Most of us know about phishing by now. Those annoying emails coming from a bank you don’t even do business with, telling you in poor grammar and spelling to update your account settings by visiting a website with a strange looking URL. The more clever ones, such as the genuine-looking messages posing as eBay or PayPal customer support, have lured many people into exposing their account credentials and still pose a significant threat to the uninformed.

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Another chapter in the saga surrounding millions of missing White House emails was written this week, when judge John Facciola ordered the Bush administration to collect and preserve all emails stored in .pst files including data copied onto portable media such as flash drives.

While there are many theories about the missing emails, reaching from government conspiracy to sheer incompetence, I would side with the latter.

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Feeling the urge to check your Blackberry during meetings? Many people find this disruptive and disrespectful. One company, DDB Canada, is now implementing a penalty card system as found in soccer.

“Over the past year, I’ve become increasingly aware of and annoyed by staff who use their BlackBerries during meetings,” says Frank Palmer, chairman and CEO of DDB Canada. “Whether it’s done openly or covertly under the table, using a PDA during a meeting is completely unacceptable, disrespectful and hinders the progress of the meeting. While these devices are considered time-savers, they’re also extremely intrusive.”

Colleagues will show the yellow card to first offenders, followed by a red card for repeat misconduct. Receiving a red card results in the employee footing that month’s mobile services bill.

Technorati Tags: blackberry, etiquette

eWeek brings this story from last week’s Gartner ITxpo in Las Vegas. During an overview presentation of the UCC market, Bern Elliot, Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst, made the claim that companies must invest in UCC tools in order to attract and retain top talent.

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Just in case there has been any doubt, here is another example of how all electronic communications can be used in court. This eWeek article covers the recent subpoena issued by New York City, to obtain text-messaging records and recipient information related to protests during the Republican National Convention in July of 2004. The event was orchestrated through the now infamous TXTmob tool, which was created by Tad Hirsch, a doctorial candidate at MIT.

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Coincidently, a couple of days after I had posted the blog entry about spammers now targeting cell phones, I received a couple of unsolicited text messages. I don’t really use texting, since I have a Blackberry and prefer email and IM instead. Consequently I don’t subscribe to any texting plan. I had previously made a mental note to check what anti-spam tools my cell carrier - Verizon - had available to control the inbound text message stream. Now was a good time to follow-up on that.

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