Cyber Info Never Dies

It’s official: anything you ever email at work will be stored for evermore and, should the circumstance ever arise, will be used against you! AP business writer Christopher Rugaber, observes that “U.S. companies will need to know more about where they store e-mails, instant messages and other electronic documents generated by their employees in the event they are sued, thanks to changes in federal rules that took effect Friday,” according to legal experts.

“The changes, approved by the Supreme Court's administrative arm in April after a five-year review, require companies and other parties involved in federal litigation to produce ‘electronically stored information’ as part of discovery, the process by which both sides share evidence before a trial.”

There you have it: if you write it and send it, your message will live on and on and on…

Held Hostage by Info Overload

Here is a wonderful article titled, “We Have the Information You Want, But Getting It Will Cost You: Being Held Hostage by Information Overload” written by then doctoral student Mark Nelson.

Posting the Wrong Kind of Info

Vast segments of the population have turned to online exhibitionism. Writing in the Washington Post, economist Robert J. Samuelson observes says, “ It turns out that the Internet has unleashed the greatest outburst of mass exhibitionism in human history.”

“People seem to crave popularity or celebrity more than they fear the loss of privacy.” However, “what goes on the Internet often stays on the Internet.

Of particular concern: Something that seems harmless, silly or merely impetuous today may seem offensive, stupid or reckless in two weeks, two years or two decades,” says Samuelson. “Henry David Thoreau famously remarked that ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ Thanks to technology, that's no longer necessary. People can now lead lives of noisy and ostentatious desperation...”

Internet access in your area

Want to know what options you have for Internet access in your area or in an area you'll be visiting? Visit http://www.thelist.com/ and enter the telephone area code or zip code. You will then see a display of all the providers.

Finding Info by Googling

Google is the number one search engine in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S. Google now provides an interface for 120 languages and offers results in 35 languages. Remarkably, more than 50% of Google traffic is from outside the U.S.

So... how easily can you be found, on Google.com?

Wikipedia's Contorted Entries

The Herald Tribune reports that "Last year, someone edited the Wikipedia entry for the Sea World theme parks to change all mentions of orcas to killer whales, insisting that this was a more accurate name for the species... There was another, unexplained edit: A paragraph about criticism of Sea World's "lack of respect toward its orcas" disappeared. Both changes, it turns out, originated at a computer at Anheuser-Busch, Sea World's owner."

"Dozens of similar examples of insider editing came to light last week through WikiScanner, a new Web site that traces the source of millions of changes to Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. The site, wikiscanner.virgil.gr, created by a computer science graduate student, Virgil Griffith, cross-references an edited entry on Wikipedia with the owner of the computer network where the change originated, using the Internet protocol address of the editor's network."

...So, read what you will on Wikipedia with a huge grain of salt.

Internet Protocol Overload!

BusinessWeek reports that the Internet is running out of addresses. There are 4 billion possible
combinations that make up a 10-digit IP (Internet Protocol) address, which identifies the location of computers, routers, and other network devices. Some 3 billion IP addresses are taken, and the remainder will likely be gone by 2010.

Bogus Information for the Masses

For at least the last three years, 3 to 4 four times a day, I've received various ridiculous "help me move my fortune from my third-world country" email letters. How can the same transparent tactics be employed more than 3,000 times unless there are legions of moron recipients who actually respond to such letters?

Yet, how difficult can it be for full-facultied recipients to figure out that these bogus claims are perpetrated by career criminals in the world's cyber cafes where their thievery is largely untraceable? Did I miss an important announcement -- is the general level of intelligence dropping to new lows

Clean My Mailbox

Check out www.cleanmymailbox.com/whitelist.html which offers a "free tool to generate specific instructions on how to whitelist your publication(s) within a variety of popular fitering solutions in use today."

By filling in and submitting a form they supply, and you'll be presented with the custom HTML code to use in developing your own customized Whitelisting Instructions web page.

The Spam Plague Heightens

“Spam is back – in e-mail in-boxes and on everyone's minds. Of late, the problem has gotten measurably worse. Worldwide, spam volumes have doubled from last year,” according to Ironport, a spam-filtering firm, and unsolicited junk mail now accounts for more than nine out of every 10 e-mails sent over the Internet.

“Much of that flood is made up of a nettlesome new breed of junk e-mail called image spam, in which the words of the advertisement are part of a picture, often fooling traditional spam detectors that look for telltale phrases. Image spam increased fourfold from last year and now represents 25 percent to 45 percent of all junk e-mail, depending on the day,” Ironport says.

Privacy Related Sites

Here are some privacy related websites:

www.privacyrights.org

www.healthprivacy.org

www.junkbusters.com

PC Wins Out over Spouse

Demetria Gallegos, writing in the Denver Post Staff, says that a new study indicates that most people spend more time with technology than they do with their family. A survey conducted by Kelton Research, and commissioned by http://www.support.com/, a site that offers tech support found that 65% of respondents spent more time with a computer than with their spouse or significant other.

More than 80 percent of those polled said they were more dependent on their computer than they were three years ago. The survey was conducted in December and January, involving 1001 participants nationwide.

Small Transgressions Exposed

Jennifer Saranow, writing in the Wall Street Journal, discusses how “bad parking, loud talking -- no transgression is too trivial to document online.” In some respects this can be socially beneficial, but too quickly, I fear, such postings represent the kind of over-information in which too many people are immersed.

Is Your PC a Spam Slave?

The website ThisIsLondon.co.uk reports that “image spam” could bring the internet to a standstill. “At first, they seem like your average junk email, containing share tips or an advertisement for Viagra, along with a small, slightly garbled picture.But this, experts say, is the spam that could bring the internet to a virtual standstill this year. To bypass anti-spam software, the emails use an image instead of text.”

“In the past six months, this image spam has seen a massive increase and now represents 35 per cent of all junk email, according to security software firm F-Secure and image spam is taking up 70 per cent of the bandwidth bulge. The emails, generally containing stock tips, come from gangs and even bored teenagers in the United States and Russia trying to inflate prices in a swindle called ‘pump-and-dump’".

“They promise that a cheap, usually American, stock will take off. The perpetrator then dumps his stock as buyers leap in before it collapses. Dmitri Allperovitch of computer security company CipherTrust said: ‘They're niche companies with no profit and no products, so when you see a spike from almost no trades to two or three million when the spam is sent out, you know there were a lot of people who fell for it.’”

Is your PC a slave unit to such schemes. Are you unwittingly passing bogus information to millions of other people?

Info on Demand: Boon or Bane?

Apple announced the iPhone at its annual Macworld expo. Steve Jobs called the iPhone a "revolutionary mobile phone" that will feature an iPod, phone and "Internet communicator."

The Web as Social Hangout

From the AP newswire in New York:

“The online hangout MySpace got even more popular in November, beating Yahoo in Web traffic for the first time, a research company said Tuesday. News Corp.'s MySpace recorded 38.7 billion U.S. page views last month, compared with 38.1 billion for Yahoo Inc., according to comScore Media Metrix. MySpace's growth was 2 percent over October and triple the 12.5 billion recorded in November 2005.”

“The numbers underscore the rapid rise of a social-networking site that encourages visitors to stay and make friends through free tools for messaging, sharing photos and creating personal pages known as profiles.”

Getting Our Information Faster

According to J.D. Power and Associates in their “2006 Internet Service Provider Residential Customer Satisfaction Study,” broadband has finally passed dial-up for Internet home access. Some 56% of residential ISP customers subscribe to broadband, and 44% to subscribe dial-up.

Search Engines Aid in Purchases

Where do web surfers get information on potential purchases? According to Hitwise.com, an online competitive intelligence service, Google is by far the top U.S. search engine in terms of driving visitors to shopping sites, accounting for 14.9% of visits. Yahoo! Search was found to be the second most popular search engine, accounting for 4.7% of shopper visits, followed by MSN Search and a rapidly-gaining MySpace.

Spam is Now 90% of All Emails

A Reuters report out of London says that “criminal gangs using hijacked computers are behind a surge in unwanted e-mails peddling sex, drugs and stock tips.”

According to Postini, a U.S. email security company, “The number of spam messages has tripled since June and now accounts for as many as nine out of 10 e-mails sent worldwide.”

"E-mail systems are overloaded or melting down trying to keep up with all the spam," said Dan Druker, a vice president at Postini.

The Reuters report observes that “as Christmas approaches, the daily trawl through in-boxes clogged with offers of fake Viagra, loans and sex aids is tipped to take even longer.”

Postini has detected a staggering 7 billion spam e-mails worldwide in November compared to 2.5 billion in June.

According to Spamhaus, an agency that tracks the problem, “About 200 illegal gangs are behind 80 percent of unwanted e-mails.

Reuters: Experts blame the rise in spam on computer programs that hijack millions of home computers to send e-mails. These "zombie networks", also called "botnets", can link 100,000 home computers without their owners' knowledge. They are leased to gangs who use their huge "free" computing power to send millions of e-mails with relative anonymity.

Junk Mail May Never Die

Louise Story, writing in the New York Times, sheds light on why in the age of the Internet and email, junk mail is proliferating:

“United States Postal Service says marketers sent more than 114 billion pieces of direct mail, increase of about 15 percent from five years ago; volume of bulk mail, which is all direct mail, exceeded first class in last year; advertisers like it that mail ads, which do not get snagged in spam filters, can be aimed at just right customers and be monitored for effectiveness; those traits are increasingly important to companies as they target American public into finer and finer categories; some advertising executives comments.”

Info that Nobody Wants

A study by conducted Commtouch indicates that most spam originates from websites hosted in countries outside the U.S. Pharmaceutical drugs are most advertised, with Viagra the leading the way.

The recipients of these largely unwanted messages are nearly all in the U.S. Meanwhile, despite filters and spaminators, the pace of spam is accelerating . The aggregate number of unique spam outbreaks per day has been rising for for more than five years.

Websites: 100 Million, so Far

• The Web has reached 100,000,000 sites
• In August 1995 there were 18,000 sites

Advice from a Fellow Speaker

Have you noticed that your productivity is down because you're constantly checking email? If so, consider using a spare computer or laptop that is not connected to the Web. Your productivity will be amazing.

Webliography on Info Overload

Here is an “Information/Work Overload Annotated Webliography.” Best bet: scroll down to the turquoise blue banner containing links to books and articles.

Science New Alerts

DOE and other federal science agencies help public stay "alert" to the latest R&D results with Science.gov Alert Service. The latest research results from the U.S. Department of Energy and 11 other Federal science agencies can be delivered to desktops through the new patron-customized Science.gov Alert Service.

Science.gov, the public's “go to” Web portal for federal science information, provides a free and convenient science Alert Service that will send alerts to patrons' desktops on their specified topics of interest. From the Science.gov home page, patrons can set up an account, and then let Science.gov do their searching for them.

Each Monday, up to 25 relevant results from selected science sources will be sent to the patron's email. The results are displayed in the email alert, as well as in each patron's personalized Alert Archive, which stores six weeks of alerts results. From this archive, past results can be reviewed and the Alert Profile can be edited.