December 31, 2004

Happy New Year

May 2005 be better than 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001 and so on. The previous years have been graded to determine the mean and referenced to 1999 as a benchmark for happiness. All claims and wishes are based on objective results and cannot be understood to be a promise by the party wishing a Happy anything. This wishing contract has been reviewed by the attorney of the wisher and those wishing to serve legal action based on acceptance of this wish will kindly be directed to the sender's office for service. If an error should occur in transmission such as swishing versus wishing then the reciever has the option to carry on at will without holding the sender liable. The wishing versus the swishing debate is now in Congressional review and updates will be provided. In addition to the Wishing/Swishing issue the Phishing issue has been determined to be a 2004 problem that will not be carried into the 2005 year. So all those wishing/swishing/ phishing in 2005 should stop immediately and simply wish a Happy New Year. (Written by Jimbo!)

Posted by iang at December 31, 2004 04:17 PM | TrackBack
Comments

Actually, 2004 was a big improvement over previous years. XP SP2 is becoming widespread and making its influence felt. Just today I was reading about infected online music files which SP2 owners are immunized against. Another major milestone was the first reported drop in spam by a major provider, AOL. I expect to see further drops in 2005.

It's great to see the naysayers and professional paranoids with egg on their face. In the old days we used to make fun of those who predicted the death of Usenet. Modern Cassandras predict the death of email. I doubt that they will be any more successful.

The truth is that neither pessimism nor optimism is the appropriate stance for predicting the future. Realism will win every time.

I have written before about the pendulum concept for how progress works. Every action triggers a reaction. Blind extrapolation without understanding this effect leads to massive errors. Spam has triggered a reaction. Phishing is triggering a reaction. But these reactions take time. And of course there will be a counter-reaction and the pendulum will go the other way, as some new medium becomes popular and attackers find ways to exploit it.

Posted by: Cypherpunk at January 3, 2005 01:17 PM

Cypherpunk, Yea of Too Much Faith! The AOL report wasn't credible, and we already made the point that SP2 only protects those that install it, not the rest of the world. The good news is that spam can only increase another 30% as its already at 70%!

You and Bill predict that spam will be dead in 2 years. I predict "email is dying" by which I mean it is going the way of the post and the telegraph... Let's see who gets smacked by eggs and who by the pendulum...

2004 - The Year of the Phish - Tuesday 4th January 2005

If anything dominated the IT headlines it was IT security or the lack of it. Before we dive into the coming year, here's a quick roundup of the year gone by.

* Despite hopes to the contrary, 2004 turned out to be the worst yet for IT security - just when all those regulatory initiatives started to bite too (in the US at least). Perhaps the most notable scam was phishing (attempts through fraudulent emails to steal personal financial data). According to MessageLabs, the volume of phishing emails grew by a factor of over 20 in the year (to many millions per month). Spam volumes increased from 40 percent of all email to about 70 percent with an average of 6 percent of emails carrying viruses. To add to that, spyware went wild and the number of reported security problems continued to rise over the previous year. When will it end? This year hopefully, but don't hold your breath.

...

http://www.it-analysis.com/article.php?articleid=12478

Posted by: Iang at January 4, 2005 11:48 AM
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