Christopher Caldwell on the spam problem
Financial Times article. Interesting piece. He doesn’t think much of Larry Lessig’s ‘bounty hunter’ idea, but focusses on the key issue — which is how to stop spamming being a cost-free activity.
Aside: given that the FT has moved away from keeping its archive of web-pieces free, I’m not sure how long the link will continue to work.
Spam stats
I spent a week on holiday recently away from broadband access and with only one or two opportunities to dial up every day. That’s when I really began to be alarmed by the amount of spam I was receiving — one doesn’t notice it so much on broadband because it’s relatively quick to dispose of. But with a slow and irregular connection it really begins to bite. So it’s interesting to see how other people perceive it. Here is an interesting finding from Jonathan Peterson who started seriously analysing his spam count recently. Of the 1,595 emails he received in the first logged month, 1,047 were spam. Yikes!
OpenOffice 1.0 is one today. Happy Birthday!
A year ago today, 2002-05-01, OpenOffice.org 1.0 was released. Since then, around 10 million people have downloaded the application from the volunteer mirror network.
Apple Music Store sold 275,000 songs in its first 18 hours
Well, according to this source it did.
So airlines do have a rational reason for banning cell-phones in flight
I’ve often wondered about this but according to this report, the U.K.’s air safety regulator has released research about cell phone use on planes, warning of the serious effects that it can have on a plane’s navigational equipment.
” The Civil Aviation Authority research found that standard cell phone use can cause a compass to freeze or to overshoot its actual magnetic bearing. Also, flight deck and navigation equipment indicators can be rendered unstable and inaccurate, and transmissions can interfere with critical audio outputs.”
Reassessing the Saudi connection
I’ve always thought that Saudi Arabia, not Iraq, should have been the main focus of US anti-terrorism activity. So it’s nice to see an article in The Atlantic taking much the same view. Former Middle East CIA operative Robert Baer argues in the May issue that the US’s longstanding ally in the Middle East now deserves a critical look.
Baer points to the facts that fifteen out of the nineteen September 11 hijackers were Saudis, that four out of every five hits on a secret al Qaeda Web site have been shown to come from within Saudi borders, and that, according to a recent U.N. Security Council report, Saudi Arabia has transferred $500 million to al Qaeda over the past decade. Furthermore, Baer notes, popular Saudi preachers call openly for jihad against the West and “[t]he kindom’s mosque schools,” he writes, “have become a breeding ground for militant Islam.”
In spite of such evidence of Saudi complicity in anti-American terrorism, however, the U.S. has not chosen to treat Saudi Arabia any differently than it did before 9/11?namely, as an important ally and business partner. Baer suggests that this is at least in part because “almost every Washington figure worth mentioning has been involved with companies doing major deals with Saudi Arabia.? Spending a lot of money was a tacit part of the U.S.-Saudi relationship practically from the very beginning.”
Spam: the fightback begins?
1. NYT piece.
“The leading providers of e-mail accounts said yesterday that they had started to work together to develop ways to reduce the unwanted commercial messages, commonly known as spam, that are increasingly clogging their customers’ mailboxes.
The companies — America Online, Microsoft and Yahoo — are calling for technical changes in the way e-mail is passed around cyberspace to make it easier to determine who really sent it and what it is about.
Each company has developed its own technologies to identify and discard spam, and they boast of these in their advertising. But even though these systems sidetrack several billion pieces a day, they miss so much more that spam has become a leading source of complaints from users. Many studies show that the quantities of spam have at least doubled in the last year so the companies have agreed to cooperate with rivals.”
2. Meanwhile Scott Rosenberg reports that “America Online says the amount of spam aimed at its 35 million customers has doubled since the beginning of this year and now approaches two billion messages a day, more than 70 percent of the total its users receive.”
Anti-spam tools emerge, the spammers figure out a way around them, better tools come along, the spammers adapt — it’s a perfect example of what my friend and colleague, Andrew Leonard, described as “the technodialectic” in his fine book, “Bots.”
3. Larry Lessig has entered the fray too. A few months ago, he made an unusual wager: If Congress enacts an antispam law that offers bounties for the reporting of spammers, and the law fails to “substantially reduce the level of spam,” he will resign from his job at Stanford law school.
4. I’ve just found an interesting (if depressing) essay arguing that Span has just celebrated its 25th anniversary.
5. The US Federal Trade Commission has been running a three-day symposium on the spam problem.
Back!
Just back from a week’s holiday with my kids in Ireland. Weather beautiful. And not a wireless network in sight!
This is the road to Dingle over the Connor Pass.
Apple’s new iMusic strategy
Good report of Steve Jobs’s presentation in San Francisco. Karen Lillington has a credit card with a US billing address (lucky gal) and has been testing the Apple music store’s offerings. One of her commentators points out, though, that at 99 cents a song it would cost over $7,000 to fill the new iPod! Sigh.
Update: A very thorough review of the Apple Music Store by David Pogue of the NYT — including a comparison with the brain-dead downloading sites offered by the music industry at present. Sometimes you have to hand it to Apple — complex stuff made easy and elegant.
Technology comes to rescue of monoglot US troops in Iraq
According to this report, linguistically-challenged U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq have been able to communicate with local citizens by using a paperback-book-sized device called the phraselator.
“Co-developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and private contractors, the phraselator uses computer chips to translate English phrases into as many as 30 foreign language equivalents, noted Army Lt. Col. James Bass, the project manager.
Users either speak into the device, which translates the English into the foreign-equivalent phrase, Bass explained, or they can punch a button to call up the desired phrase.”
Hmmm… Wonder what the Arabic for “All of your oil wells are belong to us” is.