| Thursday, December 1, 2005 |  |
| Spam |
| I just glanced at the e-mail stats for my server. I personally got 94,917 e-mails during the month of November. That's over 3000 per day. 1018MB of "data" for the month.
It's mostly spam, of course. Judging by my spam folder, I get between 1 and 2 spam messages every minute. I'm glad I have a spam folder. And I'm glad I don't have a "You got mail!" message. No wonder e-mail is getting to be more and more useless. And sorry if I didn't answer your mail. [ Diary | 2005-12-01 19:42 | 7 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| Consumer Networking |
| Wouldn't it be nice if "consumers" were well enough networked and well enough informed that companies just can't get away with screwing them over?
We seem to be getting closer, probably thanks to blogs more than anything else. Sony BMG released more than 20 million CDs that, if you played them on your windows computer, would install a Root Kit, which would hide itself in your operating system, mess with what you were doing, and report back your activities to Sony. A Root Kit is a hacker technology, for installing hostile programs on your system, while they remain undetected and trick the system into making it look like nothing at all is going on. Sony did that deliberately, as DRM (Digital Rights Management), to try to make sure you didn't violate the rules they'd like you to follow. Remember, we're just talking about a normal audio CD, which you wouldn't expect to install anything in your system. But it installed some very bad stuff, making your system further vulnerable to attacks. Around 500,000 networks were compromised by this hack. Read the timeline here. Because of a storm of bad publicity and a number of class action lawsuits, Sony finally recalled the CDs, although they didn't give more than a very wimpy apology. The good news is that the debacle probably set back the deployment of DRM several years. Which is good for you, as DRM basically just means that the big music and film companies want to break your equipment so it only does what they'd like it to do, if any of their CDs or DVDs are involved. And most likely Sony will take a big dip in sales because of this. And maybe they'll start getting the message that their customers don't want crap like that, and that enough of them are sufficiently well-informed and loud enough to say so. The Grateful Dead isn't exactly a big corporation, but they have been a shining icon for file-sharers everwhere. They always allowed fans to make their own recordings of their concerts and to share them freely. And that was part of what kept them having a large following for a long time, and probably a major driver behind their commercial enterprise. But recently their company commanded some websites to remove archives of their music, apparently because Jerry Garcia's widow had changed her mind or something. Which caused a big uproar, and deadheads immediately and loudly started boycotting all things Grateful Dead. Read here. And, now, today they apparently changed their mind and reinstated the archives they had asked to get removed. And, now, also from the last few days there is this story. An avid amateur photographer wanted to buy a $3000 camera, and an online store in New York called PriceRitePhoto had the best price. But what followed was an outrageous sequence of abusive experiences with them, being threatened and blackmailed in an assortment of ways. But this guy had the guts to post the whole thing on his blog. Which got a LOT of attention, Slashdot, BoingBoing, Digg, and many other sites. And a lot of help too. And despite lots of, probably fake, positive reports on various review sites, it turned out that lots of people had similarly horrifying experiences with that company. Be sure to read the update section after his account. First more outrageous threats. But then, in brief, in the course of two days it seems that the camera vendor has gotten de-listed from several of the main price listing sites, and that their ISP is considering terminating their account for illegal activity. And the owner of the company called the guy and was suddenly very nice and apologetic, and said the responsible employee was fired. Nothing like seeing one's business go down the drain to get somebody's attention. What all of this means is that it is a lot harder for a company to do something misleading, unethical, sleazy, illegal, or just unpopular. OK, not all incidents are going to get this kind of publicity, but enough of them are to create an impact. [ Information | 2005-12-01 22:58 | 5 comments | PermaLink ] More > |