More phishing - Equifax customers alerted

Dear Equifax Customer,

We’re sorry to inform you about a recent “phishing” attack on Equifax. Phishing" or "spoofing" is an e-mail threat where fraudulent e-mails appear to be from a well-known company and ask you to provide, update or confirm certain confidential information – such as User ID or password.


This week, we detected e-mail phishing activity by fraudsters attempting to solicit sensitive personal information, including user IDs and passwords, from Equifax customers and consumers. For your protection, please know that Equifax never sends out requests for personal information via e-mail or phone.

If you received an e-mail that appears to be from Equifax and requests personal information, please do not respond and delete the e-mail immediately. If you did respond to an e-mail that appears to have been from Equifax, and you provided personal information, such as your user ID and password, please let us know by following the “Contact Us” links from www.equifax.com so we can assist you further.

As a general rule, to help safeguard your identity – we recommend that you never click anywhere within a suspected “phishing” or “spoofing” e-mail, and never hit “reply”.
At Equifax, your privacy is extremely important to us and we wanted you to know about this unfortunate situation. Your continued trust and confidence in Equifax is greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Your Equifax Personal Solutions team.

I have seen the future, or, why Microsoft needs to wake up

I hate to be a party pooper the weekend that Microsoft is finally seeing a rally for their share price. But some thoughts arise about the situation, and something new in the field has crept into view - silently in the night so to speak.

First the events that sparked this round:

Microsoft announced higher than expected earnings due mostly to Halo 3, Vista and Office 2007 -- with a dash of Windows Live and other server offerings in the mix.

Just prior to the market news, we heard that Microsoft decided not to continue any appeals to their loss in the European anti-trust cases and will settle for a cash payment (which in the broad view of things is a tiny payment indeed: only 357M!) They also settled the lawsuit against them in South Korea.

So what's really driving this rally, and will it last?

I believe that investor interest has increased because of both the above events. Either taken singly may not have spiked the rally. The trouble is, as soon as the next big lawsuit comes along we'll be back into fuzzy territory and investors will once again look elsewhere, which will drive MSFT back down at worst. At best it will hover at current prices for a long period of time until that uncertainty is resolved.

Meanwhile back at the farm:

While we've been focusing on the big news about Microsoft, their battle with the EU, the states desire to renew and extend oversight from the US anti-trust case and slipping dates for Longhorn and Dynamics NAV . . . Sun has been going open source with their operating system and file technologies. That in itself is perhaps not too remarkable. What's interesting is the way a legal fight between a patent troll company named "Network Appliance" and Sun is evolving over a file system called ZFS that Sun gives away for free.

It's my belief that Sun is in the clear in this matter. They have years and volumes of prior art for the technology. The patent troll, according to some rumors, may be a shill for Microsoft (shades of SCO vs IBM/Linux) but in the end this will not matter.

The reason this is significant may be due to the way that Sun is reacting to the lawsuit. It may change the market for us forever. And if Microsoft refuses to open their eyes it may well be the turning point and endanger their future market dominance.

Sun's CEO posted a blog entry explaining the position they will take in response to the situation at http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/harvesting_from_a_troll . . .

Notice the URL which I left unchanged instead of href'd.

Key points:

1) Sun indemnifies all its customers against IP claims like this.

2) Sun protects the communities using their technologies under free software licenses. Even Apple . . . who is using ZFS in the upcoming Leopard OS X.

Those two points are unprecedented, as far as I know. If Sun succeeds in their counter-suit and defense against Network Appliance and if they indeed make good their promises to protect their customers, the market may see a change in how business is done concerning enterprise class software and services.

Permission to speak freely

"My freedom is more important than your faith."

- Pat Condell

Thanks to fiveforfun for the heads up!

Email spam gets noisy

Stock "pump and dump" spam is migrating to audio. (Link pops)

If you see email from an unexpected sender with an attachment purporting to be elvis.mp3, ljcooldj.mp3, or "nameyourartisthere.mp3" . . . you might want to mark it as spam and delete it unheard.

Anger and dismay over the iPhone update

Seen today on the DailyTech site (link pops . . .) -- buried in the comments:

"To me, it's like GM breaking into my garage and slashing my tires and taking a baseball bat to my windshield because I put new headers on my Vette!

Voiding my warranty? Sure. Having the company purposely destroy my property that I legally purchased just because they don't like the way I use it?

No."

I don't have an iPhone. After observing Apple's treatment and attitude towards it's paying customers I am fairly sure the temptation to own one will never cross my mind again.

Upon observing traffic today while riding a motorcycle

Anger makes you smaller,
while forgiveness forces you to grow
beyond what you were.

- Cherie Carter-Scott