I have just finished “a simple guide to email use”:http://www.davidbrake.org/dealingwithemail/ for individuals or companies to accompany my book, “Dealing with E-mail”. It features additional material and numerous web links covering anti-spam and anti-virus techniques, legal issues, using email sensitively and effectively to market your products or services and simple ways to organize your old e-mail messages for easy retrieval.

I hope you like it – if you have any additional ideas, comments or (heaven forbid) corrections, please comment below.

Carrying the Internet over the electricity grid is a solution to problems of broadband availability in rural areas that has been long-discussed but ran into persistent problems with radio and radar interference in earlier trials. Now, apparently, trials in Crieff, Campbeltown and Stonehaven in Scotland “have been successful”:http://www.vnunet.com/News/1143183 and Scottish Hydro-Electric is expanding its coverage to Winchester in England. It is charging £29 per month which is competitive with “conventional” ADSL but offers 1Mb of bandwidth in both directions instead of the 512Kbps download/256Kbps upload speed offered by BT and others. Another benefit is that you can plug into broadband anywhere in your house instead of relying on a single access point.

Simon Bisson has written a handy piece for the Guardian giving an overview of the software available to protect your business’ e-mail and how and why to deploy it.

A BBC correspondent’s personal account of India’s digital divide.

… but unfortunately when the “Software & Information Industry Association”:http://www.spa.org/ tried to educate kids with this video “Don’t Copy That Floppy”:http://static.hugi.is/video/fyndin/dctf-1.wmv they produced something truly embarrassing (which is presumably why the video is – ironically – now only available as a file on a server in Iceland).

(The SIIA’s rapping lecturer)

I wonder if it is possible to tell kids not to break the law or to avoid doing something stupid without coming across as ridiculous or painfully earnest?

_Thanks to “NTK”:http://www.ntk.net/2003/08/29/ for the link_

Also see “this New York Times article”:http://mbhs.bergtraum.k12.ny.us/cybereng/nyt/mbhs-nyt.htm – again, ironically, pirated from the NYT archives (though admittedly for educational use).videos shemale amature sexvideos women sex abusedteenagers more alcohol50 cent sex tapeporn pics amatueradult porn forumadult sextoy shoptechniques sex advertising appeal Map

I just finished reading Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide by Mark Warschauer and I was bowled over. This is to my mind the academic text on this subject – I agree with him almost throughout. He wrote a Scientific American piece which summarised some of his thinking available in PDF form. You may also want to see this First Monday article for a more academic take.movies lesbian homemovies pussy lesbians lickingclit lick mybest list scene sex moviesmovies porn list micheals sean ofmovie little darlingslittle movie mermaidtheaters loews moviemovie documentary making amovie making a

There seems to be a gulf between what the BBC reported its head to have said and what a transcript of the speech revealed. There has been some excited discussion by Danny O’Brien and Alan Connor (and, inevitably, on Slashdot and kuro5hin) that seem based on what they would like this announcement to be rather than what it is.

Matt Jones (who works at the BBC) says the move is, “brave and disruptive – and will have to be executed as such, with no half-measures or compromises to vested interests.”

In fact, while BBC News’ summary suggests Dyke said the Creative Archive would contain “all the corporation’s programme archives”, the speech actually promised to allow “parts of our programmes, where we own the rights, to be available to anyone in the UK to download” (emphasis mine). Nothing there about all of the BBC’s archives. And the example he uses – kids downloading, “real moving pictures which would turn their project into an exciting multi-media presentation” make it sound like a collection of digital clip-art.
(more…)

The BBC’s director general has announced “plans to give the public full access to all the corporation’s programme archives… everyone would in future be able to download BBC radio and TV programmes from the internet.”

Well, the announcement certainly sounds huge, but as Danny O’Brien reflects, “Sorting out the contractual issues with anything but completely internally produced content will be difficult ” – a huge understatement! And who will pay the cost to digitise and index all that content? Who will decide when enough has been digitised? Will it be seen as a waste of license fee payments to “super-serve” the broadband-using public? Will the BBC actually encourage the use of file sharing applications in order to reduce its bandwidth charges? The list of questions goes on and on…

But even if a fraction of what is possible is achieved, this is a great step forward and it will open a number of important debates.movies blonde free sexfree throat deep moviemovies pussy eating freefacial movies gay freeporn gay movies men freefree samples movie gaymovies free gay postporn movies free granny Map

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?

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