Focus On: Scams

A powerful emarketing tool combines eyeball motion studies with heatmapping display to help sellers bump sales. Unfortunately, when the conclusions derived from email heatmaps are liberally applied, phishers and other evil-doers benefit from the camouflage required to do evil properly. Email Battles tells you how to undo the evil, whether intentional or otherwise.

Most folks don't know that the zombie capital of the world isn't China or the USA. It's the European Union, by a long shot. The secret has been kept by well-meaning reporters who are living in the past, preserving each European state as an individual unit, as opposed to the EU as a full-fledged competitor on par with China and the US. Sometimes, it seems, the EU is treated like Rodney Dangerfield. It can't get any respect... even from its very best friends.

A blogger's claim that one rogue operator tricked Google into indexing over 5 billion bogus pages serving Pay-Per-Click ads has helped solidify the claims of the legal teams chasing the search giants: PPC advertisers may, in fact, be getting screwed through faked clickery. At the same time, it helps explain the increasing irrelevance of search results. This, for many, is a deal killer. Searchers and advertisers alike need a better model. But who can deliver it?

A month after anti-virus techs gave Yahoo's abuse team a "heads-up" about a website that appeared to be narrowly phishing Yahoo subscribers, the website is still active. The a/v gurus are scratching their heads wondering why the site hasn't even appeared on global blocklists. Email Battles runs through current anti-phishing techniques and shortcomings, then tells you how one website successfully warned about the alleged scam.

The death of the Blue Frog anti-spam client has mobilized a small group of developers to rethink Blue Security's concept. Not the tit-for-tat spam opt-out methods, mind you. The network architecture. Developers suggest that, if Blue Security had built a distributed P2P network, it could have withstood the type of attack that brought it down, along with Prolexis, Tucows, Typepad and UltraDNS. After looking over the plans, Email Battles offers a few suggestions.