Internet Scams Videos
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Leah Andersson unravels old sweaters and recycles the yarn for her business, Smart Monkey Knits. She explains how her business plan has provided some unexpected returns. We also meet a food writer who has been hanging out with all kinds of grandmothers in the kitchen.

NBC Dog Show host DAVID FREI is back on Animal Radio with a sneak-peek into this Thanksgiving Day Dog Show...seen by 20 million people! Pet Insurance may or may not be right for you and your pets - we'll take a look at the options. Dr. JIM HUMPHRIES looks at Internet Scams. Animal People Editor MERRITT CLIFTON lays down the line on Declaw legislation. Listener Thanksgiving Pet Stories. Dealing with inappropriate urination. ABC Good Morning America's DR. MARTY BECKER is back and talking about pet motion-sickness. LIZ PALIKA talks about what you should know before you get a dog. DR. STEVEN NESS on Feline Heart Disease. PETA Founder INGRID NEWKIRK with ideas for a Dog Party. Cat Yoga...need we say more? And why did Santa sue the Air Force?! More at AnimalRadio.com. We're streaming Live 24/7 at http://AnimalRadio.com

add to reddit! add to del.icio.us Almost everyone with an e-mail account has experienced unsolicited commercial e-mail, or spam - and everyone knows how irritating it can be. Every day we can read about new breakthroughs in anti-spam technology, or another successful prosecution against spam senders located in the United States and Europe. The most surprising thing about spam, and what has kept it plaguing our e-mail accounts for years now, is that it invariably makes money for its senders. A Radicati-Mirapoint study this year found that almost one third of e-mail users have clicked a link in an unsolicited commercial e-mail for more information, and nearly one in ten have gone on to purchase a product as a result. The running rate for sending around a million spam e-mails now is around US$200. Given that most spam senders are hawking high margin get-rich-quick or impossibly hopeful lose-weight-quick schemes, it takes less than a 0.01% hit rate to make a lot of money. Regardless of how successful spam is for the senders, the fact is that most users dislike it, and want it to stop. The fight against spam, from the user s point of view, revolves around two solutions: server side and client side filtering. Each has unique advantages and disadvantages. Server side filtering works from a central server, usually connected to several spam blacklists (these lists identify known spam senders) and also analyzes each e-mail based on its individual characteristics. The ability to pool knowledge from analysis of millions of messages can help the accuracy of these systems. The Report Spam button on your web mail service is a good example of how spam is eliminated democratically. Another benefit of server side filtering is traffic economy. When spam messages are caught before they are received, users and service providers do not pay for their delivery. However, server side filtering is not perfect. There is the real threat of false positives - genuine e-mails from friends or colleagues identified as spam, and not delivered as a result. Server filters often can t deliver suspected spam to a special folder that you can look through later. Some servers can also be overzealous in their blacklisting techniques, and block whole Internet Service Providers (ISPs) while a spam outbreak is happening. Every user might find himself unable to send legitimate e-mail and the recipients usually aren t aware that their e-mail provider, or ISP, is using spam technology that blocks the sender. Finally, server side filtering can lack the ability to approve certain kinds of e-mails (like newsletters from companies in which you’re interested). You might make a purchase at an online shop and never receive the receipt, lost forever in a spam filter. Main advantages of server filtering: - Traffic economy through interception of messages earlier in the delivery chain; - Spam filtering is based on the analysis of many messages hitting many server users at once, potentially increasing accuracy. Spam is annoying, but being unable to send an e-mail to a loved one because it s wrongly identified as spam is much worse. Even though most of our e-mail will pass through a server spam filter somewhere on its journey, server filters suffer from a need to be over-cautious about designating a message as spam, lest this decision be incorrect. Therein lies the benefit of client side filtering. This technology works in a similar way as described above, except that the work is done by a program on the user s own PC. Client filters usually depend less on blacklists and more on sophisticated detection methods that search through each e-mail. It s usually possible to customize the strength of the spam filter, and approve or disapprove of specific senders and domains, be they relatives, friends or industry newsletters. Client filters also deliver spam to special e-mail folders that a user can browse through every so often, to check if any mail has been misidentified. Main advantages of client filtering: - Most programs include a folder containing messages thought to be spam, to prevent loss of your messages; - Wide range of personal settings, such as which senders will always be delivered, which sites may not send you e-mail, and how strong you want your spam filtering to be; - You are in control of your own spam filtering. The challenges for all spam filters, no matter what the technology, are huge. For example, on the client side, the better our spam filter gets, the less we tend to check our spam folders, thus increasing the risk of false positives. The kind of spam filter technology you choose depends on how much real e-mail you are willing to miss in exchange for less spam. If you’re willing to let some real mail get lost for the sake of getting no spam, server filtering may be the better option. If all your mail is essential, choose a client side filter with an easy-to-use spam folder. Experience shows that there is no single way, and no winning formula, to stop spam yet. Of the forty billion e-mails estimated to be sent each day, around half are spam. The fight gets bigger each day. All the same, a combination of technologies, such as those found in modern client side filters, can help keep you spam free. SoftwareTalks Podcast (Time 6:11 min; File Size 4.96 Mb) spam, filtering, client, server

add to reddit! add to del.icio.us There have always been scams. Get-rich-quick letters, pyramid schemes, fake competitions, charities that don’t exist. The Internet hasn’t increased the chance of falling prey to scammers - it just makes it easier for the scammers to get your attention. The tools available to senders of disreputable e-mail are extensive and cheap. Spam is illegal in many countries but we still get a lot of it. The same goes for the scams that arrive in our inbox. These days, there are so many possible scams that it can be hard to tell the difference between them. The first we’ll focus on is the practice of ‘phishing’ - the word is derived from ‘fishing’ for consumer information, and ‘ph’ is a common replacement for ‘f’ in the hacking community. Phishing refers to the process of tricking you into giving up personal details such as your bank account or credit card details, or your passwords. Phishing is so prevalent on the Internet today that if you receive an e-mail purporting to be from your bank, it’s likely to be either a criminal attempt to find out your login details and steal your money, or a real e-mail warning you to be careful of this phenomenon. When I use my online banking service, I’m faced with no less than three separate warnings to ignore any e-mails claming to be from my bank. At the same time I receive genuine e-mails from my bank, which themselves tell me to ignore e-mails from the bank. Another example is eBay, the popular web auction site. There was a time when eBay sent me regular e-mails about my account and the progress of my auctions. Now eBay urges their users to use an internal messaging system, akin to e-mails that only work when you’re using the site, to communicate with the company. It’s less convenient, but it is safer. Due to the prevalence of this scam, most reputable companies, especially banks, will not ask you to take any direct action as a result of receiving an e-mail from them. They specifically request that you visit their company website directly and type in the address yourself, in order to seek more information. Here’s what to look out for. A phishing e-mail will often look and read like genuine material from a real company. So when you receive an e-mail from a company with whom you do business, think before you respond. Why did I get this e-mail? What is it asking for? Do I really need to take action now or can I verify it first? If the e-mail seems suspicious, for example if it’s out of the blue, or contains spelling or grammar mistakes, you should check it before doing anything else by calling the company. You can also visit the website of the company, and login to check on your account, but be very careful not to click on any links from the e-mail. Through the use of pictures that look like text links, and also through the use of IP addresses (like 203.23.45.61) instead of regular web addresses, the e-mail changes where you end up but not the text that you see on the screen. Using this method, scammers can unknowingly redirect you to malicious sites. This is how they get people to enter personal details which are then sent over the Internet: not to your bank, but to criminals. The solution to this is easy - type the address you know, for example www.paypal.com, directly into your web browser yourself, and make sure you don’t make any typing mistakes. There are also e-mails which clearly and simply request - for example - your credit card number, and some people do reply with these details. Just remember that you’ll never be asked for such details in a legitimate e-mail. An interesting but rare form of phishing involves criminals purchasing a misspelled website name, for example www.payplal.com, and constructing a real-looking site designed to fool people. Only a small percentage of web users will incorrectly type the name, and less still might go on to enter their private details, but this can be enough for web bandits to make a tidy profit. It’s clear that banks and Internet giants are worried about the problem. But how concerned should we be, as Internet users? According to Gartner Research, phishing fraud between mid-2004 and 2005 cost over US$2.4 billion. Phishing is big business. The good news is that prevention is not difficult. The popular and free Gmail service, from Google, includes a phishing filter that alerts you to most kinds of phishing e-mails. You can find an anti-phishing attachment on Microsoft’s free MSN Toolbar and also in the next version of Internet Explorer (7.0). To report an e-mail or a site that you believe is a scam, you can visit www.antiphishing.com. Technology can only help so much. The best defender against phishing scams is you. Take care when you receive e-mails and type in web addresses and remember, if in doubt: close your browser window or e-mail, and verify. SoftwareTalks Podcast (Time 5:33 min; File Size 3.8 Mb) phishing, scam