Monthly Archive for June, 2007

From eWeek:

Money is the motivation for scam-spam. The motivation for clicking on it is far less straightforward, and none of us is immune.

“It’s not like certain people are going to be nailed by spam all the time. Or that there are certain motivations that will just [always] trigger people [who respond] to spam scams. It’s really the interplay between personality and motivation, emotion—all sorts of things,” said Dr. James Blascovich, professor of psychology at UC Santa Barbara and co-director of the university’s Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior.

“It’s a little more complex, but not much different from the complex interplay of psychological factors that get people to succumb to any sort of scam.” …

McAfee, of Santa Clara, Calif., throws around figures like these: If half of the population in the United States (about 150 million people) use e-mail on a daily basis, and if only half of them (75 million) are gullible, and only 1 percent (750,000) buy into scam-spam on a given day, and if those victims were to cough up a mere $20 per scam, the potential market amounts to $15 million a day, or $105 million per week, or nearly $5.5 billion per year in just the United States.

From Forbes:

If Jonathan Ive were dead, which he’s not, he’d be spinning in his grave. Instead, Apple’s chief designer is probably vomiting in his wastebasket.

In an effort by the staid, slumping computer maker to break its bland streak, Dell rolled out new laptops Tuesday cloaked in eight different colors, including “sunshine yellow” and “flamingo pink.”

But while Dell may or may not impress design snobs with its pink and yellow machines, the computer maker is reading its market right, if a little late.

From Technology News Daily:

The government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers, according to a landmark ruling Monday in the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The court found that email users have the same reasonable expectation of privacy in their stored email as they do in their telephone calls — the first circuit court ever to make that finding.

Over the last 20 years, the government has routinely used the federal Stored Communications Act (SCA) to secretly obtain stored email from email service providers without a warrant. But today’s ruling — closely following the reasoning in an amicus brief filed the by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other civil liberties groups — found that the SCA violates the Fourth Amendment.