OUT-LAW.COM: Liberal Democrats broke privacy laws with 250,000 calls -
“The Liberal Democrats broke anti-spam laws by placing 250,000 automated telephone calls last week without prior consent, according to the UK’s privacy chief. If the party continues placing such calls, it has been warned that it could face prosecution.”
(via legalbrief)
TheHill.com: House limits constituent e-mails to prevent crash -
“The [U.S. House of Representatives] is limiting e-mails from the public to prevent its websites from crashing due to the enormous amount of mail being submitted on the financial bailout bill.”
At Word to the Wise, Laura Atkins reminds us that “This is similar to what some ISPs have to do under periods of peak load.”
It’s a technique (actually a variety of techniques) generally called “rate limiting” or “traffic shaping,” described fairly well by Desmond Liao in this article (MailChannels often talks like they think they invented these techniques, but, um, they didn’t. They do talk more openly about it than the ISPs who’ve been doing it for years, though.)
Spam Wars: Riding the Coattails of Credibility - Danny Goodman discusses pharmacy spam which “borrowed” an opt-out link & CAN-SPAM statement from a legitimate message.
Google Webmaster Central: Keeping comment spam off your site and away from users -
Jason Morrison shares some tips on avoiding comment spam — all of which can help with other web form attacks, too.
(via DirectNews)
Washington Post Security Fix: Microsoft, Washington State Sue Scareware Purveyors -
“Microsoft Corp. and the state of Washington this week filed lawsuits against a slew of…scam artists who use fake security alerts to frighten consumers into paying for worthless computer security software.”
Finally!
Freedom to Tinker: Popular Websites Vulnerable to Cross-Site Request Forgery Attacks -
“We found four major vulnerabilities on four different sites. These vulnerabilities include what we believe is the first [Cross-Site Request Forgery] vulnerability that allows the transfer of funds from a financial institution. We contacted all the sites involved and gave them ample time to correct these issues. Three of these sites have fixed the vulnerabilities listed below, one has not.”
(via fergdawg)
Terry Zink: Stopping bots from abusing webmail - some interesting ideas, and some surprisingly antagonistic comments
Guardian (AP): Congress sending child porn bills to president -
“Currently, Internet service providers are required to report child pornography to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The legislation would expand those companies with reporting obligations to include search engines such as Google and Yahoo!, social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, domain name registrars and wireless phone carriers.”
(via DomainNews, via fergdawg)
This would be the first time that domain registrars have been asked to pay attention to domain owners’ illegal activities. Perhaps other crimes will follow….
Deliverability.com: FBL Mantra - “My good friends in the industry have really stepped up to share their knowledge to those who are new to the delivery/email job and in many cases to those who are interested in what the deliverability people do everyday….”
Not Always Right: And We Wonder Who Clicks On Spam, Part 2 -
PEBCAK (or is it?)
(also: part 1)