Got my Chase letter. It warns about not sending information by email. Nothing about not clicking on links. In fact, it contains the lines:

The security of your information is a critical priority to us and we strive to handle it carefully at all times. Please visit our Security Center at chase.com and click on "Fraud Information" under the "How to Report Fraud." It provides additional information on exercising caution when reading e-mails that appear to be sent by us.

chase.com is a link!

All a phisher needs to do is send this exact email, pointing to a dummy Chase page, and encourage the victim to log in when he reaches it.

Clearly they are either very stupid or really just don't care. I'll go for the latter.

As with the firefox extension, this only works on Windows 7. So it in no way makes H.264 universally available.

In An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications by William Feller, published before 1968, Feller describes this effect, pointing out that we mentally average over time, not occurrences, and spend most of our time in the slow line.

In soldering 101 I learned that if you put hot solder on cold metal, the solder doesn't really wet the joint, and you will get early or immediate failure of conductivity. You can even accidentally create a diode. So why will this work?

A few days ago, my wife hit the same thing following a link in a perfectly benign google search result! she would have had no idea how to untangle this by herself, since I had failed to turn off firefox restore on error so killing and restarting firefox got right back to the problem.

Infected windows machines are a plague on the internet. Many of these presumably have no useful anti-malware running. Microsoft takes lots of heat, as the comments above prove. So Microsoft decides that trying to sell anti-malware won't work, but maybe giving it away, and I assume bundling it, will get it widely deployed. And take some heat off Microsoft for shipping vulnerable stuff. If this happens, and it works at all, it will be a great improvement to the current mess. To put it differently - it's clearly impossible to make an OS bug proof - so an OS ought to contain defenses against malware out of the box.

Lots of misunderstandings in the replies. First - the most common offender is the Hotel's local internet service. Second - this is about DNS, not routing. Windows tries all the DNS servers at once and believes the first positive answer. The DNS servers in the story are the onces the Hotel gave you on the real interface, and the ones VPN gave you on the VPN interface. You can often make this go away by using the advanced settings in the network folder to order the VPN adapter first as a service provider. Failing that, I know of no solution that doesn't require messing with the DNS server entries in the real adapter.

Proofs and Refutations by Imre Lakatos takes the reader through an apparently simple and obvious mathematical theorem, and by the end has you deeply aware of how subtle mathematics really is.