Will This Solve Spam?

State and local governments this week resumed a push to lobby Congress for far-reaching changes on two different fronts: gaining the ability to impose sales taxes on Net shopping, and being able to levy new monthly taxes on DSL and other connections. One senator is even predicting taxes on e-mail.

Taxes on email? Well, that's spam sorted. Pity about the collateral effects.

Internet in a Box 2.0

Only really, really old-timers - and sad ones at that - remember one of O'Reilly's less well-known products, called simply Internet in a Box, which came out in 1995. Well, it was clearly an idea ahead of its time.

Now, though, we have a real Internet in a box - or rather, Internet dans

la première « box » associant l’accès à l’Internet haut débit et les principales fonctionnalités d’un ordinateur.

For 40 Euros a month, and a deposit of 150 Euros, you get EasyGate, which is effectively a super-router that handles not just the Internet side, but the entire PC side as well. If you add a screen, mouse, keyboard and webcam, it'll cost you an extra 99 Euros. But since you end up with a GNU/Linux-based system, completely with Firefox and OpenOffice.org and a GNOME-like environment, that's not bad.

As hardware prices plummet, this was bound to come. But having come, it does look extremely attractive as an all-in-one, techophobe-safe system - rather like the highly-successful Amstrad PCW8256.

I predict we're going to see more and more of these systems, which means that GNU/Linux and open source software in general is going to start popping up in all sorts of unexpected places. (Via LXer and The Inquirer.)