8 Ways to Sunday

Outside my window,
Ten inches of purest white.
I sigh: “Winter sucks.”

Last year was so mild.
Global warming giveth, and
It taketh away.

According to Manuel Amador, there are benefits to offending your weblog’s audience, as well as a right and wrong way to do it. His essay on the topic is being featured on Weblog Tools Collection as part of that site’s blogging essay contest. It’s a good, thought provoking, and occasionally funny read.

If you like the article, you might want to check out Amador’s personal site. He has some good stuff there, including a cheeky formula to calculate the duration of modern copyrights and instructions on how to fix an unbootable Windows XP computer… using Linux.

These men will not be visiting your house.

An e-mailed phishing scam that appeared in late December takes an extreme new approach to defrauding its recipients. Pay up, threatens the message, or you’ll be killed.

The “hitman spam” is part of a highly targeted con directed mainly at well-paid professionals in the United States — doctors and lawyers, for example.* It seems sure to gain traction and spread to other markets, however, so stay on your toes. Do not respond in any way to this message, as the threats are utterly baseless. The goal is for you to fork over bank account information, allowing the scammers to clean you out.

SophosLabs — a virus, spyware, and spam analysis company — was the first to report on the hitman phishers. Graham Cluley, a Sophos consultant, says the message is “surely one of the sickest phishes yet seen.” The online edition of The Times of London has more, including news about the scam’s impact so far.

Personally, I think the emergence of such extreme phishing tactics is a good sign; it shows that the criminals are getting desperate. As the general population becomes increasingly savvy about the dangers of phishing, the old methods aren’t working anymore. We’re winning, and the only way to keep winning is to continue deleting their messages without response. Keep up the good work, folks.

(Props: Windows X’s Shrine)

Blendtec is a little company that makes kitchen appliances, most notably some uncommonly powerful blenders. Faced with the question of how to market their blenders, Blendtec decided to do something… different. You’d best take a moment to steady yourself before pressing the “play” button, especially if you own an iPod. (more…)

I’ve been preparing to upgrade WordPress — the software that powers this blog — by upgrading all the WP plugins that I have installed. Somewhere along the way, the form that allows people to subscribe and unsubscribe to e-mail notifications of new posts stopped working.

I’ve taken the form down until I can fix whatever has gone wrong. If you have an urgent need to change your e-mail subscription status for this blog, you can send me a request using the contact form and I’ll make it happen.