Iran’s telecommunications agency announced Wednesday that it has permanently suspended Google’s e-mail services and that a national e-mail service for Iranians will be rolled out soon.
It is not clear what effect the order has had on gmail in Iran. Google has not yet commented about the announcement. Google on Tuesday unveiled a new service called “Buzz,” a social networking tool built into its gmail service.
The announced suspension of gmail comes as Iranian authorities have deployed in force across Tehran to conduct last-minute security sweeps and warn residents to refrain from joining antigovernment protests planned for Thursday — the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution.
Police have confiscated satellite dishes from residential rooftops, according to opposition Web sites. Some pedestrians have been quoted saying that their mobile phones were searched and, in some cases, taken by police patrolling areas of the capital where protests have erupted in the past. Iranians have also reported widespread service disruptions of text messaging services, though mobile phones appeared to be operating normally Wednesday.
Iranian authorities tasked with upholding Islamic values have also been scouring the streets, harassing people wearing green, the trademark color of the opposition, according to witness accounts posted on opposition Web sites.
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A new bot can crack defenses erected by Microsoft to keep spammers from creating large numbers of accounts on its Live Hotmail service within seconds, a security researcher said Friday.
Dan Hubbard, vice president of security research at Websense, said the bot broke Live Hotmail’s CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) within six seconds, on average. CAPTCHA is the name given to the distorted, scrambled characters that many Web services require users to decipher and type in to create a new account; the tests are meant to block automated account registration by spammers and malware authors.
The bot, Hubbard acknowledged, is similar to one Websense uncovered in February.
“In the past, though, it was kind of questionable whether the CAPTCHA breaking was automated,” Hubbard said Friday, noting that there had been some evidence that spammers were paying people to decode and type in the CAPTCHA characters. “But the bot’s breaking [CAPTCHA] in six seconds, so it’s definitely automated.”
In a long post to the Websense blog Thursday, Sumeet Prasad — “our CAPTCHA expert,” said Hubbard — provided technical details of how the bot automatically registers Live Hotmail accounts and then immediately begins using those accounts to spew spam.
The bot’s total response time — how long it takes the program to grab a CAPTCHA image, analyze it and return with the correct code — is considerably shorter than that of earlier such bots, said Prasad in the blog.
One in every eight to 10 attempts to create a Live Hotmail account is successful, added Prasad, meaning that the success rate is 10% to 15%. However, the rate is actually meaningless, said Hubbard, since the bot will continue to try to create accounts using a predetermined list of account names until they’re all registered.
Copies of the bot are seeded on unsuspecting users’ PCs, said Websense, making it less likely that Microsoft will detect and stop the automated account registrations.
Free Web-based e-mail services such as Live Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Gmail are favorite targets for spammers because the services’ domains can’t be blocked by blacklisting antispam tools, Hubbard said. “When Google, Microsoft and Yahoo [domains] are in the top 10 or top 20 spam domains, it’s hard to use reputation tools,” said Hubbard.
“You’re not going to block those [domains].”
There’s a lot of buzz today about Yahoo!’s latest major updates to its Yahoo! Mail application. This latest version makes it easier for contacts to stay in touch in two ways:
The first is by instant message from Yahoo! Mail to mobile phone. Yahoo! Mail users can now send IM’s directly to mobile numbers in the US, Canada, India and the Philippines without leaving the Yahoo! webmail interface. Simply enter a mobile number, type the message and hit send.
The second is by instant message from Yahoo! Mail to Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live Messenger users. This opens up the possibility of chatting to millions of other IM platform users, straight from the Yahoo! Mail interface. These new features make it easier to connect with friends by converting emails to instant messages to text messages.
The new features are supposed to begin rolling out today. Smart move, Yahoo!
Thunderbird 2 features many new enhancements to help you better manage your unruly inbox, and stay informed. Thunderbird 2 scales to the most sophisticated organizational needs while making it easy to find what you need.
Mozilla has bolstered Thunderbird’s acclaimed security and privacy measures to ensure that your communications and identity remain safe. It’s like having your own security guard online.
Thunderbird 2.0.0.4 features can be found here.
Thunderbird 2.0.0.4 release notes can be found here.
By next year, Internet users can expect more cyberattacks to originate from the Web than via e-mail, security firm Trend Micro predicts.
E-mail has traditionally been the top means of attack, with messages laden with Trojan horses and other malicious programs hitting inboxes. But the balance is about to tip as cybercrooks increasingly turn to the Web to attack PCs.
“By 2008, most of the threats you are facing will be Web placed. Today most of it is still e-mail,” Raimund Genes, Trend Micro’s chief researcher, said in a presentation at the Gartner Symposium and ITxpo here on Monday.
The reason for the flip is simple. Security tools for e-mail have become commonplace, but the same isn’t true for Web traffic. Security firms have found it tough to secure what comes into a network and computers over port 80, the network port used to browse the Web using the hypertext transfer protocol, or HTTP.
“You can’t block port 80,” Eva Chen, Trend Micro’s chief executive, said in an interview. “It is different than e-mail. E-mail is store and forward. HTTP is real time and you need to be able to deal with the latency in the user experience.” continue reading…
New features. Improved security and privacy. Open Source. Available in more than 30 languages thanks to the efforts of our amazing localization communities. Personalizable. Customizable with extensions. Access to web mail services.
Thunderbird 2 has arrived. Try improving your email experience today!
Scott MacGregor of Team Thunderbird writes in with news of the release of Mozilla Thunderbird 2: “Thunderbird 2 is now available for download on Windows, Mac and Linux in over 35 languages. Thunderbird 2 offers easy ways to manage and organize your email with message tags, advanced folder views, message history navigation, find as you type, and improved new mail alert notifications. Thunderbird 2 also includes a refreshed user interface and support for Microsoft Vista.
“Thunderbird 1.5.0.x users will be offered Thunderbird 2 via software update at a later date. Those wishing to upgrade now are therefore advised to download and install Thunderbird 2 manually.
“The Thunderbird 2 features page has more details about the new features in Thunderbird 2. The Thunderbird 2 Release Notes have more specific information. The Rumbling Edge has a list of notable bug fixes in Thunderbird 2.
“We also want to extend a huge thanks to everyone in the MozillaZine community for their help and support with Thunderbird 2 over the past year. We wouldn’t have been able to release Thunderbird without you. A special thanks to the awesome forum moderators who spend so much time answering questions and to the folks who help organize and participate in our weekly test threads here at MozillaZine.”
Thunderbird 2 Download (Windows)
Thunderbird 2 Download (Linux)
Thunderbird 2 Download (Mac OS X)
Postful, which launched in closed beta this week, allows you to send an email that they will reformat into a physical letter to be sent through snail mail.
The Postful idea may seem silly, and pointless. And really, their service is little more than a fancy way of saying ‘we’ll print your letters for you and send the text in email.’ But, they’ve added a few web 2.0-ish features to slightly overcome this initial perception. Postful will provide you with an email address that can be distributed (or kept to yourself) for frequent mailings. So if Grandma refuses to get a GMail account, Postful will create one for her, i.e. ‘grandma@postful.com.’ Now you and the rest of your family can send an email there, and Postful will send Grandma a physical letter. Postful is also offering an API to integrate their service with your own.
Most would think the Postful concept is somewhat backwards. It’s completely opposite of what Remote Control Mail does, which would be to scan your mail for you and recycle what you don’t want forwarded along. I’m not sure how many people will latch onto the Postful service, but for Grandma, maybe I will.
A possible security vulnerability in Windows Mail could let attackers run applications on PCs running Vista.
An attacker could send an e-mail with a malicious link that, when clicked on, would execute a program on the PC without warning, according to a description of the problem published Friday on a widely read security mailing list called Full Disclosure. Windows Mail is the successor to Outlook Express, Microsoft’s free e-mail client, and ships with Vista.
Microsoft is investigating the issue, a company representative said in an e-mailed statement. “As a best practice, users should always exercise extreme caution when clicking on links in unsolicited e-mail from both known and unknown sources,” the representative said.
Depending on what the malicious link tells Windows Mail to do, the threat to Vista users could be significant, said Dave Marcus, security research and communications manager at software maker McAfee. “Theoretically, attackers can do a lot of things; they will be able to pass any command through it,” Marcus said. continue reading…
loconet writes to tell us about a little surprise coming in Outlook 2007: it will render HTML email using the MS Word engine, dropping the use of IE for this purpose. This represents a body-check to the movement towards Web standards. Whatever you think about HTML email, lots of it get generated, and those generating it won’t be able to use CSS any more, and may stop pushing for more widespread standards support. The announcement was made on MSDN. From the Campaign Monitor post:
“Imagine for a second that the new version of IE7 killed off the majority of CSS support and only allowed table based layouts. The web design world would be up in arms! Well, that’s exactly what the new version of Outlook does to email designers.”