US legislators to get serious about spam?

Register report.

The US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation held hearings on the problem last week. According to the Register report, “The hearing … heard that spam costs US businesses $10 billion each year in lost productivity. According to Enrique Salem, president of spam blocking company Brightmail, nearly half of all e-mails sent are spam. This compared, he said, with just seven percent in 2001. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has also seen an explosion in the number of complaints it receives from consumers about spam. In 2001, around 10,000 junk e-mails were forwarded to it each day from Internet users. That daily figure now stands closer to 130,000. Such evidence seems to be having the desired effect on American lawmakers. Although Congress has failed to crackdown on spam in the past, following pressure from some retailers, marketing firms and business users of e-mail, it appears that tighter regulation will be introduced some time this year. Two Senators, one Republican and one Democrat, have proposed a bill that would ban deceptive subject lines, require valid return addresses and order spammers to obey requests by e-mail users to stop sending them e-mail. In addition, Senator Schumer from New York wants an international anti-spam treaty. For its part, Microsoft is seeking increased penalties for fraudulent practices by spammers. It is also pushing for an electronic seal-of-approval system for legitimate marketers and for unsolicited mails to be labelled as such so that e-mail users could delete them without having to open them.”

Ethernet will be 30 next Thursday

Hooray! Nice interview with Bob Metcalfe, who with Dave Boggs invented it at that wonderful ideas factory, Xerox PARC. Interviewer asked “Why did you come up with the name Ethernet?”

Answer: ” The luminiferous ether was once theorized to pervade all of space and was passive and omnipresent, a medium for the propagation of electromagnetic waves and particularly carrying light from the sun to the earth. That was the 1800s, and around 1900, thanks to Michaelson, Morley, and Einstein, et al., the ether was determined not to exist. So in 1973, while searching for a word to describe the medium that would be everywhere, that would be passive and would serve as a medium for the propagation of electromagnetic waves into particular data packets, we took that word that had fallen into disuse and called it the ether network.”

What if SCO is right?

As every geek must know by now, SCO — the company which now owns the licence to UNIX — is claiming that Linux contains some proprietary UNIX code. If true, I thought, this could be serious for everyone. But this interesting column by Mitch Wagner points out a serious potential flaw in any lawsuit SCO launches — namely that it has itself been distributing Linux for years under a GPL licence!

Amazing research archive

Just discovered an amazing archive of research papers published about the Net between 1999 and 2003.

Meanwhile, back at the real war…

As the US and the UK struggle to impose order on a shattered Iraq, the New York Times reports that “U.S. Officials See Signs of a Revived Al Qaeda”. And, right on cue, suicide bombers kill 41 people in Casablanca. “Leaders and operatives of Al Qaeda”, says the Times, “have reorganized bases of operations in at least a half-dozen locations, including Kenya, Sudan, Pakistan and Chechnya…

The leaders have begun to recruit new members, train the new followers and plan new attacks on Western targets in earnest, according to senior counterterrorism officials in Washington, Europe and the Middle East. As evidence of this, senior government officials pointed to the secret arrests in the United States in the last two months of two Arab men suspected of having been sent by senior leaders of Al Qaeda to scout targets for new terror attacks.

The two recently apprehended men, whom the officials would not identify, were said to be conducting “presurveillance” activities. They were part of a larger group of about six Qaeda followers arrested in recent months whose presence in the United States has led the authorities to conclude that the terrorist group remains determined to carry out attacks on American soil, officials said.”

What if…?

“Who assumes the presidency if a deranged Islamist sneaks a nuclear suitcase bomb into an inaugural, … vaporizing not only the President and the Vice President but also most of the Cabinet, the Supreme Court, and Congress?” Fascinating piece in The Atlantic about Norman Ornstein’s attempts to get American constitutionalists to think about the unthinkable.

France’s Minitel is 20 this year

BBC Online story. Funny how things change: once upon a time, France was the only country in the world with a serious e-commerce and online information infrastructure — via the closed but freely available Minitel system. That was in 1983, the year the Internet was switched on. Then came the Web, and with it the idea that boring old steam-age Minitel was finished. Well, maybe it was, but the Web has yet to deliver the same reliability and micro-billing capability.

Firsts

When Sue died, a wise old friend who’d been similarly bereaved said: “Expect a terrible year of ‘firsts’ — the first Christmas, the first New Year’s Eve, the first Easter, the first wedding anniversary — the first birthday — without her. After that it gets easier because next time round it won’t be the ‘first’ anything”. Well, she was right about the first bit. I only hope she is right about the second. Today was Sue’s birthday.

Downloading done right

According to David Pogue in the NYT, the Apple Music Store had 2 million downloads in the first 16 days.

So is the Internet dying or not?

Interesting essay by Andrew Orlowski on Larry Lessig’s increasing pessimism about the Net. Quotes from Thomas Pynchon’s observation (in his Intro to the centenary edition of George Orwell’s 1984) that the Internet is “a development that promises social control on a scale those quaint old 20th-century tyrants with their goofy moustaches could only dream about”.