loose wire | blog – Page 439 – Jeremy Wagstaff: ex Reuters/BBC/WSJ etc. Now consulting and writing. Blogging here since 2001

Plaxo Gets Lax?

By jeremy | November 24, 2011

Sometimes things change, and it’s hard to stay on top of them. Plaxo is supposed to help with this — an Outlook plug-in (i.e. a little piece of software that attaches itself to Outlook) which will update your contacts with other Plaxo users you know, and vice versa. Nice idea, and on the whole they did a good job of executing it. But now things are changing in PlaxoLand, and I’m not sure I’m on top of them anymore.

There are privacy issues: who exactly gets to see your data? And then there’s the money issue: how is Plaxo going to make money out of it? These sort of things worry folk: David Coursey, a columnist like myself but with more readers, trashes Plaxo, as does Mike in his excellent TechDirt blog. Plaxo was fine when people you knew added themselves and shared their info, but what happens, as Mike points out, when complete strangers do it?

I started to get peeved when I noticed that insurance salesmen started adding their contacts to my Plaxo setup. Surely that couldn’t happen? I thought folk needed permission to do that? I asked Plaxo about this a few weeks back and was told: “If you are a Plaxo user and someone sends you a Plaxo card, there is a link in the notification to add them to your address book. They are only added if you explicitly click on this link.” But I’m not sure that’s true. I’m a journalist so I’ve got a lot of people in my address book I couldn’t identify in a police line-up, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t let some of this pondlife into my Outlook.

Bottom line: Plaxo need to address this and other issues before folk believe them. Sure, 800,000 people are using it in over 200 countries (how many countries are there? I thought it wasn’t much more than that) but they’ll leave in droves if they feel their privacy is being compromised.

Stop It Before It Starts

By jeremy | November 24, 2011

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A program I’ve found highly useful of late is Windows Startup Inspector. It does something Windows XP should do, but doesn’t: Allow you to decide what programs do and don’t start when Windows does. It sounds dumb until you realise that most programs these days — including a lot that should know better — automatically load themselves, or bits of themselves, into memory when you boot up. It can seriously slow down your computer, and there’s no straightforward way to fix the problem in Windows XP. It’s a bit like the next door neighbour cadging a lift to work everyday without asking.

Startup Inspector lists all these annoying programs, and will even try to tell you more about them than merely their name, via an online database of some 3,400 known programs. I have disabled about half of the programs that have loaded themselves uninvited and it definitely helps, even when you’ve got lots of memory to play with. They hog memory, but they also take time to load. Even sneaky little programs like RealNetworks’ Tkbell.exe (a silly little reminder program) will try to reload itself automatically into your start-up queue whenever you use the RealPlayer (my advice: don’t use it if you can possibly help it.)

Windows Startup Inspector is Freeware. If you like it you can make a donation to the author, through PayPal. Or you can buy his laptop, which he seems to be selling on eBay. Hard times for software authors?

2003, Year of the Spiral of Evil? Or Just The Start?

By jeremy | November 24, 2011

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MessageLabs, who track this sort of thing, say that spam and viruses hit all time highs in 2003. Not surprising, but the figures are pretty shocking, revealing the symbiotic relationship between spam and viruses — what I called in a recent WSJ/FEER column The Spiral Of Evil (no, it doesn’t seem to have caught on). Here are the figures:

— Two-thirds of all spam coming from open proxies created by viruses
— Ratio of spam to email is 1 in 2.5 – up 77 per cent in 12 months
— Ratio of virus to email now 1 in 33 – up 84 per cent

Basically, this means that virus writers are hijacking innocent computers and turning them into open proxies — a sort of free sorting office for spam, churning it all and in the process hiding the original sender from anti-spammers.

Here’s the link: Highlights of 2003 include Sobig.F breaking the world record in August to become the fastest spreading virus ever with one million copies stopped in a day by MessageLabs. MessageLabs also reckon that 66% of spam was coming from computers infected by viruses such as Sobig.F. At its peak, 1 in every 17 emails stopped by MessageLabs contained a copy of the SoBig.F. By December 1, more than 32 million emails containing the virus had been stopped by MessageLabs, putting Sobig.F at head of the Top 10 Viruses List for 2003.

Kazaa Gets Tough — On Copyright Infringement

By jeremy | November 24, 2011

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The irony is not lost on those writing about it: Sharman Networks, owner of the music-swapping program Kazaa (a Napster imitatator) is closing down Kazaalite K++, a version written by other folk that was designed to do what Kazaa does without all the spyware and adware. They complained about it infringing copyright, or something.

The irony continues: Although the main download site is down, users can apparently still obtain copies via the Kazaa network: In other words, use the Kazaa program to find the ‘illegal’ version of Kazaa to download music (illegally).

What strikes me is on the discussion sites (here’s Metafilter and Slashdot), you realise just how many other similar programs there are to Kazaa, or Kazaalite. I guess online music swapping in one form or another is going to continue as long as there are clever programmers out there.