Tag: EMAIL

It looks like Russia won't be banning Skype or Gmail, after all. The Kremlin was reportedly considering blocking both services, along with Hotmail, in response to a major cyberattack that crippled the country's most popular blog and an independent news site. Some within the Kremlin had believed the services posed a major threat to national security, but some critics had thought the government may ...

Here's a fascinating look at the world of Sakawa, a unique blend of e-mail fraud and African religious tradition that has become a cultural force in Ghana. The young and unemployed people who use scavenged computers and Juju priests for their scams also drive a thriving music and movie scene centered on the lives of e-mail conmen. The video above is 20-minutes long, so if you're working, ...

A cyber-attack on an online marketing firm has impacted a wide array of companies and customers in what could be the largest data breach in U.S. history. The online marketer, Epsilon, sends out more than 40 billion email ads and offers each year, typically to users who register with a company's website, or give their email addresses while shopping online. On Friday, Epsilon announced that a ...

Glance at your inbox lately? If it seems to be overflowing with crap you just don't need, well, that's probably because it is. While spam filters have been working more effectively than ever, you, my friend, have been pretty much undermining the entire process by signing up for every travel, sales and group-buying program out there. Infographic World has a masterful infographic showing just how ...

The ACLU and other civil liberties groups can continue their legal battle against a federal wiretapping law, now that a New York appeals court has reinstated their lawsuit. At issue is a 2008 federal law known as the FISA Amendments Act, which empowered the U.S. government to conduct widespread electronic surveillance on suspected terrorists. The ACLU's challenge had been previously thrown out ...

Lately, solving a problem that no one never knew existed seems to be the golden ticket. The most recent example is fiesta.cc, which purports to cut down on the agony of group e-mailing. Fill out the 'To' field as usual, make up a relevant (or irreverent!) @fiesta.cc name to enter into the 'CC' field, and send off that missive. Next time anyone in that group wants to e-mail the entire group, he ...

As it did last year around this time, the Associated Press is making some tech-term related changes to its style guide. Hence forth 'e-mail' will be 'email,' 'cell phone' will be 'cellphone' and 'smart phone' will be 'smartphone.' Game-changing? No. But it's interesting to see the language evolve. The terms are no longer merely abbreviations for things like electronic mail or cellular telephone -- ...

Krebs on Security is reporting that a huge drop in the volume of e-mail spam circulating worldwide on Wednesday was the result of a planned takedown of the Rustock botnet, which, at one point, was the most prolific purveyor of spam in the entire world. According to the Composite Spam Blocklist (CBL), which measures global spam volumes, Rustock spam (usually ads for online pharmacies and male ...

Early this morning, Anonymous released a collection of internal e-mails sent between employees at Bank of America, in an attempt to expose what the group calls widespread "corruption and fraud." The e-mails, allegedly obtained from a former bank employee, document discussions among workers at Balboa Insurance, a Bank of America subsidiary that offers mortgage and car insurance to banks and home ...

Ever wonder how all those insipid rumors about Barack Obama's citizenship became so ridiculously virulent? According to a recent study from researcher R. Kelly Garrett, e-mail is to blame. Blogs? Not so much. Though the Internet can expose us to a wider array of rumors, it can also expose us to a variety of counter-arguments, effectively neutralizing the blogsophere's rumor-mongering potency. ...

Paranoid about how you come across in electronic missives? Well, sadly, there's not yet an app for that -- but there is software. ToneCheck, which first rolled out its inflection-analyzing program last summer, recently launched an update that PCWorld took for a spin. Currently available only for Microsoft Outlook, the ToneCheck plugin parses text for potentially unpleasant words or phrases. (In ...

IP addresses may help identify the source of anonymous and malicious e-mails, but they can only tell authorities where the message originated, without providing many details on the individual who authored them. Using some pretty innovative analytics, researchers at Concordia University have just come up with a new technique that could help investigators determine the precise identity of these ...

If your Yahoo Mail account seems to be a little sluggish today, you're not alone. Many users have complained that e-mails are taking hours, or sometimes days to arrive in their inboxes, while other users are having trouble logging into their accounts. Yahoo has yet to offer an explanation for the slowdown, but company spokeswoman Dana Lengkeek dismissed rumors that the service's spam filter is to ...

Thousands of Gmail users suddenly lost access to their inboxes yesterday morning, some claiming that their entire collections of e-mails, Google Chat logs and attachments had simply vanished. Others reported that their accounts had been reset by the bug, which, according to Google, affected as many as 150,000 users. The company says it's investigating the issue, and should resolve it shortly. ...

Symptoms: People listed in your e-mail contacts report being flooded with spam messages sent from your account. Or, you start receiving a bevy of "bounced" e-mails from random addresses you don't know. You aren't able to log into your account or change its settings, or you've discovered the settings have been altered. You attempt to use e-mail, and find it has been blocked by your provider. ...