Spam in every pot
An insidious, (relatively) new form of spam exploits a laxly designed aspect of Windows to pop commercial messages onto your screen and make them appear to be system notifications. Details here. It won't work if you have a properly configured firewall, and you can turn off the "messenger" service that makes it possible pretty easily. Still, it's a depressing indication that the spammers of the world will dragoon into service any little nook or cranny of your computer's technology and turn it into a conduit for worthless commercial messages you will never ever respond to. Makes me wanna holler... Meanwhile, IBM published this paper by David Mertz reviewing and field-testing several different spam-defeating technologies. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

10:46:06 AM  #  

World Business Briefing: Australia and New Zealand. QANTAS TO BUY AIR NEW ZEALAND STAKE;. [New York Times: Business]
10:45:21 AM  #  

Books and blogs. A while back I mentioned Erik Benson's All Consuming site. It continues to intrigue me, and I've now signed up for the weekly RSS feed. Inspired by Weblog BookWatch, Erik's service makes books, as well as people, an organizing principle of  blogspace. So here's a little experiment. I'm going to cite some books I've read recently, and have been thinking about, in order to see what kind of discussion is reflected back through All Consuming. ... [Jon's Radio]
10:44:01 AM  #  

What's not to fear?.

Tom: Informationally more aware. A sample:

The point is, serious privacy concerns are heightened by the very communications strategies that apparently were supposed to allay them.

Read down through the prior post to see the full range of his concerns. Interesting stuff.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]
10:43:09 AM  #  

Multimedia Moblogging. The moment I heard of Howard Rheingold's concept of 'Smart Mobs' I immediately had this vision of 'Tools for the Mobs'. Joi - at the time - was talking allot about posting blogs from cell phones, but it delights me to see he's taken that notion further to (what I believe is) a logical extension of an end-users digital identity.

That notion includes 'private clouds' of family members, friends or colleagues - who have permission to be part of your 'inner circle' - which just happen to coincide with the legal limits of 'Fair Use'. These private clouds are the folks who care about whether or not you're on the toilet or how much cash you've got in your pocket. They also (in my opinion) are the ones who have the RIGHT to share your music, fav TV shows, movies or books you're reading.

Joi's vision has folks' status, location, state - an intricate part of how and why they communicate and blog. By enhancing blogging tools with templates and structure so that new types of 'micro-content' can be posted, interchanged and interacted with - these new kind of tools can form the mesh between on-line information, communication and real space. [Smart Mobs]

10:42:18 AM  #