For the second time in two days I have received a phishing email. It is puportedly from Bell.ca but a little research shows that it is really out of the IP space of Speedware.com a Montreal based company that develops and sells business intelligence solutions. Most annoying especially after reporting to abuse@bell.ca yesterday and getting no response.

So what to do? I found no Canadian sites collecting data on phihing exercises but I did find a couple elsewhere:
http://www.antiphishing.org/index.html and
http://wiki.castlecops.com/PIRT
I reported to both.

So be warned, the attempts are getting more and more sohistcated. By way of example, here's an excerpt from the messages I received:

There's not much that longtime tech columnist John Dvorak has to has that I find agreeable. He's been wrong on so many issues related to open source it's been hard to keep track.

This week, however, there's finally something on which we can agree, as he implores his readership to Screw the Digital-Rights Bugaboo. Of course, in the US such a plea at this time is somewhat pathetic, as the DMCA is already in place. Where was this opinion when the DRM debate was actually going on south of the border? I guess I shouldn't expect more from Dvorak, but I guess it's (maginally) better late than never.

The tar backup program is an archiving program designed to store and extract files from an archive file known as a tarfile. A tarfile may be made on a tape drive; however, it is also common to write a tarfile to a normal file.

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I have been invited by the executive to be a policy coordinator, working for CLUE in Ottawa. My focus will be on the federal government and federal policy, but will also be collaborating with other CLUE members on other levels of government as well.

I thought that this being my first foray into the blog world that I would like to address something that is important not only to CLUE but also to other FOSS projects. I am most familiar with OpenOffice.org and its deployment via the Ontario Ministry of Education. This is a significant change for the government to go to Open Source after initially choosing StarOffice.

Okay now to get to the point which is that the Ontario government itself is not considering using OpenOffice.org but is sticking with MSO. To me this is a waste of your and my tax dollars and should be remedied. How? By each of us who use and work with Open Source to lobby our government representives. I started with my MPP, David Caplan, some time ago and will meet again with him, even though I moved from the constituency, to give him charts and spreadsheets that demonstrate that the cost of moving in this direction would cost about half of what it costs annually with the present choice.

Let me introduce myself to the CLUE community. My name is Jim Elliott and I am the advocate for Open Computing (including Linux and Open Source) at IBM Canada Ltd. (which covers Canada and the Caribbean). I have been working pretty much full-time on Linux since mid-1998. First as the launch manager for Linux on IBM mainframes for the Americas and then since January of 2002 in my current role.

My web site is at ibm.com/vm/devpages/jelliott where you will find copies of presentations I have made at public events recently on Linux and Open Source.

February 1986. I was in Oakland, CA, and Lou Katz, founding president of USENIX, asked me whether I was interested in becoming Executive Director of the organisation. He showed me the ad and the job description. I applied. I was interviewed by Debbie Scherrer, Steve Johnson, and Tom Ferrin. I got the job.

The next three years were the most fun I can imagine anyone having while getting paid for it. We were running 4.2BSD and then 4.3BSD on a VAX 780. Early in 1987 we got a SUN and a 3/60 and two 3/50s.

In 1987, I sponsored the first LISA; the first POSIX workshop; the first C++ workshop. We began the publication of Computing Systems. We sponsored the founding of UUNET by Rick Adams and Mike O'Dell.