I know this appallingly cynical of me, but I can’t help worrying about the most recent development in the War On Spam. That, in case you hadn’t heard, is the news of a ‘fighting cooperative’ as Jupiter Research’s Microsoft Monitor puts it, between Microsoft and New York State attorney general Eliot Spitzer, who have together … Read more
The story of electronic voting machines, and the company that makes many of them, continues to roll along. I wrote in a column a few weeks back (Beware E-Voting, 20 November 2003, Far Eastern Economic Review; subscription required) about Bev Harris, a 52-year old grandmother from near Seattle, who discovered 40,000 computer files at the … Read more
The online world is having a bit of fun at the expense of the U.S. navy which appears to have allowed computers aboard one of its vessels to be used as a relay for spammers (this usually occurs when spammers plant code aboard the computer in question via a virus, which would then funnel the … Read more
One guy who’s done great stuff detailing and researching the efforts of spammers, scammers and phishers Down Under is Daniel McNamara of Code Fish, a site for students of Linux. He’s just launched a new site today dedicated to “to following and exposing spam scams” which will include some of his detailed dissections of some … Read more
Here’s another whacky trick that Google have quietly introduced, adding to the impression they are fast cementing their role as one-stop portal: Book searching. According to SearchEngineWatch (via the excellent TechDirt), Google Print is an experimental service that “indexes excerpts of popular books, blending the content from these works into regular Google search results”. These … Read more