Technology

Spammers and mass-ticket purchasers have outsourced CAPTCHA solving to teams of low-wage workers in places like Russia and Southeast Asia. Many of them don’t even speak English. They don’t have to, according to Stefan avage.

The beauty of most modern CAPTCHAs is that they simply take Latin characters — so they don’t actually need to understand what the words mean — they simply need to be able to look at the symbols and type the appropriate ones on their keyboard, he says — via redwolf.newsvine.com

When we think of tech crime, we tend to imagine hackers cooking up exploits to crack banking systems or spammers launching phishing attacks, but they are only half the story.

While these cybercrimes might capture the imagination of Hollywood script writers, there is a much lower-tech assault taking place on the nation’s IT infrastructure that is more Lock, Stock than The Matrix.

Every night across Britain, old-fashioned robbers take to the streets, looking to plunder an increasingly valuable commodity — copper — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Australia mail is a prestigious web-based email account, you get YourName@australia.edu which is great for personal or business use

The market for personal data about Internet users is booming, and in the vanguard is the practice of scraping. Firms offer to harvest online conversations and collect personal details from social-networking sites, résumé sites and online forums where people might discuss their lives.

The emerging business of web scraping provides some of the raw material for a rapidly expanding data economy. Marketers spent $7.8 billion on online and offline data in 2009, according to the New York management consulting firm Winterberry Group LLC. Spending on data from online sources is set to more than double, to $840 million in 2012 from $410 million in 2009 — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Google has added notification for phishing URLs to its service that lets administrators know if their networks have been compromised — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The position of the infamous Zeus trojan may be usurped by a new upstart that is unknown to four of the six largest antivirus companies and has already been used by a criminal group to empty bank accounts across Europe and America — via redwolf.newsvine.com

As a Mac consultant, I’m often asked some pretty bizarre questions. One that I frequently hear is “How do I type <some special character> on my Mac?” A good example of this is people who want to type fractions that look like this — ½ — rather than like 1/2, or plop a character like an umbrella — ☂ — or a skull and crossbones — ☠ — in the middle of a sentence — via TUAW

US aviation officials are warning air carriers that new research shows lithium batteries are sensitive to heat and can ignite in-flight if transported in cargo compartments that get too hot — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Just a few days ago we broke the news that the first BitTorrent app had been allowed into Apple’s App Store. The developer managed to get it approved despite Apple’s hatred towards BitTorrent. Unfortunately, the fun was soon over as Apple has already kicked the App from the store. The developer is not giving up that easily and hopes to convince Apple they’re wrong — via redwolf.newsvine.com