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Let's talk about phishing. Phishing is just like fishing, only your identity is the fish and the bait is an email that looks like it came from your bank, or eBay, or Paypal, or any other legitimate place. The goal is to get you to follow a link to a site owned by the phisher, and trick you into divulging some private information, such as your bank account number, pin, passwords, or social security number.

Some phishing emails look completely legitimate, using logos, links, and text from the real business. Many try to warn you about fraud being committed with your account--the truth is, the senders of the email are the ones trying to commit fraud with your account, if they can trick you into divulging it. These types of emails are almost always fake. When you follow the link in such an email, you'll usually get taken to a web site that looks exactly like the real web site. But it's not.

Just found a site that provides a feature comparison for several dozen content management systems of various types, both proprietary and open source. Search for the features you need, and this will show what's available.

This isn't exactly new, but apparently it's news. A popular rapper, Chuck D, has decided to release an album under a Creative Commons license, which specifically gives people permission to reuse the work in other works.

Over in Boston, not having clear ownership rights to the source code installed to manage traffic in the systems put in place in The Big Dig has cost the project an extra $10 million dollars, when the original vendor took them to court.

The Win-tel duopoly is about to become obsolete? An interesting editorial on the Enterprise Linux I.T.

Right after yesterday's post about Lessig's interview at O'Reilly, Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, has written a piece contradicting Lessig's belief that most creative works should not be copyrighted.

The O'Reilly Network has a fascinating Interview with Lawrence Lessig, where he explores these and other topics.

Novell is sponsoring development of a new email/calendar server called Hula. This promises to be an Exchange killer, providing standards-based calendar sharing and storage using WebCal to share calendars and free/busy information.

Hah! You gotta love this one: It Pays To Read License Agreements. PC Pitstop put a little clause in their software license agreement, saying to contact them for financial compensation for reading that far.

In our previous episode, my laptop had died a spectacular death from a full cup of coffee. I had to send it into the IBM depot, where they replaced nearly everything but the battery. Including the hard drive.

At Freelock Computing, several of our clients are looking for decent project management tools. We think we're going to roll our own solution, but have found a few new options.

Great background information on what I always considered to be "Windows Networking". The author of Samba writes about the Myths about Samba.