I recently booked a rental car on Priceline.com, thinking I had saved a few dollars. I always make sure I uncheck any obscure checkboxes during the checkout process so that I don’t inadvertently provide legitimation for sending me unwanted emails. Today, hardly a week later, I got several hundreds of emails from Priceline.

A data breach at a little-known entity that affected companies from J.P. Morgan ChaseJPM -0.02% & Co. to TiVo Inc. TIVO -2.79% is shining a light on the outsourcing of email marketing campaigns, a practice that has grown steadily over the past decade as consumers become less responsive to commercial pitches.

The effectiveness of black-listing mail servers is questionable. The overall spam volume does not appear to be impacted and keeps going up. The argument that the amount of spam would rise faster without blacklisting is nonsense. Blacklisting affects a very small percentage of emails that are in a gray zone between spam and ham, such as [...]

This article is no longer relevant. In Visual Studio 2008 SP1, setup projects allow you to select the ‘User’s Application Data Folder’ as a deployment target. This is where any SDF files and other application data and content should go. The ‘Common Application Data Folder’ is no longer accessible for write operations in Windows 7 [...]

Major web sites like Yahoo.com and Boston.com are infecting thousands, if not hundred thousands of computers with trojans, back doors, and other viruses, through some of their ad service providers. When will the people in charge of these web sites wake up and start screening the ads that they are serving?   For the 2nd [...]

I am pretty sure I caught the Mebroot root kit last night, or some variant, and potentially some other things, too. I was working when all of a sudden the machine rebooted, without a blue screen. It did an orderly shut-down and reboot (XP Pro SP III). I did not allow XP to boot back [...]