I finally circled back to see what Clancy Ratliff was up to with her research on blogs and Creative Commons licenses. Turns out she will present the paper at the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Toronto in October. The rest of the program for the conference looks interesting, with several panels on blogging, a bunch of papers around the ethics of collecting data on line, and others.

Something I didn’t mention in my initial posts about SoBig: the worm can send mail by itself, since it contains its own SMTP server, and will forge return addresses based on entries in your Outlook address book or your Internet cache. So if you see email from me, no, I’m not infected with the virus, but someone else who knows me or has read my web page is.

Technical details of SoBig at the Berkman Geekroom. Reaction from Kevin Werbach: “either email is broken, Microsoft's email software is broken, or those two statements are the same.” Rob McNair-Huff at MacNetJournal has been hit hard, as has Mark Frauenfelder at Boing-Boing.

On top of Blaster, SoBig, and Welchia, there is yet another email Trojan Horse loose: w32.squirm@mm. This is the best yet: it poses as an email from support@microsoft.com asking you to install a file that it attaches.

Word to the wise: Microsoft Support does not email files asking you to install them! Ever! Tell your friends!!!!

I got something like 60 messages on my home email account between 10 pm last night and 7 am this morning, all carrying the Sobig virus. Dave Winer had about 650 infected messages. Who is opening these damned attachments??? The BBC has more information on Sobig.

Meanwhile, the worm designed to patch the Blaster vulnerability, known variously as Welchia and Nachi, is spreading in the wild and Slashdot reports it’s slowing emergency response networks in Canada.

Could we all just knock it off for a few minutes, please?