email

Embarassing email story #1056

business, security / /

From MedZilla’s “Emails ‘gone bad’“:

In another example of embarrassing and damaging emails sent during work is an investigation that uncovered 622 emails exchanged between Arapahoe County (Colo.) Clerk and Recorder Tracy K. Baker and his Assistant Chief Deputy Leesa Sale. Of those emails, 570 were sexually explicit. That’s not the only thing Baker’s lawyers are having to explain in court. Seems the emails also revealed Baker might have misused public funds, among other things.

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Free markets need visibility to work

business, technology / /

From Slashdot’s “Pay-per-email and the ‘Market Myth’“:

But I think there’s a bigger problem underlying all of this. It’s not about specific problems with GoodMail’s or AOL’s or Hotmail’s system. The problem is that many advocates of these systems say that any flaws will get sorted out automatically by “the market” — and in this case I think that is simply wrong. And in fact the people on Thursday’s panel can’t really believe it either, because one thing we all agreed on was that Bonded Sender sucks. But has the marketplace punished Hotmail for using it? Have people left in droves because non-Bonded-Sender e-mail gets blocked? No, because if they never see it getting blocked they don’t know what happens. Free markets only solve problems that are actually visible to the user.

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Greetings from beyond

security, technology / /

From PCWorld.com:

Imagine receiving a new e-mail from an old friend that begins, ‘By the time you read this, I will have passed on.’

It could happen, as a result of a new Internet service called TimelessMail.com . Through this new service (which costs $12 to $24 annually), subscribers create and store e-mail messages containing their final adieu to friends and family. After a subscriber has bought the farm, his or her messages are forwarded to the intended recipients following a verification of Social Security Administration death records. …

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Social engineering via celebrities

security / /

From PC World’s “Britney Spears Ranked Top Virus Celebrity“:

Researchers combed through the seven years of virus-laden messages stored in Panda’s malware database to determine which celebrities most often had their names involuntarily used in association with malicious spam. …

The top ten list of celebrity virus rankings (in descending order) is: Britney Spears, Bill Gates, Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, Osama Bin Laden, Michael Jackson, Bill Clinton, Anna Kournikova, Paris Hilton, and Pamela Anderson.

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