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Tech: InfoWorld reports that phishing attacks up by 50 percent per month. No surprises there. I was discussing e-mail with my father, who is having problems with his Mailblocks account. He agrees with me that e-mail is broken. John Dvorak’s recent column on broken e-mail is an interesting perspective from a mailing-list owner’s point of view. His call for a central registry of permanent e-mail addresses seems premature, however. To close today’s posts, AOL just bought Mailblocks today, in a desperate attempt to improve AOL’s spam-ridden e-mail service.

Related posts on billso.com

• 22 August 2006: 95 percent of all email is UCE
• 22 April 2008: It’s 2008 and email is still broken
• 25 July 2004: How I protect my Windows boxen from email evil

Yahoo! News - Spam can hurt in more ways than one: Tim needs some free software, like a virus scanner and a spyware protection tool. ‘When Tim Graf mistakenly opened an e-mail greeting card recently, it contained a virus that not only turned his PC into a spamming machine that spit out thousands of male-enhancement ads overnight but got him booted from America Online, his e-mail service. “I was burned by spam and accused of spreading it,” says Graf, 34, of Washington, D.C., who was marketing a board game at the time. AOL reopened his account after fixing the problem.’

Tech: Virus Designed to Steal Windows Users’ Data (TechNews.com): There are more than a few Microsofties fuming over this announcement. However, Mozilla and Firefox do work well. I’m currently using Firefox as my web browser, although WebCT performs better in IE. Firefox also supports many free extensions that are too handy to ignore, like access to BugMeNot. Opera is quirky and displays ads in the free version. Netscape installs AOL helpers applications, and should be avoided by non-AOL users. “CERT recommends that Explorer users consider other browsers that are not affected by the attack, such as Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape and Opera. Mac, Linux and other non-Windows operating systems are immune from this attack. For people who continue to use the Internet Explorer, CERT and Microsoft recommend setting the browser’s security settings to ‘high,’ but that can impair some browsing functions.”

Tech: The New York Times > Technology > AOL Engineer Sold 92 Million Names to Spammer, U.S. Says: ” software engineer for America Online stole the Internet provider’s customer list — some 92 million names — and sold it to an on-line marketer, setting off a torrent of unsolicited commercial e-mail commonly known as spam, federal authorities said today. The engineer, Jason Smathers, 24, of Harpers Ferry, W. Va., and the on-line marketer, Sean Dunaway, 21, of Las Vegas, Nev., were charged with conspiracy and face prison terms of up to five years and fines of up to $250,000 if convicted, said David N. Kelley, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York.”

Asia: From Slate, Tim Wu describes how AOL Time Warner and J. K. Rowling are using international copyright laws to shut down Harry Potter clones. But are Russian, Chinese and Indian knock-offs anything that the publishers should worry about? Not really. Slashdot discussion here.