News Blog

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....

(via Ars Technica)

Google is warning people about the dangers of phishing e-mails that ask for sensitive information and appear to come from a legitimate trusted source, like your bank, but are really scams to steal your data.

You would think that with all the publicity phishing attacks have had over the years there wouldn't need to be a public education campaign. But so many people still get lured by these spam e-mails every day that the warning is merited.

"Millions of people have gotten 'urgent' e-mails asking them to take immediate action to prevent some impending disaster. 'Our bank has a new security system. Update your information now or you won't be able to access your account,' or 'We couldn't verify your information; click here to update your account,'" Ian Fette of Google's Security Team wrote in a posting on Tuesday on the Official Google Blog. The post, titled "How to avoid getting hooked," is one in a series on online security.

"People who click on the links in these e-mails may see a Web page that looks like a legitimate site they've visited before. Because the page looks familiar, these people enter their username, password, or other private information on the site," Fette writes. "What they've actually done is given an unknown third party all the information needed to hijack their account, steal their money, or open up new lines of credit in their name. They just fell for a phishing attack."

According to the posting, here are some things to remember: Be wary of responding to e-mails or clicking on links that ask for information, particularly because legitimate businesses don't ask for that type of data via e-mail. Type in the purported organization's Web address in a browser rather than clicking on the link. Double check that the URL looks legitimate if you are already on the site. Be wary of promises of "fantastic prizes" and other too-good-to-be-true offers, and use an updated browser with a phishing filter.

Before I became a marketing wonk I was a knowledgeable technologist, which is probably why I've never once enjoyed any e-mail system that I have used or implemented. Over the last 15 years, I have tried pretty much everything, from Pine to Zimbra, to MS Exchange to Lotus Notes and several different IMAP and POP options. Every time it's the same thing--the system works within reason but is never great. And there is always something that bites you in the rear.

I first started outsourcing e-mail to managed providers in 2003 when I worked for a CEO who demanded MS Exchange and we only had Linux boxes. It was never great and it was too expensive to boot. But the offerings have gotten much better and at this point I can't see a small- or medium-sized business running its own mail server. It's just not necessary.

Here are my fundamental hopes for e-mail:

• Reliable delivery of mail (dare to dream)
• Reliable delivery of mail on mobile devices (Blackberry and iPhone)
• Shared calendaring with administrator abilities (i.e. admin access)
• Backup and recovery
• Reliable SPAM prevention
• Sync across multiple computers and devices