The following extraordinary sentence launched yet another tedious social enginering 419 scam in my spam box: "Take notice that based on the UNITED NATIONS government inauguration of this committee which extended to all countries which combined with the United Nation Anti-crime commission to alleviate and redeem the image and past wounds of our dear citizens and foreign firms who were duped, defrauded, scammed and abandoned by some impostors who indiscriminately use the name of God, Office of governors, Presidency, Banks etc to slight down our dignities to international communities." Most 419ers are clearly one sandwich short of a picnic as all they seem to do is replay the same old scams over and over. The 'clever' ones add daft little elaborations and the rest duly plagiarise them without actually understanding how dumb they end up sounding. This cretin continued: "Many banks have been in bankruptcy today, Universal firms, Companies due to the activity of these...

Using banned-word lists to block spam may be a simple and hence cheap control but it may be too crude or simplistic to work properly. Blocking emails with "teen" in them, for example, is perhaps not the smartest move made by New Zealand's Social Development Ministry .

A set of policies , presented as checklists or guidelines for employees, explains typical rules for employees who use blogs or other social media: "The Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit is a draft series of checklists to help companies, their employees, and their agencies learn the appropriate and transparent ways to interact with blogs, bloggers, and the people who interact with them. We believe in the principles of transparency and openness, and this document is a way of making this real on the inside. Our goal is not to create or propose new industry standards or rules. These checklists are open source training tools designed to help educate the hundreds or thousands of employees in any large corporation the appropriate ways to interact with the social media community." The authors evidently have a bee in their bonnet about people disclosing any pecuniary interest in the matters on which they are writing. If adapted to become corporate policies, management may wish to be...