Oh, those ingenious swindlers

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

I thought I’d seen all of the clever methods used by those lovely people who send phishing emails in the hope we’ll click where we really shouldn’t, but today saw a new trick. It still had the tell-tale signs – “Dear customer” not “Dear Tim”, a suggestion that something had gone terribly wrong with my account – but this time the From address looked scarily accurate. Until I looked a little closer, that is.

Ten out of ten for creativity, though.

Google and eBay’s e-commerce argument

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

It’s emerged today that some supposedly ‘anonymous’ criticism of eBay’s proposed monopolisation of Paypal actually came from the bowels of Google. The information was found in some meta-data – the information that links documents to where they’ve come from, among other things – with the name of the document listed as ‘Microsoft Word – 204481916_1_ACCC Submission by Google re eBay Public _2_.DOC’. Pretty damning, it seems, when the submission was supposed to be anonymous.

Oops.

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