You will love the rack overheat alarm going off in the middle of the show. Adds for some comedy and bewilderment by me as I have never heard that alarm coming out of the rack. Lots of great tech news and the show goes way long tonight. Will get that back in check as I do not have to report on “All the News”

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Credits:
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iPhone

If you use Google groups, you might have noticed the switch to the new version. It is a little more colorful, using html5 and integrating into the other Google properties.

Google Groups Interface

Google Groups is Google’s answer to message boards. Just like with Yahoo! groups, you can create a new group and invite friends to it. They can then read the messages, or interact (depending on how you have the group set up). For example, Todd uses groups to message subscribers of Geek News Central podcast.

Switching is not that difficult. Just choose to use the new Google Groups interface, then (when comfortable) select the button on top called “Switch to the new Google Groups”.

It’s got an email feel to this new version. The left pane is the groups you are in. When you select a group, the list of messages show up on the right. At the top, you are asked to adjust your profile – either update your name or attach this group to your Google profile. Then you can message away!

Does it change the email version?

So you don’t go to this interface. You end up emailling to [whatever]@googlegroups.com. You get emails and respond that way.

So far, nothing has changed there. You can still email to google groups and get messages either when they come out, on a daily digest or never.

It’s another Monday and seems to be another day of inbox Spam. However, I’ve noticed recently how more and more spam groups are being created on Yahoo! and joining me. They basically say the same thing:

I’ve added you to my akljsdfklj group. a free Yahoo! Group to send and receive group messages.

Description: asdflkhasdf

To gain access, click the link…

This is another reason that Yahoo! just doesn’t care about their product. I use Google Groups all the time and don’t get any spam messages like this. Yet, every week I am removing stupid posts like in the image.

Where is the confirmation? I really have to click on a link and tell them this group is spam? Why not have some protocols in place to avoid me getting annoyed like this?

Here are some ideas that anyone running a group website could implement:

1. Multiple fields on form

Make them fill out more information than your name and small description. Make them enter in some contact information. Require a description field to be 20 words or more (not just characters). Have an algorithm determine if the description is jibberish or actually says something.

2. CAPTCHA

It’s annoying, but in a way, it’s meant to be annoying. That way, you know someone is human. Yahoo! does have some CAPTCHA algorithms that they could use in this group. It also kills the bots attempts to register groups.

3. Confirmation

Email confirmation means they have to register an email address first. That might also stop some bots from creating groups.

These are not revolutionary ideas. They have been used before and can be used again. The more we can stop spammers and bots, the less phishing scams and malware can be created. When that happens, people and companies save millions of dollars.

So Yahoo! – If you’re just going to let it continue, then why not shut down YahooGroups and get out of the business. It’s what you’re doing anyway…

It seems in the world of computers and the Internet there is always a steady stream of new things on the horizon, as well as a steady stream of new products and services. It’s been this way for many years at this point.

There are always winners and losers. Winners can win big, and losers at worst fail to make any marketplace splash or even a ripple and end up in the tech dustbin of obscurity with few people ever knowing that the product or service ever existed.

What is it that makes for a successful product? Why is it that some products and services that seem very similar to other products and services end up becoming household names, while others end up being cancelled domain name landing pages?

It’s obvious there are a variety of factors that come into play. If it were easy to predict these things, we would have a lot fewer losers. Why did Twitter become a household name, whereas similar services such as Plurk and Jaiku languish in the shadows? What enabled Facebook to steal most of the MySpace thunder?

New products and services that end up being successful frequently incorporate elements and principles of previously-existing successes, but package them in more compact and useful forms.

Initially when Twitter came along a couple of years ago, I heard people talking about it, but I was a bit resistant to sign up. I felt like I had plenty of ways to communicate with people, so why did I need to add yet another account to a service that would steal away time I already had filled, only to ultimately let yet another account go dormant? I finally signed up for Twitter, and after I began using it I began to understand the value of it. With a service like Twitter, the more people that are using it, the more valuable it becomes.

About the same time I signed up for a Twitter account, I also signed up for a Plurk account. After a few visits to the Plurk website over a period of a month or two, I haven’t been back to the site since.

I believe what is valuable about Twitter is that 140 character limit per Tweet, forcing people to be succinct with their wording. Twitter and Tweet are cute names. The site design is simple, the blue bird logo pleasing to the eye, and the developers kept the API and name open to other developers, allowing an entire ecosystem of ancillary products and services to develop around it at the same time it was rapidly increasing in popularity. Twitter is very much like chat, which was already well established, but it had the added value that it either could be in real time, or not, able to be accessed from a vast array of devices beyond the Twitter website. Twitter also allows you to subscribe to just the people you want, and ignore or even completely block the rest. Twitter also allows you to reach out and touch people, and it allows you to monitor what others are up to whose lives are at once very similar to your own, yet often radically different. You can spend as much or as little time as you wish interacting with the service. Another thing that turned out to be incredibly useful with twitter is the vast 24/7 real-time data stream that it generates. Real-time Twitter data mining has proved to be quite valuable to many people.

To be honest I have always thought that many MySpace pages were often monstrous, unbelievably cluttered messes that often took a long time to load. Nonetheless, MySpace became popular because it obviously served a need with a younger demographic.

I’ve always thought Facebook’s interface is somewhat confusing, though allowing for far less cluttered and confusing-looking profile pages. I still don’t quite understand what got Facebook to the level of critical popularity – perhaps the less-cluttered, faster-loading profile pages gave it the critical edge over MySpace.

It should also be noted that Facebook allowed for an open API, allowing a myriad of interesting and often useful applications to be plugged in to its interface.

However it did it, Facebook managed to get to a critical mass of users where it became THE thing to sign up for and THE place to be to stay connected with family, friends and business associates. Something interesting has happened with Facebook that has never happened before – everyday, non-geek people who had never built website profiles in all the years they had been doing email and web browsing were suddenly signing up for Facebook in unbelievable numbers. Mothers, dads, aunts, uncles, grandmothers, etc. were suddenly showing up on the same service with their kids, nieces, nephews and grandkids. Once the ball rolled, Facebook became an incredible success.

I started noticing a while back that many people were starting to use Twitter and Facebook to communicate with each other in lieu of email. At this point I find myself getting pulled into that trend myself. These services don’t offer the relative privacy of direct email, but they allow for easy, frequent public conversations and easy sharing of personal media such as photos between friends and family on a global scale.

What I take away from the success stories versus the less-successful competitors is that oftentimes the differences in design and implementation can be slight, but those slight differences can offer real, tangible advantages to the end user. If those often-slight advantages can somehow help get the product or service to a critical mass threshold, they can find themselves catapulted to the point of planetary awareness.

The USA is the worst country in the world for relaying spam, according to Sophos’ latest report on spam.  The US was responsible for 13.1%, followed by Brazil and India at 7.3% and 6.8% respectively, with the UK, Russia and Italy tied in 7th place.  In a further twist, China has completely disappeared from the top 12 and now relays only about 1.9%.

The full hall of shame is below.

Given the amount of attention that China receives as the “Country of Cybercrime”, the table shows that US and Europe ought to be looking a bit closer to home when it comes to spam.

Sophos estimates that 97% of email received to business servers is actually spam and only 3% is legitimate email.  Frankly that’s a both scary and a disgrace.  The level of resources needed to cope and the subsequent cost incurred by business shows that spam ought to be much higher up on the agenda of our lawmakers.

Perhaps they could take a break from the usual “digital rights” arguments and do something that would help everyone. That would get my vote.

Whenever I want to feel fearful and depressed I usually visit one of the news websites. Earthquakes, murder, war, theft, snoops, kidnappers, recession, depression, corruption, and all other sorts of horrible news. When I read the news sites I’m reminded of how unsafe the world is. Soon I tire of the bad news and move on to investigate the net for news on tech and design. Today Foxnews.com had the audacity to remind me that I am unsafe even on the web. The site highlighted the news from Microsoft that thousands of Hotmail passwords had been exposed. It scared me to death. I nearly jumped to my Hotmail account before I even finished the article. Reading on I discovered that Microsoft had deactivated all the affected accounts until true control could be restored. Why do I care? Hotmail only collects my spam from sites that demand an email address. Hotmail lets through all the other spam anyway! But I digress.

The point of all this is: we are never safe. Their is no safe haven in the world or the web.  Every company does it’s best and so must we.  Yet, sometimes problems may come. If we live with that understanding we can truly do our best to protect ourselves. When we react in panic there is not a clear path of thinking. So with this reminder of our web-identities fragility, what should we do? Let’s refresh four basic email and online account rules:

1. Always use a secure password. Your birthday, name spelled backwards, address, mothers name, dog’s name, middle name, favorite food, and initials hardly qualify. Use one of the many free random password generators on the web or if you insist on an easier to remember one then create a mixture of information that you can remember. For example and purely fictitious: !S1eP99t9 This could be a combination of the month and year you and your spouse were married. Now while I would only call this a basic password it sure beats “Fluffy”. Of course if you want your bank account to be protected by Fluffy, then more power to you.
2. Never use the same passwords for multiple accounts. For that matter don’t do what I did at the start and use the same password with just the last letter different! Why would you want someone to have a free-for-all with all your accounts? Use different passwords and find an open-source or free password vault. I personally love 1Password for the Mac.
3. Change your passwords periodically. I must admit it takes the misfortune of someone to remind me to do this.
4. Don’t use a public computer. Many public computers are not adequately protected against the installation of malicious password key logging applications. Just don’t log in on a public computer. Just say no. And certainly don’t buy something online with your credit card information! Browse the web on it, read the news, just don’t give any information.

I understand these are basic tips, but sometimes we just need to be reminded to stay alert and on guard.  Kind of like reminding our kids to wear their helmet when they ride a bike.  Resist the urge to become lazy online. I don’t want to read about you on Foxnews.com.

Many people are still very simple in their use of the internet.  They check email and a handful of websites on a regular basis.  They are not users who follow large numbers of RSS feeds or use an RSS reader.  For those people let me give you an option that I have used on occasion.

I follow maybe six or eight tech sites on a regular basis.  My brother recommended Tabbloid.com.  Tabbloid delivers you a daily electronic magazine composed of the RSS stories from your chosen favorite sites.  You put in the website addresses you desire and Tabbloid does the rest.  An easy to read PDF document, Tabbloid, is delivered to your inbox at the chosen time. For me that is in the morning.  With a quick easy glance I can read through the headlines and stories from my favorite sites.  Maybe you have a certain type of web content you don’t check every day, Tabbloid is like the newspaper and magazine that waits for you.  No more looking way down the list of titles or sifting through the archives of sites.  Just open and read.

This is not for the power RSS user, but for the basic user it may be perfect.  Registration is quick and easy using the email address you want it delivered to.  Everything is so easy and slick you may be astounded that its free.  The site does one thing and does it well.  It is website content delivered to the common man.

In this day and age, it’s easier to send a message to someone across the world than ever. I remember watching my mom write a letter to someone back before I knew about email. She would be meticulous in what she had to say simply because she knew that she had only one shot to get all her information in. After all, she wasn’t going to write an snail mail that said:

Hey. How are you?

Could you imagine the timeframe of those postal transactions?

August 24, 1978 – Sent “Hey. How are you?”

August 30, 1978 – Received “I am doing great. How are you?”

September 5, 1978 – Sent “I am doing great. Did you catch Led Zeppelin last night?”

September 20, 1978 – Received “Yeah.”

September 21, 1978 – Sent ” How was it?”

November 11, 1978 – Received “Sorry. Got busy. What were we talking about again?”

Now let’s flip that. Today, I might send an email like this:

Hey Joe. I am writing to talk about that thing #1 we discussed last week over coffee. I really enjoyed the conversation and would like to proceed further on that. What is a good time to sit and discuss it?

Also, what is the time frame for that thing #2? I am looking for new people to research to see if this is going to be a hot item.

I would get an email back saying:

Hey Jeff. The time frame will be by September 1st.

What happened to thing #1? Why did thing #1 even get skipped? Wouldn’t you instinctively respond about thing #1 and not thing #2?

I am not sure if anyone has done a study on this, but it would be really interesting to see how you process an email in your head and respond. It is definitely not like the days of yore. Then again, when I responded to a snail mail, I would have the original letter next to me – in which I have highlighted the important items to talk about.

Do we have short attention spans on email?

I would believe not. I think it’s more about organization. For instance – my desktop is a dual monitor system with a resolution of over 1600×1200. My laptop is a single monitor with a resolution of 1280×800 (and to respond to those who are surprised on the notebook resolution: no, I am already legally blind – at least that is what the eye doctor says).

Still, I have more real estate on my desktop between 2 screens. I can move one item over to screen 2, then respond on screen 1.

There have been past reports saying that people with dual monitor systems get more work done. Imagine what I could get done if I had 4 – 32″ monitors on my desktop at a resolution of 3200 x 2400? Imagine the suntan I could get, too.

You can always organize your email

There is a very useful tool out there called “Highlighter”. It’s a Firefox application for when I use Gmail, and there is a highlighter option in Office that I can use as well. I can mark out the key points so I remember to respond to them.

If I have an important email to respond to (especially one that will cover multiple paragraphs), I will look at it, then – depending on urgency – close it. I will open it back up an hour later and start my response. When I am done I will save it as a draft and come back to it in no less than 15 minutes later. With the “Fresh Eyes” I will paruse and make changes.

Don’t fall into the Twitter approach

Email doesn’t have to be 140 characters or less. In fact, I always hated an email – or SMS for that matter – that would be 2 letters – “OK”. It’s not even punctuated correctly, so I sometimes think “Oklahoma”, which then puts me into a rousing verse of the musical (It’s my MTS – Musical Turrets Syndrome – kicking in. I have done a thesis on this condition. Something I have to live with).

I am reminded of an important email I sent a while back. I inquired on 3 points and marked urgent. I got this for a response:

Yes, No, No in that order.

Am I bothering you?

I don’t expect a dissertation on each point, but come on: let’s be real here. Especially since I only have a short attention span to begin with. I don’t remember what the Yes, No, No could even mean. So I make things up:

Yes (I am cross-eyed), No (I don’t have a million dollars), No (I dance naked in the rain) in that order.

I’ll tell you, I get a little annoyed when I get those very short responses. I try not to take it too seriously, of course. I may eventually stop corresponding if I feel that I am wasting your time.

We don’t write like we used to. We know that whatever we miss we can send in another email a couple minutes later. No 40 cent stamp required (or whatever it costs to send via snail mail). The art of communication is blindsided by 140 character tweets. Not to say that 140 character tweets are not an art form of their own.

Don’t use the Mobile Device to respond

A screen of 240 x 120 cannot be any better than 1280 x 800. Add to it a smaller keypad, and in some cases, a numeric keypad used to respond. I seem to still send email responses on my iPhone that are a couple paragraphs, but other times want to just send out a fast reply. No “O.K.” response though.

I suppose any email response is better than no email response (Gus, do you realize I send you email on a business nature? Tell me if you are alive at least). Then again, I might just send out a snail mail for old times’ sake.

Anyone have an address I can send a letter to?

Tell me what you see with this email (remember you have to read up on this one):

to: Bill
from: Tom

Original Message:

Hey Bill – don’t have your email. call me: 555.4321

——–

to: Tom
from: Bill

Original Message:

Hey, Tom – Call me: 555.1234

——-

to: Bill
from: Tom

Original Message:

Hey Bill – call me: 555.4321

————-

I have 3 clients I have been waiting for answers from. I gave them my number and told them to call me when THEY have the time. After all, my schedule is looser than most. One just emailled me and said “Hey, I don’t know your phone number. Call me when you get some time.”

Really? If you scroll down the email, my phone number is sitting there. Heck, in my signature (which is on the email about 4-5 times about now), my phone number is all over the email and I still get the “Call me” message.

Have we gotten lazy? Are we afraid of talking on the phone? Are we going to a hidden-social type environment?

I remember when I was a kid, the phone was a major lifeline. We were annoyed because our parents did not get a second line or even call-waiting. My mom would be on the phone for 2 or more hours talking to an aunt or friend.

Now we sit behind a keyboard and screen.

I love email – I can communicate to many in a quick fashion. I even enjoy SMS. But I have a policy – more than 5 SMS messages and I am calling. More than 3 short emails and I am calling. Of course it also depends on if this should be in print or over the phone.

Still, it seems that nowadays we shy away from the phone – at least using it with it’s original intention. With newer phones we’ll have the ability to SMS AND IM AND Facebook AND MySpace AND Twitter and so much more, then why would we want to call?

Wouldn’t it be funny if someone released a phone that had no receiver on it? You can do everything but call someone.

Maybe we’re just not reading the emails. After all, how many times did I have the number in the email? 4-5? I still got an email back on “Call me”.

It could be a power struggle. I do have to admit – I have a couple emails where their number was in the email and I just sent one back with my number and asked to call me. Then you sit back and go “Hey! He called ME! Yeah! I’m the man!”

Well, I got to go. I have to make some phone calls. Then again, maybe I should email them back…

On Thursday, at the i/o conference, Google unveiled a project two years in development, Wave.  Answering the question, “What would email look like if it were invented today?”  Google’s answer awed me.  For the normal person, like myself, let me just say that it brings instant delivery, interaction, commenting, joint authoring, and media/attachment sharing into one mix.  It is not simply email on steroids, it is truly a new way of thinking about internet communication.  And most of the time while watching this demo, it is mind boggling.

Further mind boggling. . . it is open source.  This is not meant to run on one companies server.  This is going to run on anyone who has a server.  Kind of like a new communication client that sends pop3 and imap into oblivian.  Imagine sending a note to your coworker who is at their desk.  They see the new “wave” arrive and read it.  You have not yet turned away from the screen when they begin to type their reply.  You begin to see their reply character by character while they type.  Instantaneous.  Now wave is no longer “email” but instant messenger reinvented.  And that is just the tip of the iceberg.  You can add in other participants to your conversation, wave, and they can replay it.  That means they can play the message and see how it all took place start to finish.  No more scrolling to the bottom to see the previous conversation.  They can play it back, jump in and participate.  Wow.  I didn’t know I was thirsty but Google Wave is like a refreshing glass of cold water on a warm day.

I love the name of  Wave.  Communication is not meant to be separate individual messages, but all rather ripples of water, waves, that join together and separate.  I would love to further explain it, if I had the right words, but I have touched only the tip of this tsnami of a Wave.  There are embedding API’s for your website, extension API’s, as well as the server software itself.  For now do this.  Know that it is scheduled for release later in the year.  When it is released we will see a communication revolution that will overwhelm email and the social networking sites.  Secondly, head on over to the landing page for Google and watch the demo video.  Thirdly, take a drink of the refreshing Wave.

You have to watch to win! Video link is in the show notes.  One more show here in Honolulu before I take the show on the road. It will be a very busy May and June as farmers say you have to make hay while sun shines. No locked in travel plans yet for listener meet-ups but will advise when I can. Tonight’s show has some incredible stories that will cause your eyebrows to raise.

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Show Topic Notes:
Firefox hits projected 270 million users.
Verizon says WiFi for all broadband customers through Boingo.
Should startup founders Starve?
Video Embed Widgets to control your own brand!
Some really great Flickr Search Tools from Mashable.
Amazing Story of a Rouge Botnet controlled by Good Guys.
Parental Control on the iPhone.
Control your own short url service don’t pay for it!
New Amazon Reader on Wednesday supposed to be Big!
YouTube say NO ads in Your own Videos!
Nettica suffers DDOS that shuts down thousands of Websites!
Sprint customers are leaving in droves bleeding red ink everywhere!
LexisNexis waits 5 years to tell customers of Serious Security breach?
MPAA and RIAA site feature TorrentFreak content through XSS hack!
Who have you shared your email password with lately?
16 Drupal Clones which are great if you can find someone to design a template!
The true cost of Bandwidth that the ISP’s don’t want you to know about.
Time to get rid of some space junk with sails!
Limwire tells Congress that Limewire 5 shares nothing without notification.
Hubble repair crew ready to fly!
Can digital paper save the newspaper industry.. In a word NOPE.
Ex RIAA Lawyer at DOJ to work RIAA cases after 1 year?
193 Lasers to Ignite and create Mini Star???????? Why????

A report of Internet-related activities, published by Stanford University in 2000, asked 4,000 respondents to select among a list of 17 online activities. The results were not surprising. An updated report is forthcoming next week.

By far, e-mail is the most common online activity, an activity of 90 percent of all users; however, e-mail isn’t the principal reason most folk go online.

The net is an information goldmine, perceived by many to be a digital library. Users frequently search for commercial products, hobbies, and general information. Almost all respondents agreed that they use the net for information gathering.

Slightly over ovne third of users find entertainment value on the net, playing online games. A quarter of users reported using chat rooms; however, this activity is more popular with younger netizens, under the age of 25. Most chat activity is anonymous.

Business to Consumer (B2C) activity increased significantly; however, in 2000 only a quarter of all users reported engaging in online purchases

Dave’s Opinion
I offer these research data today in expectation of comparing them to the results of the upcoming report, which will include more current data. I expect that next week’s report will indicate that e-mail is still the most common online activity; however, B2C commercial activities will increase to include a significant majority of users, possibly over 90 percent of all users, including adults and teenagers. Online banking and digital music distribution have, in my research, encouraged these niche markets to put their credit cards forward, online.

Call for Comments
What do you think? Leave your comments below.

References
Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society

The U.S. Navy is developing a service-wide policy regarding the acceptable use of information technology. The policy will affect approximately 900,000 users, including Navy and Marine Corp service members, civilian employees, and contractors. The policy, which is scheduled to be effective during the first quarter of 2005, is designed to guide users and personnel managers in applying consistent rules of operation. The policy will affect all IT devices, including desktops, notebooks, handhelds, cell phones, and fax machines.

The service-wide policy is designed to offer guidance in the consistent application of IT use regulations and procedures, alleviating local policies that vary from station to station. Navy and Marine Corp personnel will be allowed to use the services’ IT equipment for personal use, such as web surfing, online shopping, and personal e-mail, so long as these activities don’t use excessive bandwidth.

Dave’s Opinion
This is a sound organizational policy, and it models policies that I have seen developed in creative, forward-thinking commercial businesses. Much IT infrastructure sits idle, especially during the evening and weekend. Allowing employees to use this technology to attend to personal projects, such as pursuing higher education and sending e-mail to family at home, can provide a significant boost to morale. Go Navy!

Call for Comments
What do you think? Leave your comments below.

Watch out for a special present included with your e-mail Christmas greetings. A mass-mailing worm, W32/Zafi.d@MM or Zafi.d, is making the rounds of e-mail users and is transmitted in the form of a Christmas greeting card with the subject line of either “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays.” The e-mail message will appear to come from one of your acquaintances.

The messages of good cheer come in 15 different languages and the language is selected, based on the recipient’s -mail address. The worm modifies the system registry of Microsoft Windows computers, automatically self-executing when the computer is rebooted. Zafi will also seek out antivirus and firewall applications, overwriting those programs. The nefarious action of the worm is to open a backdoor on the PC, allowing the system to be turned into a zombie, remotely controlled to send more spam or participate in a distributed denial of service attack on selected websites.

Dave’s Comments
I’ve got as much holiday good cheer as the next person, but e-mailed greeting cards rub me the wrong way, especially at this time of the year. I think that holiday cards should be hand signed and either postal mailed or hand delivered. Take the time to show how much you care for your friends and loved ones, write them a card. Oh, and as for this worm; you know the drill: don’t open any file attachment that you didn’t expect, no matter from whom it comes.

Call for Comments
What do you think? Leave your comments below.

Internet e-mail scammers are using the popularity and allure of Google’s Gmail service to phish for personal data, including e-mail addresses and passwords. Gmail e-mail accounts are one of the most coveted holdings for hip and techie Internet users. A quick eBay search proves the popularity of invitations to join Google’s upcoming e-mail service that offers 1GB of mail storage.

The current Gmail phish reads “The Gmail Team is proud to announce that we are offering Gmail free invitation packages to the existing Gmail account holders. By now you probably know the key ways in which Gmail differs from traditional webmail services. Searching instead of filing. A free gigabyte of storage. Messages displayed in context as conversations. Just fill in the form below to claim your free invitation package.”

Dave’s Opinion
Phishing, commonly used via e-mail and the web involve conning unwary users into releasing private data. The cons are best known for their attempts to garner AOL, Citibank, and eBay login usernames and passwords; however, there seems to be no end to how the cons can be applied.

Call for Comments
What do you think? Leave your comments below.

References
Gmail
Google

It seems like forever ago, and it seems like just yesterday. It’s been a decade since the first Internet cafe opened for business in London’s West End. Cafe Cyberia was designed to support the way women used computers, at the time. Started with $35,500 in seed capital, the store grew to include international locations. The stores are now owned by a South Korean entity and have been rebranded.

Dave’s Opinion
Internet cafes have changed from being the hip place for stylish folk to gather for an evening of surfing and java to a drop-in spot for business professionals and consumers to grab a cup of joe and a check of the inbox.

Call for Comments
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Spam is an ever-increasing annoyance for e-mail users. Most people have some form of spam filtering application that reduces the instances of the frequently offensive unsolicited commercial messages. Many of these filters seek to identify spam based on the address from which the message is sent, but spammers are already wise to this trick, and spoofing is now commonplace. By hiding or misdirecting their transmission source, spammers make it exceedingly difficult for most users to determine from where the spam message actually came.

But there’s some hope for spammer identification. An loose alliance formed by large e-mail services (Microsoft, Yahoo, America Online, and Earthlink), the Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG), and Intelligent Computer Solutions (ICS) is working on an e-mail sender-authentication system that’s been dubbed the Big Gorilla Project.

Using an identification system based on public key encryption, ISPs who have control over outgoing e-mail can include a piece of encrypted code in header of each outgoing message. The code snippet can be used by receiving ISPs to confirm the identity of the outgoing e-mail server and the authenticity of the e-mail message’s return address.

By confirming the identity of the transmission site, it’s a simple matter to blacklist and block known offenders.

Dave’s Opinion
I use a combination of anti-spam filtering applications, both on our incoming mail servers and our client workstations. So far I’ve been able to drop my daily spam tally from over 600 messages to about a dozen, maybe double that on a bad day. But that’s still not good enough. It’s not just receiving junk mail that bothers me, it’s the offensive content.

I’m all for proposals, both legislative and technical, that help kill off spam.

Call for Comments
What do you think? Leave your comments below.

References
Anti-Spam Research Group
Intelligent Computer Solutions

California Governor Gray Davis must be bucking for the Geek vote in the October 7th special election in which he could be recalled from office. Today he stood tough and signed an antispam law that prohibits anyone from sending unsolicted commmercial e-mail (UCE, aka spam) to a California e-mail address.

Requiring subscribers have opt-in (yes, opt-in, not opt-out) control over which junk mail they want to receive, the law will help prevent e-mail users from being bombarded with unwanted e-mail messages. Offenders are liable for damages up to $1 thousand for each message sent to an individual and up to a whopping $1 million for each advertisement campaign. The law grants the right to seek damages to the recipient, the state attorney general and the e-mail service provider.

The law has additional provisions that make it illegal to collect e-mail addresses for the purpose of sending spam.

Dave’s Opinion
Hoo-whee! This is the way to write an anti-spam law. Make just about everything about junk e-mail illegal. Way to go, Gray!

Call for Comments
What do you think? Leave your comments below.

References
California SB 186

The craziest thing that I’ve ever heard is to pay spammers not to spam, and that’s just what a startup company from San Antonio, Texas, Global Removal (GR), is planning to do. Their theory is that spammers are in business to make money, and that the lowbrows will remove your e-mail address from all of their junk mail lists for a buck.

In addition, subscribers (you and me) are required to pay a fin to be part of this crazy scam.

Dave’s Opinion
My B.S. radar is way overloaded after reading about GR’s plan to pay spammers one dollar for each e-mail address that subscribes to GR’s program (after being spammed in an effort to garner subscribers). Yes, you read that right.

Here’s the scoop as I read it from Global Removal’s website:

1. spammers seek to get people to subscribe to Global Removal’s “do not spam list” by sending the invitation as a spam message.
2. spammers are paid $1.00 for each address that subscribes to the “do not spam list.”
3. uninformed users give Global Removal their e-mail address and $5.00 to be added to the list.
4. spammers are to purge their list of all subscribers.

Am I the only one who sees a problem here?

I’ve got to start giving spammers more credit. They’re smarter than I thought.

Call for Comments
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References
Global Removal
Message Center