| Spamhaus hits out at paid-for email delivery plan
A leading anti-spam agency has hit out at moves to charge companies a fixed fee to ensure emails are delivered, saying it will erode freedoms. On Monday, Richard Cox, chief information officer of anti-spam organisation Spamhaus, said that "an email charge will destroy the spirit of the internet". Cox said: "The internet has become what it is because of freedom of communication. Open discussion is what gives it value. There should be no cost for particular services, and email should be free and accessible to all. This will disenfranchise people." According to reports, web giants AOL and Yahoo! are planning to charge companies up to a cent, which at the moment equates to just over half a penny, per email to guarantee delivery. Paid-for emails would not go through AOL spam filters, meaning businesses could send marketing emails directly to the potential customers' inboxes, without the risk of the mails being sent to a junk mail folder or having web links and images stripped, according to an article in The New York Times.
Category: ERP
Between the Lines Latest Post | Last 10 Posts | Archives BTL podcast: Macbook Air, BEA, MySQL, SAP and more…. Posted in: General Open Source Personal Technology Software Infrastructure Web Technology Between the Lines podcast Apple SaaS SAP Yahoo Utility computing Oracle Salesforce.com Sun ERP MySQL It's been a busy few days highlighted by Macworld and activity on the merger & acquisition front. This week on the Between the Lines podcast, Larry and I give our impressions on the latest Macworld revelations by Steve Jobs. It was clear that Jobs took great pride in the new MacBook Air, which he declared the thinnest notebook computer in the world, but who is the target customer? We also discuss the acquisition of BEA by Oracle (not surprising), Sun's $1 billion payout for MySQL (surprising but in line with Sun's focus on open source and infrastructure), and SAP's addition of Business Objects (good move).
Phishers won't stop as long as users continue to click
Carnegie Mellon University is researching the best ways to educate e-mail users about the dangers of phishing, such as how to distinguish the URL of a fraudulent Web site from a legitimate one. Not exactly rocket science…or is it? The Pittsburgh-based university has scientists and graduate students working on research to determine, in essence, how to get through to e-mail users. Early results of a recent study show that users need to fall for phishing first in order to become aware enough to educate themselves against this form of fraud. Another Ph.D. student at CMU took the time to develop an online game called Anti-Phishing Phil that goes into great detail about fraudulent sites and how to detect them. But clearly, not enough people are playing Anti-Phishing Phil.
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