A few strange spam messages led a writer for Salon to discover a huge scam costing taxpayers a lot of money. It all started when he got an email from BachelorDegreeOnline.com asking him to remove a link to them from …

Those of you who hold a mad, crazy iLove for your iDevices should stop reading now.

Apple Corp. would have people believe that it invented the computer mouse (it didn’t), the GUI (it didn’t), and running water (okay, we made that one up). The company has even managed to convince some patent trial juries that it invented the motion of swiping one’s finger from left to right, although ancient Mesopotamian sages (and some modern jurists) might disagree. Late demigod and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is famously quoted as saying “good artists copy. Great artists steal”, and, ironically, he was quoting someone else (Picasso). The ever-litigious company keeps its lawyers rich and never lacking work, and if it had its way, the company would probably sue God for making apples.

Apple’s arrogance is aplenty, and its tactics have left some of us – especially those who make a living in the technology world – scratching our heads at some of its choices. Recently, the company famously dumped arch-rival Google in iOS 6, when it canned the YouTube and Google Maps apps. A curious choice, because there was absolutely nothing wrong with either of those apps, except that they weren’t made by Apple. So when Apple makes an app, you want it to work, right? If no one else is good enough to make apps for their hardware, then you have to rely on the company that made the hardware. That seems to be Apple’s modus operandi.

  Dropbox users are again complaining about receiving spam at the email addresses they have registered with the service and blaming it on the data breach the popular storage service suffered last year. Users say they believe their email addresses …

If you’ve spent any time at all as a IT professional, you know that your colleagues have what to outsiders could only be considered a bizarre sense of humour, and will often latch on to memes and other pop culture references that seem to remain funny for long after they should have faded to ignominy. Take, for example, the Harlem Shake, planking, or even this one. Yes, yes I did. Sorry. This time honoured tradition goes back to the earliest days of computers, and the story of why Unsolicited Commercial Email is called spam.

In 1970, the fledging ARPANET had not yet hit its first real growth spurt and had only four connected nodes. On the other hand, British sketch comedy was enjoying its golden age, and Monty Python’s Flying Circus was one of the best shows on BBC One. At the end of one episode, the comic troop performed a sketch in a restaurant where two patrons wanted to order breakfast, and practically every item on the menu came with spam, a canned meat product. The woman of the couple apparently did not like spam and became rather vocal in her objections, while the man seemed to think nothing was wrong. Throughout, a group of Vikings would interject with song, and, well, if you haven’t seen it, you’re missing out, and need to go see it for yourself to really understand what was happening.

2013 is speeding along and, as usual, spam is at the top of the headlines. Here’s a look at what made the news in the spam world in February: Dropbox Users Complaining About New Spam Attack http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/02/28/dropbox-users-complain-of-spam-emails-reminiscent-of-last-years-data-leak-company-is-investigating/ Apple Acknowledges Issue …

Some anti-spam filters rely solely on technology to do their jobs. This is adequate for stopping many of the malicious emails that are out there, however this method fails to take into consideration one of the greatest tools there is when it comes to spotting harmful or junk email – the human being.

People not only have the ability to learn how to spot illegitimate emails, but they have the ability to read into the context of the message as well. They can evaluate what an email says more accurately than any algorithm out there.

Google is continuing its fight against spammers by strengthening its anti-spam controls. They announced this week that they’ve tweaked their algorithms to further fine tune them and adding new tools to keep their user’s accounts safe. “Although spam filters have become very …

Welcome back. In our last post, we took a look at the very first email spam message ever sent. If you haven’t read that post yet, you may want to do that first, before proceeding with this one. Go ahead, we’ll wait. Back? Great, you’re ready to go along with the rest of us as we take a look at how the original users of the ARPANET reacted to receiving the first spam email.

Facebook, Microsoft and Apple, oh my! The interwebs have been abuzz this week with the hacking of three of the bigger kids on the technology field; and while conspiracy theorists continue to push the Chinese military as the bully, it seems like just another week at the ol’ IT school of hard knocks. Cyber attacks like the ones perpetrated on Apple are a bit of a ‘ho hum’ event. Big tech companies work hard to prepare for security breaches, using trained personnel and established policies to ensure that any threat is quickly mitigated, even if it means taking down an entire network during a security event. One would think the same applies to any tech company, certainly the ones which provide, as part of their service, access infrastructure to end users. But apparently, not all telecoms are created equally, certainly not the ones which show little imagination when choosing their names.

In the beginning, there was the ARPANET, and all was well with the world. The ARPANET was the term given to the collection of networks that would eventually give rise to the Internet we all know and love today. Electronic communications were between peers, and everyone knew everyone. That was relatively easy considering that there were only a few hundred researchers and scientists working on the early precursor to the Internet. While work on packet switching, resilient communications networks began back in 1969, the ARPNET really started to get going by the late seventies.