Posted on March 20, 2006 at 9:50 AM in round-ups
Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.
- Instant Messaging and Peer-to-peer Security Incidents On The Rise - According to a recent analysis by FaceTime.com, reported IM and Peer-to-peer incidents rose by a factor of 100 from 2004 to 2005.
- Cryzip Virus Demands Ransom - Here's a new one. Researchers have discovered instances of a new computer virus that locks up your files, and then asks you to deposit money into an online payment account to get them back. Cryzip is believed to be part of a batch of e-mail spam.
- Security-enabled Blogging For Kids - Few details are available yet, but a company called Industrious Kid is working on a blogging tool they say will have "easy-to-use access to the necessary insight and controls related to the communications and content development activities of their children."
- Digital Rights Management Shortens Battery Life - All of the extra encoding and checking that portable mp3 players do to make sure you own some of the music you play can reduce the life of your battery by as much as 25%. Yahoo Executive Dave Goldberg suggested recently that maybe the music industry should think about getting rid of Digital Rights Management completely. Would anyone complain?
- Del.icio.us Adding A Private Bookmarking Toggle - It used to be that everything you saved in Del.icio.us was automatically shared with other users. Now each time you save a bookmark, you can choose whether to share it or not. I just tried it -- when you go to save a bookmark, if you want it to remain private you check a box that says "do not share". Seems pretty simple.
- Even Deleted E-mails May Be Seized - A court asked Google to turn over all of the contents of a defendant's Gmail account, including the deleted e-mails. In their privacy policy, Google is very up-front about the fact that your deleted messages may stick around. They explain, "Even if a message has been deleted or an account is no longer active, messages may remain on our backup systems for some period of time." This is apparently standard to most webmail providers. I bet most people still think that deleting e-mails from a webmail provider automatically gets rid of them for good.
Note: I'm home battling a cold today and may be slow in responding to comments and e-mails.