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| | | July 13, 2003
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Sunday, July 13, 2003 |
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Spam grows as lawmakers ponder action
U.S. legislators debated this week on two competing proposals for outlawing unsolicited commercial e-mail. The Anti-Spam Act mainly supported by Democratic House members and the Reduction In Distribution of Spam Act, also known as RID Spam Act, largely backed by Republicans, gave the effort to tackle junk mail a sip of political wrangling. While the Anti-Spam Act allowed for class action suits to be filed against violators of the law, the RID Spam Act prohibited the measure, but required e-mail marketers to place warning labels on unsolicited messages and reveal their real identity. The Republican-supported bill, which has been endorsed by the U.S. Department of Justice and several concerned companies, including Microsoft and AOL Time Warner, stipulates spammers would face up to two years in prison and fines of up to $1.5 million.
Consumer protection organizations and anti-spam groups, however, remonstrated against both proposals, claiming they will not effectively cope with the problem and may even worsen the situation. Currently, the two bills would let direct marketers to send e-mails until a user unsubscribes from their mailing lists. Opponents of such legislation argue it is in the best interest of the customer to move from an "opt-out" to an "opt-in" policy, obliging the existence of user consent before commercial messages could be delivered.
As the U.S. Congress mulls potential legal action against spammers, Brightmail, a prominent provider of e-mail filtering solutions, announced more than half of all electronic messages will be junk mail by September this year. According to the company, 20 percent of it already contains explicit pornographic content.
More from: BusinessWeek | CNET News.com 1 2 3 | eWeek | InternetNews.com | PC World | Reuters | TechWeb 1 2 | VNUNET.com 1 2 3 4 5 | The Washington Post | The Washington Times
Defacers' Challenge falls flat
After gaining worldwide notoriety in mere days and being clamorously hyped by Atlanta-based Internet Security Systems Inc., the Defacers' Challenge, which promised hackers prizes, fell utterly flat. As reported last week, an unknown group staged a web site defacement competition, urging hackers to deface 6,000 web sites within a six hour period.
Instead of disrupting normal Internet activity, however, the contest's independent monitor -- Estonia-based Zone-H.org web site which tracks hacker activity on the Internet -- was brought down by a sustained Denial of Service (DoS) attack. According to security experts, the day of the challenge saw normal defacement activity, with small unsecured web servers overtaken by hackers. To rebuke the substantial media hype, security experts even spuriously "defaced" a number of their own web sites with the following message: "I panicked over the Defacement Challenge scare and all I got was this lousy defacement."
Still, the organizers announced on the competition's web site a Brazilian team as the winner of the event.
More from: CNET News.com | ComputerWorld | Reuters | VNUNET.com | The Washington Post | Wired News
EMC to acquire software company Legato
Storage giant EMC Corporation announced it will acquire California-based storage management software maker Legato Systems in a stock deal worth $1.3 billion. In recent years, EMC has been aggressively expanding its software portfolio, aiming to reform its image of a storage hardware company into a storage solutions provider. Legato Systems has had a traditionally strong presence in the backup and recovery software market, and has been one of the biggest competitors of Veritas, the leader in storage management software.
More from: CNET News.com | ComputerWorld | InformationWeek | InternetNews.com | Reuters
In Other News...
 Industry group Business Software Alliance (BSA) declared a small victory after a 23-year-old software pirate was imprisoned in the UK and fined £15,000 for selling illegally copied products on online auction sites such as eBay and QXL. Bilal Khan pleaded guilty to all charges. BSA, however, claims Khan was making over £300,000 a year by deceiving consumers they are receiving legitimate software at a bargain price.
Microsoft released three new patches, fixing vulnerabilities in virtually all Windows platforms. A newly found critical vulnerability exists in Windows' HTML conversion utility, which can be easily exploited by an attacker from a web page or an e-mail message. A buffer overrun hole in Windows XP, 2000 and NT in handling SMB (Server Message Block) packets could also be used by a hacker to execute code of his choice. A third vulnerability allows Windows 2000 users to elevate their privileges by exploiting the system's accessibility options for disabled users. The software maker has released updates for all affected versions of Windows.
The Apache Software Foundation released version 2.0.47 of its flagship web server, plugging security holes which could potentially expose systems to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. The update fixes four recently uncovered vulnerabilities in the product and comes as software inspection firm Reasoning released a report claiming Apache's source code is no better than that of its commercial rivals.
Yahoo! on Wednesday reported another batch of strong quarterly results, meeting analysts' expectations. For the second quarter that ended June 30, Yahoo!'s revenue of $321.4 million translated into a profit of $50.8 million, or 8 cents per share -- a growth of over 137 percent from the same period last year. The Internet giant, however, failed to beat Wall Street's expectations -- a key requirement needed to demonstrate Internet commerce is getting back on its feet. The results dragged Yahoo!'s stock lower.
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