The Times: Tech column - Spam wars/Machinima/Hypertext patents
By David Rowan
MICHAEL MARTIN, Speaker of the House of Commons, has received a fair amount of unsolicited abuse this year, but nothing to compare with the pornographic images sent to him by the Labour MP Derek Wyatt, who wants the Speaker to schedule a Commons debate on unsolicited e-mail porn that makes no distinction between adult recipients and children.
About a third of unsolicited e-mails promote porn sites, and Wyatt's solution is to make internet service providers (ISPs) responsible for the spam received by their customers. Now Wyatt is normally one of the more internet-literate MPs, but his response betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. It is rather like blaming the postman for delivering a fraudulent mailshot.
The real culprits are the spammers. They should be Wyatt's targets, not the networks they use as their unpaid conduits. The ISPs know this, which is why most of them already spend money to filter out spam and disconnect the bad guys. After all, it is not in the ISPs' interests to have junk e-mails clogging their bandwidth and undermining their reputations. But there is only a limited amount that they can do if their customers let their e-mail addresses become widely known, or if they (unwisely) respond to spam asking that no further mailings be sent, which merely confirms that their account is active. Some ISPs use commercially available filtering software to block e-mails containing the spammers' favourite words such as "Viagra" and "porn". But there can be unintended consequences, such as innocent e-mails being blocked for containing words such as "Cockney" or even "cherry". One musician found himself banned from discussing Bach's "fugue".
The best anti-spam resource at the moment is the Spamhaus Project, a non profit body run by volunteers from London which tracks known spammers and publishes their internet addresses so that ISPs can block anything sent from them. Its website, spamhaus.org, takes delight in publishing death threats received and warnings that it will be sued for "deformation" (an indication of the types we are dealing with). Its database protects about 80 million e-mail addresses, and any ISP not using it should do so.
The other solution would be to sue the spammers themselves. I am greatly inspired by a California businessman, Steve Kirsch, who last week sued a junk-fax company for $2.2 trillion. Yes, trillion - based on $500 for each of the three million daily faxes that Fax.com has sent since 1998. Time for a fact-finding trip to California?
++++
There is an exciting new film genre of which you will be hearing more. It requires neither actors nor cameras, and its leading directors do not even bother to leave their bedrooms. Called "machinima", it relies on video-game software to produce short action-filled movies on a standard home PC. Machinima - think "machine" and "cinema" - grew out of games software such as Quake and Unreal Tournament, and it has become so popular among amateur Spielbergs that the first Machinima Film Festival has just taken place in Texas.
It can take just a few minutes to produce a one-minute action movie, and the best of those shown in Texas are little artistic masterpieces. It might take a year or two to go mainstream, but Hollywood should watch out.
++++
NOW that a US federal judge has thrown out BT's absurd claim to own the patent on hypertext linking, perhaps other corporations will realise that the web is built on freely linked pages. From Disney to KPMG, companies keep trying to control who links to their websites while web users continue to question their control-freakery. So concerned is David Sorkin, a Chicago law professor, that he has set up Don't Link To Us (dontlink.com), which highlights the worst. His hall of shame includes Crossrail and Mars, which "ban" links beyond their front pages, as well as Nikon Precision, which claims that unwanted links may cause "irreparable injury". And Sorkin's answer? To link prominently to the offending pages, of course.
(The Times, August 28 2002)
MICHAEL MARTIN, Speaker of the House of Commons, has received a fair amount of unsolicited abuse this year, but nothing to compare with the pornographic images sent to him by the Labour MP Derek Wyatt, who wants the Speaker to schedule a Commons debate on unsolicited e-mail porn that makes no distinction between adult recipients and children.
About a third of unsolicited e-mails promote porn sites, and Wyatt's solution is to make internet service providers (ISPs) responsible for the spam received by their customers. Now Wyatt is normally one of the more internet-literate MPs, but his response betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. It is rather like blaming the postman for delivering a fraudulent mailshot.
The real culprits are the spammers. They should be Wyatt's targets, not the networks they use as their unpaid conduits. The ISPs know this, which is why most of them already spend money to filter out spam and disconnect the bad guys. After all, it is not in the ISPs' interests to have junk e-mails clogging their bandwidth and undermining their reputations. But there is only a limited amount that they can do if their customers let their e-mail addresses become widely known, or if they (unwisely) respond to spam asking that no further mailings be sent, which merely confirms that their account is active. Some ISPs use commercially available filtering software to block e-mails containing the spammers' favourite words such as "Viagra" and "porn". But there can be unintended consequences, such as innocent e-mails being blocked for containing words such as "Cockney" or even "cherry". One musician found himself banned from discussing Bach's "fugue".
The best anti-spam resource at the moment is the Spamhaus Project, a non profit body run by volunteers from London which tracks known spammers and publishes their internet addresses so that ISPs can block anything sent from them. Its website, spamhaus.org, takes delight in publishing death threats received and warnings that it will be sued for "deformation" (an indication of the types we are dealing with). Its database protects about 80 million e-mail addresses, and any ISP not using it should do so.
The other solution would be to sue the spammers themselves. I am greatly inspired by a California businessman, Steve Kirsch, who last week sued a junk-fax company for $2.2 trillion. Yes, trillion - based on $500 for each of the three million daily faxes that Fax.com has sent since 1998. Time for a fact-finding trip to California?
++++
There is an exciting new film genre of which you will be hearing more. It requires neither actors nor cameras, and its leading directors do not even bother to leave their bedrooms. Called "machinima", it relies on video-game software to produce short action-filled movies on a standard home PC. Machinima - think "machine" and "cinema" - grew out of games software such as Quake and Unreal Tournament, and it has become so popular among amateur Spielbergs that the first Machinima Film Festival has just taken place in Texas.
It can take just a few minutes to produce a one-minute action movie, and the best of those shown in Texas are little artistic masterpieces. It might take a year or two to go mainstream, but Hollywood should watch out.
++++
NOW that a US federal judge has thrown out BT's absurd claim to own the patent on hypertext linking, perhaps other corporations will realise that the web is built on freely linked pages. From Disney to KPMG, companies keep trying to control who links to their websites while web users continue to question their control-freakery. So concerned is David Sorkin, a Chicago law professor, that he has set up Don't Link To Us (dontlink.com), which highlights the worst. His hall of shame includes Crossrail and Mars, which "ban" links beyond their front pages, as well as Nikon Precision, which claims that unwanted links may cause "irreparable injury". And Sorkin's answer? To link prominently to the offending pages, of course.
(The Times, August 28 2002)
posted by David Rowan at Wednesday, August 28, 2002
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