General: March 2005 Archives

Bank of Ireland's online banking service, 365 online, has been targetted in one of the latest rounds of phishing attacks. Compared to other attacks, such as the paypal one I mentioned recently, this one is quite rudimentary, but could be effective against some people. The initial email uses the BOI logo and phone number and calls upon users to login immediately as there has been "a security breach": The email links to what looks vaguely like the real BOI site: Where users are asked to provide their PIN etc. Of course the address bar gives it away: While another page they put up is full of grammatical errors and cultural faux pas: Note the incorrect plural of the nouns and the request for a Zip code. The site being used by the scammers is hosted by an Italian ISP. Update: BOI have made an announcement about this phishing attack and the Italian site has been taken offline. I got a rather amusing email from their IT department telling me what I already knew. I might post it later.

Eircom have announced today that they will be offering "one of the fastest speeds in Europe for entry level or standard Broadband" Their entry-level product will move to 1Mb, while business users will be able to get up to 4 Mb. The one thing there is no mention of in the press release is whether they will be making any improvements to upload speed. It's all very well being able to download at 2 Mb/sec, but being able to get something close to that speed upstream would make a real difference. The other question is whether their resellers, such as Netsource, have any intention of following suit... Only time will tell.....

Since I've got Wordpress MU working pretty well and will be making further improvements over the next couple of days people can now sign up for a free blog over on IrishBlogs.com. At the moment the accounts are directory based, but we should be able to convert them to subdomains without too much difficulty And before anyone thinks of it - I know the site looks ugly at the moment.

According to an article on Wired the US government is going to stop registration of .us domains via proxy (anonymous) services. There are, of course, privacy and freedom of speech issues involved, but one thing the article doesn't mention is spam. The number of .us domains that are abused by spammers and MLM / pyramid schemes is disturbing, yet no mention of this was made.

One of the things I've noticed is that highly intelligent people get confused by 'net concepts very easily. Although they have no difficulty in dealing with complex philosophy they seem completely baffled by the basic concepts surrounding domains and the way the 'net works (or doesn't). The other evening I was trying to explain to a client the concept of a domain alias and he got completely confused until I gave him the example of his own domains. The client in question is extremely intelligent, but the concept was too foreign for him to grasp immediately. Another client couldn't understand why eNom were sending emails to them to verify domain contact details. The email states clearly the who and the why, but the client could not comprehend the underlying concepts. In these situations trying to find a good clear example that they can relate to can be a challenge.