Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Bill Gates says he hopes to have the spam problem under control within two years – again. The world’s most spammed email recipient, Bill Gates, said last month that he hopes to have the spam problem under control within two years. However, this is not the first time Gates has quoted this time frame –…

Australia’s latest anti-spam initiative The Australian Communications Authority (ACA) is teaming up with Internet Service Provider Pacific Internet and software company Spammatters to run a trial of a spam-reporting system. In the trial, Pacific Internet customers will be able to report spam via a plug-in to Microsoft Outlook or a web interface. The spam will…

Vulnerability assessment for country’s critical infrastructure systems The Australian government is to spend more than 8 million dollars on a project that will identify and fix security vulnerabilities in the country’s critical computer systems. The Computer Network Vulnerability Assessment (CNVA) Program, announced by Attorney General Philip Ruddock at the end of last week, will fund…

‘Make love not spam’ Lycos Europe has come up with an interesting new way for its users to feel they are getting their own back on spammers. Lycos is encouraging its users to download a screensaver program named ‘Make Love not Spam’. When the screensaver is activated it sends HTTP requests to servers which are…

Do women hate spam more than men? Are humans better at identifying spam than computers? Make your contribution to (anti-)spam research… John Graham-Cumming, author of POPFile and compiler of the Spammers’ Compendium has put together a survey about people’s experiences with spam. The online survey asks respondents about themselves, their attitude towards spam and anti-spam…

An end to the virus-naming problem? A new initiative that aims to standardise malware naming may be in operation as early as January 2005. The US Department of Homeland Security’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team, US-CERT , is set to coordinate a Common Malware Enumeration initiative among anti-virus vendors, according to a letter sent to The…

Think you’ve got it bad? Spare a thought for Bill. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is the world’s most spammed email recipient. The (let’s face it, not entirely surprising) fact was revealed by Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, who himself ranks among the top spam recipients. According to Ballmer, Bill Gates is on the receiving end…

Member of notorious virus-writing group found guilty. A Russian virus writer has been found guilty of creating viruses and fined the somewhat paltry sum of 3,000 roubles. Eugene Suchkov, a member of the notorious 29A virus-writing group, admitted to writing W32/Stepan and MSIL/Gastropod and posting the virus code on various websites. Suchkov’s 3,000 rouble fine…

The latest version of the virus name lookup tool – VGrep, is now available. VGrep is a system produced in an attempt to clear up some of the confusion surrounding the naming of viruses. It works by running scanners across a large collection of virus-infected files, and parsing their output into a simple text database.…

Significant decline in the volume of spam messages seen in the days immediately following the three recent hurricanes. Email security firm FrontBridge Technologies Inc. reported a significant decline in the volume of spam messages seen in the days immediately following the three hurricanes that hit the South East coast of the US in September. Hurricanes…