The Peculiar World of Private Label Rights

Here's a variety of "sharing" I'd not come across before: private label rights. This is what Wikipedia has to say on the subject:

Private label rights is a concept similar to reselling, but the merchant is permitted to modify the product to fit his or her needs. Typical PLR products are articles, reports, eBooks, and autoresponders. This kind of content is used for the purpose of allowing multiple buyers to invest in the content with free rein to alter and use it by claiming authorship of it. It is typically used in online affiliate marketing systems.

As far as I can make out, this is a kind of a cross between spamblog content and pyramid selling.

One question that comes to mind is how much CC-licensed stuff ends up being passed around in this way? Of course, if the licence allows it, that's fine, but I wondered whether anyone had any experience of their content being "repackaged" in this way?

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The DRM of Government Policy

One area that I have been covering increasingly is that of open government. The parallels with the other opens are not immediate, but there are some suggestive similarities. Here's a great interview that has these illuminating thoughts on the subject:

if lobbyists are the spammers of policy making, then closed doors are the DRM of good policy. Obstacles to creativity, inspiration, and just sort of generally an affront to the most creative people in that field. Being open to a social network of contributors helps solve a lot of those problems, and that gets a sigh of relief from a lot of policy makers.

BTW, the rest of the interview is well-worth reading. (Via @mlsif.)

Is This the Solution to Spam?

I think I may have come up with a possible solution for spam. But first, some background.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Why We Need More Spam

Jerry Fishenden is not somebody you'd expect me to see eye-to-eye with much:

Jerry Fishenden is Microsoft UK's lead technology advisor, strategist and spokesman. Since being appointed to the role in 2004, Jerry has been responsible for helping to guide Microsoft's vision for how technology can transform the way we learn, live, work and play. He plays a key role in an international team of technology officers who work closely with Craig Mundie, Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer. Jerry's popular blog on issues of technology and policy can be found at http://ntouk.com.

But he's put up an excellent analysis of all that's wrong with the UK Government's proposed super-snooping database that's all-the-stronger for being much more moderate in tone than mine often are:

I remain unconvinced that we should be using technology to progressively build a panopticon here in the UK. Technology has a huge upside that we should be using positively, not allowing its more toxic potential to erode our long cherished liberties.

But what really caught my attention was the following point about weaknesses in the plan:

scale and volume: at Microsoft, last time I looked we were having to deal with some 3 billion spam emails a day through our Hotmail/Windows Live Mail service. Let alone the volume of legitimate emails. The Independent states that about one trillion emails and more than 60 billion text messages will be sent in Britain this year, and that most homes and offices now have a computer, with an estimated 20 million broadband connections. That's a serious volume of data and a serious data centre or data centres we're potentially talking about - let about the analytics then required to make sense of that data.

Yes, of course: what we need to do is *increase* the volume of spam, say, a thousand-fold - easy enough to do if you sign up for a few obviously dodgy Web sites, and reply to a few spam messages with your address. That would be inconvenient for us, but not a problem given the efficiency of spam filters these days (Gmail catches about 99.5% of the spam that I receive). But multiplying the quantity of information that the UK Government's super-snooping database would need to hold by a factor of one thousand would really cause the rivets to pop. And once databases scale up to cope with that, we just turn up the spam volume a little more.

Perhaps the same approach could be applied to Web browsing: you could write an add-in for Firefox that pulls in thousands of random pages from the Internet every day (text only). This, again, would add enormously to the storage requirements of any database, and make finding stuff much harder.

If the UK Government wants to live by technology abuse, then let it die by technology abuse. Alternatively, it might try actually listening to what people like Fishenden and countless other IT experts say about how unworkable this scheme is, and work *with* us rather *against* us on this matter....

The Economics of Information Security

On Open Enterprise blog.

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.

They Can Because ICANN

The court case against Spamhaus is outrageous on plenty of levels:

A lawsuit filed in an Illinois court by David Linhardt (aka e360 Insight LLC) against The Spamhaus Project Ltd., a British-based organisation over which the Illinois court had no jurisdiction, went predictably to default judgement when Spamhaus did not accept U.S. jurisdiction.

To get the 'SLAPP' lawsuit case accepted in Illinois, David Linhardt fabricated, under oath, that Spamhaus "operates business in Illinois". Illinois District Court Judge Charles Kocoras, although being aware Spamhaus was a UK non-profit organization, did not require any proof before ruling the UK organization to be in Illinois jurisdiction. Spamhaus in fact operates no business in the United States, has no U.S. office, agents or employees in Illinois or any other U.S. state.

The default judgement awards Linhardt, a one-man bulk email marketing outfit based in Chicago, compensatory damages totaling $11,715,000.00, orders Spamhaus to permanently remove Linhardt's ROKSO record, orders Spamhaus to lie by posting a notice stating that Linhardt is "not a spammer" and orders Spamhaus to cease blocking spam sent by Linhardt.

But one point which has only been mentioned in passing is that the latest threat of being suspended by ICANN is only possible because the latter is subject to US jurisdiction.

Which means that effectively US law is being imposed on the Internet, wherever people may be located. Which, in its turn, is yet another argument why ICANN needs to be pulled out of the US and situated somewhere less likely to be at the beck and call of courts in countries with histories of rampant litigation.

And no, I don't have any good suggestions where that location might be: any ideas?

In Praise of Google Groups

Although people are rightly suspicous of Google's huge power these days, it is also important to remember those actions that are praiseworthy by any measure. One of them was acquiring a company originally called DejaNews, which had the biggest collection of Usenet postings, and making them freely available. Had Google not done so, it is quite possible that great swathes of Internet, computing and indeed modern history would have been lost forever.

To get some idea of the treasures this trove contains, take a look at the Usenet timeline that Google has put together. Highlights include:

* Stallman's announcement of the GNU project

* Tim Berners-Lee's announcement of the World Wide Web

* Linus's famous "Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?" posting, made exactly 15 years ago today.

* Marc Andreessen's announcement of Mosaic

* The first commercial spam (ah, I remember it well)

* The first mention of Google

and several hundred million more.

Google has just announced a beta version of its new Google Groups service, but the main interest will always be the old stuff. Thanks, Google.

Bad News in Your Inbox

I have been asked so many times "Is it possible to tell if someone has read my email?" And the answer, of course, is no: email gets sent; whether it is received or read is entirely unknown.

Unless you use DidTheyReadIt. I presume this works by adding an invisible HTML element to the email message that calls back to the company so they can track when messages are read. Although this might satisfy people who insist on knowing whether their masterpieces have been read, it's really Bad News because of the tracking it carries out. And just think of the field-day spammers will have: now, they won't have to guess whether an address works or not.

I hope that email clients will add the facility to block this kind of stupidity. It's not what email is about: if the person who receives your email can't be bothered to reply, either your message wasn't important enough - or maybe they aren't. (Via Lessig .)

Open Access...to Search Spam

Open access is usually about being able to read high-value texts that are normally only available for a correspondingly high fee. But, in reality, it's about access for free to stuff. For example, as Open Access News points out, you can have open access to "value-added" search spam data (and note the scrupulously precise use of the CC licence at the bottom).

The Karenina Code

Never mind Da Vinci, there's clearly a deeper Karenina Code waiting to be deciphered, judging by the number of (different) spam messages I've received that use it. The latest began:

several successful shots, and in the night they drove home

Amazingly, those words are enough to identify the text, thanks to Google. Content as the ultimate index....

Microsoft's Open Source Blog

Not something you see every day: a Web site called Port 25, with the explanatory line "Communications from the Open Source Software Lab @ Microsoft". Yup, you read that right. It will be interesting to see what they do with this apparent attempt to reach out (port 25, right?) - especially if they can get rid of the Russian spam on Bill Hilf's welcoming post....

The Poetry of Splogs

After the poetry of spam, the poetry of splogs.

Don't ask how, but I ended up here a few minutes ago:

They were all old and once besondern, and all of a fishermanship of moss-green days. This morning, the recessess of the apsara, while I was whisking the drawing-room, I went to the isoude, which was wide open, to shake out my duster, and there, vestito by the gate, stoop'd Accomplish.

etc.

It may not be poetry, but it has a certain charm. Or maybe it's just me.

An Unprintable Me Jobs You Standardizing

I must be one of the few people who actually enjoys getting spam. Not, I hasten to add, because I wish to avail myself for any of their services, but for the insights they give into both the transient fads and enduring preoccupations of the general public.

The best spam provides valuable insight into what makes people tick - and what makes them click. Even if, like me, you never do the latter, you can still admire the enormous cunning that spammers manage to squeeze into a subject line. I read spam every day, and write about its dangers frequently, but I am forced to admit that I'm often nearly taken in by some of the stuff I receive, so plausible is it.

But better more than the ever-evolving marketing skills on display, it is the sheer poetry of some of this stuff that captivates me.

As everyone who receives spam will have noticed, it is vital for spam to beat the spam filters. To do this, it frequently employs random words and phrases in an attempt to fool the software into thinking that it is human generated (a sort of Turing test writ small).

Sometimes these are random single words, sometimes they are gobbets of text torn bleeding from online sources (it's always interesting to Google these in order to find out where they come from). But occasionally, you get something special: words that have a real poetry of their own.

I received one of these recently; it's so good, I just have to share it.

I normal of whisde a conversed the stomping is imperial
She witnessed was waves of jumping it lifelong uselessly
Me destitute embracing is need of production a recompensed
A this? the tucked tempting it materials she howled
You broken of reaches the series and fourthlargest or stratagem
Not kicking you afternoon and choralsinging me burningly starts
No gateways is limited this stained of exposed the drawers?
If very we prophet of amidst a sources is candy
An unprintable me jobs you standardizing she vertically openly
Have veering influence of ribbons it riffraff was package
Was disciple not occupant damned a twanged or chances
And wetted epigraph is coffee of lighting an country

Just one question: who owns the copyright for this stuff?

On Social Bookmarking, Spam - and Steganography

A fine analysis of the threats posed to social bookmarking sites (del.icio.us, digg.com etc) from Alex Bosworth. But for me, the real corker is his idea of steganographic spam.

Steganography involves hiding something in a message so that it is not even apparent there is hidden content - unlike cryptography, where the content is obscured but its presence is obvious. This might be achieved by hiding a message in the pixels of a picture - few enough for their presence not to be obvious to casual observers - that can be extracted using the appropriate software running the right algorithms.

Bosworth would have us imagine steganographic spam - so subtle, we are not even aware that it is there. Fiendish.

Thunderbird, Firefox and OpenOffice.org Are Go

Version 1.5 of the open source email client Thunderbird is now available for download. This is a major release of an important program, even if it tends to be overshadowed by its bigger sibling, Firefox.

Thunderbird matters because it forms part of the key trio of browser, email and office suite that together satisfy the vast bulk of general users' computing needs. Now that Firefox is widely accepted as the best browser around, and with OpenOffice.org 2.0 increasingly seen as on a par with Microsoft Office, the only missing piece of the (small) jigsaw puzzle is email.

Like the other two, Thunderbird is available for Windows, Macintosh and GNU/Linux. This platform-independence means that users can start using the three programs on Windows or Macintosh, say, and then be discreetly slid across to running them on GNU/Linux when they are ready. They probably won't even notice.

I've been running Thunderbird for some time now, and I find it powerful yet easy to use. It's got intelligent spam-filtering built in, and takes a safe approach to displaying dodgy images and attachments. It works with POP3, IMAP, Gmail and other email services, so there's no excuse not to switch - now.