Will Spam be the end of the Internet?

Everyday it’s the same thing. An email box full up of messages, 90% of which is spam. Remember back in the day when you used get excited when you got snail mail? With email … not so much. Would it surprise you that 97% of all email is spam? In fact I have several email accounts for this exact reason, to avoid spam. However it forces me to keep a schedule. Logging in each account to check for spam and delete it. Forget a few days and it inconveniences me to delete everything. Go on vacation and you might as well close that email account because legitimate emails have already been bouncing because your email was full within a day. Despite a few notable arrests and charges, spammers are not deterred. Sadly it’s just a part of daily life when you’re living with the Internet. However, it’s unbelievable that it only takes a handful of bad apples to ruin something so incredibly useful. Oh, and don’t forget to subscribe so I can spam you.

“Hello? This is George Dubya, I need data recovery”

I’m surprised they are finally getting around to this. Given the timing, they are just going through the motions. How many president’s have been impeached after they’ve left office? Probably take a presidential pardon along with them just in case. You got the CIA and FBI who tap phones and monitor Internet traffic but you can’t keep proper backups of internal emails? Come on! You know it’s a big cover up. Simple deletion does not render data unrecoverable. And reputable data recovery company would be able to get those emails back in a snap. I’m sure the IT staff were instructed to keep a lid on the issue as to ensure their job safety.

“The recovery project would not use backup tapes going back to March 2003, according to the draft document, even though an earlier White House assessment suggested e-mails were missing from that period as well.

Industry experts point out that relying on the backup system to ensure accurate retention, preservation and retrieval of all e-mails is problematic because it does not take into account deleted e-mails.” (link)

UK government wants to keep track of all data exchanges

The Government will store “a billion incidents of data exchange a day” as details of every text, email and browsing session in the UK are recorded under new proposals published yesterday.

The information will be made available to police forces in order to crack down on serious crime, but will also be accessible by local councils, health authorities and even Ofsted and the Post Office.

One example of crime prevention using the data given in the consultation document is that of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection agency, which targets sexual abuse of children.

“The vast majority of CEOP’s work is by resolution of IP addresses, e-mail addresses and increasingly mobile phone numbers. (link)

Steve Jobs ‘MobileMe sucks’

In an internal e-mail sent to Apple employees this evening, Steve Jobs admitted that MobileMe was launched too early and “not up to Apple’s standards.” The e-mail, seen by Ars Technica, acknowledges MobileMe’s flaws and what could have been done to better handle the launch. In addition to needing more time and testing, Jobs believes that Apple should have rolled MobileMe’s services out slowly instead of launching it “as a monolithic service.” For example, over-the-air iPhone syncing could have gone up initially, then web apps one by one (Mail, Calendar, etc.).

Jobs goes on. “It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store,” he says. “We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.” We agree with that one. (link)

Spam clogging up the Intertubes, 80% of email traffic

Almost everyone hates spam. The only people that don’t hate it are the ones that make vast amounts of money from sending it. The profits they turn are so large that regardless of what spam fighters do, the amount of spam keeps increasing. According to web security firm MessageLabs, spam accounted for 81.5 percent of all e-mail traffic in June.

This number, which is calculated based on 3 billion e-mail connections that MessageLabs scans every single day, more or less corresponds with US-specific data. An analysis of year-to-date spam rates for individual US states shows that the percentage of e-mails that were spam range from 77 (Montana) to 91 percent (Illinois). In other words, in every single state in the US, over three quarters of e-mails sent are junk. The average spam level in the US was 86 percent in June. (link)