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“Unfriend” is named word of the year... seriously.
A testament to how social media has abounded, the Oxford American Dictionary made it official.

    

Kristina Mameli
news editor

how popular the social media trifecta

of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter has
become over the last year, give or take, the
Oxford American Dictionary has decided to
officially choose the word “unfriend” as the
word of the year.

According to the reputable dictionary,
“unfriend” is a verb meaning “to remove
someone as a friend on a social networking
site such as Facebook.”

Side note: Facebook now has over 300
million members worldwide.

The word was actually selected by a
panel of experts at Oxford University Press
that track how the English language changes
from year to year. The word chosen must
“reflect the ethos of the year and its lasting
potential as a word of cultural significance
and use.”

Senior lexicographer Christine
Lindberg told The Vancouver Sun that, “in
the online social networking context its
meaning is understood so its adoption as a

I: what is being hailed as a testament to

modern verb form makes this an interesting
choice for Word of the Year. It has both
currency and potential longevity.”

Other contenders for the 2009 word of
the year included a number of Twitter terms,
more net slang and a few fan favourites.
The following gems, that should soon
find themselves entrenched in your daily
vernacular, come to us courtesy of the
newly revised Oxford American Dictionary:

¢ Intexticated: distracted by
texting on a cell phone while
driving a vehicle

¢  Paywall: a way of blocking
access to a part of a website
which is only available to paying
subscribers.

¢ Freemium: a business model
in which some basic services
are provided for free, with the
aim of enticing users to pay for
additional, premium features or
content.

¢  Funemployed: taking advantage
of one’s newly unemployed
status to have fun or pursue other
interests.

* Zombie bank: a financial
institution whose liabilities are

 

   

 

 

greater than its assets, but which

continues to operate because of

government support.

¢  Birther: a conspiracy theorist
who challenges President
Obama’s U:S. birth certificate.

¢ Choice mom: a person who
chooses to be a single mother.

¢ Death panel: a theoretical body
that determines which patients
deserve to live, when care is
rationed.

¢ Teabagger: a person who protests

President Obama’s tax policies

and stimulus package, often

through local demonstrations

known as “Tea Party” protests (in

allusion to the Boston Tea Party
of 1773.

¢ Brown state: a U.S. state that
does not have strict environmental
regulations.

¢ Green state: a U.S. state that has
strict environmental regulations.

¢ — Ecotown: a town built and run on
eco-friendly principles.

¢  Deleb: a dead celebrity.

¢ Tramp stamp: a tattoo on the
lower back, usually on a woman.

¢ Netbook: a very small, very
portable laptop.

¢  Sexting: sending sexually explicit
texts and pictures on your cell
phone.

 

Universites make ideal target for spammers

Hacked accounts can send thousands of spam emails at a time

By Ashley Gaboury, CUP Central
Bureau Chief

WINNIPEG (CUP)— Universities across the
world are facing a slew of phishing scams,
with both students and staff falling victim
to spammers who trick them into divulging
personal information, including university
web mail user names and passwords.

Steve Hillman, an information
technology architect at Simon Fraser
University, describes phishing as an
attempt to get persons’ online ID and
passwords to access their systems and
can take on different forms. He says that
universities are often the targets of phishing
operations because they usually have vast
email systems, large data pipes and little
restrictions on outbound mail, and thus
can send out thousands of messages very
quickly.

“Banking [phishing scams] go after
baking accounts and passwords... same with
credit cards. With universities in general,
they’re just after your email account so that
they can then use your email account to
send out spam,” he says.

“They can tailor the message to be
relatively generic but to the average student
and even staff, it looks official enough that
they will be duped into responding to it,”
says Hillman. “On a particular phishing
blast they might get half a dozen or a dozen
replies that are legitimate and then they’ll
sit on them for a while, up to many months,
and then they’ll send out a blast of spam and
then they’ll never use the account again.”

Ken De Cruyenaere, University of
Manitoba computer security co-ordinator,
says phishing attempts are a daily
occurrence at the U of M and that, within
the past month or so, there have been a
few cases where both staff and students
have replied to phishing emails with
their personal information. He says that

 

 

User ID:

Secure Access Login

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sometimes within minutes the compromised
account is logged into and sending spam to
thousands of web mail users.

In order to prevent mass amounts
of university accounts being spammed,
university IT departments have a number
of measures put in place including spam
filters and limits on the number of emails
an account can send out in a certain time
period. “We have spam bulk mail filtering
and if something looks like bulk mail, we
let the first 99 get delivered and then we
start blocking it after that,” says U of M’s
De Cruyenaere. “If it’s coming from a
University of Manitoba account then there
is no blocking. That’s why it gets painful
if a university account starts spamming
the university. It gets sent to potentially
thousands of U of M IDs instead of just a
hundred.”

He says that web mail accounts
cannot send more than a certain number
of emails—a number he did not want to
specify—in an hour or it is temporarily
blocked at which point steps are taken to
determine whether the emails are legitimate
or not. “Most of the time it turns out to be
some broken account that’s logged in from

Nigeria, usually.”

De Cruyenaere says that an account
is shut down once it is confirmed that it is
spamming.

Hillman says that when SFU
introduced a new emailing system, there
was no mechanism in place to restrict the
number of emails sent per day. During this
time, a number of email accounts were
compromised and without restrictions
in place, sent enough spam to lead the
university to being blacklisted.

According to Hillman, there are a
number of sites on the Internet that monitor
for spam being sent out. If these sites detect
too much spam from a particular source, it
is put on a list as an undependable source of
mail. Other email hosts can choose to follow
this “blacklist” and if they receive mail from
any of the listed sites, they can choose to
reject it. “In one case, we were blacklisted
from Hotmail which actually set up lots
of nasty email loops . . . It took us several
days to clean that mess up and for a while
there were a lot of people not receiving their
mail,” says Hillman.

He says that since limits on emails sent
were put in place, the university has not

been blacklisted.

Hillman says that this week, a phishing
message was sent to SFU that instead of
asking people to respond by email, directed
them to a website to log in. “Luckily the
website didn’t look like our own centralized
authentication site so it was relatively easy
to tell it was a phishing attempt,” says
Hillman.

He says that other universities have
reported phishing messages that have
directed users to more convincing university
log in pages, making it even more difficult
for an unsuspecting user.

De Cruyenaere of the U of M says that
no legitimate organization would ask for
your username and password.

According to Hillman, phishing
schemes are so widespread that “pretty
much every university has had to deal with
it in one way or another.”

“Tt’s a booming market, it’s well
organized and in many cases it’s several
steps ahead of the security experts who are
trying to crack down on it,” says Hillman.
“Tt’s one of those things like spam itself.
It’s just a part of doing business on the
Internet.”