Security Response

Webmail has become ubiquitous - most people have at least one account and some people use several. As the folks at Google pointed out this April Fool’s Day, we’ve gotten to the point where the idea of relying on postal mail for communication is almost completely absurd. Services like Google’s Gmail, Microsoft’s Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail all offer an incredibly large amount of storage and can be accessed from almost any internet-connected machine.

This weekend I got an email from a friend, arriving from her Hotmail address. It was actually an auto-generated invitation link to a social networking service called ‘Tagged’. Tagged is employing some very sketchy tactics in expanding their user base. While the whole idea behind Web 2.0 is the combination of existing Web services/technologies to make them more useful, when a user signs up for Tagged, they’re practically forced to put in their Webmail...