I had heard about this before but never recieved one myself…

There’s an obvious phishing attempt going to gmail users. I got the following message this morning:

VERIFY YOUR FREE G MAI L ACCOUNT NOW !!!

Dear G ma il Account Owner,

This message is from Gmail messaging center to all Gmail free account owners and premium account owners. We are currently upgrading our data base and e-mail account center. We are deleting all unused Gmail account to create more space for new accounts.

To prevent your account from closing you will have to update it below so that we will know that it’s a present used account.

…and it goes on to ask for your ID, password, birth date and location.

Do NOT reply to this. It’s a phishing attempt where some scumbag is trying to get your details so they can break into your account and access your email.

The big problem here is that numerous people now use gmail as their main email accounts. They have their bank passwords, paypal info, hosting and blog info, etc., sent to their gmail accounts and stored there. If anyone were to log into your account they could steal your identity and literally ruin you.

Best case scenario… they could read the love letters from that hottie you’ve been cyberpoking and blackmail you.

In all seriousness though, never, never reply to an email that asks for your passwords or any info. Open a new browser window and log into the site in question by typing the url of that site into your browser. If there are no notifications on that site asking you to update your info, chances are, the email you recieved is a phishing attempt.

To you and I, savvy internet users, this may seem obvious. To a person whose not so savvy… they could lose everything.

Be careful out there.

Pulling out seconds before the life giving injection is made. Not only is Withdrawl a questionable birth control method, it’s a nasty tactic for a private investor to use to gather all the info they possibly can without actually delivering the goods.

It also destroys friendships and relationships, maybe even lives if taken just a little too far.

54 is dead in the water. My sincere apologies to the 150+ people who applied for a blogging position. If there were no legal or privacy ramifications present in the deal, I’d point you all to the person who killed it.

Oh well, another black eye and temporary limp. Time to heal and move on… Maybe next time.

This has to be the funniest thng I’ve seen this year.

I like it. I really like it.

Jason Calacanis launched Mahalo.com, his hush-hush new project yesterday, in a style only Jason can.

I won’t pass judgement except to say that I love simple, uncluttered interfaces and quickly being able to find what I’m looking for, even though the search results are sparse on the long tail right now…

…and his site is nowhere near being similar to the project I’m working on. Phew! Wouldn’t want to be accused of being a copycat.

I expected something much different but I do like what I see. Nice work Jason!

Mahalo, Jason Calacanis

The new TalkNewMedia site is online at http://www.talknewmedia.com after 15 hours battling plugin compatability issues. Ugh!

Setting up email forwarders for 30 sites on a new host. Gawd, I had forgotten how mind-numbing all this can be.