A decent piece on the possible motives behind SoBig. In short, money. Without a doubt, it contains the cheesiest quote of the year:

"You can liken this guy to Lex Luthor and we're all Supermen," said Russ Cooper, a computer security expert at Trusecure, based in Herndon, Va. "Luckily we've been able to get the kryptonite from around our necks each time so far."

Poor guy. I know the press takes you out of context and it probably didn't sound silly when they were talking. At least I hope that's the case. Otherwise, someone takes our job a little to seriously.
posted by mt at 08:22

Note to self, removing battery for several months does not erase data. Who the heck has all that private info on a blackberry?
posted by mt at 14:31

From Slashdot, reports of a major spammer shutdown. What's crazy about this is that all weekend, I was thinking to myself that my spam load was exceptionally light, around 15% of the normal numbers. Several slashdotters report similar results. Could this one guy have been the cause of so many problems? If so, we need to continue the pursuit of such individuals. A major meme last week on the blog circuit was the diminishing returns of email and its pitiful state. I'd love to see us reclaim it and filter out the BS clogging so many boxes.
posted by mt at 09:34

A report on the biometric standards looming for travelers. Interesting stuff and by far the most ambitious implementation to date. Check out this factoid:

Mexico maintains 60 million face-recognition files to prevent people from registering to vote more than once.

posted by mt at 09:27