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Day: November 24, 2017

Links for 2017-11-24

  • Witney Seibold watches all the Academy Award Best Picture winners

    Myself and the missus are in the process of doing this right now!

    (tags: nerdist witney-seibold academy-awards best-picture awards movies)

  • Spam is back | The Outline

    it’s 2017, and spam has clawed itself back from the grave. It shows up on social media and dating sites as bots hoping to lure you into downloading malware or clicking an affiliate link. It creeps onto your phone as text messages and robocalls that ring you five times a day about luxury cruises and fictitious tax bills. Networks associated with the buzzy new cryptocurrency system Ethereum have been plagued with spam. Facebook recently fought a six-month battle against a spam operation that was administering fake accounts in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and other countries. Last year, a Chicago resident sued the Trump campaign for allegedly sending unsolicited text message spam; this past November, ZDNet reported that voters were being inundated with political text messages they never signed up for. Apps can be horrid spam vectors, too — TechCrunch writer Jordan Crook wrote in April about how she idly downloaded an app called Gather that promptly spammed everyone in her contact list. Repeated mass data breaches that include contact information, such as the Yahoo breach in which 3 billion user accounts were exposed, surely haven’t helped. Meanwhile, you, me, and everyone we know is being plagued by robocalls. “There is no recourse for me,” lamented Troy Doliner, a student in Boston who gets robocalls every day. “I am harassed by a faceless entity that I cannot track down.” “I think we had a really unique set of circumstances that created this temporary window where spam was in remission,” said Finn Brunton, an assistant professor at NYU who wrote Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet, “and now we’re on the other side of that, with no end in sight.”
    (via Boing Boing)

    (tags: spam privacy email social-media web robocalls phone ethereum texts abuse)

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