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When you sign up for an e-mail account at Google's Gmail, you have to navigate past a CAPTCHA -- squiggly words and letters that need to be typed into a box to prove you're human and not an automated system looking to send spam. But in the war against spammers, CAPTCHAs are not holding up well and the latest attacks let spambots into Gmail.

CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart." Typically image files, the challenge-and-response system has been fairly successful in preventing spammers from opening e-mail accounts on popular Web domains like Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail. Those accounts are prized by spammers because Web administrators can't simply blacklist the popular domains.

Spammers have found ways to break CAPTCHAs, according to Stephan Chenette, manager of Websense Security Labs. "What we're seeing is the technology on the hacker side has surpassed the simple CAPTCHAs," Chenette told us. "In the public domain there are several tools available right now for everyone to use to break simple CAPTCHAs."

Human and Computer Attacks

Chenette said organized attackers are using automated tools to sign up for Gmail and other Web-mail accounts. When the CAPTCHA image appears, it's automatically sent off to a large and low-paid workforce, typically in another country, where a worker enters the code and sends it back so the account can be created.

This type of attack has been used against other Web-mail sites, Chenette said, but in the attacks on Gmail there's a new wrinkle. "One of the more interesting things about the Gmail CAPTCHA breaking is that we believe that this might be happening through an automated process, which is the next step to breaking CAPTCHAs as opposed to hiring a large workforce to break them," he said.

In fact, Chenette believes these are two-pronged attacks. The...

Worldwide sales of mobile phones skyrocketed to 1.5 billion in 2007, according to research firm Gartner, a 16 percent increase from 2006 sales of 990.9 million. Sales at the end of the year matched a trend that has demand spiking in the fourth quarter. Fourth-quarter sales reached 330 million.

"Emerging markets, especially China and India, provided much of the growth as many people bought their first phone," said Carolina Milanesi, research director for mobile devices at Gartner. "In mature markets, such as Japan and Western Europe, consumers' appetite for feature-laden phones was met with new models packed with TV tuners, global positioning satellite functions, touch screens and high-resolution cameras."

Nokia is the Global Leader

Nokia continues its global leadership with a 40 percent market share in the fourth quarter, when it sold slightly more than 133 million phones. Samsung maintained second place and, although its market share slipped slightly, the gap widened between Samsung and third-place Motorola.

The problems that beset Motorola in the third quarter continued in the fourth quarter. The company recorded global sales of 39 million for the quarter, taking 11.9 percent of the market.

Motorola retained second place in annual sales, Gartner reported, largely thanks to the inventory it disposed of in the first half of the year. Nevertheless, the extent of Motorola's troubles can be seen in the 9.7 percent drop in its market share in the fourth quarter from the same period in 2006.

Sony Ericsson ended 2007 with another positive performance, growing its market share on a quarterly basis to nine percent from 8.7 percent. And LG's mobile-phone sales totaled 23.5 million in the fourth quarter, maintaining its 7.1 percent market share despite a sales increase of more than 3 million..

The Ones to Watch

The market saw three new players in the top 10 for the fourth quarter...

A large organization decides that blogs cut productivity, provide misleading information and could compromise security. It discontinues access for its personnel, even though information is a key weapon in competition. The question is whether this is a smart policy for a large organization, especially the U.S. Air Force.

According to a report this week in Wired, the Air Force is eliminating access for its troops to virtually any site that uses the term "blog." Sites are also being blocked because of a negative review of content by supervising personnel. The move comes, according to the publication, as the Cyber Command of the Air Force Network Operations Center (AFNOC) takes over control of what sites Air Force personnel can visit, a responsibility previously borne by each major command.

Block First, Then Review

Maj. Henry Schott of AFNOC is quoted by Wired as saying that the Air Force personnel can still access "primary, official-use sources," such as established media like The New York Times. The basic idea is that non-legitimate sources of news shouldn't be read during work time because of credibility, security risks, and loss of productivity.

The Air Force will block other, less-established sources on the basis that they provide less credible information. The policy, according to one Cyber Command spokesperson, is to "block first and then review exceptions." This means that Air Force personnel posting to or reading from sites that might relate to technical or military subjects have found themselves caught in the filters.

The tools used by the Air Force have included Secure Computing's SmartFilter software, running the Web Security Appliance platform from Blue Coat software. According to a press release on Blue Coat's site, SmartFilter's international control list "continuously categorizes millions of Web sites into content groups, including pornography, gambling and MP3."

The Air Force has also banned some sites...