While spam filters have gotten better over the years, meaning that email spam is now "manageable" for most people, some people are apparently arguing that a better solution to stopping spammers is to go after the web hosts who host the sites advertised in spam. That sounds nice in theory, but in practice it doesn't make that much sense. In fact, the article even notes that a guy who's been using this approach over the past four years has shut down over 30,000 sites... but the number of spammers out there has remained essentially constant. In other words, despite the entire premise of the article, this method doesn't seem to work very well in stopping spam. It's not too hard to figure out why. First of all, there are tons of different webhosts out there, and some less-than-scrupulous ones have found that hosting for spammers is quite lucrative. There's always going to be someone out there willing to host these sites... and even if there aren't, spammers will probably just focus on using their hijacked zombie networks to run web servers as well. Also, of course, lately spammers have found that stock spam is incredibly lucrative -- and that doesn't require any site to link to at all. So a method like this is pretty useless for any kind of stock spam or other popular spam like 419 advance fee frauds or even the spam messages designed to get you to install a trojan to draft your computer into a zombie network. Yes, it would be great if this method does help stop spam -- and we're not saying the folks doing it should stop. But, the reports claiming that this is a great way to stop spam probably could have used a little more support.

gbr writes "I've been trying to automatically synchronize data between a laptop and a server. When the laptop is connected to the network, I want all writes to automatically propagate across to the server. When the laptop is disconnected I want the laptop user to continue working with the local data. When the laptop is reconnected, I want the data to automatically re-sync. The issue is, the data on the server may have changed as well, which needs to propagate back to the laptop. The data doesn't contain anything too special, no database tables etc. It does contain binary data such as executables and word processing documents. I've looked at ChironFS, Unison file sync, and drbd. ChironFS needs a manual rebuild if a connection fails, and the user needs to know which machine contains the correct data. Unison requires the user to initiate the synchronization process manually every time, and drbd is just not meant for the job at hand. How do you automatically, and invisibly to the user (except in the case of conflicts), synchronize between a laptop and a server?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today at the An Event Apart Chicago conference, Liz Danzico wondered aloud what “seamless” means. You hear it bandied about often—especially in the form of a “seamless user experience.”

So, in 10 words or less, explain what “seamless” means in the context of the often-promised “seamless user experience.”

Today at the An Event Apart Chicago conference, Liz Danzico wondered aloud what “seamless” means. You hear it bandied about often—especially in the form of a “seamless user experience.”

So, in 10 words or less, explain what “seamless” means in the context of the often-promised “seamless user experience.”

JonathanF writes "If you were hoping judges would see reason and realize that just using a program that could violate copyright law is about as illegal as leaving your back door unlocked, think again. An Arizona district judge has ruled that a couple who hosted files in KaZaA is liable for over $40K in damages just because they 'made available' songs that could have been pirated by someone, somewhere. There's legal precedent, but how long do we have before the BitTorrent crew is sued?" The New York case testing the same theory is still pending.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last month, the entertainment industry (with the help of Senator Harry Reid) slipped a nice little amendment into the Higher Education Reauthorization Act, which funds colleges and universities as well as students. The amendment would require universities block p2p file sharing or lose funding. A number of universities complained (reasonably) about the expense involved in doing so, but some are arguing that it's about time that universities got away from just the cost argument and stood against this on principle. John points us to an argument for why universities should be fighting back against copyright maximalism, noting that, of all places, universities should recognize the benefits of a freer flow of information, and how trying to artificially limit information only leads to problems. The author notes that the high price of college textbooks should be example number one of how copyright can hinder the educational purpose of a university by artificially driving up the price. Of course, these days it seems like too many of the myths from the entertainment industry have been accepted as fact -- so it seems unlikely that universities will stand up against dangerous copyright practices any time soon.

I spent this morning reviewing the suggestions that came in last month for the OPML 2.0 spec, and doing some research for the ones I am going to attempt.

One of the questions came from Randy Morin, who wants to see examples of the category attribute. I did a little digging in the archive of this blog from late 2003 when I was working on a tool I called Channel Z, that was all about routing stuff from outlines to various buckets that would accumulate content over time.

Here's an example of an OPML file from December 2003, when I was actively exploring this stuff..

And while the dynamic site that was "aggregating" all this categorized content is long gone, archive.org is doing a good job of preserving it. Here's the RSS category, one that I posted to a lot. You can navigate using the links at the top of the page.

SkiifGeek writes "After news at the end of last year that mobile phones could be remotely eavesdropped, and there being a long history of remote eavesdropping possible on normal telephones, it was only a matter of time until VoIP devices were found to be eavesdropable (whether intentionally or not). In the last week there have been several exploit code releases, and it seems that some vendors who chose to write their own SIP networking stacks are at risk of their devices being easily eavesdropped on."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last November, radio broadcaster Clear Channel announced that it would be taken private by a group of private equity firms for $19 billion. But the deal is just one of many such deals whose status is currently in doubt, as financing and credit have significantly dried up of late. As part of the preconditions for the sale, Clear Channel agreed to dump nearly 400 local stations across the country. Now, however, that's proving to be a significant snag, as buyers of the stations are now going back on their agreements (via Deal Journal), due to the same financing issues affecting everyone else. Assuming that agreements can't be worked out, the company may be forced to slash the prices on these stations or risk imperiling its own plan to go private.

As regular BB readers know, fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machines that scan the brain in real-time are now being used for a variety of unusual and interesting purposes, from studying fear to "neuromarketing" to lie detection. Yesterday's New York Times looks at the trend and profiles start-ups Omneuron, which plans to treat pain, addiction, and depression, No Lie MRI, a firm that sells "truth verification" via brain scans. From the article:

Ed Boyden, an assistant professor at the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a researcher in neuroengineering, distinguishes sharply among different brain-scanning ventures. “If you want to commercialize this technology,” he said, “then the use has to approximate real-world situations.”

In his view, tests of fMRI truth verification don’t meet that criterion. For instance, in studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002 and 2005, subjects were told to conceal the identity of a card under questioning. FMRI was able to distinguish falsification 77 percent of the time.

(No Lie MRI chief exec Joel) Huizenga was so inspired by this research that he decided to start his company, confident that fMRI would soon identify lies 90 percent of the time.

But Dr. Boyden says he believes that being asked to tell a falsehood that everyone knows is a falsehood is not the same thing as lying to deceive someone. Thus, whatever brain patterns fMRI detects when a person constructs such a requested fiction may be different from whatever happens when we lie.

By contrast, Dr. Boyden says: “What I like about Omneuron is that it’s working with real-world situations. They gave people visualization strategies which they could monitor — and which produced real, measurable results.”

Link (Thanks, Marina Gorbis!)

Previously on BB:
• Reading minds with fMRI Link
• Neuroscience of altrusium Link
• Shocking Pac-Man-like game used to study fear Link
• Neurology of humor Link
• Science of forgetting Link
• Neuromarketing soda Link
• Brain scans predict buying behavior Link
• This is your brain on Super Bowl ads: research conclusion Link
• Neuroscience of branding Link
• Lie-detection via fMRI: mind-reading or coercion? Link
• Neuroeconomics: sub-prime mortgages exploit a bug in our brains Link

UPDATE: BB reader Karen Green points out that an article from the New Yorker last month about fMRI and lie detection is now available free at the magazine's site. Link

word munger writes "Commercial scholarly publishers are beginning to get afraid of the open access movement. They've hired a high-priced consultant to help them sway public opinion in favor of copyright restrictions on taxpayer-funded research. Funny thing is, their own website contains several copyright violations. It seems they pulled their images directly from the Getty Images website — watermarks and all — without paying for their use."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

andy1307 writes "According to an article in the New York Times, Lenovo has expressed an interest in buying Seagate. This has raised concerns among American government officials about the risks to national security in transferring high technology to China. From the article: 'In recent years, modern disk drives, used to store vast quantities of digital information securely, have become complex computing systems, complete with hundreds of thousands of lines of software that are used to ensure the integrity of data and to offer data encryption.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's interesting to hear that the New York Times gets approximately one request a day to delete an old article, because we get those requests at Techdirt as well (though, not nearly as often). In both cases, it's often due to someone who is upset that, even if the old article was accurate at the time, it's no longer the case any more -- but Google still calls it up on searches. Clark Hoyt, the current Public Editor of the NY Times discusses the struggle the paper has about what to do in those circumstances. Traditionally, they've just said "sorry, we can't do anything" to people. Now there are cases where they may add a correction or an additional note on incorrect information. There's even a bizarre (and somewhat silly) suggestion that they should have their archives simply "forget" certain "less important" news.

However, what may be most odd is that the article does not include one of the most obvious way to deal with these issues: post a response from the person who feels wronged, to give their side. When people complain about old posts on Techdirt, assuming they're factually accurate, we simply suggest that people put up a comment on the post explaining their side of the story. Of course, this response is quite similar to the new Google News comment feature that so many journalists seem up in arms about -- fearing that it will simply be used for spin, PR and distortion. What they forget is that if such comments are clearly marked as coming from the biased party, people can take that into account, and it provides the additional info necessary for people to make a more informed decision. The NY Times piece also leaves out a second option: that the person can get themselves in the news again, and have the old stories disappear into the dark caverns of Google's later page search results. In fact, that technique may be working for Allen Kraus, one of the guys used as an example in the NY Times piece. Thanks to this new NY Times piece, many of the links on Google appearing under his name are already about this particular story, rather than the old one he's upset about.

I took a picture of my new server closet. I could have used my Nikon, but it's extra work to get the pic off the camera and somewhere useful. The Nikon pic would have been better, but I'm lazy. The step I'm skipping is synching.

I think synching is a bad idea, but Apple's mobile technology is built around it. I dislike synching. I want my devices to go straight to the cloud, both ways. My podcast player should have a built-in podcatcher. And my podcast recorder should also be a publisher.

Seems unlikely that Google's phone will depend on synching. It will be more Dave Winer-compatible than the iPhone is.

But the iPhone is pretty cool when you tether it to Twitter through Flickr. Yeah.

I realized earlier today that I have a pretty good bag of tricks for Twitter and Flickr. I may just package em up and give em away. You'll have to run your own server if you want to access it over the net.

tedswiss writes "Fate has dropped a unique opportunity upon my lap: I teach at a moderately small independent school who has as one of its alums Richard Taylor. Mr. Taylor is both speaking at our start-of-year festivities and being honored with this year's "Distinguished Alum Award." Having followed and been disgusted by the MPAA's corporate practices regarding DRM and government lobbying in the past (Anyone remember DeCSS?), I would love to make his visit a chance to truly educate our student body, not just indoctrinate them. The school administration is sympathetic to my plight, but I want to present them with more than just my complaints. How would you best make use of this opportunity if you found yourself in my shoes?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ronald J. Riley runs an organization called the Professional Inventors Alliance, which fights vehemently against any kind of patent reform that might make life harder for patent trolls or those who obtain horribly obvious or broad patents. He has been known to show up here at Techdirt to argue with us in the comments, but his arguments are based on the faulty assumption that pretty much all patents are good and anyone accused of patent infringement has clearly "stolen" the hard work of someone else. The fact is that that's very rarely the case. As we've seen repeatedly, many patents should never have been issued as they don't qualify as non-obvious or they're too broad. In those cases, patents are clearly an economic hardship, and there's plenty of research to back that up. Also, most cases of patent infringement occur when multiple companies come up with the same type of solution independently, which is hardly "stealing." No matter though. By focusing on the false idea that all patent infringement is stealing, it can be a very compelling case for those who don't delve into the details.

The latest news is that Riley has convinced the AFL-CIO to come out against the latest attempt at patent reform. Now there's a lot to dislike in the latest attempt at patent reform, and we'd be upset if it passed as is. But the two specific things that the unions are complaining about are the two most reasonable things in the reform package. The first would change how damages are calculated, so that if the infringing component is only a small piece of a larger product, the damages shouldn't be based on the value of the larger product, but the value of that small piece. That seems completely fair. Why shouldn't the damages be reflective of the actual value? It's hard to see why that's controversial, but it is if you hold completely irrelevant patents and you want to hold up those companies that are actually making useful technologies. The second complaint is with making it easier to contest a patent after it's been issued. This is also a no-brainer. Given how little review goes into a current patent, along with the fact that patent examiners are given incentives to approve, rather than reject -- combined with the length of time it currently takes to get a patent reviewed, the incredibly arcane rules that everyone is required to go through to contest a patent and the quick draw of some courts who refuse to wait for the patent office to review patents, it makes sense to have a better system to make sure a patent is valid. Why would anyone be opposed to improving the quality of patents... unless they hold questionable patents?

Unfortunately, Riley's organization appears to have blinded the AFL-CIO to what's really happening. In convincing them that this is about stopping theft, he apparently left out all the economic research showing that it would actually do plenty of harm to the industries that most employ AFL-CIO workers. That's because it would limit their ability to innovate, make it more expensive to do research, and open up opportunities for foreign companies to do a much better job innovating and beating us in the market. Of course, given the history of the AFL-CIO, they must be used to that kind of effect, because that's been the result of previous policies in previous decades. In the meantime, Riley is hoping that by getting the support of unions, Democrats will feel compelled to vote against patent reform -- and, in fact, a Wall Street Journal article on this same subject suggests that the AFL-CIO's letter has been effective in slowing the reform effort. Hopefully, though, someone will explain to both the unions and the politicians the basic economics of monopolies and how they slow competition and innovation. If the folks at the AFL-CIO would like a detailed explanation for why their letter actually goes against the best interests of the people they supposedly represent, they should give us a call.