Like the Poor, Spam Is Always With Us

Network World has an interesting article called “CAN-SPAM: What Went Wrong?” This title is akin to: “Subprime Mortgages: A Bad Idea?” There are three depressing trends: spam remains a huge problem, both in IT costs and in volume; legal efforts have been mostly useless; and experts still disagree about solutions. There are two interesting ones: [...]

Notes on Ubuntu - But Does Anyone Care?

At Lotusphere 2008, IBM announced that Lotus Notes 8.5 will run on Ubuntu Linux 7.0. This shows IBM’s ongoing commitment to Linux - even on the desktop. And any Linux desktop users help IBM in its ongoing competition with Microsoft. (Domino, the server side to Notes, runs on virtually everything. I remember testing it on [...]

Trademarks, Resurrected

My former employer Lotus has (re)-launched Symphony, an office applications suite that competes with Microsoft Office. (Yes, I know this is like sending Elmo to take on Darth Vader.) Symphony uses Open Document Format, an open standard for application files.
The fun part is that this is the sequel to Symphony - the original, released in [...]

Reputation Economies Symposium at Yale

On December 8th I’ll have the privilege of speaking alongside many smart people at a symposium put on by the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. The title is Reputation Economies in Cyberspace. The topic could hardly be more timely. Admission to the day-long event, sponsored by Microsoft, is available to [...]

Group Ranks Internet Services, Slams Google

The UK-based advocacy group Privacy International has released a preliminary draft of a provocative study which includes a ranking of major internet companies on their overall privacy practices.
The biggest bombshell in the study must be the ranking of Google as the worst company — alone in the lowest of six color-coded ranks of companies, in [...]

Hackers, Badware, and Google

Ethan Zuckerman has a fantastic post up about Google’s response to scams by hackers who hijack other peoples’ blogs and wikis: it lists the link with the warning message, “This site may harm your computer.” They do so based on analysis by the Berkman Center’s rapidly growing “Stop Badware” project, which analyzes malicious code [...]

In Defense of Zune

The reaction (”turkey… disaster”) to Microsoft’s Zune player has been almost uniformly caustic. (Tim rightly points out that Apple’s iPod, with which the Zune is contrasted unfavorably in most cases, was developed in an entirely different legal universe.) There are a lot of problems with the Zune, most prominently that PlaysForSure really means PlaysForNow. Apple’s [...]

The Gamut of “Identity Management” in CS Monitor

There is a nice story in today’s Christian Science Monitor about online identity management (which quotes me, but is good anyway). The author, Christian Lupsa, surveys three services with very different areas of focus — underscoring in the process how malleable and undefined the notion of “identity management” remains:

ClaimId allows users to tag [...]

Zune stinks? Blame Grokster.

Andy Ihnatko is none too impressed with Microsoft’s new Zune portable media player. His review essay in what the rest of us think of as Roger Ebert’s newspaper declares the Zune “just plain dreadful,” “absurd,” “immune to success,” and “about as pleasant as having an airbag deploy in your face.” And that is just [...]

Seltzer on Microsoft Vista EULA

Wendy Seltzer has dissected the End User License Agreement (the agreement where the user needs to click “I Agree”) for Microsoft’s new Windows Vista operating system. She is not impressed. Many commenters to her post chime in with their own objections to the EULA.
Discussion question: Is this “badware“?

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