One Out Of Six: Yes To Spam
Last week, I found myself craving for Spam – the kind that you put in between two slices of nice white bread. The moment I checked my Inbox, though, my feeling towards spam – in general; food or e-mail related – changed drastically. For some reason, I keep getting these e-mails about Viagra and winning the lotto. And I am talking about my WORK e-mail here, not my personal e-mail! Seriously, I don’t understand why these people keep sending out these e-mails when everyone knows they’re SPAM and that they amount to NOTHING! No one pays attention to these e-mails, right?
Well, apparently, some people do! According to a survey conducted by Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, 1 out of 6 people in the United States and Canada respond to spam e-mails. I know, this is simply unbelievable, isn’t it?
In this day and age, why would anyone still fall for these scams? Haven’t we learned anything at all? No wonder that these scammers continue to send out their e-mails! I mean, just one or two people who respond to their bait might give them the profit that they are out for.
To be fair, the scammers are getting more and more creative. They also take advantage of the hottest things happening. For example, around the time of Michael Jackson’s death, there was an astronomical increase in e-mails about him – a lot of these were spam. Even those who are normally careful were lured into opening these e-mails and clicking away.
Bottom line: spam might be here for a while. Make sure you are careful and don’t be cocky (like me) – you never know what might hit you!
This is the first minor point release in the 3.5 series of Firefox. The main reason for this patch is a security flaw in the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine of the browser. We have “zbyte” to thank for the discovery of this flaw. This Firefox user reported that his browser kept on crashing each time he tried to type text in an input box on the site apport.ru. Zbyte sent this bug report in on July 9, and less than a month later, Firefox developers were able to find the reason for the bug AND send out a fix as well.
