We have received our sixth Tshirt submission in our Tshirt contest. What do you think?

 

 Remember there is a cash prize for winning so submit your entry today.

Today we were pleased to release our Phish Phinder Outlook Plug-in.

You can view the full details of Phish Phinder, install and whitelist instructions on our Phish Phinder information page.

This plug-in will be free for 6 months after which time we will consider charging those people who are not BlueFur.com customers a small fee for this service.

We hope you find this tool useful and will recommend it to your friends, family and co-workers in order to help combat Phishing.

We feel we are doing our part to fight Phishing, now it is your turn to get involved by spreading the word.

 

We received an interesting complaint last night that I felt compelled to comment on here in order to bring to light some common misconceptions and and see what others thoughts are on the subject.

The person lodging the complaint informed us that we are hosting a site using their copyright information. As it turns out, they own the domain xxxxxpersonalchef.com and our customer’s site, which we are hosting, is xxxxxpersonalchef.ca (made up names).

Hearing the word copyright, the first thing we did was look over the content of both sites to see if there was indeed any merit to the complaint. There was no obvious copying of content in either text or images. Upon rereading the complaint again, it became clear that the person complaining felt that because they had an older site in which the prefix of xxxxpersonalchef had been used longer, they felt the registration of the .ca domain with the same prefix was a copyright infringement.

We informed them that Copyright laws do not apply to domain names in the same way Trademarks apply. The person complaining does not have a trademark for their domain, thus is powerless to do anything about the owner of the .ca. They can of course apply for a trademark, but because the domain in question uses 3 very common words, I doubt they will ever get it.

This is a valuable lesson for everyone. The cost of purchasing the other domains is very negligible. Purchase them if you can before someone else does. Also if you can get a Canadian Trademark or US Trademark, we strongly urge you to do so.

 

We make use of remote blacklists (RBL’s) on our servers such a spamcop.net to block 1000′s and 1000′s of emails per server each day. The thought occurred to me that those 100 or so that slip through to my own inbox could be added to our own RBL.

Do you think we should have our own RBL called a bluelist?

I haven’t looked into how hard it would be to set this up but it might be something useful.

Anyone have any experience creating there own RBL?

I also have our staff looking in to another Outlook tool which will allow for you to create your own social blacklists. More details on that to come later though.

I just got my yearly email from CIRA letting me know that they are looking for Directors. The email clearly outlines how the process works and how to nominate a candidate.

So why does CIRA hold elections?
CIRA is governed by volunteers made up of 14 people who set policies and are evangelists of the Canadian Internet community.

Last year did you know any of the people running?
Most people don’t know who is running or how that will impact them as a CIRA member. What most do not know is that you can go to the CIRA site and post questions to the Candidates. This might help you in choosing a candidate if you are not sure who they are.

Know anyone that would be a good nominee?

Congratulations to this weeks geek Rainer from Thinkreferrals. This weeks questions are tech but also Earth Day related:

1. What uses more energy leaving your PC on for 16 hours or turning it off and on?
2. How much energy would be saved if Google were to use a black colour scheme?
3. How much power does a PowerPC 970FX use?
4. What does the hibernate feature do in Windows?
5. What yearly event does Dell have on April 22?