Monday, November 17, 2003		Feature

Spam erodes users’ faith

BILLIONS of ‘spam’ messages that cross the Internet daily are beginning to erode users’ faith in e-mail communications, according to a report. Half of all Internet users say spam has made them less trusting of all e-mail in general, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found, while one in four say they now use e-mail less because of spam. The non-profit group’s June survey of 1,400 Internet users found that most feel they can do little to block the billions of pitches for get-rich-quick schemes, ersatz painkillers and other unwanted offers that arrive in their online mailboxes on a daily basis. More than half said the flood of spam makes it difficult to find messages they do want. Spam now comprises roughly half of all e-mail messages, according to several estimates, costing businesses billions of dollars in wasted bandwidth and lost productivity. Most respondents said they did not post their e-mail addresses to Websites in an effort to keep off spammers’ lists, and many said they use filters to block spam at work or home.

But others admitted to behaviour likely to perpetuate the problem. About 7 per cent said they had bought a product or service that was offered in an unsolicited e-mail, while one-third said they had clicked a link to get more information.

Two-thirds said they had clicked a link to be removed from a spammer’s e-mail list, an activity consumer advocates say is likely only to generate more spam. Companies complain that junk e-mail costs them millions of dollars to delete and block. Many e-mail account holders are shocked by the crude content of subject lines promising genitalia-enlarging products, crude pornography and often fraudulent work-at-home schemes.

Meanwhile, the US Senate has voted 97-0 to quash junk e-mail that advertises everything from pornography to mortgages. The bill, which must still be approved by the House of Representatives, would create a do-not-spam plan similar to the registry created for telephone marketers.

The Federal Trade Commission would be responsible for creating the list of people who request to be removed from mass e-mailing lists. The passage was hailed by two of the largest e-mail gateways, Microsoft and Yahoo!

Making mountain of data ALL those e-mails - junk or otherwise - are adding up. In 2002, people around the globe created enough new information to fill 5,00,000 US Libraries of Congress, according to a study by faculty and students at the University of California at Berkeley. The 5 billion GB of new data works out to about 800 MB per person - the equivalent of a stack of books 9 metres high - the study by the university’s School of Information Management and Systems found. That’s a 30 per cent increase in stored information from 1999, the last time the global study was conducted. The information area with the biggest percentage increase in data was, unsurprisingly, hard disk drives. The study found the amount of stored information on these increasingly high-capacity storage media rose by up to 114 per cent from the previous study in 1999. The study also put to rest any lingering myths about the paperless office. The amount of information stored on paper, including books, journals and office documents, increased up to 43 percent in 2002 compared to 1999. "We thought in our (last) study that film and paper would head toward digital formats," UC Berkeley Professor Peter Lyman said. With paper, that has not been the case, as people access documents on their computer, but then print them out, he said. But photography is fulfilling his initial expectations. "Individual photographs are really moving quickly to digital cameras, or even image-producing telephones," Lyman said. That helped contribute to a decline of up to 9 per cent in film-based photographs in 2002 compared with 1999, and fueled the growth of magnetic storage. The study received financing from Intel Corp. Microsoft Corp. Hewlett-Packard Co. and EMC Corp. technology companies whose businesses deal with managing information. In addition to looking at stored data, UC Berkeley measured electronic flows of new information at 18 billion GB in 2002, of which about 17.3 billion gigabytes occurred over the telephone. Whether or not that information has any value is another question. "I couldn’t come up with a very simple way of understanding quality because it’s so much in the eye of the beholder," Lyman said. How, or if, all that information actually ends up being used will be the topic of his next study, Lyman added. — Reuters