Employees at a National Weather Service center in Maryland were randomly interrupted by a “message in Chinese” broadcast over the facility’s little-used intercom system on Wednesday, morningthe Washington Post reported. Bizarrely, it also reached “employees by phone” in the same complex.
Apparently sick of being criticized by everyone from US Congress to Seth Rogan for not doing enough to purge its platform of bots, trolls, and malicious foreign actors, Twitter has started liberally dropping the ban hammer on suspicious accounts, suspending more than 70 million users over the course of May and June.
Facebook says it’s “working to” reduce the number of annoying notifications it sends you when you add new friends. The alerts, which masquerade as Facebook Messenger notifications, were the subject of a BuzzFeed article lambasting the feature two days ago.
Getting rid of spam is a never ending game of cat and mouse. Just as soon as email hosts figure out how to thwart spammers’ latest tricks, the spammers come up with new ways to fill your inbox with junk you don’t want.
The notorious Florida Man is at it again, this time allegedly placing nearly 100 million robocalls offering fake travel deals, according to the Federal Communications Commission.
If your name is Will Robinson, be careful—Netflix will find you. The Lost in Space Twitter account is teasing out the show’s next trailer by spamming hundreds of people who go by the name Will Robinson. Danger, indeed.
Facebook is bleeding users, with external researchers estimating that the social network lost 2.8 million US users under 25 last year. Those losses have prompted Facebook to get more aggressive in its efforts to win users back—and the company has started using security prompts to encourage users to log into their…
You’re not the only one who has noticed an uptick in annoying robocalls seemingly coming from your same area code.
A good rule of thumb is that if a random website tries to trick you into giving it access to your Twitter account in order for you to watch a video titled “Baby Poops In His Onesie, But Dog’s Response Leaves Millions Of People In Hysterics,” you shouldn’t do it. You absolutely should not do it.
“Was The Morningside Post website hacked?” a friend asked me. The site, which I once co-edited, seemed to have died, and returned as a zombie version of itself. About five months ago, my successors at TMP—the student-run news publication at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs—accidentally…
An unknown hacker has gathered up to 711 million email accounts stored on an “open and accessible” server in the Netherlands, ZDNet reported. The server contains passwords to both email addresses and servers which are apparently being used to send large amounts of spam through legitimate accounts, thereby bypassing…
Once I became a parent, I noticed for the first time that the products I was buying came with pre-addressed postcards. These postcards ask you to send in your contact information, so you can be informed if the product you bought is later deemed unsafe and recalled, so you don’t, for example, get killed by a whipped…
Normally, if a publisher has a problem with spam bots. it has something to do with dreaded promotional comments that don’t make any sense. But USA Today has another problem—the bots just love the colorful newspaper’s Facebook page. That’s led to the FBI getting involved.
Facebook is embroiled in another embarrassing scandal. It appears that some users who post InfoWars articles to the social networking site are noticing that it’s being marked as “spam.” As everyone knows, content from InfoWars isn’t “spam,” it’s “bullshit.”
If you’re one of the many iCloud users that has been receiving spam calendar invitations, you’ll be relieved to know Apple has now worked up the courage to acknowledge the problem and is trying its best to fix it.
For the last few weeks, I’ve noticed that I’ve been getting an influx of spam calendar invitations to my iCloud account, often from random counterfeit retailers. “Save 20% on UGGs” one says. “$19.99 Ray-ban&Oakley Sunglasses,” says another.
People join LinkedIn to help advance their careers (or at least feel like they’re trying). People do not join LinkedIn to receive an endless torrent of emails with this infamous line: “Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.” A judge agrees, and now LinkedIn must pay.
We all have that list of, like, ten people who email us about crap we don’t care about — or just don’t want to see. Now, with two clicks, Gmail will let you block them from ever showing up in your inbox again. This is progress!
The only thing that sucks more than spam are the greedy people who send it to you. That's why the Department of Justice charging three spam kingpins responsible for one of the largest data breaches in history is so exciting. Finally, Feds are taking down the spam kingpins—or at least trying.
This new Pornburger has some unexpected ingredients: The bun is an upside down pineapple cake and the patty is made with beef and ground Spam. Add crispy jalapeño-rubbed bacon and sharp cheddar Riesling cheese and I'm ready to stuff my mouth with it.
