Spammer stole my Yahoo email and sent out spam mails

Friends, in case you received an email selling you Viagra online, which appears sent from my Yahoo email. I apologize. Obviously I don’t sell those. Some hackers used my Yahoo email and did this. Please ignore that mail. More information (prevention tips) about this tactic can be seen at:

I had my email account hacked into and emails sent out.?

I realized this problem as my Gmail acct is also in my Yahoo address book. Also, one friend asked me “huh”? I think this is not really brand new tactic, and I believe most people already know it. This note is just in case.

Blackberry down

Yesterday one of the big news (Reuters) in the technology arena is the down of Blackberry (a.k.a., the Crackberry) email sevice in north America. This obviously has huge impact on the business and goverment users as they rely on device for email. But how could this happen? Isn’t blackberry supposed to be more reliable than the mobile phone network: one example is in 911, Dick Chenny got his Blackberry working while many cell phones users in White House and Congress stopped working.

Well, while the Blackberry is usually reliable, it is not perfect. According to the news, it appears the networking center of RIM had a glitch yesterday. As shown in the picture below, every email has to route through RIM’ networking center (or data center).

(source, Blackberry.com, a full size architecture picture can be seen here.)

Phishing Mail Appears from eBay?

This one caught me off the guard. It looks like a normal eBay message. I actually clicked through the link in the email and a few days later I received the real email from eBay says my eBay account is compromised. So I did the demage control thing.

Today I received the same message again. I don’t know whether this is a mistake by eBay or a phishing mail. But from now on I should be real careful about clicking on the links in an email…