Message Labs discovered last week that spammers have started to use a hacking software that hides itself on your computer, collects information about you and send it back to the spammer.

The personal information is then incorporated into spam emails and the victim is more likely to open the message since its seems to contain information directly relevant to him, such as passwords, a pet’s name, or a company name.

The technique does not appear to be widespread yet but computer users should be on their guard.

Via Web User.

And spam is just insupportable for…
the blind and visually impaired Internet users who have to resort to text-to-speech software in order to check e-mail. But as the spam problem gets worse, those users are finding that having their e-mail read aloud (Get your P… enlarged) can be a minefield.

Besides, blind users spend disproportionately more time sorting through their junk e-mail than other people, since sighted users can simply scan large batches of messages to spot important mails, whereas blind users must listen to the subject line of each message before they know whether it’s spam or not.

It’s a process that has become so unbearable that some blind users say they are giving up on e-mail altogether.

Furthermore, some attempts at fighting the problem are just unsuitable for the blind community. For instance, the image-verification systems are not always accessible to blind Internet users (such as asking to decipher the text in a garbled image and then enter that text into an online form as part of a security check.)

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