Robert Accettura's
Fun With Wordage

Many people think that making an image out of an email is a good way to protect it from being harvested by spam bots. It’s now possible to convert it from an image to email link via a Firefox extension. Guess what, an email harvester can do this just as well. What’s [...]

This happened a few weeks ago. I kept it quiet and reported it. Hasn’t happened again, and I haven’t heard anything, so I presume it’s fixed.
It appears spammers have learned to hijack Google Alerts for spamming purposes. By setting up an alert with a spam text, the email is sent through [...]

Kiplinger has a great story on phishing and security. The bottom line: while progress has been made there’s still a long way to go. Here was a very concerning piece:
When researchers at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studied the anti-fraud image system used by Bank of America, they found that [...]

Using Firefox on a shared computer such as an office workstation, library, or school computer lab? Don’t want people seeing what you did/saw? That’s a very good idea. When your done browsing the web go to the “Tools” menu and select “Clear Private Data”. Check the data you want to delete [...]

As of yesterday SafePasswd.com is now suggesting passwords over SSL for better security. Seems like a good idea right?
In other news, there is now a SafePasswd.com blog. The focus is quite simple. Bring better security to the masses.
Check it out, add the feed to your favorite RSS reader, bookmark it.

Recently there has been a fair amount of talk about bringing web applications off of the web and onto your desktop, or to put it in really simple terms: providing a bare-browser that has no UI but the site you visit. It sounds good, but I’m not convinced it’s quite workable, at least at [...]

The Chase Freedom credit card isn’t bad (1% cash back, 3% on certain items). There is an unadvertised downside. While Chase doesn’t promote it very well, the card contains a tiny RFID chip. This allows you to pay for something using a contact-less terminal (no swiping). Just put your card near [...]

If you have bluetooth on your phone, there’s yet another reason to turn it off when you don’t use it. Besides saving battery life (which is always a good thing), and just general security you’ll be seeing more and more spam as time goes on if you keep it on. It’s already [...]

I didn’t find this anywhere online, so I thought I’d post it. Norton AntiVirus up to and including 2007 doesn’t support POP3 over SSL. That’s a problem since sending mail without SSL is insecure, and sending mail over SSL with no virus scanning is also insecure. There is a fix.
Please note these [...]

A teacher could get 40 years for Malware (which IMHO is nothing more than a variation of “Virus”). That sounds like a harsh sentence.
Even more reason to scan your computer regularly, and keep anti-virus and anti-spyware definitions up to date, but 40 years? Yikes.
For anyone interested, Sunbelt’s Blog is fantastic, and I’ve blogged [...]