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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg debuted the social networking site’s new messaging system today, in what many tech journalists considered an attempt by Facebook to take on other Web-based e-mail systems. Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch wrote last week about the launch of Project Titan, which has apparently been in development for some time, and has been called a “Gmail killer” by those inside the company.
Proposed Legislation Would Make Internet Wiretaps Easier
by Jonathan Strickland | September 27, 2010
Glancing through the news this morning, I came across this report from the Associated Press. According to AP, the Obama administration is pushing for new regulations that would require any company that provides electronic communication services make those services easier to wiretap. It’s not that the government would necessarily be tapping more devices — it’s that those devices wouldn’t throw up roadblocks to make obtaining information more difficult.
I wonder if Marc Maron knows this. I wonder if anyone else knows this. It’s entirely possible that I’m the only person on the entire planet who knows this. I’m pretty sure I discovered the first use of “wtf” in an e-mail.
And it’s actually mentioned in print form, deep in Robert Woodward’s book, “Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981 -1987.” In it, Woodward chronicles the covert action waged by CIA director William Casey under the Reagan Administration against the governments of countries like Libya and the funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to arm the resistance against the Soviets by the Mujahideen (which later became the Taliban) in Afghanistan.
Journalists writing on matters of interest to China and Taiwan have had their Yahoo e-mail accounts compromised, according to a report from Lucy Hornby and Alexei Oreskovic at Reuters. This news follows reports of a similar incident at Google, which has led the company to cease censorship of its search results in China.
If you are, you aren’t alone. Lance Whitney at CNET wrote about the Mobile Messaging Study commissioned by Neverfail and conducted by Osterman Research. Judging from the press release, I believe the point of the study was to show how many people use business e-mail and how important it is to protect your e-mail infrastructure.
There’s been lots and lots of talk out there about the next phase of communication, especially with the launch of Google Wave, which some people see as the successor to e-mail. Admittedly, I’m not terribly excited about Wave, but there are two factors at work here:
- I’ve only had it for a few days.
- Jonathan’s the only person I’ve sent Waves to.
I’m not dismissing it, certainly, but it seems like a tool I’d use for work, rather than completely overhauling my entire communication strategy. We’ll see how that pans out.
But then the other day I heard about Mozilla Raindrop. Now for those of you who only know Mozilla as the creator of the Firefox Web browser, you should know that the organization works on many projects. In fact, I like the Thunderbird e-mail client quite a lot. But in Mozilla Labs there’s a new project called Raindrop that is supposed to unify messaging from multiple protocols.
Honestly, I thought the days of the “forward this e-mail on to x number of people and you’ll get a free y product” messages were behind us. Doesn’t everyone know that these messages are always a hoax?
I thought we all knew that. But this morning I logged in to my mail to see that I was the latest lucky recipient of a mass spam mailing. Other HowStuffWorks.com writers were also in that lucky bunch. The e-mail said “I wonder if this is a scam. Oh well.” Following that message was a series of other messages, and buried deep inside was the original “offer.”
That supposed offer was to send a free Sony Ericsson T18 Laptop to anyone who forwarded the message on to at least eight other people. Sending it to at least 20 would get you an upgrade to an R320 Laptop. To add a little authenticity to the bogus offer, the message asks that you carbon copy the message to a person with an Ericsson.com e-mail address. Presumably, this was how Sony would keep track of people taking advantage of this amazing deal. I’m not going to include the e-mail address here because I’m sure that this person, if she does exist, is already tired of receiving dozens (if not hundreds or thousands) of spam messages.
On September 30, Google made a select group of salivating techno geeks very happy. That was the day when Google offered a few coveted invitations to its Google Wave service. Until that day, the only people who had a chance to really play with Google Wave included people within Google and attendees of Google’s last I/O Developer conference back in June. Google announced in its blog that it would send out 100,000 invitations to preview the service.
Keylogging Attack May be to Blame for Compromised E-mail Accounts
by Chris Pollette | October 8, 2009
In Tuesday’s episode of TechStuff Live, Jonathan and I discussed the discovery that user names and passwords from Google, Yahoo and Hotmail accounts had been posted online where anyone could see them. At the time, only people with user names in the As and Bs had been posted, and we conjectured that there would be more. Not only have more been posted, but it appears that the scam is spreading.
The reaction many people have when something like this happens is that someone has hacked into the providers. But it appears that that’s not what happened here. Instead, it’s a phishing scheme — a scam where people trick users into revealing important personal information, including names, credit card numbers, Social Security numbers and more.
According to an article I read last night at the BBC, this phishing scam is spreading. People are using the compromised accounts to send e-mail to address-book contacts.
I’m excited about Google Wave — so excited that I was surprised to find I hadn’t written about it yet. Marshall Brain wrote a quick post in which he says Google Wave is designed to replace e-mail. I think it goes well beyond that. Now Mark Hachman of PCMag reports that Google will open the beta build of Wave to 100,000 users beginning in September.
Google unveiled Wave to a group of application developers attending the Google I/O event back in May. Google Wave combines elements of e-mail, Google Docs, instant messaging and video and picture hosting services to create a real-time collaboration tool. I can imagine using Wave for everything from working on a professional project with several team members to creating a fun online scrapbook with your family. And that’s just for starters — the whole point of debuting Google Wave at the I/O event was to get application developers excited about the prospect of building new features using Google Wave as a platform.
You’ll find the video of the Google I/O presentation behind the jump. It’s about an hour and twenty minutes long. Normally I’d find it hard to sit through a presentation that long without getting antsy, but Wave really caught my attention.
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