Column: AlphaSmarts

By | November 24, 2011

Loose Wire — Frustrated Writers, Take Note: This Palm-powered, plain-vanilla, word-producing machine has none of the bells and whistles of other computers and won’t break your back or the bank — meaning more time for haiku

By Jeremy Wagstaff from the 26 June 2003 edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review (c) 2003, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

I used to write a lot better before I got a computer. Really. The lethal combination of pen and paper ensured that I could write anywhere, anytime. Then, in 1986, I bought an Amstrad word processor and it’s been downhill ever since.

Nowadays I can’t focus on one program for more than five minutes, what with all the distractions: software notifying me of incoming e-mail, software notifying me that my incoming e-mail-to-spam ratio is 96.23%, software notifying me my last e-mail to Auntie Mildred has been read 12 hours and 46 minutes after it was sent, a chat message from an insomniac Australian friend, an alarm alerting me I need to pay rent, my firewall alerting me of yet another assault on my Internet defences. No wonder I never write haiku any more.

Computers are designed to do lots of things, and with graphical interfaces like Microsoft Windows and the Mac, they’re designed to do them at the same time, jostling for room on your screen. That’s great if you’ve got tunnel vision, or are crashing up against deadline [like me right now]. Otherwise, all this extra processing power isn’t matched by any great multitasking ability in our brains. My message this week, therefore, is this: If you’re planning to write seriously, don’t use a computer. Use a Dana.

OK, for e-mails and memos to your vocabulary-challenged boss, you may not need monastic calm and a minimum of distractions. But computers, even notebooks, may not be your friend if you’re trying to compose something masterful and meaningful. Instead, you may want to check out AlphaSmart, a U.S.-based company, which realized early on that there was a market for something to write on without all the extra hullabaloo to distract you. The decade-old AlphaSmart series, now into its third generation with the 3000, has been popular with students, teachers and anyone else needing a decent keyboard and a usable screen that don’t break their back or the bank. They’re robust too: One reader describes on the company Web site [www.alphasmart.com] how her unit — stuck to the floor, and slightly melted — was the only electronic gadget still working after her house burned down.

The 3000 is about the size of a notebook, but looks more like a keyboard with a small LCD display on the top. Powered by three AA batteries, it delivers you to whatever you were writing before you turned it off [or had to flee the licking flames]. The four-line display is simple but shows just enough of what you’re doing without feeling cramped. The keyboard is full sized and there’s a USB socket for uploading files to your computer, and a socket to connect to a printer [or external keyboard, if you wish]. Grey keys line the top of the keyboard, allowing you to store and recall up to eight separate files. It’s the sort of thing a student would love, which is the market AlphaSmart has focused on, but it could just as easily work for you if you’re sick of sitting at a computer all day, or tired of firing up a laptop on a flight and watching the power die just as the Muse kicks in.

Late last year AlphaSmart took the concept one stage further with the Dana. The Dana does everything the 3000 does, only better. The screen is bigger at 10 lines to the 3000’s four, the keyboard’s nicer and the whole thing is a tad sleeker than its forbears. It also runs the Palm operating system, which brings with it plenty of advantages: For one thing, if you’re familiar with Palm, you’ll know your way around; for another, you can do everything a Palm device can do, such as swap Office documents with your computer, store contacts, calendars and whatnot. In fact, to some it could be just a bigger Palm device — most of the software is redesigned to fit a screen far wider than your hand-held — with a first-class keyboard attached. But that’s missing the point: The Dana is a word processor that uses the best Palm has to offer — compact, useful software, immediate access, configurable fonts, low power consumption — without trying to be too much else.

If you’re looking for something to write on during a trip to the country, the dentist or the restroom, and can’t be bothered to bring a laptop [or can’t afford one] then the Dana is an option. If you’re a writer and sick of the distractions of modern computing, the Dana is worth a look.

Gripes? A few. The monochrome screen is nice but looks a bit dated, especially the backlight. With a list price of $400 it’s substantially cheaper than a laptop or notebook, but not that much cheaper than a state of the art, full-colour hand-held device. [Shell out another $75 and you have a foldable keyboard which fits in your pocket.] And without a cover or clamshell, some reviewers have rightly suggested the screen might easily get scratched.

But these are minor niggles. I’m seriously thinking about getting one for my inspirational visits to the hills where a laptop is too much, and the miserly screen of my Palm Tungsten not quite enough. Might even try some haiku.

Column: Under the Wire

By | November 24, 2011

UNDER THE WIRE

From 26 June 2003 edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review (c) 2003, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

You’re Fired

SMS, or text messaging, is great for staying in touch but isn’t so hot for conveying bad news. A recent spate of dismissals via SMS — staff of British insurer Accident Group, for example, were notified by administrators from PricewaterhouseCoopers that they were being laid off and would no longer be paid — raises interesting ethical and legal questions about the medium. The new chief executive of Britain’s Vodafone Group, Arun Sarin, is taking no chances: His contract says he cannot be fired via “electronic mail or any other electronic messaging service.”

More on Spam

If you need more evidence that spam is big business, try this: DoubleClick, better known for its on-line advertising strategies, on June 12 announced initiatives “to further differentiate legitimate marketing communications from spam.” Given that I’ve seen very little difference in tactics between spammers and “legitimate marketing communications” I don’t find this particularly reassuring. Here’s something else: CNET, an on-line magazine, reported last week on a legal dispute between two anti-spam software makers over patents for something called challenge-response technology, which allows an e-mail recipient to check out the sender to see if he’s [a] a person, and [b] the person he says he is. The recipient receives an e-mail asking for verification, and if the e-mail goes unanswered, the e-mail gets dumped. Nice idea, but not rocket science, in my view, and kind of time wasting. Still, Mailblocks and Spam Arrest have been slugging it out, at least until a Washington district court denied Mailblocks a preliminary injunction. I stick by my advice: Go with free software developed by people genuinely committed to ridding us of spam, not to making money out of it. My Bayesian Filters from POPFile are working wonders: In the past week only five bits of spam have reached my inbox. But if you want to try out commercial solutions, here are a couple: AlienCamel [www.aliencamel.com], allows you to select what e-mails you want to allow through, and Spam Slicer [www.spamslicer.com] provides each user with a virtual e-mail ID, so the user can tell where a spammer got his name and can block subsequent spam from that source even if the spammer changes his e-mail address.

Keep Out the Hackers

Talking of sleaze, Zone Labs Inc. [www.zonealarm] have just released a new version of their excellent ZoneAlarm firewall program. If you have a computer connected to the Internet then you should have a firewall, software that does its best to prevent ne’er-do-wells from getting in, either to steal pictures of your dog’s wedding, or to use your computer to attack other computers. ZoneAlarm Pro 4.0 improves its security features, including one that examines not just inbound but outbound e-mails for harmful file attachments — usually a kind of virus called a worm. Another innovation gathers data on suspected hackers, helping security experts to track and report them to their moms. ZoneAlarm Pro sells for $50; a free version of the earlier model is still available, and should be enough for us amateurs.

 

Column: An end to spam?

By | November 24, 2011

Loose Wire — Exorcism for Spam: A theory devised by an English vicar and adopted by smart anti-spammers is your best bet for keeping spam out of your inbox

By Jeremy Wagstaff

from the 19 June 2003 edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review, (c) 2003, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

A milestone, of sorts, was passed last month. According to MessageLabs, a United States-based company that studies these things, the Internet for the first time handled more spam e-mail messages than normal e-mails. In other words, for every legitimate e-mail sent, there was at least one spam, or unsolicited junk e-mail, sent. Compare that with a year ago when the ratio was about one spam for every 20 e-mails. A year before that? One in 1,500. Spam was never pretty, but it’s getting ugly, and something has to give. But what?

Spam is a business, and understanding that is halfway to embracing a solution that works. Why, for example, does MessageLabs spend so much time counting spam? Because it sells services and software that help companies avoid it. In fact, spam is, I suspect, much more profitable for the folk who clean it up than the guys who put it out. Think about it: It costs a spammer very little to send one e-mail, and only one in 10 million to generate a sale to stay in business, but God knows how much in lost man-hours for you or I to receive it, open it, read it, feel slightly nauseous, discard it and then wander over to the water cooler to complain to colleagues about it. There are conflicts of interest here that make me slightly uncomfortable advising you to buy products to keep out what shouldn’t be in your inbox anyway.

So here’s my solution: It’s simple, costs you nothing and will improve as you get more spam. Most anti-spam software looks for things it recognizes as spam-like: words like “Viagra,” for example, and filters it out. But this isn’t always that effective — replace “i” with “1” and you have v1agra, or add some invisible formatting code in the middle of the word, so the word looks the same to a reader, but different to a spam filter. So as spammers get more cunning, filters have to get smarter. This is why using logic, rather than keywords, makes sense. Enter an 18th-century vicar called Thomas Bayes from the English town of Tunbridge Wells. He devised a probability theory that has become a useful tool in gauging whether e-mail is spam or not.

Briefly, Bayesian filters look at the content of e-mail (including the headers, in most cases, and the hidden code in e-mails, called HTML, that organizes fonts, colours and pictures), slices it into bits — words and chunks of code — and judges the probability of each bit being evidence of spam. It will then scrutinize the 15 most interesting bits and add up their probabilities (0.99, for example, meaning 99% likely it’s spam) and then cast judgment on the e-mail. The more you prod it along — yes, this one is spam; no, this one looks like spam but is actually my Auntie Edith suggesting I have plastic surgery — the better it gets. And of course the more e-mail you get, the more it has to play with. Bayesian filters don’t just look for matches, they look for patterns of behaviour that give spam away.

For starters, try POPFile which will work on most operating systems and with most e-mail programs. If you’re squeamish about manual tweaking, check out Spammunition for Outlook or SpamBully for Outlook or Outlook Express ($30 from www.spambully.com).

On top of that, try a trick of my own: Ask colleagues or friends to assign agreed tags to subject lines and set up your e-mail program to recognize those tags and filter them into special folders. [Meet] for example, could be used to relate to meetings, [Budget] for stuff related to how much money you plan to waste that year and [Fire] for e-mails alerting staff they’re being downsized. Such e-mails would then leap past any filters and be easy to search for. Spam’s not going to go away soon, but with good filters you need never see it in your inbox again. Or go to the water cooler.