So, it’s Monday morning, you’ve sat down at your desk, powered up your PC and then slunk lower and lower in your chair as a fresh tide of spam rolls into your inbox.
And if you’re thinking that January was a pretty bad month for spam, you’d be right.
Commtouch’s virus and spam statistics for January 2006 show that the year started out with a bang, with four massive virus attacks unleashed during the month including an evil sounding “multi-wave attack of 7 variants.”
The company noted that the most aggressive attacks struck before the average anti-virus vendor could even release a signature
“The number of massive attacks grew in January,” points out Amir Lev, President and CTO. “In large part due to the speed of distribution, they succeeded in reaching many of their targets despite the presence of traditional anti-virus programs.”
Looking through the depressing stats for January reveals 19 new email-born significant virus attacks, of which eight (42%) were categorised as “low intensity”, seven (37%) “Medium Intensity” and four (21%) rated as massive attacks – a rare phenomenon for a single month.
The report also tracks the domains used by spammers, with hotmail.com leading the list with 4.7 million spams, followed by yahoo.com (4.2 million), msn.com (2.1 million), cisco.com (1.9 million) and gmail.com (1.5 million).
As usual, most of the spam revolved around dodgy pharmaceuticals (52%), gifts (14%), ‘enhancers and diets’ (13%), refinancing (7.5%), software (6%), porn and local dating (5%) and fraud (just under 1%).
If musing over updated spam graphs are your thing, check out the Commtouch stats page
SMS Onslaught in Korea
In Korea, unwanted text messages and spam phone calls have got so bad that the Korea Communication Commission (KCC) is to take the unusual step of punishing the country’s telecom companies, along with unlawful marketers.
“Up until now, we have checked just spam senders. But we are required to take punitive actions against fixed-line telecom entities, which are partially responsible,” commented KCC secretary general Kim In-soo.
Initially, mobile spam looked to be in decline after the introduction of an opt-in system in March, 2005 which prohibited marketers from placing promotional calls or sending advertising messages to handset users who hadn’t given explicit permission in advance.
Sneaky marketers tried to get around this with a clever bit of human engineering: they fired off hundreds of computer-generated calls to mobile phones that hung up after just one ring.
Any curious recipients calling back to find out whose call they missed found themselves connected to a porn hotline charged at premium rates. Ouch!
Handango has released their annual “Handango Yardstick”, a global snapshot of the state of the mobile content industry in 2005.
New additions included the Motorola RAZR V3, the BlackBerry 7100 Series and the BlackBerry 7250/7290 (the first BlackBerry smartphone to ever make the top ten).
The top ten Windows Mobile Pocket PC applications were:
The days of smugness of Apple Macintosh users are coming to an end. Symantec is reporting that they’ve recently identified a virus for Macs. It’s a pretty rare occurrence, given there’s only been about 10 Apple viruses in the last 10 years.
By identifying the four most recently executed apps using Spotlight, it uses this information to attempt to infect these files.
It’s rare that there are inconsistencies in the Digital-Lifestyles clan, but there’s one subject that brings a split consensus. Some of us, me included, think that different forms of controllers for video game is a trend that is just starting – a more natural way of working with the games console is inevitable, like the 
Rock-power-fiends will set their fingers a flyin’ around the five frets, strum-bar and whammy bar. Beyond the buttons, there’s an alignment sensor used to gain extra style points when it’s played vertically. Expect the inducement of dizziness as heads are thrown around in a frenzy.
With the Multiplayer mode seeing two players facing-off in what are described as ‘an electrifying series of guitar duels’, it’s quite unclear what will happen over artistic differences, or even usages of the power axe (otherwise known as guitar) as there’s only one shipped with the software.
Initial previews have been strong and it’s gained from PR boosts with the like The Darkness talking about on MTV Overdrive. It looks like there’s high hopes from this one.
Major UK consumer broadband providers NTL are teaming up with BitTorrent, the developers of the world’s most popular peer-to-peer (P2P) application.
Naturally, rights holders and movie heavyweights weren’t too chuffed to see their content whizzing around the Internet for gratis, and quickly hired in squadrons of lawyers to apply pressure on BitTorrent.
Inga Chernyak, until recently, had a legal clerk job at an IP law firm in New York City. On the 26 January she was called in to the firms HR department and fired.
There may be those who think that it’s pretty obvious that is you work in an IP firm; wanting to train as an IP lawyer; you hold views that IP law is over restrictive; then have your name and photo featured in an article that starts by describing how to circumvent CD DRM protection and are a founder of NYU chapter of the Free Culture movement – you’re going to end up in trouble said IP law firm. 
Google have released version 4 of their popular toolbar for Web browsers, with groovy new features to lure more visitors to their sites.
The Bookmarks functionality has also been enhanced to allow users to create and label bookmarks that can be accessed from any computer – something noticeable missing from arch-rival Internet Explorer.
By ramping up the feature set Google is hoping to grab a larger share of Web users (and thus more advertisers) and steal a march on Yahoo and Microsoft who both offer their own toolbars.
A great shame to hear that ZipTV has had to enter receivership.
They way it worked was, as the punters were watching ‘normal’ TV and an advert from one of ZipTV’s clients was shown, a press of the Red button on the remote control (the UK standard for interaction), would take the punter away from the ‘normal’ TV show, to a dedicated TV channel. This gave the advertiser the opportunity to show an 8 minute video advert, but just pay for a 30-second spot-ad to get them there.
You see Sky, and it’s very competent employees and owner, Rupert Murdoch don’t muck around. If they see some bright young things coming along with a super wheeze they will drain their income – it will get their attention – and not in a good, cuddly way.
Opera Software have announced the worldwide release of 
As a result of the compression technology, users can surf the Web faster – and those paying for their data traffic can dramatically reduce their bandwidth costs.
“With Opera Mini most people can start surfing the Web with the mobile phone they have today,” purred Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software.
Opera Mini can be freely downloaded by pointing your phone’s WAP browser in the direction of