The other day a really good demo of the Microsoft Fingerprint Reader was posted on the Windows Vista Blog.
I know Microsoft is supposed to be some evil corporation, but just take a quick look at the video. It is pretty awesome, and I wouldn’t mind being able to log in by simply placing a finger on a little device.
What would be even cooler is a multi-touch monitor with fingerprint-reading capabilities.
I just got this little charm in my inbox the other day:
Subject: Worm Detected!
Dear Customer,
Our robot has detected an abnormal activity from your IP adress
on sending e-mails. Probably it is connected with the last epidemic
of a worm which does not have official patches at the moment.We recommend you to install this patch to remove worm files
and stop email sending, otherwise your account will be blocked.Administrator
There was a link in it that goes to some mysterious webserver and downloads a nice chunk of malware. Either the virus makers and spammers are getting really desperate, or they honestly believe people are stupid enough to click the link even though they can’t even spell “address” right…
Sad thing is some people really are that stupid 
According to the Akismet blog (I suggest subscribing if you haven’t already), comment spam is greatly on the rise, and it just recently hit two billion.
According to their figures the amount of spam is exponentially increasing every year, and it only took only 108 days for it to double from 1 billion to 2 billion vs 100 million to 1 billion in 257 days. Bleak news, indeed.
Comment spam has good comments beaten by a factor of 9 or 10.
So, what can be done about this?
One simple thing… let the ISP know.
Many times spam is submitted from someone’s webserver via a chunk of malicious software, but other times it is right from their own computer. Either way, if you notice comment spam is coming from the same IP (or even really similar ones, for example: 24.24.24.135 and 24.24.24.136), you should run a search on a site like domainwhitepages.com to get the IP addresses information.
After that, look for an “abuse” contact and send them a report letting them know one of their users is spamming. If their is no abuse contact, get the ISPs name, goto their site, and contact them.
When you collect a bunch of comment spam it gets reported to Akismet, but what happens then? As far as I know, nothing. Akismet is really good at preventing spam from appearing, but the fact remains it is still being submitted and it is up to us (bloggers) to prevent it from being submitted in the first place.
The amazing thing is, I have done that with some ISPs in places like Russia and China and it didn’t even take more than a few weeks for that IP to stop spamming me. They don’t like spam either, it costs them $$$.
I don’t really like The Pirate Bay at all, but I have to kind of agree with them in regards to this situation:
The Swedish Police may use a child porn filter to knock out The Pirate Bay via DNS redirections performed by the ISPs. According to Brokep’s Blog the police haven’t notified them about any content in question, let alone The Pirate Bay does appear to do some pretty kick ass filtering based on my experience the 2 or 3 times I’ve visited it.
I suppose the fact they might be linking to a torrent which may contain hidden child porn would be enough for the Police to get mad, but since they didn’t even talk to the bay I do have to agree something fishy is going on.
Just a quick thought though, the police hate that site, and The Pirate Bay did recently launch an image sharing site which has been controversial from the get-go due to the fact it is uncensored. In addition, the people behind the bay have been getting a lot of attention because their recent projects may be linked to pedophilia support.
Perhaps this is just a bite in the ass for their “other” projects, or maybe the Swedish police found a nice opportunity to take down The Pirate Bay and are going for it?
What do you think?
Well, the A Week Of Staying Save series is over.
Here are all of the articles:
A Week Of Staying Safe Articles:
Day 1 - The Ultimate Guide To Detecting E-Mail Scams
Day 2 - Huh? Who Sent That? - How To Find Out What Server Really Sent That E-Mail And How To Deal With Spam
Day 3 - Having A Good Host Can Sure Save Your Sanity
Day 4 - Top 3 Ways To Secure MySQL
Day 5 - Avoiding Make Fast Money Affiliate Scams
Day 6 - 17 Ways To Avoid Spyware Forever
Day 7 - Password Rotation
I hope you enjoy reading them 
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