I spend a fair amount of time helping Signal clients create and send legitimate email marketing messages to their list subscribers. But this work is made ever more difficult by the fact that there are so many 'bad guys' out there (10 million?) spamming every mail box in site. I also spend a lot of time talking to clients about how they can reduce the amount of spam that they see in their mail boxes. It seems like half of the time a think about how to block messages, the other half I think about how to get message through.

Botnets winning spam wars

Report says that by the time anti-spam systems have identified compromised PCs and servers, most botnets will have shifted to using new machines. The world's anti-spam systems are fighting a furious but hopeless battle against botnet spam, a new threat analysis from Commtouch has claimed. According to the U.S. company's zombie monitor, by the time that reputation and source analysis systems have identified compromised PCs and servers responsible for sending the spam that floods the Internet every day, most botnets will have shifted to using new machines. Given that the company reports there being an average of 10 million botnet 'zombies' active on any one day in the second quarter of 2008, the only way to of stem the spam tide is to filter it out in a reactive way using costly technologies at the ISP or gateway level.

Read the whole story at InfoWorld

After years of hype the mobile advertising medium is starting to gain real momentum. Advertisers who are willing to invest in customizing their messages for this new medium are gaining real advantage in their markets, particularly with localization. The future belongs to mobil devices; if you doubt this just look at what your kids and their friends are doing with cell phones; the small size of the screen is no impediment to this group.

The differences between advertising on the mobile Internet and the PC-based Internet are due to the physical differences between the devices -- most notably the limited size of the interface, which creates new user habits and necessitates innovative approaches for those advertising on the mobile screen. This may seem obvious, but advertisers who recognize how to turn these differences to their advantage are far ahead of the game in mobile advertising.

Read the rest of the story at Adotas

The security landscape is becoming more dangerous by the minute. Readers of this blog have seen multiple articles here about the growing security threat that we all face (see: security archives). I think that most of you have taken the warnings to heart and checked that your web browsers, and your mail clients, are up to date, and properly patched against the latest threats. However, the study referenced below suggests that over 40% of the machines on the web are not properly patched and thus represent a serious problem for their owners and ultimately for all of us on the web. If your computer is not patched and fully up to date, then you need to do something about this today. Check your browser status

Study: Unpatched Web Browsers Prevalent on the Internet

Only 59.1 percent of people use up-to-date, fully patched Web browsers, putting the remainder at risk from growing threats from diligent hackers, according to a new study published by researchers in Switzerland.

The study, published Tuesday, is one of the most comprehensive analyses of what versions of Web browsers people are using on the Internet. The study was conducted by researchers at The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology,Google and IBM Internet Security Services.

Read the rest of the story in PC World

If you have Flash on your web site you know how huge this development really is.

In a move that could add substantial volumes of Flash content to Internet search results, Adobe is working with Google and Yahoo to provide optimized Flash Player technology to enhance the searching of this content. The project, being announced Tuesday, will enable searches on Flash content to return text and links, which can then be indexed, said Justin Everett-Church, Adobe senior product manager for the Flash Player. Content from a Flash application or even a game or advertisement will be available to search engines. Pages containing a Flash .SWF file will be returned in a search.

Read the whole article in InfoWorld

Here's more evidence that we're going to be pushing more an more web content and web applications onto mobile devices; eventually everything will be delivered to small mobile devices that are decedents of your cell phone. The future belongs to the wirelessly connected "pocket computer", not the tethered desktop, or even the laptop computer.

Your laptop is likely to soon go the way of 5.25-in. floppy disks, made obsolete by smaller, more useful technology: the smart phone. Based on current trends for low-power chips used in devices like cell phones and iPods , we're likely to see eight times the CPU power in handheld devices by 2010 that we have today... The progress behind such advances isn't the overall boost in processing capabilities seen under Moore's Law (doubling the density of transistors on a chip every two years), Cockcroft said, but the increasing robustness of low-power chips and devices that use them. In other words: handhelds are advancing faster than laptops. For example, laptop memory capacity typically doubles every two years, while pocket devices are seeing such doubling annually.

Read the whole article at ComputerWorld.com