The BBC reports a boom in Fake universities on the web. Of course there are lots of fakes which are only meant to deceive employers, but these seems to be designed to try to rip off hapless punters who don’t realise that they aren’t properly academically accredited. Check out Greater Manchester University from the Internet archive – “April 2003”:http://web.archive.org/web/20030404133454/www.gm-edu.co.uk/index.htm – and compare with the “current site”:http://www.gm-edu.co.uk/ for example… Here’s a hint for the University-seeker – if it doesn’t have .ac.uk at the end (in the UK) or .edu at the end (in the US) it isn’t a proper university!

An interesting discussion going on at the very insightful “TheFeature”:http://www.thefeature.com/ (which is all about ‘the mobile internet’). It was sparked by an article by “Howard Rheingold”:http://www.rheingold.com/ all about the potential dangers of ubiquitous location-aware devices. Some good points made about the need for sensible default settings (since few people change their defaults) and I pitched in:

Making “off” appear to be the same as “out of network range” is only a social protection as long as the technology doesn’t work reliably. The old phone excuse of “you’re breaking up I’ll call you back” really doesn’t work any more across most of the UK, for example – the network is just too good!

If your boss requires you to be locatable at all times during work hours you may not be able to pretend the technology doesn’t work – so the only protection for the individual against such harassment would be a social taboo against such behaviour – and I don’t think we can guarantee this will happen.

The only way I think this kind of thing can be prevented would be to make it illegal for a workplace to track someone’s location without a strong reason.

Mark Davies, the founder of BusyInternet, Ghana’s biggest cybercafe, told the BBC World Service’s latest “Go Digital”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsa/n5ctrl/progs/03/go_digital/24nov.ram programme that Yahoo had threatened to block all purchases to “Yahoo-hosted stores”:http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/index.php from Ghanaian or Nigerian addresses because of the widespread fraudulent use of credit cards from his cafe. To try to head off this problem, he simply blocked all shopping. It’s extraordinary that a major portal like Yahoo could consider redlining entire nations, and that the “solution” should be for a cybercafe to block all ecommerce – particularly in a country where cybercafes may represent the only accessible Internet connection with the outside world.

A search turned up an article in “Balancing Act”:http://www.balancingact-africa.com/news/back/balancing-act_158.html from May this year with much more detail. According to the Yahoo security consultant:

The point is, 99.999% of purchases from Ghana are fraud. At least 99% of Yahoo stores don’t ship internationally anyway. Our fraud orders are up literally about 1000 percent over last year, almost all from Ghana. The cost to us in time and effort has reached the breaking point.

While it is certainly understandable why the move was threatened, imagine the furore if Yahoo had unilaterally threatened to block, say, all ecommerce from Portugal. This reveals how much unaccountable power these organizations have.

I expressed worries about the new Outlook in an “earlier posting”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_email_discoveries.html#000904. It seems if you receive an email message using “Information Rights Management”:http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/editions/technologies/irm.asp but don’t have the latest version of Outlook there is still a way to read it – you have to download an “Internet Explorer plugin”:http://r.office.microsoft.com/r/rlidRestrictedPermissionViewer?clid=1033 (and be given the necessary rights of course). It’s still a bit clumsy, though.

Microsoft’s new “Information Rights Management”:http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/editions/technologies/irm.asp software in Office 2003 will only let approved users open Outlook email messages which are ‘IRMed’ and allow users to set an expiry date after which their messages will die. Rather handy for business use, but if you “read the fine print”:http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/itcommunity/chats/trans/office/OFF0327.asp you find out that:
1) This is a subscription-based service, so if you use it you will be locked into paying Microsoft for ever after.
2) The only email software that will be able to read ‘IRMed’ messaged so far will be Outlook 2003 – and there are not even plans to make rights management work on the Mac.

I worry profoundly about what might happen if this proves popular. It might result in a situation where it’s a lot of hassle for non-Outlook email users to receive Outlook email and/or where people using Outlook end up having to remember who in their address book has Outlook and who doesn’t.

It also might actually make corporate email security worse – no technology fix is perfect and this might make people think they have solved the problem when in fact the only solution is eternal vigilance…

Like many other Moveable Type weblog owners I have been suffering from a recent onslaught of automated, offensive ads for porn posted as comments to messages. Jay Allen has just produced a “spam blocking tool for Moveable Type”:http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/ which should help some – I fear this is not a final solution to the problem but merely the start of a depressing “arms race” between spammers and weblog users which may substantially reduce the usefulness of weblogs for everyone. In a way I am surprised this took this long to happen, people being what they are.

P.S. I apologise in advance if you accidentally stumble across any offensive links in comments – it will take me a while to get around to deleting all of them because at least for the moment there is no easy way for me to bulk-delete comments.

Tom Coates comments on a phenomenon that I hope will not turn into a real problem – people posting spam as comments on weblogs. I’ve had some of that (which I have promptly deleted) but what I find odd is that none of it seems to have been automated – it’s actually been typed in by hand. I can’t imagine it would be worth anyone’s time to do that. But if someone finds a way to automate posting comments to popular weblogs it could start to become a real hassle.

I also seem to get a lot of people just typing stuff like ‘hi’ as a comment. I delete those comments as well since I can’t see anyone else being interested in reading it. If you do just want to say hello, please send me an email via my “contact me page”:http://www.davidbrake.org/contact.htm and if you can, tell me where you are from and how you found me.

At a forum about spam in May, NTT in Japan warned that, “the company’s 38 million customers still receive up to 30 wireless spam messages per day” and American wireless carriers are concerned the US could be next.

“…Federal law prohibits most telemarketers from dialing cell phones, but no such regulations prevent spammers from sending messages to addresses like 2025551212@cellphonecarrier.com. Because many text services carry a per-message charge, costs to consumers could mount quickly.”

Here in Europe cellphone spam does not seem to be too bad so far a) because we have better privacy protection anyway and b) because the sender pays for each message sent instead of the receiver paying to receive so truly bulk spams would be uneconomic.

Do you Nordics have problems with cell spam?

Not only is the idea of missile defense unworkable (and irrelevant, since missles are not nearly as worrying as other nuke delivery means, and destabilising if other countries become afraid that it might work) but it is emerging that even the Pentagon admits the program is in trouble according to this article in Slate.

Apparently, the Missile Defense Agency has suspended the space-based kinetic-energy boost-phase interceptor (one of the program’s most crucial components) on the grounds that the technology it involves is “not mature enough” to fund.

Yet Bush’s budget asks for $9.1 billion next year and even more in subsequent years to continue research…authority alabama finance loan department housingk loan interest rate 401mortgage loan 500 scoresupplemental alaska loansapplications 1003 loanloans access and software store accountscash application loan application advance paydayloan conforming 2007 limitsagri loansstated loans 100 subprimesex having amateurs18 eighteenteens 100street 8th analia latinas8teenboy bradley riversnineteen orwell george 1984 eighty-four videophotos sexy alicia keysagainst teen curfews Map

I was wondering when this issue would start receiving some attention. A recent survey discovered that on average 17 percent of “permission-based” marketing messages are “erroneously” tagged as spam by ISP spam filters and are therefore never seen by their intended recipients. I would imagine that at least some of that is due to large numbers of people tagging email as spam that comes to them because of dubious definitions of “permission” (where companies have passed on details of their addresses to other “partners” for example). It’s noteable that 46 percent of email from “catalogers” (whoever they are?) is bounced on average compared to less than 1% of non-profit email so I expect some of the email bounced arguably deserved to be.

Nonetheless this is a serious problem and may become more so over time if spam volumes continue to rise and more people start to rely increasingly on technical “fixes”. The problem is, of course, that people who really do want to receive some bulk-delivered email – notifications of special offers they requested, for example, or even political communications – will end up missing it and won’t even know it happened. That’s why I believe carefully-phrased legal solutions to spam will in the end be better solutions to the problem than technical “fixes”.

Some suggest spammers (who are mostly in the US – and apparently mostly in Florida) will simply move overseas to avoid regulation but I believe only a hard core will be willing to live with the disruption to their lives and businesses that moving overseas to a country without anti-spam laws would cause. Anyway it has to be worth at least trying to lessen irresponsible bulk emailing using the law.

Thanks to this Techdirt thread for the heads-up