A group of York students has won the opportunity to have their very own I-phone application developed after winning The App Challenge final, held at the Ron Cooke Hub on Wednesday, January 18.
YUSU Welfare officer Bob Hughes has warned students to be vigilant after a student loans phishing scam has been revealed.
Her Majesty the Queen will be visiting York on Maundy Thursday, 5th April, as part of the 800th anniversary of York’s Charter for the traditional “Royal Maundy” ceremony.
A flood caused by a heating system “failure” forced the university IT services to shut down many essential systems on Sunday night, causing problems for many students on the eve of their exams and assignment due-dates.
On Monday, 5th May, Proof-Reading-Service.org contacted students via their university e-mail account, offering to proofread their "reports, essays, dissertations and PhD theses" at a rate of £6.95 per thousand words.
Approximately 70% of valid YorkMail accounts received the e-mail, amounting to 14,300 messages.
Such services undermine academic achievement and progression
Anne-Marie Canning, YUSU President, warned students to be "wary of the e-mail and delete it straight away".
Canning added that “such services undermine academic achievement and progression”, noting that "there are no guarantees that this company are even able to proof read well".
Computing Services have assured The Yorker that the university’s data protection system has not been breached and that no mailing list exists which contains all staff and/or student e-mail addresses.
Proof-Reading-Service.org have admitted to using an American third party to promote their services via e-mail, and have apologised for any inconvenience caused.
The company has received a number of complaints about the spam sent on their behalf.
They claim that their advertisers sent out e-mails on a much wider scale than was anticipated, without authorisation.
The Message Lab's virus and spam filtering service that the University of York subscribes to blocks 98% of spam intended to reach university accounts.
Computing Services advise students to install good quality anti-virus software and consider installing anti-spyware or phishing software in order to deal with spam and ensure safe computing use.
I guess that it's not too hard to figure what all the York e-mail addresses are, something along the lines of spamming all the e-mail addresses of the form [a-z]{2,4}[0-9]{2,3}@york.ac.uk (that is, any combination of letters followed by numbers) will probably hit most people.
One of the major anti-virus/spyware/spam companies is currently running an anti-spam campaign: http://www.sophos.com/security/blog/2008/05/1364.html
Not too hard now you've given the formula, no!
It's fine...its the wrong formula!!
But there is a rather more accurate way.
That gave me a list of about 12000 genuine usernames - quite a catch for a spammer. It'd be nice if they could prevent this somehow.
Clarification: this only works if you're already a York user.
Hmm, that is quite worrying. Should be fairly trivial to run the sftpd in a chroot.
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