It’s time to get rid of email

There are few things in life that I hate more than spam.  But I hate receiving one type of message even more:  delivery status notifications for spam that was sent to bad email addresses, spoofing my address as the sender.  Lately, I’ve been getting a couple hundred of these per day.  Of course, that means that probably several thousand spam messages reached their destination, fingering me as the sender.  I wonder how many mail servers have black-listed me.  Even the most intelligent spam filters have probably begun to assign a high spam probability to my address.

As far as I know, there’s very little that can be done about this.  SMTP was not designed with spammers in mind.  Back when email protocols began evolving in the ’70’s, the only people who used email were innocent geeks.  Even though the first spam message was sent thirty years ago, spam didn’t really become a popular marketing tool until everyone and their grandmother got on the Internet in the 1990’s.

Spam isn’t the only reason why email is a broken communication medium, though:

  1. Delivery is not guaranteed.  Between potential problems with your email client, a server hiccup somewhere in between, or any number of junk mail filters that your message might encounter along its journey, the odds of it actually reaching its destination are getting worse daily.
  2. Too much noise.  Even if your message reaches its intended audience’s inbox, they might not even notice it among all the other messages they receive every day — especially since 90% of the ones that aren’t caught by spam filters are still spam.
  3. It isn’t private.  Sure, you can set up secure email, but who goes to the trouble?  In my experience, many companies send sensitive business plans over unsecured email.  Individuals, too, often send personal information over that same public channel — even passwords.
  4. Sender spoofing means you can’t trust that the message is from the person that claims to be the sender.  If you hit “Reply”, you’d better examine the resulting Reply-to address, or you might not know to whom you’re telling all your deepest secrets.
  5. HTML mail makes it easy to hide phishing links.  A savvy email recipient will never click a link in an HTML email without viewing the source to verify the domain — but how easy is it for most people to be fooled?

Clearly, the time has come for a replacement for email.  We need a secure, private service with guaranteed delivery, verified identity, and no spam.  Messages should be organized into discrete conversations to which only specific people are granted access — to read or to contribute.

Hmm…I may have just given myself an idea…

Blu-Ray vs. DVD: The New Format War?

By Patrick Biz
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

With HD DVD now buried six feet under and all major Hollywood studios onboard in the Blu-ray camp, the stars are aligned for next-generation format sales to finally take off. Surprisingly, prices aren’t falling, and customers still aren’t buying.

The War Has Just Begun

Don’t laugh, Blu-ray vs. DVD is really THE new format war. When comparing specs from Blu-ray and DVD players, on paper, Blu-ray has a clear advantage. But on the field, it’s a different story. Truth is, there are many reasons why consumers are happy with the traditional DVD format:

  • They barely see the audio/video improvement
  • They already own a DVD player
  • DVD Players are much cheaper to buy
  • DVDs are 30% to 40% cheaper than Blu-ray disks
  • Video stores have considerably more DVDs for rental
  • While this one may seem odd, the fact that DVDs are easier to copy also plays in favor of the old poorly protected format

Upconverting DVD Players: Simply Too Good?

If you want to take your DVD collection to the next level on your sexy high-definition television, get yourself an upscalling DVD player, also known as an up-converter, such as the Sony DVP-NS700H/B, the OPPO DV-980H or the Panasonic DVD-S54K. Equipped with an HDMI cable, these players upscale the 480p signal to 1080i/1080p by using complex maths to improve color ratios, contrasts and the overall picture quality. Of course, with a native signal of 480p, they cannot beat the native resolution of a Blu-ray disk that’s 1080p. But the wow effect is not significant enough to make people drop 400 bucks (and up) on a Blu-ray player.

Not Enough Bang For The Buck

This is where DVDs overtake Blu-ray by a mile. Looking at the concept of bang for the buck from a mathematical and graphical perspective, we understand that when prices go up, devices usually provide more features. At a certain price though, quality cannot sustain value as cost increases substantially, while the product itself has less and less to offer. DVDs and up-converting DVD players are comfortably sitting in the bang for the buck area of the graph, while Blu-ray has not yet fallen from the overpriced zone.

Christmas 2008

While many of you may be tempted to wait for the holiday season before taking the next-generation format highway, experts are expecting no significant decrease in price in the upcoming months. Surprisingly, Blu-ray prices have gone up since the death of HD-DVD. Also, the rising price of oil increases transportation costs, and directly impacts the production of plastic.

The format war is far from being over, and the economical situation resulting may restrain the Blu-ray group from making it to your living room. All things considered, DVD may end up being a stronger contender than HD DVD ever was.

Edit: Nearly 6 months have past since we wrote this article, and the situation has changed quite a lot since then. With Christmas time coming, it is now possible to get a very good blu-ray player for around $200, namely the Samsung BD-1500. Amazon.com is the cheapest place to get it right now.

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New Virtual Telescope Offers Awesome Views

By JR Raphael
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

There’s a new way to access far away galaxies right from your home computer.

Microsoft has just unveiled its long-awaited WorldWide Telescope utility. The program lets you check out views from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey — some of the same images actual NASA scientists use for their own explorations.

At a first glance, you might think you’re just inside another random computer-generated world. But once you realize that this is the real deal and that you’re looking at the actual universe, these views will blow you away. You can check out the stars in such clarity that you’ll feel as if you were in space yourself.

Microsoft hopes the tool will become an important part of future education that’ll inspire students and teachers alike. And so far, it’s getting rave reviews.

“Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then cross-fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago,” explained Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics researcher Roy Gould.

“I believe this new creation from Microsoft will have a profound impact on the way we view the universe.”

The software isn’t for the faintly resourced. It requires a full gig of hard drive space, with a recommended 10 gigs for optimal usage. Microsoft also recommends two gigs of RAM for the best viewing experience, and you have to have .NET Framework 2.0 or later and DirectX 9.0 or later to play.

WorldWide Telescope provides some astonishing images, no doubt. For me, though, Google’s easy-to-use, download-free Google Sky does the same trick with a lot less hassle. One click, a few seconds load time, and you’re getting pretty impressive sights from worlds far, far away. This space cowboy gives Microsoft a nice nod but ultimately tips his hat to the G-team once again.

Make life easier by automating all your Twitter invites

By Mark O’Neill

There’s no need to tell you that I am Mr Twitter. You only need to look through the GAS archives to know that. But the one thing that irritated me about Twitter was going through each email that told me that someone was now following me and then going to that person’s Twitter profile, following them, going to the next email, following them… it got a bit tedious after a while. I mean, I get enough email in my day without getting even more. There had to be a way to automate all of this… right?

It turns out there is a way. There’s a website called TweetLater which is marketed as a site where you can schedule Twitter messages to be posted in the future. But you can also tell it to auto-accept people who are following you and follow them right back on your behalf. It will even send an automated thank you message to their Twitter account! So how do you set it up?

Continue reading ›

NSA Cyber-WarGames Showcases NSA Takedown Potential

By PatB
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

The NSA just finished a series of cyber-warfare gaming with itself as the attackers.  The defenders?  The military academies, including the Naval Academy in Annapolis, the Air Force Academy in Colorado, and the US Military Academy in West Point.  For the second year in a row, the Army came in first place in the exercise.

But what is more interesting than the winner is the information this article from Wired here reveals about the NSA, including the facts that they have the legal authority to disable any US network, and can classify attack codes based on skill level of an adversary.

From Wired:

For four days in late April, the National Security Agency — the nation’s most secretive repository of spooks, snoops and electronic eavesdroppers — directed coordinated assaults on custom-built networks at seven of the nation’s military academies, including West Point, the Army university 50 miles north of New York City.

It was all part of the seventh annual Cyber Defense Exercise, a training event for future military IT specialists. The exercise offered a rare window into the NSA’s toolkit for infiltrating, corrupting or destroying computer networks.

For the second year in a row, the Army placed first over the Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and others, winning geek bragging rights and the privilege of holding onto a gaudy, 60-pound brass trophy festooned with bald eagles and American flags. Adams credits the team’s thorough preparation and their excellent teamwork despite the round-the-clock schedule.

Even with a solid network design and passable software choices, there was an element of intuitiveness required to defend against the NSA, especially once it became clear the agency was using minor, and perhaps somewhat obvious, attacks to screen for sneakier, more serious ones.

Legal limitations were a surprising obstacle to a realistic exercise. Ideally, the teams would be allowed to attack other schools’ networks while also defending their own. But only the NSA, with its arsenal of waivers, loopholes, special authorizations (and heaven knows what else) is allowed to take down a U.S. network.

And despite the relative sophistication of the NSA’s assaults, the agency told Wired.com that it had tailored its attacks to be just “a little too hard for the strongest undergraduate team to deal with, so that we could distinguish the strongest teams from the weaker ones.”

In other words, grasshopper, nice work — but the NSA is capable of much craftier network take-downs.

When it comes to Cyber-Warfare, I’m happy to have the NSA on our side.

High-Tech Glove Lets You Speak With Your Hands

By JR Raphael
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Watch out, Power Glove: There’s a new sensor-based item on the market, and this one has the potential to change lives.

A team of computer engineering students at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a glove that can convert hand movements into spoken words. The idea is to give deaf people an easy way to use American Sign Language to communicate over the phone. Make a fist, the phone says “good morning.” Hold out two fingers and a thumb, it says “thank you for your time.”

The guys are getting a lot of attention for this little class project. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette did an entire feature about them, and their web site detailing their work is seeing plenty of visitors these days.

It’s no surprise, either. They’ve already figured out a way to automatically send the gestures directly into a user’s cell phone, making communication almost instant. The phone uses software to translate the electronic message first into text, then into spoken voice. The team’s planning to put the glove into testing with actual hearing-impaired users in the next few months.

This class seems to have a record of success. The Post-Gazette says the product created by one of last year’s teams is now on the market. It’s a bar code reader that blind people can use to scan an item in any store, then hear details about what it is and how much it costs.

Not bad for a bunch of college kids. I think my biggest accomplishment back then was freezing a textbook into a solid block of ice and dropping it off a 15 story building. Though, come to think of it, that was pretty cool. Advantage JR.

The X-Files movie trailer is finally out

By Mark O’Neill

For those who have been waiting patiently for the upcoming X-Files movie trailer to come out, wait no more – it’s finally out.

It doesn’t show that much but you do get to see some revealing scenes – including a gorgeous Gillian Anderson. Plus my girlfriend found David Duchovny quite delicious too apparently.   Scottish comedian and actor Billy Connolly also looks good. I’m sure he and David had a great time on the set as the two of them probably share the same sense of humour, especially with the last line of the trailer when Connolly remarks “so you believe in these kind of things then?”

But how well is the movie going to do after a break of six years? That’s the big question. Does the X-Files still have its mojo? Do YOU still believe?

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“We are the Borg Collective…we are writing a wiki book….”

By Mark O’Neill

As a professional writer (and one who is also working on a novel), I found the following project quite amusing and also quite cringing in its own way. Penguin Books and De Montfort University wanted to see if a novel could be written by a collective group of people using wiki software (the same software that Wikipedia uses) and thereby blow away the image of the solitary writer sitting toiling away at his craft year after year.

So someone can help to write chapter one, then someone else can come along and rewrite that part if they didn’t like what the previous person had written and so on… sounds like a recipe for total anarchy if you ask me.

1,500 people ended up taking part in the project which came to be known as A Million Penguins and it is now finished for you to read. If you can make it as far as Chapter Two without losing the will to live that is.

The critics’ verdict? Bloody awful. That’s not just my opinion but everyone’s. As one blog pointed out, being a wiki, the project was plagued by vandals from day one. Gawker too didn’t really have nice things to say about it either. I mean, just look at the opening paragraph :

The deep waters, black as ink, began to swell and recede into an uncertain distance. A gray ominous mist obscured the horizon. The ocean expanse seemed to darken in disapproval. Crashing tides sounded groans of agonized discontent. The ocean pulsed with a frightening, vital force. Although hard to imagine, life existed beneath. It’s infinite underbelly was teeming with life, a monstrous collection of finned, tentacled, toxic, and slimy parts. Below its surface lay the wreckage of countless souls. But we had dared to journey across it. Some had even been brave enough to explore its sable velveteen depths, and have yet to come up for precious air….”

Jesus… it’s enough to make my English teacher have a multiple coronary!   As a social experiment, I’m sure it was interesting but it sure isn’t Shakespeare!

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