Via Poynter Online comes this report:

Former WHYY reporter Rachel Buchman left this voice-mail message — with her work number — for the conservatives at Laptoplobbyist.com: “I wanted to tell you that you’re evil, horrible people. You’re awful people. You represent horrible ideas. God hates you and he wants to kill your children. You should all burn in hell. Bye.” The station says: “Rachel has decided to move forward with her career and her life.”

A follow-up story adds a few extra details:

[Buchman] says she left a nasty message for the people at Laptoplobbyist.com because she was tired of spam. “I was incensed that I wasn’t going to finally get to ask a real person to remove me from the list,” she writes. “The answering machine asked the caller to leave a name and number, and without thinking, that’s what I did.”

OK, Rachel’s message was a little over the top, but tell the truth: You’ve screamed similar sentiments at your inbox, right? For the record, I think her only mistake was leaving her work number.

PS: I won’t link to the site she called, because they really are hateful and they really do represent horrible ideas. And if they ever put me on one of their mailing lists, I’ll probably call them myself.

Steve Ballmer says Bill Gates gets 4 million e-mails a day.

Ballmer said Microsoft has special technology that just filters spam intended for Gates. In addition, several Microsoft employees are dedicated to ensuring that nothing unwanted gets into his inbox.

“Literally there’s a whole department almost that takes care of it,” he said.

Bill has had the same e-mail address for as long as I can remember, and it’s been printed in more places than anyone can count. Still, you have to be pretty amused at the notion that the world’s richest man would even think of buying a fake Rolex or male enhancement products via an anonymous e-mail message.

I’ve had the same e-mail address since 1994. Most spam gets blocked at the server, with a combination of SpamAssassin and some manual filters I’ve set up. When I shut off those filters, I get roughly 200-300 unwanted messages a day. With them in place, I’ve cut the flood to a trickle of fewer than 10 spams a day, and virtually all of those are filtered into my Junk Mail folder in Outlook.

Do you have a spam horror story or a favorite spam-blocking product? Click the Comments link and give me the details.

I’m working on the revision of Windows Security Inside Out and am currently researching backup software. You can help.

If you have a favorite backup program, leave a note in the Comments section here. Give me enough information to find the program, and tell me why you like the software you’ve chosen.

Thanks.

I’ve done a whole bunch of site improvements here. The eagle-eyed among you will notice that comments are enabled again – for some threads, anyway.

I’ve also created archive pages by category, which you’ll find linked in the sidebar on the right (or on the main Archives page, available from the link at the top of every page on the site).

I get a lot of questions about Service Pack 2, so I’ve categorized the SP2 posts and collected them on the SP2 Archives page.

Like it? Want me to add something? Leave a comment.

I’m not sure what to make of this announcement from the copy chief of Wired News: It’s Just the ‘internet’ Now.

Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the “I” in internet.

At the same time, Web becomes web and Net becomes net.

Why? The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was.

I’m torn. The former copy editor in me says this deserves serious debate. The realist in me says decisions like this get made over time, by consensus, without ponderous announcements like this one. I suspect that the editors of Wired News are a few years ahead of their time, if not a few decades.

Also, this will drive writers and editors at Wired nuts. If a story quotes another publication, should Internet be capitalized?

Do you care about this?

I’ve been away on vacation for the past few weeks, and now that I’m back I’m knee-deep into my next book project. I’ll have some interesting announcements in the next few weeks.

You might also note that I’ve disabled comments. Partly that was a practical decision. I don’t have a huge problem with comment spam, but typically I was getting 5-10 crap comments per week that snuck past my filters and had to be manually deleted. I couldn’t do that while I was away, so I killed comments.

I don’t plan on bringing them back, either. If you want to comment on something I’ve written, please do so on your own blog and use the Trackback feature to ping my site. (Or sign up with Technorati, and I’ll get notification automatically when you link to an entry here.)

What? You don’t have your own blog? Go to blogger.com and set one up on BlogSpot. Takes a few minutes. Costs nothing. Who knows? You might discover that you have more to say than just a random comment to me.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation explains why Sen. Orrin Hatch’s Induce Act is terrible, terrible law.

Under the Supreme Court’s ruling in Sony v. Universal (the Betamax VCR case), devices like the iPod and CD burners are legal as long as they have legal uses—what the Court called “substantial non-infringing uses.” This has been the rule in the technology sector for the last 20 years. Billions of dollars and thousands of jobs have depended on it. Industries have blossomed under it. And any case brought against Apple or HP or Dell would be immediately dismissed because of it.

Now Senator Hatch and his allies want to tear down that rule and substitute a new one with the Induce Act. With it, the fact that a device or product has legal uses, even lots of them, is irrelevant. Filing a lawsuit under the Induce Act is like dropping a litigation bomb on any company that gives users products that have even the slightest potential to assist in copyright infringement. Technology companies will avoid being innovative, and investors will avoid supporting new technologies for fear of being sued out of existence based on the possible conduct of their customers. If this bill had been law in 1984, there would be no VCR. If this bill had been law in 1995, there would be no CD burners. If this bill had been law in 2000, there would be no iPod. If this bill becomes law in 2004, we may lose those devices and many more that we haven’t even begun to imagine.

Orrin Hatch has probably introduced more bad legislation than any sitting Senator, but this one takes the cake. Read the EFF’s write-up. Then write your Senator and your Congressman.

A very popular blog I read regularly reports that it has come under sustained attack this week by comment spammers. Nothing unusual there — I delete a dozen or more comments every week, and many, many more get shunted away by a spam-blocking program that runs on my Web server.

What’s alarming about this report, though, is the detail that the attacks have been launched from computers in the .mil domain. For those who aren’t up on their Internet architecture, those are PCs that belong to the United States Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, not to mention the Army Corps of Engineers and special offices in the Pentagon. Comments (of the non-spam variety) in the thread that first reported this suggest that this problem is happening to other people as well.

So, if these reports are to be believed, we have two possibilities:

1. A group of computers in the United States military have been compromised by viruses, Trojan horses, and/or hackers. What other types of damage could a compromised machine inside a .mil network do?
2. An arm of the United States military is actively targeting specific Web sites with attacks. I don’t have nearly enough tinfoil to make the hat I’d need to wear to believe this one.

But if the first case is true, it sounds like someone in the Government needs to get serious about security. Soon.

The press release says the show is “postponed,” but we all know what that means. The Death Spiral, baby. Who wants to bet that next year’s Comdex doesn’t happen at all?

BBC quotes a Yahoo study that says spam and viruses put the average computer down for the count approximately nine days a year:

Research commissioned by Yahoo finds that the average British PC has nine ‘sick days’ per year, two more than the average for workers.

Six of these are wasted battling with spam and three more days are lost due to viruses.

Nearly half of British computer users find dealing with junk e-mails more stressful than traffic jams and the majority want service providers to act.

I’m always a little skeptical of these studies, which tend to be done for marketing reasons, not in a quest for actual facts that can be used to set, you know, sensible policies. I’m also puzzled at how they arrived at the notion of six “sick days” dealing with spam. I can understand that cleaning up a virus can be messy and time consuming. But getting rid of spam means either creating filters, installing filtering software, or hitting the Delete key. It may take several minutes a day, but that’s a nuisance, not true downtime. And multiplying those minutes by the number of working days in the year to find the actual “cost” of spam is bogus science.

Nonetheless, the principle is an interesting one. So how many computer “sick days” do you have every year? Click the Comments button below and let me know.

(Via Techdirt)