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!
We covered 
In an interesting and innovative twist, Dixons have teamed up with Pulse Rated, a Internet radio station, to fill up the empty space on new MP3 players with tracks from unsigned bands.
We expect this initiative to increase our already impressive tally of artists offered recording deals as a result of our activities – all of which are provided totally free of charge to the artists,” he added with a plug-tastic air.
The kids may love it, but concerns are growing over social-networking sites like MySpace.com which encourage young users to build ever-larger circles of friends.
Last week, authorities in Santa Cruz, California arrested a 26-year-old man on suspicion of felony child molestation after he met a 14-year-old high-school student on MySpace.
With promotions like this, it’s not surprising that the site is proving attractive to older predators seeking to exploit young members.
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:
When it comes to Friday, our thoughts are drawn to life on the sea with the inevitable weekend sojourn to Monte Carlo (doesn’t everyone weekend there?).
The latest innovation from Volvo Penta is bound to add extra ammunition to the yacht-owners dislike of Motor boats and their owners. It looks like it makes it a doodle of maneuver a boat, with almost super-human skills.
They’ve taken the idea beyond simple X-Y joystick movements to incorporate a twisting action and a couple of buttons. X-Y provides the obvious forward/backward, plus an interesting side-to-side action, which doesn’t swing the boat around, but literally slides it sideways – neat.
The joystick’s twisting action rotates the boat, seemingly on a six-pence, in either direction, right or left – again, most impressive.
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.
There’s a growing reliance and expectance of networks in the home to handle all of this digitised media that we want to chuck around our homes, from room to room.
What’s involved in getting the network setup? Basically nothing. Take the power lead, plug it into one end of the NetPlug. The Ethernet (RJ45) goes in the other end.
There are different ways of creating a computer network. A traditional wired network is the cheapest but takes the longest time to set-up, unless you do not mind trailing cables. PLC devices cost more but are the quickest to set-up, and do not require any new cables. Wireless networks are the most expensive but can take less time to set-up than a traditional wired network, and offer out of doors networking.
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.
Motorola has unveiled their new, mass-market Motorola W220 phone at the 3GSM conference in Barcelona, Spain.
There’s no external display for caller ID purposes, with Motorola instead offering a simple set of three icons on the outer fascia displaying call status, message status, and battery remaining.
With such a slender feature set, we expect the W220 to be offered for next to nowt for contract deals sometime in Q3 2006.