Interesting piece on the downside of Amazon’s new book-searching feature, launched last month, which allows customers to do a full-text search on more than 120,000 books. The Register reports that it has quietly disabled printing after researchers managed to print out 108 consecutive pages from a bestselling book. As a failed bookseller, I sympathise. … Read more
Further to my posting about SpamCop, it seems that a new virus, actually a worm, is aiming at bringing down SpamCop and some other anti-spam sites. Is it more evidence of collusion between sleazy spammers and spotty virus writers? Sophos reports that W32/Mimail-E is a worm which spreads via email using addresses harvested from … Read more
It’s not clear whether this is another salvo in the Spam War, but if it is, it’s a novel one. A major anti-spam website, SpamCop, was taken off air — by the registrar, SlashDot reports. Could it be a move by a spammer frustrated by the efforts of SpamCop to eat into their little game?
In the end this may be more important than anything else in the evolution of technology: information is growing very, very fast. The BBC quotes a study by the University of California, Berkeley that: every year 800MB of information is produced for every person on the planet; information stored on paper, film, magnetic and optical … Read more
A story from Reuters that says one of the biggest hurdles facing RFID tags — the widgets that store information about products — is that they still aren’t very good. “The tags fall far below the 99 percent reliability rate of UPC tags because of the difficulty of transmitting clean radio signals,” the piece says. … Read more