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Some family members while at Universal Studios. From left to right, Christina, Emilee, Rebecca and my dad. I didn't take the picture and in fact was not even there (I skipped Universal Studios in favor of shopping and sleeping and not walking around all day), so I have no comment about Emilee and the gun in the shark's mouth.
Saturday night, while at Herb and Jeff's, we all had a conversation about Gmail. I'm fairly certain that every one of us who was there uses it except Herb. Herb is morally opposed to Gmail, in fact, because it has computers reading your emails to determine which ads to display in the sidebar. Despite the fact that Hotmail and Yahoo could do this, because they claim to own all of your email there, he feels that they are better because despite the ability to do so, they do not actually read your email. And while Gmail may become ubiquitous (no other company could do exactly what they do for quite some time, because Google patented the technology), Herb would not like to contribute in any way to its success. My take on it is that you should never, ever trust that your email is one hundred percent secure (and there are of course companies that would be happy to track down emails if you paid them to do it), so it doesn't bother be.
Anyhow, I've been paying a bit more attention to the ads that come up in the sidebar because of this. Today I received a phishing email from Ebay, which I found totally fascinating. I immediately knew it was not legit, because it was supposedly a question about an item I'm selling, and I've never sold a thing on Ebay. Upon closer inspection, it was immediately apparent that hardly a single link went back to Ebay, though it looked remarkably like other emails I have gotten from Ebay in the past. I reported the email to Ebay, and then went back to look at it again, this time paying attention to the ads in my sidebar. I wish I still had them so I could give you the exact titles and URLs (I have since reported the email to Gmail as a phishing email, so the ads no longer show up), but you'll have to take my word that all four of them had to do with spoofed emails. At first I was quite impressed that Gmail's algorithms enabled them to detect that the message was some sort of spoof/phishing scheme, resulting in the ads in my sidebar (which of course is another clue to me about the nature of the email). Then it occurred to me that if their algorithms are good enough for that, they should also be good enough such that the spoofed email never made it to my Inbox in the first place. :-)
- Lizzardie, at 12:43 PM
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