Tech Thoughts Daily Net News – July 18, 2009

Gambling spam offers ’secret roulette trick’: Roulette-email-scam – Recently, emails containing a secret roulette trick that was supposedly intended for someone else have started to invade in-boxes.

Lifehacker: How to SMS with Google Voice from Any Mobile Phone – Just because you don’t have an Android phone or BlackBerry (or even, unofficially, an iPhone) doesn’t mean you can’t text from your cellphone using your Google Voice number. In fact, you can use Google Voice SMS capabilities on any phone.

Microsoft Lawsuit Aims to Block Spam Over IM – Microsoft’s lawsuit seeks to stop what it says is abuse of its Windows Live Messenger service.

‘Sexy View/Sexy Space’ Symbian Worm Spreading – Worm’s application payload comes Symbian-signed; researchers disagree over whether it’s building a full-blown mobile phone Botnet.

E-Commerce Fraud: The Latest Criminal Schemes – Expert outlines some of the latest exploits involving online payment systems.

Survey: Why Do People Respond To Spam? – Almost one-third of users say they have responded to email they suspected was spam.

Passwords 101: A Simple Way To Make It Hard For Hackers – Protecting your account is not difficult, but many users fail to remember the basics.

E-banking used by four in five online US households – More than two million US households have adopted online banking and bill payment during the last year, meaning the services are now used in over three quarters of homes with Internet access.

Off Topic:

Ten Things You Can Do to Stimulate a New Economy – At a time when the financial crisis has eroded any faith we might have had in big business and the capital markets, it is more important than ever to support companies that are having a positive impact on their communities, employees, consumers and the environment.

Computer can judge human attractiveness: – Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the popular saying goes, but new Canadian research suggests this is not really true.

Ten Things You Didn’t Know About the Apollo 11 Moon Landing – Auspiciously timed is Craig Nelson’s new book, Rocket Men–one of the most detailed accounts of the period leading up to the first manned moon mission. Here, we have ten little-known Apollo 11 facts unearthed by Nelson during his research.

Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits – The original recordings of the first humans landing on the moon 40 years ago were erased and re-used, but newly restored copies of the original broadcast look even better.

Today’s Free Downloads:

Xpy – Repair Tool of the Week – Xpy is a small, portable and freeware registry tweaker with an emphasis on tweaking privacy and security settings.

VoxOx 2 - A new Personal Assistant for robust call forwarding, call recording, call transfer, conference calls, call screening, and personalized call routing. VoxOx 2.0 for Mac is also available.

Hotspot Shield 1.19 – Hotspot Shield is freeware which ensures anonymous and censor-free internet usage. With Hotspot Shield you can even access blocked websites. For example: Skype is blocked in certain parts of the world. With Hotspot Shield, anyone can access Skype (and any other site they choose). The free software ensures censor-free internet usage by encrypting all communications to and from your computer to protect you from online spying.

UltraVNC 1.0.6.4 – UltraVNC is a powerful, easy to use and free application that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location.

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