German Spam Linked to Latest Sober

Latest Sober worm sends German spam – Computerworld
E-mail users perplexed by the barrage of German-language spam waiting in their in-boxes this morning can blame the latest version of the Sober mass-mailing worm, which began rapidly spreading over the weekend.

Sober.q uses both German- and English-language messages to direct recipients to Web sites with right-wing German nationalistic content, according to an advisory from e-mail security company MX Logic Inc. in Englewood, Colo. One of the URLs points to the Web site of the right-wing German National Democratic Party, the security firm said.

I’ve seen several of these from different zombies hit CALI’s server and picked up a couple from Emory.

MSFT Desktop Search Out of Beta

BetaNews | MSN Desktop Search Moves Out of Beta
Microsoft’s MSN division on Monday launched its Toolbar and Windows Desktop Search product after five months of beta testing. The new toolbar promises to give a taste what search experience Longhorn is expected to bring. Noticeably missing from the final release, however, was a tabbed browsing feature that appeared in early betas.

Microsoft planned to bring a tabbed experience to Internet Explorer 6 through the toolbar, but pulled the feature shortly before release, sources told BetaNews. Microsoft plans to add tabbed browsing to the product in a future release, but fully integrated tabs will only come in Internet Explorer 7, the company said.

Too bad about the tabbed browsing featuer. It sure is something that will help IE.

IBM Supports Firefox for Employees

IBM backs Firefox in-house | Tech News on ZDNet
IBM is encouraging its employees to use Firefox, aiding the open-source Web browser’s quest to chip away at Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Firefox is already used by about 10 percent of IBM’s staff, or about 30,000 people. Starting Friday, IBM workers can download the browser from internal servers and get support from the company’s help desk staff.

Finding Brothels With Google Maps

Internet Week > Google Maps finds whorehouses > Quickie Google Search Lays Out “Brothels” > May 12, 2005
What do the University of Oregon’s history department in Eugene, Ore.; the Happy Ending bar in Manhattan; and the Abstinence Clearinghouse in Sioux Falls, S.D. have in common?

According to Google Maps, the for-free location and driving instructions service that the San Francisco-based search giant operates, all are identified as houses of ill repute.

Better try this one out while it lasts as I smell a googleprank here.

Slashdot | Google Acquires Dodgeball

Slashdot | Google Acquires Dodgeball
Dodgeball.com, a service that uses mobile phones to help people meet up with friends who are in the same location, said on its website on Wednesday that it has been bought by Web search leader Google Inc. Also available on the official site is a Q&A about the deal.” From the article: “As a two-person team, Alex and I have taken dodgeball about a far as we can alone. Since we finished grad school, we’ve been trying to figure out how to grow dodgeball and make it a better service along the way. We talked to a lot of different angel investors and venture capitalists, but no one really ‘got’ what we were doing – that is until we met Google.

Firstgov.gov RSS Feeds

Library Stuff
A big “Hip Hip Hooray” and a tip of the ol’ Mets hat to Marylaine Block who mentioned the First Gov – U.S. Government RSS Library in her Neat New newsletter today. Finally, a directory of government RSS feeds. I hope they keep it current and update it regularly. In fact, an RSS feed for new feeds (how meta) would be nice…

Hmm, I may have menitoned this already.

FCKeditor 2.0 Released

freshmeat.net: Project details for FCKeditor
FCKeditor is an HTML/DHTML editor for ASP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, PHP, and JavaScript that brings to the Web much of the powerful functionality of known desktop editors like Word. It’s very lightweight, and doesn’t require any kind of installation on the client computer.

My favorite WYSIWYG browser editor hits 2.0!