Microsoft provides this “hard to believe someone wrote it seriously and they were not smoking crack” Knowledge Base article Steps that you can take to help identify and to help protect yourself from deceptive (spoofed) Web sites and malicious hyperlinks..

In a nutshell, the smart folks in Redmind suggest that you type all in the browser address field rather than actually touching your mouse on those dangerous hyperlinks:

…a malicious user could create a link to a deceptive (spoofed) Web site that displays the address, or URL, to a legitimate Web site in the Status bar, Address bar, and Title bar. This article describes steps that you can take to help mitigate this issue and to help you to identify a deceptive (spoofed) Web site or URL.

The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER.

Can you imagine how popular the web would be if this was how Tim Berners-Lee designed it from the start? Heck, we’d still be using Gopher…

This morning’s unwanted, unwarranted, un-necessary e-mail virus bounceback count = 127 mass deleted.

Let’s talk with Symantec’s email message, sent personally to me:

It’s bad enough I am mass deleting virus generated e-mails (there were 66 this morning, about 8 hours later than the cleansing last night) but I got one on my home e-mail account, all be-decked with formal looking graphics. It made me suspicious….

A recent barking about “everything is a learning object”, including my left big toe got some interesting responses– sometimes you can slave over an important blogged item and get nary a trackback, but toss out something silly and it ends up down under somewhere. So part two to this escapade is “Everything is a weblog” […]

It is happening again. If you are like me, you have spent a chunk of time every few hours recently deleting piles of messages from email virus protection systems elsewhere, all claiming that I sent them infected emails (the latest viral attachment crud, W32.Novarg.A@mm, yum what a name). Nothing has changed since September 9, when […]

There are people who can look at a peaceful valley or serene mountain vista and only see how it can be exploited; they see only golf courses, shopping malls, and asphalt. Likewise, there are those that can only look at a useful communications technology and only rub their hands in glee trying to figure out […]

I thought I really had nailed a blog spammer by tracking down the internet provider, documenting, and submitting all the information to the appropriate abuse contact. What I got in return was zilch.

Why would an internet provider protect me from spammers? They might be paying customers and I am not.

More detective work with analysis of web server logs with AWstats shows that poor spammers are unable to find their links on my web site. Alas! What is a roach to do!

Does that mean that they will target me next? No luck, as they are blocked at the door by the MTBlacklist army boot. Does this mean that they are looking for the fruits of their spam roach labor? Too bad, no signs here…

The euphoria of stomping out blog spam cockroaches may be short-lived. Mark Pilgrim lays out the depressing, sobering truth on weblog spam [dive into mark]. Mark sez the good times will last last than a month… And then the spammers will strike back. They’ll complain to your ISP that you’re spamming, and your ISP will […]