Nielsen: Eight million U.S. households still unprepared for digital television transition

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving.  It's a great time to reflect on how fortunate we are to be Americans.  Have a great holiday and I'll be back on Monday.

Nielsen Says Fewer Households Are Unprepared for DTV Transition [Multichannel News]

According to a report from the Nielsen Company, the number of households that are completely unprepared for the digital transition dropped from October to November. There are 7.4% of American households that remain unprepared for the transition to digital television - that's over 8 million households that are not ready for the February 17th deadline next year.

Other data in the report indicates that households with older heads-of-household tend to be better prepared for DTV than younger households. That sounds counter-intuitive to me so I wonder if this data is a good indicator of what's going to happen when they flip the switch in February.  And a larger percentage of Hispanic households still have not prepared compared to non-Hispanic households.

Joe the Plumber's Next Gig: DTV Transition Spokesman [Washington Post - Post IT]

Joe the Plumber is looking to extend his fifteen minutes of fame beyond the presidential election - he's starring in a series of online videos designed to educate television viewers about the digital transition. The videos are produced by an online retailer of digital television converter boxes. Joe Wurzelbacher will talk about the digital transition and how to request coupons from the federal government to purchase a digital converter box.

This article indicates that Wurzelbacher agreed to appear in the videos for the retailer due to the fact that the retailer is providing information for Spanish and Chinese speaking households - two populations that are disproportionately affected by the transition.

In any case, I'm glad our tax dollars are not paying him.

Microsoft ranked fifth worst spam service ISP [CNET News]

A prominent spam-tracking service has named Microsoft as the fifth worst spam service ISP in a recent top-10 list of the worst domains for spam-related traffic. The ranking is due to links in spam email that link back to Microsoft-owned sites like Live.com and Livefilestore.com. The spammers use Microsoft's free upload services to host their sites, knowing that spam filters won't block Microsoft hosted sites. For Microsoft's part, using their sites to host spam-related material violates their terms of service and they maintain that they remove spammers from their sites as soon as they become aware of them. 

Gmail 'vulnerability' turns out to be phishing scam [CNET News]

Google has announced that a supposed vulnerability in their Gmail webmail system is not actually a vulnerability at all, but a phishing scheme designed to allow an attacker to secretly set up email filters on a Gmail user's account. Here's what Google says about the scam:

Attackers sent customized e-mails encouraging Web domain owners to visit fraudulent Web sites such as "google-hosts.com" that they set up purely to harvest usernames and passwords. These fake sites had no affiliation with Google, and the ones we've seen are now offline. Once attackers gained the user credentials, they were free to modify the affected accounts as they desired.

It's important to remain vigilant when reading emails that purport to be from credible sources like Google. Don't click on links in an email unless you completely trust the sender of the email is who they claim to be.  Then again, it's starting to sound like you should almost never click on links, even if you think you trust the sender.

Comments

[Deborah]

o sorry I hope u had a good Holiday, mine was great. Thank u

[Deborah]

I am one of the 8 million, is it bad that I dnt care about the new upgread, there is nothing good on TV anyway, I just buy DVD, but thaxs for the info