Scams on the Internet never cease to amaze me.  Some of them are sophisticated, some subtle, and some are just downright absurd.
I’d recently discovered a mailbox that I had left unattended for several years.  It had no anti-spam tool monitoring it, so it was mostly filled with really obvious spam messages and phishing attempts [...]

Filed under: Consumer Web, Microsoft, Offbeat, Security | 1 Comment »

It wasn’t long ago that everyone was buzzing about web mashup tools.  They were supposed to be miraculous pieces of software that would be able to bring together different disparate web applications, built in any language, and smash them together into one uber-cool application.  Alas, the term mashup is now out of fashion – or [...]

Filed under: Enterprise Web, SaaS, Security | 2 Comments »

Social aggregator site Power.com, which allows users to access multiple social networking sites from one interface, got in trouble recently with Facebook.  Facebook sued Power.com for storing Facebook user credentials within their own database and scraping what Facebook called "proprietary data" (i.e. user data).  Facebook and Power.com are working towards an agreement to settle [...]

Filed under: Consumer Web, Privacy, Product Management, Security, Social Computing | Comments Off

I’ve often overheard people saying the reason they like Macs so much more than PCs is because they are "less vulnerable to viruses."  But that’s simply not true, as Graham Cluley of Sophos correctly points out in his blog: Mac users are just as human as Windows users, and they too can be tricked [...]

Filed under: Consumer Web, Security | Comments Off

Twitter recently announced a warning on their company blog about people sending private messages with links to a phishing site that pose as Twitter’s login page.  The site links to a bogus URL, twitter.access-logins.com, in hopes that the victim will re-enter their Twitter username and password without noticing that the URL is incorrect:

A [...]

Filed under: Consumer Web, Security, Social Computing | Comments Off

Yes, it turns out that Firefox has critical security bugs, too.  Microsoft Internet Explorer is not alone in dealing with security problems.  But at least the Mozilla Foundation is generally good about reacting to them swiftly.
In case you haven’t noticed Firefox telling you that you need to update to 3.0.5, you probably should do [...]

Filed under: Consumer Web, Security | 1 Comment »

Considering the recent Internet Explorer security vulnerability, there are all too many reasons to make sure your installation of Windows is safe and secure (or otherwise switch to MacOS, Linux, or some other *nix).
If switching to an alternate OS isn’t feasible, here are 5 easy ways to make your Windows installations less virus and [...]

Filed under: Consumer Web, Security, Windows | 2 Comments »