Senator:
There oughta be a law against Gmail
Many people found Google’s announcement last month that
it intended to create “Gmail” mildly
alarming from a big brother standpoint. California State Sen. Liz Figueroa finds it illegal. Gmail
would be a free email service with huge storage capabilities in
return for allowing Google’s robots to scan incoming email and then
deliver targeted ads based on the information. The senator said yesterday
that she’s drafting anti-Gmail legislation for what she likened
to having a billboard in the middle of your house. Whether the
legislation passes or
not, the measure probably won’t be the last.
Privacy advocates in the United States and abroad are screaming over Gmail,
even before it has been formally launched. Google faces a tougher
challenge in Europe than at home, where privacy laws are much stricter.
Some advocacy groups have already filed complaints with United
Kingdom authorities,
saying Gmail violates European laws by not allowing users the
ability to permanently delete some emails. Stateside, Google is warding
off attacks with claims of confidence in its compliance with international
privacy laws.
Asian
portal sues Microsoft for anti-trust breach
South Korea has become the latest country to go on the
offensive against Microsoft. Yesterday the country’s top internet portal
filed an anti-trust suit against the Washington-based software
manufacturer. Daum Communications alleges that by bundling instant
messenger with Windows XP, Microsoft violates
fair trade rules. The company is asking for about $8 million following a
failed effort to block the sale of Windows XP in South Korea. Last month
the European Commission levied a $611 million fine on Microsoft for a
similar bundling violation, and the company also has settled an anti-trust
suit with the U.S. government. Microsoft claims
the messenger inclusion doesn’t violate fair trade
because consumers are not forced to use it.
New
e-prank crowns Kerry king of waffles
The Bush campaign is trying to paint likely Democratic
presidential nominee John Kerry as a waffler. Looks like they’re getting
some help from the online community. A group of anti-Kerry jokesters are
coordinating an effort to get the candidate’s web site,
www.johnkerry.com, to pop up when the word “waffles” is typed into a
search engine. Yesterday johnkerry.com zoomed to the top of Yahoo’s and
MSN Search’s results page
for
the keyword
waffles, though it
wasn’t in the top 50 for Google. The prank is called Google bombing, and
it’s been used against President Bush before – last year searches for
“miserable failure” turned up Bush’s whitehouse.gov biography. A
Duquesne University law
student started the
waffle campaign via his blog. Google bombing works by coordinating an
effort to have many web
sites link to the same page using the same descriptive
words. The search engine’s
algorithm, which ranks pages largely by the number of incoming links, is
fooled into thinking the link has relevance and places it higher in its
rankings. The Kerry wafflers hope to get johnkerry.com and waffles to No.
1 on Google by election day.
Yikes!
Spam may hit 142B in four years.
How
much
spam
can
be left to send? Try 142
billion messages by 2008 if it keeps up its current rate of growth. A new
study from Palo Alto, Calif.’s Radicati Group finds that spam will
continue to make up more than half of all emails sent unless drastic
measures are taken. Last year spam accounted for 15 billion emails,
according to Radicati, though
another
firm, Brightmail, found significantly more (see today's article in Media
Life). This
year
Radicati
estimates that number will more than double to 35 billion.
Things are a little worse at home than at work. Radicati found that 17
percent of business email, compared
with
30 percent of consumer email, is spam.
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