Category — Internet

For all you PayPal users out there, there’s a new hoax to contend with!

It comes in the form of an e-mail, supposedly from PayPal, with the subject-line “PayPal Account Security Measures“. The contents of the mail are as follows,

Dear PayPal Member,

Your account has been randomly flagged in our system as a part of our routine security measures. This is a must to ensure that only you have access and use of your PayPal account and to ensure a safe PayPal experience. We require all flagged accounts to verify their information on file with us. To verify your Information at this time, please visit our secure server webform by clicking the hyperlink below

Click here to verify your Information

Thank you for using PayPal!
The PayPal Team

Please note that this is not a genuine PayPal e-mail. It is a fraud!!

The URL to supposedly verify your information takes you to the fraudster’s website where any information, that an unsuspecting PayPal user might enter, is phished!

As usual, I checked with PayPal by forwarding this suspicious mail to spoof@paypal.com. And a few minutes later, PayPal confirmed with a reply which said,

Dear Sameer,

Thank you for contacting PayPal.

Thank you for bringing this suspicious email to our attention. We can confirm that the email you received was not sent to you by PayPal. The website linked to this email is not a registered URL authorized or used by PayPal. We are currently investigating this incident fully. Please do not enter any personal or financial information into this website.

There! … straight from the horse’s mouth!! :-)

Stay informed!!

Update: Thanks to hpnadig for pointing out the following resources on information on these ‘homograph attakcs’.
1. Phisihing, IDN and Gecko Browsers
2. The state of homograph attacks

Internetizens rejoice! For the first conviction of a spammer has happened and a jail-term served!

Jeremy Jaynes of Raleigh, N.C., one of the Internet’s top 10 spammers, according to watchdogs, was convicted in the first felony spam case — just up the road from Fool HQ in Loudoun County, Va. He and his sister, Jessica DeGroot, were both found guilty by a jury that then recommended a jail term of nine years for Jaynes and a fine of $7,500 for DeGroot.

What’s important here is the nature of the convictions: intentional spamming. Jaynes and DeGroot were convicted not for the alleged fraudulent nature of their millions of email solicitations — Jaynes has amassed a reported fortune of $24 million hawking products like penny-stock pickers — but for sending unsolicited junk and forging IP addresses to cover their tracks.

[emphasis mine]

It really is a significant judgement, because as the emphasized portions of the above excerpt indicate, the conviction is purely for spamming and not for some fraud or scam. This means that spamming is being (rightly) recognized as a felony and is being dealt with accordingly.

But of course this is just the beginning. One long jail-term for a spammer, one snall step in the fight against spam-kind!

Instapundit felt it. And so did I!

My webhost, HostingMatters (or HostMatters, if you will) experienced a downtime earlier today as the US Presidential elections brought about a huge surge in traffic on the Net. And I’m sure this would’ve affected a great lot of hosts out there.

Hopefully… by the time I wake up, the traffic would’ve subsided to some extent. It pained me to see my blog take so long to load.

By the way, at this time, Bush has taken 4 states to Kerry’s 1 Kerry has overtaken Bush as he has taken 9 states to Bush’s 7, even as the Democrats are running with a loss of 3 electoral votes. And pollsters are still chickening out of predicting who’ll take Ohio

Wikipedia, the world’s largest and the fastest growing encyclopedia, has reached the ‘one million‘ mark with the addition of the millionth article yesterday.

I just noted via Eric Meyer that the folks over at GMPG have just published the XFN 1.1 profile.

For those who do not know, XFN stands for XHTML Friends Network. It provides for a easy way to attribute relationships to hyperlinks. By simply adding an additional attribute to the hyperlink, relationships between people/sites/blogs can be indicated on the web. As such, it paves the way towards a more human web.

The XFN 1.1 profile has three authors, Eric Meyer, Tantek Çelik and Matthew Mullenweg. While Eric and Tantek have published the news (about XFN 1.1), I wonder why Matt hasn’t done so yet (at least by the time of publishing of this post).