The Times: Tech column - War technology/spammers
By David Rowan
THERE IS nothing like a war for boosting the popular adoption of new technologies. The first Gulf War let CNN establish cable as a mainstream television force, and the Afghanistan conflict sold the videophone as a credible business conferencing tool. This time round, the immediacy and breadth of much internet coverage has, for news junkies, already given it the edge over TV and print. Think of this as the first broadband war.
The signs are everywhere, from the lightweight Sony PD-150 digital cameras instantly beaming reporters' footage back to newspaper websites via satellite videophones, to the thousands of amateur weblogs vying with professional streaming webcasts to dissect every conceivable detail of the conflict. Never has so much information been available so quickly from the battlefield: if you cannot bear to see al-Jazeera's screenshots of mutilated Iraqi civilians, then Ari Fleischer's extended presidential briefings are a click away on the White House website. If you choose not to read Rageh Omaar's middle-of-the-night contemplations on the BBC reporters' weblog, you can follow events from an Iraqi's viewpoint at a fascinating personal weblog (dearraed.blogspot.com) apparently filed from Baghdad.
For a couple of pounds, you can also watch raw battlefield footage on sites such as Yahoo and ABC News - an offer that millions of office workers have been taking up.
The huge volume of material coming out of Iraq is also changing how the information war is being fought. Military news managers know that any dubious rumours will be torn apart within minutes - not just by the amateur commentators, but by the hundreds of professional journalists carrying kit such as the IPT Suitcase, a 75lb (34kg) broadcasting system that uses internet protocols to transmit video at up to two megabits a second.
Those opposed to the war have also turned to the web in unprecedented numbers, using sites such as moveon.org to organise their protests, and in some cases to hack in to "pro-war" websites. In the first days of war, security firms identified more than 1,000 website defacements by anti-war activists - including the US Navy site, hacked by someone called Apocalypse to display the message: "No War, USA think they can tell the world what to do."
Tom Ridge, the US Secretary of Homeland Security, says that his team is monitoring the net for "state-sponsored information warfare". But with this medium empowering ordinary citizens like no other, it's not just enemy states that want to shape how this war is being perceived.
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IF YOU HAVE ever wondered how junk-mail "spammers" get hold of your e-mail address, you might like to read an enlightening report from the Centre for Democracy and Technology (at www.cdt.org). The Washington-based campaign group created hundreds of e-mail addresses, used each of them once, and then waited six months to see what happened. Sure enough, more than 8,800 unsolicited e-mails arrived - almost all of them to addresses that had been placed just once on the internet.
Only when an address was obscured in some way - such as writing the @ sign as the word "at" - did the spam fail to get through. This is because spammers use software that automatically "spiders" the web to harvest what it recognises as e-mail addresses. So if you do list your address on a website, consider making it harder for the software to read - perhaps by using HTML equivalents of individual characters. Addresses in busier domains, such as ebay.com, face another problem: software that generates millions of character combinations on the assumption that some will exist. The answer? Choose a long name over a short one. They're harder for the software to guess.
(The Times, March 25 2003)
THERE IS nothing like a war for boosting the popular adoption of new technologies. The first Gulf War let CNN establish cable as a mainstream television force, and the Afghanistan conflict sold the videophone as a credible business conferencing tool. This time round, the immediacy and breadth of much internet coverage has, for news junkies, already given it the edge over TV and print. Think of this as the first broadband war.
The signs are everywhere, from the lightweight Sony PD-150 digital cameras instantly beaming reporters' footage back to newspaper websites via satellite videophones, to the thousands of amateur weblogs vying with professional streaming webcasts to dissect every conceivable detail of the conflict. Never has so much information been available so quickly from the battlefield: if you cannot bear to see al-Jazeera's screenshots of mutilated Iraqi civilians, then Ari Fleischer's extended presidential briefings are a click away on the White House website. If you choose not to read Rageh Omaar's middle-of-the-night contemplations on the BBC reporters' weblog, you can follow events from an Iraqi's viewpoint at a fascinating personal weblog (dearraed.blogspot.com) apparently filed from Baghdad.
For a couple of pounds, you can also watch raw battlefield footage on sites such as Yahoo and ABC News - an offer that millions of office workers have been taking up.
The huge volume of material coming out of Iraq is also changing how the information war is being fought. Military news managers know that any dubious rumours will be torn apart within minutes - not just by the amateur commentators, but by the hundreds of professional journalists carrying kit such as the IPT Suitcase, a 75lb (34kg) broadcasting system that uses internet protocols to transmit video at up to two megabits a second.
Those opposed to the war have also turned to the web in unprecedented numbers, using sites such as moveon.org to organise their protests, and in some cases to hack in to "pro-war" websites. In the first days of war, security firms identified more than 1,000 website defacements by anti-war activists - including the US Navy site, hacked by someone called Apocalypse to display the message: "No War, USA think they can tell the world what to do."
Tom Ridge, the US Secretary of Homeland Security, says that his team is monitoring the net for "state-sponsored information warfare". But with this medium empowering ordinary citizens like no other, it's not just enemy states that want to shape how this war is being perceived.
++++
IF YOU HAVE ever wondered how junk-mail "spammers" get hold of your e-mail address, you might like to read an enlightening report from the Centre for Democracy and Technology (at www.cdt.org). The Washington-based campaign group created hundreds of e-mail addresses, used each of them once, and then waited six months to see what happened. Sure enough, more than 8,800 unsolicited e-mails arrived - almost all of them to addresses that had been placed just once on the internet.
Only when an address was obscured in some way - such as writing the @ sign as the word "at" - did the spam fail to get through. This is because spammers use software that automatically "spiders" the web to harvest what it recognises as e-mail addresses. So if you do list your address on a website, consider making it harder for the software to read - perhaps by using HTML equivalents of individual characters. Addresses in busier domains, such as ebay.com, face another problem: software that generates millions of character combinations on the assumption that some will exist. The answer? Choose a long name over a short one. They're harder for the software to guess.
(The Times, March 25 2003)
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