:Archives (April 17, 2003)

Thursday April 17

Spam, Spam and More Spam

spam   Always On includes a post by Phil Goldman, founder and CEO of Mailblocks and former co-founder of WebTV, commenting that spam is killing consumer e-mail and that the Web portals -- which dominate consumer e-mail -- are doing nothing about it. The State of Consumer Email: Consumers Deserve Better :: AO

Well, I think that Mailblocks is doing nothing, too. Filtering and blocking e-mail is a quixotic exercise, because spammers proliferate domains and e-mail addresses and because doing so only increases the chances that good e-mail will be filtered out. Mailblocks requires human confirmation, from the sender, if a "from" address is not in the recipient's address book, which of course just makes getting mail from new people -- like prospective clients, long-lost childhood friends, etc. -- problematic.

Goldman does say:

It’s perfectly clear to me that the industry needs to turn the way we deal with consumer email and spam on its head. Otherwise we risk killing the killer Internet app.

Now I can agree with that entirely. See Suing Spammers.

 Posted by glenn at 05:45 PM | Comments (0)

Wild Wild East

Russian political reformer Sergey Yushenkov, head of the "Liberal Russia" party and deputy in the State Duma lower chamber, was killed in a gangland-style execution on the streets of Moscow this evening. Pravda says that "[a]s it is supposed, Yushenkov's death might be linked to his political activities." [PRAVDA.Ru]. No shit, Sherlock!

Really, there's no question he was rubbed out, only whether Russian President Vladamir Putin can be linked to the assasination. The Liberal Russia party was founded last year with the financial backing of Boris Berezovsky, a self-exiled tycoon and opponent of Putin. Yushenkov's murder comes just one day after Liberal Russia announced it would challenge the Putin government in elections. Salon quotes Viktor Pokhmelkin, co-chairman of Liberal Russia, as saying he is certain it was a contract killing.

"It has the obvious handwriting of a professional," Pokhmelkin told Rossiya television, referring to the gun left at the scene -- considered a typical taunting gesture of hired killers in Russia.

And such a high-profile killing stands out even in a country where murders of politicians and businessmen are relatively common, observes BBC's Russian affairs analyst Stephen Dalziel.

So the new East is acting a lot like the Wild, Wild West. And we thought there was anarchy in Baghdad.

 Posted by glenn at 05:19 PM | Comments (0)