According to this Reuters story, phishing -- the use of email to pose as someone's bank or other trusted institution in order to trick people into divulging their passwords or other sensitive information -- is on the rise, with the first six months of 2006 seeing 81% more unique phishing messages than the last six months of 2005. A researcher quoted in the article states that organized crime has become very interested in phishing.
A lot of people don't make use of the RSS feeds offered by blogs and news sites. It's a bit of a hard concept for a non-technical person to grasp, and I'd been giving some thought to sitting down and writing the definitive explanatory article. It looks as though I've been beaten to the punch by a blogger named Stephanie in her blog, Back in Skinny Jeans:
The diagram above comes from her article, titled How to Explain RSS the Oprah Way. I'm going to show it around and see if it helps people "get" RSS.
I remember the first time I'd heard of an intersection between the internet and personal reportage. It was back in my days at Queen's University, during a computer networking class, when professor Donald Jardine told us about how much of the news about the Tienanmen Square massacre came via email from students in China.
This sort of "citizen journalism" is alive and well today, with blogs joining the citizen journalist's toolkit. Here are some articles about people in Thailand who've been posting blog entries about the recent military coup:
