Bottom Line: type the Web site domain name manually into your browser or use a bookmark. A healthy dose of paranoia is the best defense.

Today’s headlines scream about phishing attacks that are stealing financial data, bilking billions from consumers, and contributing to identity theft. These news articles are soon followed by vendor press releases and dubious marketing propaganda seeking to capitalize on the buzzword hysteria.

Security professionals are left trying to separate the truth from the hype while looking to SSL, token authentication, e-mail encryption, A/V scanners, blacklist and take-down services for solutions. Each incident usually gets management very excited about protecting their customers and the brand.

Meanwhile, while gleefully jumping from foot to foot, the Phishers are having the last laugh because they know something you don’t: None of this stuff actually works anyway. At least not for phishing scams. Don’t get me wrong. These solutions have their time and place, just not when it comes to phishing and I’m here to tell you why.

Wanna buy the New Pope’s old car? Does Ebay have a deal for you!!

Need to translate? Google apparently can’t translate ebay pages.Translation will be from German to English, and even then it is difficult to understand.

How do we build a political movement in this country that represents all of the people and not a handful of millionaires?

The middle class is collapsing, the people on top are making out like bandits, and the poorest people are struggling just to keep their heads above water.

Today, the concentration of wealth and income in this country is not only greater than at any time since the 1920s, but it is far greater than in any other major country on Earth.

It is not acceptable that the wealthiest 1 percent of the population owns more wealth than the bottom 95 percent.

That’s not America.

There’s a tricky clause in Chapter 32/Title 50 of the United States Code (the aggregation of US general and permanent laws) which states that the Secretary of Defense can conduct a chemical or biological agent test or experiment on humans in certain cases “if informed consent has been obtained.”

So far so good. But check out a different part of Chapter 32, Section 1515, entitled “Suspension; Presidential authorization”: “After November 19, 1969, the operation of this chapter, or any portion thereof, may be suspended by the President during the period of any war declared by Congress and during the period of any national emergency declared by Congress or by the President.”

You got it. If the President or Congress decides we’re at war then the Secretary of Defense doesn’t need anybody’s consent to test chemical or biological agents on human beings. Gives one pause during these days of a perpetual “War on Terror.”

Pressured by anti-terror laws, banks will be spending billions of dollars over the next few years on software to counter money laundering. The software will automatically track suspicious financial transactions, but it will also monitor millions of innocuous ones, and may make it harder to cheat on your taxes.

Thanks to the stringent requirements of the Patriot Act, enacted after 9/11 to choke the supply of terror funds, and the unambiguous threats of steep fines and even imprisonment of bank directors if their organizations facilitate money laundering, U.S. financial institutions are very enthusiastic about installing anti-money-laundering software.

There are a lot of great freeware products out there. Many are as good or even better than their commercial alternatives. This list features my personal pick of the “best of the best.”

“It is therefore possible to manipulate the nervous system of a subject by pulsing images displayed on a nearby computer monitor or TV set. For the latter, the image pulsing may be imbedded in the program material, or it may be overlaid by modulating a video stream, either as an RF signal or as a video signal.”
— US Patent and Trade Office, Patent #6,506,148, 2/14/03

Remember that big class action settlement from the big recording companies for conspiring to ‘fix’ prices on CD’s?? Well here’s the payoff. How do we continually get screwed like this?

Some Bay area librarians think they’re getting stuck with moldy tunes the record labels couldn’t sell.The San Francisco Public Library, for instance, will get 91 copies of a ’60s rock compilation (“Feelin’ Groovy”), 81 copies of an album by reality TV star Jessica Simpson (“Irresistible”) and 73 copies of a “Christmas with Yolanda Adams.” By contrast, it will receive only single copies of hundreds of other selections, like jazz great Louis Armstrong’s “I Love Jazz.”

One more reason to migrate towards Linux.

In a move that could rankle privacy advocates, Microsoft said Monday that it is adding the PC equivalent of a flight data recorder to the next version of Windows, in an effort to better understand and prevent computer crashes.

AMERICAblog.com has learned that Microsoft is currently paying a $20,000 a month retainer to former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed’s consulting firm Century Strategies. Which now begs the question of whether Reed was in any way involved with Microsoft’s recent decision to abandon its decades long support for gay civil rights in order to curry favor with anti-gay bigots of the radical right.