January 2005

A German court has ruled that a university acted illegally by blocking incoming emails from a former employee from reaching addresses within the institution. It's reasoning on the issue was that email is private and therefore the university did not have the right to filter it based on content, unless related to combating a viral threat.

The Register is wondering if they have thereby unintentionally banned spam blocking too, as that is generally done by applying filtering rules to message content. Surely it's more likely that spam-blockers will just be offered as services to which users have to consent, thus getting around any possible privacy issues.

A number of security flaws have been discovered, and fixed, in Google's popular Gmail service. One of these holes was apparently discovered accidentally when a couple of hackers (not crackers) were testing a mailing list distribution program they had written, which unintentionally exposed a flaw that gave them access to random information from others' messages, including (in one case) a password.

It's worth noting that GMail is still in the Beta testing stage, despite the number of users it has accumulated, so bugs like this shouldn't be considered particularly surprising. It is, however, quite impressive that this hole was plugged within an hour of its details appearing on Slashdot.