America’s new anti-spam CAN-SPAM Act is a great way to stop spam, so long as the spammer is legit. The problem is, most spammers aren’t. Mass.-based software company Ipswitch Inc. estimate that more than two-thirds of all spam is deceptive, meaning that spammers disguise the links to their website “behind unrelated graphics and pictures, or … Read more
Kindly pointed out by my old friend Robin Lubbock from WBUR, here’s an interesting piece on journalists who blog in their spare time by Steve Outing. Outing points out that in many cases, things don’t go well. Reporters “have been fired or punished because of their personal blogs,” he writes. Landmines include when “a simple … Read more
The future of newsfeeds: Trackable RSS. The biggest drawback to the commercial exploitation of RSS feeds — items from blogs and other websites, parceled up and delivered to users who request them — is that there’s no easy way for the producers of the RSS material to know very much about what their customers are … Read more
I like this idea from a Slashdot poster: Eliminate most viruses by zipping everything. It works (I think) like this: Most viruses arrive as an attachment to an email. These are called executables in that if you click on them, something happens. (As opposed to a file attachment such as a Word document, or a … Read more
We can relax: Boffins are now grappling with spam. Nature reports that P. Oscar Boykin and Vwani Roychowdhury of the University of California, Los Angeles, have come up with a way to tackle at least half the emails we get, namely those we get from friends, colleagues, and anyone else either we know or the … Read more