03 June 2003

Spam growth in the 'hood TMTM -- Tony Bowden received more than 15,000 spams in May 2003. That's as depressing as my getting an average of 320 unwanted e-mails each day. Tony expects to hit nearly 20,000 spams in June. It's good he can depend on Spam Assassin to handle most of this unwanted flow. Tony Bowden: Spam growth x_ref1482 9:50:40 AM

02 June 2003

Quick Facts about Ethernet FT -- The near-ubiquity of the Ethernet, now 30 years old, illustrates some truths about technology. Simple engineering often trumps more elaborate alternatives. Open standards, which can be used and developed by anyone, have an advantage over solutions controlled by one company. If the Internet is the information superhighway, Ethernet technology is the on-ramp. The original Xerox system moved data between computers at a sedate 2.94 megabits per second, roughly a paragraphy per second. The latest versions run at speeds of 10 gigabits, or 10,000 megabits per second. Robert Metcalfe named his invention after the "luminiferous ether," the mystical substance once thought to enable propagation of electromagnetic waves through space. The Token Ring system developed in the 1980s by IBM was seen as superior by many engineers. Intel is building gigabit Ethernet into chipsets for personal computers. The extra speed will faciliate downloading of huge databases, video streams and enable full-screen videoconferences. Scott Morrison: "Internet's brave little engine gathers speed" in The Financial Times, May 21, 2003 x_ref140 2:11:24 PM

Digitising out-of-copyright books GUARDIAN -- Challenges face those who want to digitise out-of-print books. Brewster Kahle reckons there are 16m books in the public domain in the USA, and only about 20,000 have been digitised. Some individuals are helping. Michael Hart's long-running Project Gutenbergy co-ordinates Internet volunteers who retype out-of-copyright books. Gretchen Phillips in Texas is scanning children's books. Charles Franks is digitising books using OCR with volunteers during distributed proof reading. Indians can scan a book for $1 cmpared with $9 in the USA. Jack Schofield: "Drive to put in a good word" in The Guardian, May 1, 2003. x_ref101ww 8:22:33 AM

How fraudsters set traps and take the credit FT -- Payment fraud has declined from the early days of e-commerce. Online credit card fraud has fallen to just over 2% of all credit card transactions, according to Celent Communications. The incidence of fraud in Internet transactions is more than 20 times higher than it is in the offline world, where only around 0.1% of purchases are deceptive. Five years ago, less than 5% of reported cases of identity theft happened online. By last year that figure had risen to 15% and it will probably top 25% by 2006, according to Celent. Around half of the complaints lodged in 2002 with the Internet Fraud Complaint Center stemmed from Internet auctions. Richard Waters: How fraudsters set traps and take the credit in FT-IT Review, May 21, 2003 x_ref15 8:13:58 AM

Irish food prices highest in EU GARRINGREEN ISDN -- If food prices in Ireland could be brought to the average EU level, it would be equivalent to a 2% pay increase for the average industrial earner and a 4.6% increase in income for an old age pensioner. John Fingleton: "Remove the shackles from retail and distribution sectors" in The Irish Times, May 30, 2003. x_ref17h 5:29:43 AM