigated the leakage of material financial information, such as unannounced financial results, on blogs and message boards.
The digital divide is apparently alive and well.
About 20 percent of all U.S. heads-of-household have never sent an e-mail, and about 20 million households, or 18 percent, are without Internet access, according to a study released earlier this week.
(Credit:
Parks Associates)
Similar percentages of respondents also indicated that they had never looked up a Web site or information on the Internet, the survey found.
Age and education were significant factors cited in the study, which was conducted by researcher Parks Associates. Half of those who have never used e-mail are older than 65 and 56 percent had no formal education beyond a high school level, the telephone survey found.
"Nearly one out of three household heads has never used a computer to create a document," John Barrett, director of research at Parks Associates, said in a statement. "These data underscore the significant digital divide between the connected majority and the homes in the unconnected minority that rarely, if ever, use a computer."
Just 7 percent of the 20 million households without Internet access indicated during the survey that they plan to subscribe to an Internet service within the next 12 months. However, the study noted a steady decline in the number of disconnected households when comparing findings with previous years; the 2006 survey found that 31 million households, or 29 percent, of all U.S. households were without Internet access.
"Internet connections have slowly increased in U.S. households, but getting the disconnected minority online will continue to be difficult," Barrett said in the statement. "Age and economics are important factors, but the heart of the challenge is deeper. Many people just don't see a reason to use computers and do not associate technology with the needs and demands of their daily lives."
Those annoying ads the Yahoo Mail has been appending to the bottom of e-mail messages soon will be a thing of the past.
Some at Yahoo apparently didn't like the taglines, either: this is the example the company used to illustrate how the ads can pile up.
(Credit: Yahoo)Yahoo stopped adding the ads a few days ago, the company said on its Yahoo Mail blog on Friday.
Sounds good to me. Because the ads would be appended after each message, a back-and-forth exchange could lead to an accumulation of the pesky text lines like gradual accretions of soap scum.
I also never cared for Yahoo's text intruding into the content of my letter, which is much more presumptuous than a one-time display ad showing up in a separate frame in a Web page. I wasn't afraid people would think I was actually endorsing whatever product the tagline touted, but I didn't care for the idea of this dreck being archived alongside all those letters I sent my friends and family.
If you want to see how much of a clutter the ads have caused, here's one example: Google has tallied 18,700 instances of the "Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile" tagline in mailing list postings stored within Google Groups.
Yahoo, under pressure to increase its revenue, probably would like to sell every ad it can. But I suspect the tagline ads weren't that big a deal. The only ones I ever remember seeing had a more indirect potential benefit by promoting Yahoo services.
DailyLit, which offers entire books over e-mail and RSS in daily serialized chunks every day, is now offering information from Wikipedia on various topics.
(Credit:
DailyLit)
The free service would be perfect for people who are short on time and don't mind digesting literature and information in 5 minutes at a time on their handheld.
The Wikipedia-based topics DailyLit is creating "tours" of major world religions (22 installments--compared with the 260 installments for Moby Dick), "Wine 101," presidents of the United States, "Best Picture" Oscar winners, famous poets, famous women in history, Greek mythology, famous inventors, and wonders of the world.
Each installment has a brief intro to a subcategory, such as Buddhism in the religions tour, and a link to the relevant Wikipedia page. Wikipedia's content is available for such repurposing under the Creative Commons license.
As part of the Bush administration's post-Clinton cleaning house efforts, the White House replaced its Lotus Notes e-mail system with Microsoft's Outlook and Exchange. Compatibility issues broke the automated archiving system and e-mails were lost.
No problem, Bush and Co. said and decided to have employees save files by hand. That's despite the fact that doing it manually is not a reliable or even tamper-proof way of dealing with important government communications that are required by law to be carefully archived.
Subsequent efforts to retrofit the old Lotus Notes-based archiving system to work with the new system failed or were aborted and Steven McDevitt, a senior official in the White House IT shop, resigned in disgust.
The situation led to two lawsuits filed by public interest groups against the White House and a hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this year. Last week, a federal judge ordered the government to fully answer questions related to the matter.
Maybe they should have stuck with Lotus Notes after all....
A problem this week hampered some Gmail users trying to use their PayPal accounts.
The problem caused Gmail to reject some legitimate PayPal service e-mails, Google confirmed in a statement Friday. The problem, reported Tuesday, prevented people from using Gmail to receive confirmation e-mails, set up new accounts, or reset passwords for eBay's online payment system.
The problem "affected a very limited number of users," Google said. "We worked quickly to fix the problem, and we apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused." The company encourages those with technical difficulties to report them to the Gmail Help Center.
Many Gmail users had problems with the Google e-mail service's ability to communicate with e-mail software Wednesday.
Numerous people on a Gmail Help forum reported problems tapping into Gmail with IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) technology, which lets people with desktop e-mail software such as Thunderbird or Microsoft Entourage to do so.
Google acknowledged the problem but said it's fixed. "Gmail users had difficulty accessing some features in Gmail for about a half hour today. The issue is now resolved," the company said in a statement Wednesday.
"We take issues like this very seriously, and we encourage anyone who is having technical difficulty of any kind with Gmail to contact the Gmail Support team through the Gmail Help Center."
The glitch came at an inopportune time. Google is trying to encourage not just individuals but also companies to use its online services; Google Apps, of which Gmail is a component, features prominently in a Google alliance with Salesforce.com.
"A huge, if not number one selling point for moving one of our companies over to Google Apps was Google's robust network!" complained one user. "Now that we have migrated over, it seems we are abused children who do not deserve an explanation for why the service we pay for is taken offline. Perhaps it is time to find a new e-mail host."
I can't help but notice that after all these years, Gmail still technically is in beta testing, a strong signal that people should be cautious about relying on it.
(Via David Berlind.)
You get an e-mail not only addressed to you, but it includes your company name and phone number and appears to come from the U.S. District Court.
It looks like a subpoena to appear in court on a civil case and it instructs you to download the document from a Web site.
What should you do?
Whatever you do, don't click on the hyperlink to the Web site, warns Web security services firm MX Logic. It's probably a malicious Web site that will download malicious software, such as a keystroke logger, to your machine.
The social engineering attack is similar to others, including phishing e-mails that purport to come from the Internal Revenue Service. But this attack goes a step further by including your company phone number, which makes it seem even more legitimate.
If you're an executive, chances are you're the intended victim of a so-called whaling attack. While phishing attacks are aimed at anyone with an e-mail address, whaling attacks target big fish at companies where knowing a top executive's password opens a back door to sensitive insider information.
Remember, courts communicate via regular mail, not e-mail. In addition to some spelling errors in a sample whaling e-mail making the rounds this week, MX Logic found that the link went to a top-level domain other than ".gov" which was registered a few days earlier to someone in the U.K.
A new phishing e-mail targeting CEOs looks like a subpoena and includes a company name and number. This shows the top part of the e-mail.
(Credit: MX Logic)
