Out of Scope

Gulls Gone Wild

Miami Police are counting on what looks like a flying trash can to hover above downtown Miami and steamy South Beach to keep an eye on criminals, revelers and whatever else catches the robotic drone's roving eye.

Similar drones have been used in Iraq and Afghanistan for years. Miami's $250,000, 16-pound pilotless vehicle, built by Honeywell International, can fly at treetop level and hover to train its electro-optic or infrared sensors on the lawless and, undoubtedly, the underdressed.

Rather than being flown in from a central location, the drone would be carried in a backpack to the site of a disturbance and launched by an operator, according to police. The idea is to give police an extra set of eyes when fighting crime.

Up next: an overhead video compilation of spring breakers that's being pitched on late-night cable TV.

A Web of Deceit

One of the most frightening things trotted out last month at RSA- a show pretty much built on scaring you out of your wits- was research from Secureworks' Joe Stewart on the losing battle against spam and botnets. Stewart's team has identified 11 botnets with more than a million bots responsible for more than 100 billion spam messages a day.

The biggest offender is now the Ukraine-born Srizbi, which boasts 315,000 bots and cranks out some 60 billion junk e-mails every day. It dwarfs the infamous Storm, which has just 85 bots generating 3 billion spam messages daily.

The new kids on Stewart's list also seem to be getting more efficient. Ozdok, also known as the Mega-D botnet, has only 35,000 bots, but it manages an impressive 10 billion spams a day.

Always an encouraging guy, Stewart concludes, "Template-based spam botnets are here to stay. Not only that, based on what we've seen in the lab, we don't believe they've even achieved the level of efficiency of which they could be capable.

What we want to know is, Who is buying the junk advertised in spam? And how is spam still a profitable enterprise?

TECHNOSCOURGE

PR Clunkers

A Bad-Hair Decade

"Subject: our security's In jeopardy, baby- ooh ooh ooh."

(If you don't recall that 1983 song, "Jeopardy," listen here: http://www.apple.com/search/ipoditunes/?q=jeopardy.)

The trouble Is, I do remember the song. And the Greg Kihn Band. And everything else wrong with 1983. Did anyone read past the iTunes link to see what Secure Computing was selling in this RSA release?

BY THE NUMBERS

23% of ClOs report a decline in their IT budgets for 2008.

Source: Gartner global CIO survey

"If we are forced to take an offer directly to your shareholders, that action will have an undesirable impact on the value of your company [and] will be reflected in our proposal."

Microsoft CJiO Steve Ballmer in a letter to Yahoo board members that threatens to turn the acquisition attempt into a nasty battle.