On Message with Ben Gross

GFI SecurityLabs issued a note today about a new type of pump and dump spam with MP3 attachments. The voice appears to be generated using text to speech.
GFI has a sample of the audio on it’s web site as does a note about MP3 spam from SophosLabs. I found several examples in my own spam [...]

The Pew Internet & American Life Project conducts nationally stratified surveys of American households on a wide range of topics related to internet use. Pew regularly publishes reports and data on trends they find.
China’s Online Population Explosion What It May Mean for the Internet Globally… and for U.S. Users: Although just over 10% of people [...]

The results are in from CNET’s Webware 100 contest to rank the top 100 Web 2.0 products and services. Webware’s editor Rafe Needleman posted analysis of the results. There were nearly half a million votes cast for the 250 finalists. The winners of were not ranked, however the top ten received 45 percent of [...]

At the recent Google Developer day, Google released offline functionality for Google Reader, it’s browser based feed aggregator. The offline functionality is enabled by Google Gears which “is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality[.]” It’s an interesting technology that I’ll write more about at a later date.
You can [...]

Jordan Schwartz is a senior program manager at Microsoft working on digital photography incubation projects such as Pixie Hunt a cameraphone scavenger hunt. The video of his talk on “Building an SMS Service” from December’s Ignite Seattle is online. Jordan discusses the ins and outs of prototyping and building SMS based services.
Jordan gave a extended [...]

Over at CSOonline.com Scott Berinato has two accessible articles on image spam. The first “The Scourge of Image Spam,” is a brief introduction with a series of examples showing how text can be manipulated to fool antispam filters. The manipulations may include the use of symbols, changing the letter ordering, or the addition of HTML.
The [...]

In their latest report, “A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users“, the Pew Internet & American Life Project classified American’s by their information and communication technology use. The data are based on roughly 4000 phone surveys that included roughly 2800 internet users. Pew makes its reports and questionnaires available as well as data extracts [...]

In what will certainly be a growing trend, the email marketing firm Listrak has integrated with Google Analytics to track email campaigns. Providing better integration of email analytics with web analytics will hopefully allow more granular reporting as well as better conversion rate tracking for email marketers. Google Analytics, formerly known as Urchin, is a [...]

The Email Britain project aims to archive a “snapshot” of British life as recorded in email. The project is a collaboration of the British Library and Microsoft and will run during May 2007. Request for donations include all kinds of email ranging from everyday emails, to blunders, to love and romance, and even spam. The [...]

Robin Jewsbury of Refresh Mobile posted a video showing the growth of their content sharing service EyeMags according to their Google Analytics data.

The Mobile Internet IS different - there seems to be a band of usage across Europe through the middle east, India and into Asia. Although usage is high in the US it [...]