Friday, December 21, 2001
You Have Two Days to Ship Stuff — Who Will Get it There?
WCPO does the testing and price comparisons.
WSB-TV found that you might pay many different rates to ship the same package. Protect yourself from overpaying. This is a nice Friday consumer story.
New Holiday Greeting Card Virus Could Destroy Computers
A newly discovered computer worm, sent under guise of a holiday greeting, has popped up in the United States and Europe and, if activated, could destroy personal computers, experts said. The Reeezak worm enters a computer as an e-mail message in Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O Outlook with a subject line “Happy New Year” and an attachment — “Christmas.exe” — which a recipient may think is a Christmas card. The worm can disable selective keys on the infected computer’s keyboard and delete all the files found in the Windows System Directory, rendering the computer inoperable, said Ian Hameroff, director of antivirus solutions for Computer Associates International Inc. CA.N. Because the worm, a self-propagating virus, sends itself to every e-mail in an address book, recipients are more likely to open the attachment because it appears to come from a recognized source. “If it were launched in June, many people would be suspicious of it, but since it is the holidays and you may be expecting to receive such greetings from friends and colleagues you may trust this and receive a gift you aren’t exactly expecting,” Hameroff said.
Child Porn Spam Reported Nationwide
“Hello dear friends!” reads the cheerful e-mail greeting. “I am Russian underage photographer. I am 51 y.o. … ” Then comes the jolt: “I have portal of best underage sites in my collection. I like to photograph little girls and boys.”
The St. Paul Pioneer Press says, “For the past few weeks, copies of this and other e-mails that advertise child-pornography Web sites have appeared in computer inboxes across the country with increasing frequency, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. While this isn’t a new tactic for child pornographers, the seamy missives haven’t been well publicized and have been vastly underreported by recipients, say law enforcement officials. And the e-mails appear to be increasing. The U.S. Customs Department acknowledged that it’s investigating the “Hello dear friends!” e-mail, but a spokesman declined to elaborate, citing the investigation.
Tom Geller, founder of the nonprofit Spamcon Foundation in San Francisco, an anti-spam activist effort, says unsolicited commercial e-mail provides the perfect vehicle for criminals who run child-porn Web sites to advertise their wares without giving away their identities, especially if they are located overseas. “While spam does make someone visible, it makes them visible with virtual anonymity,” he said. Spam artists, especially those engaged in criminal activities, use bogus names and addresses to register their Web sites, making them extremely difficult to trace. Their Internet provider could help identify a child-porn spammer, “but that’s hard to do if it’s in Russia,” Geller said.
Non-WTC Related Charities Hurting
Philanthropy.com has a very nice sprea don the issue of recession and war’s effect on charitable giving. It is not a pretty picture.
Reporterpitch passes this along: “Melissa Buscher of WRAL says to check out even the most obvious of charities for shortfalls this year. “The local leader of our Salvation Army says their kettle campaign is already down 20K in this one city (Raleigh, NC) alone. A lot of it has to do with the fact stores are getting so many requests from non-profits, there isn’t as much time for the kettles alone to be out in front of the stores.” The Cincinnati Salvation Army officials say they are on pace to fall $100,000 short of their goal.
KFMB San Diego did a story, too.
New Regulations on International Adoptions
Reuters says, “U.S. adoptions of overseas children have doubled in the past decade, reaching almost 20,000 a year. American families adopt four of every five children placed through international adoption, often paying tens of thousands of dollars per child.”
The children come from a wide variety of countries, with Russia and China heading the list, followed by South Korea, Guatemala and Romania. “What you have is too much money changing hands and too many people trying to get that money by producing babies for adoption,” said Fred Greenman, legal counsel to the American Adoption Council.
Earlier this year, under pressure from the European Community, Romania declared a one-year suspension of international adoptions to revamp its procedures and cut out corruption which critics said had embroiled government agencies in the lucrative trade. Emma Nicholson, the European Parliament’s special envoy for Romania, criticized the “child abuse and neglect .. and child trafficking” that she said encouraged thousands of poor people to abandon their children every year.
Widespread abuses have been found.
In Guatemala, an international report found widespread abuses, prompting the U.S. and Canadian embassies to require DNA testing of babies to prove that the women giving them up for adoption were really their mothers. At least 14 tests are known to have come back negative. Last year, the United States agreed to join The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, a multilateral treaty negotiated by 66 countries to regulate the practice. Under its provisions, which should come into force in the next two or three years, all agencies working on international adoptions will need to meet strict government standards.
