The Times: Tech column - Alan Ralsky/E-bombs
By David Rowan
YOU WILL NOT know his name, but there is a very good chance that you have been receiving e-mails from Alan Ralsky. With his database of 250 million addresses, Ralsky, a 57-year-old based in Michigan, is one of the world's most prolific "spammers", whose 190 e-mail servers can send out 650,000 unsolicited sales pitches every hour. If you are one of his victims, it will not ease your frustration to know that his business - on behalf of diet-pill hucksters, online casinos and the like - has made the one-time insurance fraudster a millionaire. "I'll never quit," he boasted to the Detroit Free Press last week. "This is the greatest business in the world."
Ralsky makes his money from clients who find that his "e-mail marketing messages", as he euphemistically calls them, actually work - with a claimed response rate of a quarter of one per cent. Nor is it a difficult business to get into: on a newsgroup search last weekend, I was offered 50 million e-mail addresses for just £32. So it comes as little surprise that junk e-mail is growing at unprecedented levels. A filtering company, MessageLabs, estimated last year that spam constituted one in every 199 e-mails received in the UK; today the rate is one in 12. Another firm, BrightMail, puts the global figure now at 41 per cent. At this rate, e-mail will soon cease to be a viable communication medium.
I have written before of products such as SpamKiller and MailWasher that, to varying degrees, can halt junk mail. But text-based filters have their own limitations, and may block as "pornographic" any e-mails referring to breast cancer or the county of Essex. Dan Gillmor, the Silicon Valley tech journalist, finds that the only solution is to select every new message in his inbox each morning, and then manually de-select the "genuine" ones before deleting the rest.
Still, the search for more effective filters is being stepped up, as researchers pore over a vast new archive of unsolicited e-mails at spamarchive.org. In the meantime, the best solution is to keep your e-mail address out of any public forum. Oh, and don't buy an anti-spam product called SpamCatchers, which has been marketing itself through...junk e-mails.
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WESTERN MILITARY planners can barely conceal their excitement at the technology standing by for action against Iraq. From new long-range precision missiles to high-power microwave "e-bombs", the hi-tech kit is further proof that war is a great stimulus to innovation. For a start, huge advances in night-vision technology and thermal sensing mean that much of the action will take place at night. On the ground, soldiers will examine enemy targets from miles away, day or night, using infrared laser-powered binoculars, while miles overhead unmanned Predator aircraft will detect the warmth of enemy tanks.
The bombs themselves will include a new "radio frequency weapon", or "e-bomb", that sends huge bursts of microwave energy to damage electrical equipment and power grids. Then there is the "blackout bomb", which short-circuits power and telephone lines using superconductive carbon-fibre filaments. Should the fighting spread to Iraq's cities, expect "thermobaric" bombs, which recently saw service in Afghan caves. They create huge pressure waves in otherwise inaccessible spaces, killing anyone in their path.
The reason I can tell you about these hi-tech innovations is, of course, because the US propaganda machine believes that early publicity strengthens its position. It is an impressive catalogue of military technology that will doubtless lead to new consumer applications. But let's not get carried away. The real test will be whether it makes any difference against low-tech weapons such as smallpox.
(The Times, December 10 2002)
YOU WILL NOT know his name, but there is a very good chance that you have been receiving e-mails from Alan Ralsky. With his database of 250 million addresses, Ralsky, a 57-year-old based in Michigan, is one of the world's most prolific "spammers", whose 190 e-mail servers can send out 650,000 unsolicited sales pitches every hour. If you are one of his victims, it will not ease your frustration to know that his business - on behalf of diet-pill hucksters, online casinos and the like - has made the one-time insurance fraudster a millionaire. "I'll never quit," he boasted to the Detroit Free Press last week. "This is the greatest business in the world."
Ralsky makes his money from clients who find that his "e-mail marketing messages", as he euphemistically calls them, actually work - with a claimed response rate of a quarter of one per cent. Nor is it a difficult business to get into: on a newsgroup search last weekend, I was offered 50 million e-mail addresses for just £32. So it comes as little surprise that junk e-mail is growing at unprecedented levels. A filtering company, MessageLabs, estimated last year that spam constituted one in every 199 e-mails received in the UK; today the rate is one in 12. Another firm, BrightMail, puts the global figure now at 41 per cent. At this rate, e-mail will soon cease to be a viable communication medium.
I have written before of products such as SpamKiller and MailWasher that, to varying degrees, can halt junk mail. But text-based filters have their own limitations, and may block as "pornographic" any e-mails referring to breast cancer or the county of Essex. Dan Gillmor, the Silicon Valley tech journalist, finds that the only solution is to select every new message in his inbox each morning, and then manually de-select the "genuine" ones before deleting the rest.
Still, the search for more effective filters is being stepped up, as researchers pore over a vast new archive of unsolicited e-mails at spamarchive.org. In the meantime, the best solution is to keep your e-mail address out of any public forum. Oh, and don't buy an anti-spam product called SpamCatchers, which has been marketing itself through...junk e-mails.
++++
WESTERN MILITARY planners can barely conceal their excitement at the technology standing by for action against Iraq. From new long-range precision missiles to high-power microwave "e-bombs", the hi-tech kit is further proof that war is a great stimulus to innovation. For a start, huge advances in night-vision technology and thermal sensing mean that much of the action will take place at night. On the ground, soldiers will examine enemy targets from miles away, day or night, using infrared laser-powered binoculars, while miles overhead unmanned Predator aircraft will detect the warmth of enemy tanks.
The bombs themselves will include a new "radio frequency weapon", or "e-bomb", that sends huge bursts of microwave energy to damage electrical equipment and power grids. Then there is the "blackout bomb", which short-circuits power and telephone lines using superconductive carbon-fibre filaments. Should the fighting spread to Iraq's cities, expect "thermobaric" bombs, which recently saw service in Afghan caves. They create huge pressure waves in otherwise inaccessible spaces, killing anyone in their path.
The reason I can tell you about these hi-tech innovations is, of course, because the US propaganda machine believes that early publicity strengthens its position. It is an impressive catalogue of military technology that will doubtless lead to new consumer applications. But let's not get carried away. The real test will be whether it makes any difference against low-tech weapons such as smallpox.
(The Times, December 10 2002)
posted by David Rowan at Tuesday, December 10, 2002
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