An Midwest internet service provider was awarded an $11.2 billion judgment against a Florida man for sending millions of unsolicited e-mails advertising mortgage and debt consolidation services.

Wired News: Spammer Must Pay $11.2 Billion

Now this comparison just struck me... I always wondered that there's still death penalty possible in the USA and even more that a LOT of people endorse it.

This new comparison with this hyper-charge to a single person shows the mindset "death penalty" is good more then ever...

And brings up an interesting point - what is your life worth, if every cent you "earn" the rest of your life (in your home country, under your name) if you owe it to some plaintiff due to such a charge?

More discussion about this issue at WMW

In a pretty quick response Microsoft released the patch for WMF Flaw yesterday...

The patch is described more in detail here

The patch that was released earlier seems to be completely compatible with the MS patch, however i uninstalled it anyway and applied the MS match, just to be sure...

I was warned by Steve Freedman's newsletter already yesterday about a hardcore security threat in Windows, where a bug in the Windows Meta File allows malicious code to be executed without user action.

So, You don't have to click on a link, open an attachment or take any other action. It affects Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Netscape.

This seems to the the first time expert Steve has seen a vulnerability rated at the "Extremely Critical" level...

Steve even posted a step-by-step instruction on how to protect your PC,
but you need to

• install a "hack" to disable some picture related functions (you can later deinstall that)
• install a specific firewall product that seems to be the only one to have a protection against this threat (yes: and even uninstall existing firewalls!)

Read what the Washington Post also wrote in Security Fix - (washingtonpost.com)

Here is an overview of the WMF related articles at the ISC (internet storm center)

The working hotfix can be downloaded from this page

Finally FOOL.com started recommending to sell of Google stocks due to the launch of strong PPC competitors at Yahoo and MSN...

3 Stocks to Sell in 2006 [Fool.com: Commentary] December 15, 2005

I've been researching on ways to get the multiple stats reports from AWSTATS/Cpanel/WHM installations of aprox 20 diff. domains into one, convenient view - or better "overview" report.

So far I only found 2 external tools = php scripts

1. AWSTATStotals - this is nice, but allows only ONE datadirectory, while cpanel stores its into each in separate directorys :-(
2. MSSV - Multiple Site Statistics Viewer - unfortunately this one also only reads from one directory

The general Cpanel/WHM problem with the awstats setups here is, that the AWSTATs data files are stored per user domain, hence they are all stored in different directories on the server

Furthermore these files all have different permissions, so in a typical shared environment other users shall not be able to access the other users' data...

I wonder if anyone has found a hack or other script for combining many awstats reports - either by installation as root or by externally scraping the result reports

I already put up a post in the cpanel forums - wonder if someone has a solution for this.

Gizmo is a rather new VOIP application targetting the internet phone market just as Skype does...

some nice new features we're missing in Skype:

• 99 people conference call (ok - 4 max people as in Skype talking might already mean a lot of stress)
• user location mapping (by IP)
• voice recording with a one-button touch
• open protocol SIP used - vs. a proprietary one in skype... could mean a lot more options like taking over existing phone numbers (!!)

nothing new actually - ZDnet already wrote about this in July, but it mentioned in Wired 12/05 p46, so it could get some momentum now.

The powerful open source CRM system "Sugar CRM" was released in version 4.0 yesterday

New in Sugar Open Source 4.0

• Access Control by Role: Manage what a department has access to see, and what they can do with that information based on their credentials. Role security is new to Sugar Open Source.

• Inbound Email Response: Reduces costs by automatically converting emails into customer cases, leads or contacts - and incorporates escalation rules and queue management for load balancing customer support.

• Enhanced Campaign Management: Develop, test, launch, and measure lead-generation activities with a heavy emphasis on email marketing. Manage subscription lists, suppression rules, and target group segmentation.

• Enhanced Lead Sharing: Automate the transfer of leads from marketing automation into the sales pipeline with one simple click.

Other notable features

• SugarCRM has plugins for Microsoft Outlook - syncing emails, contacts, calendar entries between the groupware and the SugarCRM system

• SugarCRM now has a plugin for Word

What I am missing as of today is IM/Phone integration with skype...

The Sugar CRM system is by far the most enhanced CRM system I know about - they offer a great $40/month/user hosted version, which should keep away all installation, maintenance and ugprade hassles out of your way - I think I might go with that very soon!

Is Google going to buy Opera?

Interesting rumours and discussions about Google planning to buy Opera - still my favorite day-to-day browser

I think, if Google were to put in their usual power into a great plugin-interface for Opera - hopefully something compatible with firefox plugins (!) - then this could be the most wonderful surfing experience of the future...

Definately Google is building it's own assets for a completely independance from other internet firms - be it raw fiber cables & network, desktop tools needed for working on the net (browsers, picturetools, blogtools) etc.etc.

seems to become a "google-world" some day :-) of course this influence frigthens a couple of people already (see coverage in latest Wired mag as well)

thread coverage on this:

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