Monday - Dec 13, 2010
I hate spam. Not the canned luncheon meat; the junk e-mail messages that clog my Inbox. I’ve had the same e-mail address since 1995, so you can imagine how many mailing lists I’m on and how much spam I receive. Despite using two spam filters–one on the mail server and another with Outlook–hundreds of messages still manage to sneak through every day.
So it was great news to learn that Oleg Nikolaenko, a 23-year-old Russian, had been apprehended by the FBI while attending an auto show in Las Vegas. Why? Because Nikolaenko has been called the “King of Spam.” Investigators claim that he’s been responsible for as much as one-third of the world’s spam, sending out 10 billion–yes, BILLION–messages a day.
Nikolaenko accomplished this dastardly deed by creating a vast botnet–an army of over 500,000 computers that he secretly commandeered (yours could be a soldier in the Russian’s army), using them to spam the world with pitches for phony products, like counterfeit Rolex watches. Jody M. Smith, the Rolex scammer. paid Nikolaenko to send out his messages; he was apprehended last year and helped authorities nail Nikolaenko.
The international sting operation reads like a good spy story. If you’re a fan of the genre, read how it went down in the Wall Street Journal.
Nikolaenko is now under Federal indictment for violating the CAN-SPAM Act, America’s anti-spam law. He’s being held without bail and faces a $250,000 fine and three years in prison. But given how much money this guy has already raked in from his spam operation–a least $465,000 according to the FBI, and probably much, much more–it’s just a slap on the wrist.
If Nikolaenko is convicted and sent to the pen, my advice to prison officials: Don’t give this guy access to a computer. My advice to you: Watch the video to get tips on protecting your computer from being Shanghaied into a botnet.
Wednesday - Dec 1, 2010
Once hailed as technological marvel, e-mail now seems positively geriatric, at least among American teens. Like their peers in Asia and Europe, texting is the preferred way to communicate among friends. That’s the latest finding from a Pew Internet study.
As you can see from the chart, text messaging is increasing dramatically, while e-mailing is slowly decreasing. Does that mean that e-mail as we know it might disappear? Well not so fast. E-mail does serve a purpose. According to researchers, e-mail is “used mostly to talk to institutions, adults and others less reachable by text messaging, as well as when teens need to send longer and more complicated messages to a group.”
The entire issue may be moot as communication channels converge. Facebook recently announced a next generation service, Messages, which combines e-mail, text and chat. Send a message to a friend using any communications tool you want. Your friend can receive it anyway she wants (as an e-mail, text, etc.). In essence, the focus is on the message, not the technology. So the lines are getting blurred.
Just as radio didn’t kill newspapers and television didn’t kill the movie business, similar technologies can and do coexist. Even if e-mail seems so 20th century, it may be just the ticket when communicating with your grandparents!
Tuesday - Sep 7, 2010
Ray Tomlinson is credited with sending the first e-mail message over a network in 1971. Over the last forty years, e-mail has evolved from a purely text-based medium to one that can display a range of fonts, colorful backgrounds and images. You can also attach documents, video clips and music files to your messages.
Some e-mail programs will sort your messages: e-mail from friends go into one folder; spam into another. But what it can’t do is prioritize messages–figure out which messages to read and answer first–until now.
A few weeks ago the New York Times ran a story about a computer scientist, Hillary Mason, who grew tired of the constant barrage of the undifferentiated messages flooding her Inbox. She solved the problem by writing a program, the E-mail Classifier, which uses a set of rules to prioritize her e-mail. For instance, messages from people who have corresponded with Mason in the past rise to the top of the list.
To my mind, it sounds like one of those must-have programs, but unfortunately, it’s not commercially available. But wait. A few days ago Google announced a new Gmail feature–Priority Inbox. What does it do? You guessed it. It uses a set of rules to determine which messages take priority. The video above shows how it works.
If you use Gmail, give it try. Although I have a Gmail account, it’s not my prime e-mail address, so I can’t comment on how well it works. For any readers that have tried it, let us know.
