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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

Tech: John Dvorak has published a list of the 10 worst portable computers, to accompany his previous list of the best portables. I actually remember some of these beasts. Thanks Boing Boing.

Tech: Mike Magee of the Inquirer recounts the years he’s spent installing Microsoft Windows. I feel his pain! The article brought back my memories of configuring BlueMAX so that I could have 633 MB of RAM under PC-DOS, for example. I needed that much base memory to run Windows 3.0 reasonably well. I beta-tested OS/2, only to see Windows 95 crush IBM’s operating system.

adamga works at Microsoft and has his own development stories to share.

Tech: The first academic conference on spam was held this past weekend. The official web site is here.

Tech: Larry Seltzer of eWeek reports on a new phishing scam involving the Kerry campaign. the phishers seem to be using look-alike domains, including johnkerrys.com and yahoogoogle.biz.

Also, it seems that the Kerry office has finally removed me from their e-mail list. I’m no longer getting their despreate pleas for money.