Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

AOL victim of inside job. An AOL employee was arrested last month and charged with selling the company’s customer email list to spammers. 24-year-old AOL engineer Jason Smathers is accused of stealing at least 92 million screen names from AOL’s database and selling the information to an associate, 21-year-old email marketer Sean Dunaway. Dunaway, who…

Spam King Scott Richter says he is “out to make the Internet a better place with email marketing” . High-profile email marketer Scott Richter, aka the ‘Spam King’, has told PC World that his company is “out to make the Internet a better place with email marketing”. Richter, who recently fell at the first hurdle…

UN aims to bring spam under control by 2007. Representatives of the United Nation’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) meeting in Geneva this week as part of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) have said that the battle against spam can be won in two years. The ITU’s WSIS Thematic Meeting on Countering Spam…

Countries join forces to declare war on spam. Representatives from the US, the UK and Australia have signed a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ (MoU) on spam. The agreement was signed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the United States, along with the UK’s Office of Fair Trading, the UK’s Information Commissioner, the UK’s Secretary of…

Hungarian virus writer convicted. A Hungarian teenager has been sentenced to two years’ probation for creating the Magold virus. Earlier this week the Veszprem City Court convicted teenager ‘Laszlo K.’ of unauthorized use of computer systems. Although the teen was sentenced to one year in a juvenile prison, the court commuted the sentence to two…

First Russian to be sentenced for sending spam. Russian student Dmitry Anosov made history last month when he became the first Russian to be sentenced for sending spam – even though Russia does not currently have any anti-spam legislation. Anosov was found guilty of sending unsolicited (and ‘unquotable’) SMS messages to mobile phones. He has…

Technology to stamp out Internet telephony spam. A patent application has been filed for a method to identify and block SPIT – spam over Internet telephony, or VoIP spam. SPIT, or VoIP spam, is a combination of telemarketing calls and email spam in which a ‘caller’ uses Internet technology to send thousands of voice messages…

“Stunning” survey results lead to seven-step guide. Email security firm Vircom has issued a seven-step guide to avoiding spam, after its six-month study revealed (shock, horror) that responding to spam is the worst thing end users can do if they wish to avoid clogging their inboxes. Vircom’s SpamBuster team spent six months analysing the results…

Microsoft chief says users must play their part in cutting down virus combat time. Microsoft chief Bill Gates has pledged that the time taken for Microsoft to patch vulnerabilities will be cut, but says that users must turn on automatic update features. “We will guarantee that the average time to fix will continue to come…

Apply your patches and update your AV software. Microsoft has issued advice on what you should know about Download.Ject The Trojan downloader, also known as JS/Scob.A and Toofer, affects websites running Microsoft IIS 5.0 and has been found appended to files on those web servers. When executed, the Trojan attempts to connect to a page…