When I wrote a column in the Observer about spam I had a huge postbag (well, inbox) in response — more than I ever remember about any other subject. It felt as though I had touched a raw nerve. But I also had messages from readers claiming that I was going overboard — that spam was a nuisance, certainly, but a tolerable one. In vain have I tried to explain that, if unchecked, spam will lead to a tragedy of the digital commons which we will all one day rue. So I was pleased to see that someone else takes it seriously. “On Feb. 18 and 19”, this Business Week piece begins, “e-mail delivery to thousands of AT&T WorldNet customers slowed to a trickle. Some messages took as many as 24 hours to arrive — an eternity in Internet time. The reason? Spam — those irritating, unwanted e-mail messages that clog your in-box hawking everything from hot sex and Viagra to interest-free loans. WorldNet, which processes 15 million to 20 million messages each day, was suddenly besieged by millions of junk e-mail pitches — just as one of its sophisticated anti-spam filters went on the blink. It was the first time that spam brought a large Internet service provider (ISP) to a virtual standstill. “

An intruder broke into the New York Times intranet recently. Not that it was difficult, it seems. He managed to gather all kinds of confidential information about Times op-ed contributors etc. but did no real damage — and alerted the newspaper to the vulnerability he’d been able to exploit. But what if he’d got to the website and subtly altered Times copy? This highlights the risk of what Bruce Schneier calls ‘semantic attacks’. It means that we may need to become more vigilant about what we read online.

More on copy-protected music CDs.

Useful round-up article in today’s New York Times. The story, however, underplayed the computer industry’s hostility to the demands of the copyright thugs. Basically, they are demanding that Congress legislates to ensure that every computing device sold conforms to their requirements — that, in effect, we should have to get a government licence to own a general purpose PC — just as you have to get a licence to own a gun in the UK. The Intel rep (the only tech spokesman available, it seems) pointed out mildly that this would, er, slow down innovation in the computing industry. What he ought to have pointed out to the somnolent legislators is that the computing and technology industries are orders of magnitude more important to the US economy than the recording industry. So legislators will have to decide where their priorities lie — crippling a huge strategic industry in order to feather-bed a smaller one.

Footnote: according to figures published by Salon, the computing industry dwarfs Hollywood in size — US domestic spending on technology goods and services totaled $600 billion in 2000, according to government figures, while Hollywood receipts equaled $35 billion.