February 15, 2003

Merle Rubin reviews Anti-Semitism: Myth and Hate From Antiquity to the Present by Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer. 10:31:25 PM

The New York Times looks at the problems facing Microsoft as it tried to increase sales of the Xbox. 10:31:10 PM

The National Post reports that the Canadian military is very upset that the government has decided to send troops to Afghanistan, most likely preventing it from taking part in any war in Iraq. Military commanders hoped that Canada could provide the core of a battle group to be the reconnaissance element of a US or British division thus proving that the army was still capable of helping Canada's allies. Now Canadians will direct traffic in Kabul. 10:30:32 PM

Slashdot and other tech sites have followed on The Inquirer’s (like The Register but worse) reporting on Microsoft Research’s Penny Black project to reduce email spam. The project is a means to allow people to send e-mail to your computer only if they are on your personal preapproved list or if they first pay either in monetary form or with computing resources. Ideas of paying the receiver per email are common, in the science fiction book Earthweb by Marc Stiegler; a person’s computer would automatically delete any email that was not preapproved unless the sender agreed in advance to pay the recipient to read it. People still sent spam, but only highly targeted messages. On the downside, the antagonist of the novel was a series automated space probes from another star system that were attempting to destroy the Earth – people had much more to worry about than spam. 10:27:45 PM