Technology and legal pressure have changed
spammers’ terms of trade. They long relied on sending
more e-mails from more computers, knowing that some
will get through. But it is hard to send 100m e-mails
without someone noticing. In 2008 researchers from the
University of California at Berkeley and San Diego posed
as spammers, infiltrated a botnet and measured its
success rate. The investigation confirmed only 28 “sales”
on 350m e-mail messages sent, a conversion rate
under .00001%. Since then the numbers have got worse.
But spammers are a creative bunch.
of tricking
consumers into a purchase, they are stealing their money
directly. Links used to direct the gullible to a site selling
counterfeits. Now they install “Trojan” software that
ransacks hard drives for bank details and the like.
Spammers also have become more sophisticated
about exploiting trust. In few places is it granted more
readily than on social-networking sites. Twitter, a forum for
short, telegram-like messages, estimates that only 1% of
its traffic is spam. But researchers from the University of
California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois at
Champaign-Urbana show that 8% of links published were
shady, with
of them leading to scams and the rest to
Trojans. Links in Twitter messages, they found, are over
20 times more likely to get clicked than those in e-mail
spam.
Nor is Facebook as safe as it seems. As an
experiment, BitDefender, an online-security firm, set up
fake profiles on the social network and asked strangers to
enter into a digital friendship. They were able to create as
many as 100 new friends a day. Offering a profile picture,
particularly of a pretty woman, increased their odds. When
the firm’s researchers expanded their requests to strangers
who shared even one mutual friend, almost half accepted.
Worse, a quarter of BitDefender’s new friends clicked on
links posted by the firm, even when the destination was
obscured.

(Adapted from http://www.economist.com/node/17519964)

Ten Tips for Microsoft Word and Excel

Our latest tips tell you how to make Microsoft Office 2010's word
processor and spreadsheet apps perform some handy tricks that
Microsoft has documented poorly.

By Edward Mendelson

PCMag.com's Microsoft Office 2010 tips collection
continues, this time with ten tips for Word and Excel users. Most
of these tips are fairly straightforward, and most apply to the
most recent versions of Office. Some of them, however, offer
new twists for the latest version of Office. Expert users will be
familiar with some of these ten tips, but we hope that any user
will find at least a few of these to be useful.
What kind of tips am I talking about this time? Finding
ways to perform poorly documented functions in Word and
Excel. One of these tips, for example, tells you what to do when
Word inserts a horizontal line across the page when you only
wanted to type a few dashes. In the past few months, everyone
in my family has tried and failed to wrestle an unwanted
horizontal line out of a Word document. It might not sound like a
big issue, but once you've got it in your document, good luck
finding help from Microsoft on how to get rid of it.

Some software vendors, like Adobe, continue to provide
help systems that work like improved versions of traditional
software manuals. In those apps, every menu item, every
toolbar icon, is carefully explained, and with a little patience you
can find all the information you need. Microsoft, provides
you with a kind of information supermarket, with huge essays
about topics you don't care about, dozens of selections when
you only need one, and no consistent way to find the information
you want.


Combine Portrait and Landscape Pages in a Word Document

Microsoft Word expects you to organize your documents
in a highly-structured but not very intuitive way. If you want to
format most of a document in portrait mode, but one or two
pages in landscape, you simply change the orientation
of the current page. Instead you need to insert a section break
before and after the text you want to format in landscape mode,
and then apply landscape orientation to the section that you
created. Place the insertion point at the point where you want
landscape orientation to begin. On the Page Layout tab, choose
Breaks, then, under Section Breaks, choose New Page. Then
move the insertion point to the end of the text you want to format
in landscape, and insert the same kind of break. Then put the
insertion point anywhere between the two breaks; return to the
Page Layout tab, and click the down-pointing arrow at the lower
right of the Page Setup group. In the Page Setup dialog, on the
Margins tab, select Landscape orientation, then go to the "Apply
to" dropdown and select This Section.
(Adapted from http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,
2379207,00.asp#)