Indrajit Basu: August 2009 Archives

Simple were the days when one could just send an email without worrying about whether that mail is ending up in the recipient's mail box or somewhere else. But with the explosion of the use of electronic mail came myriad problems: spams, malicious software, botnets, rampant cybercrime and loads of technologies to check spams most of which not only fail to cut spams but also end up sending genuine emails to spam bins.

In yet another ambitious effort to cut spam -- which at the end of the day may end up being as ineffective as all others -- researchers at Yahoo are trying to resurrect the idea of email "postage stamps" which could put a stamp of authenticity to the senders of genuine emails.

Called Centmail, the modus operandi of this pay-per-email plan is simple: senders attach a cent worth of stamp on each email they send so that the receiver (or the receiving server) knows that the email comes from a genuine sender when it sees the stamp. And why would pasting a stamp on the email make it genuine? Because even a cent makes spamming too expensive a proposition for spammers who need to send millions of emails to achieve their objectives.

"The fairly immediate benefit of Centmail will come from getting your message through other  spam filter. The first time you sent somebody a message, it often that ends up in the spam filter's bin and trashed," say the researchers of Yahoo, who are working hard to tout this concept.

In other words, Centmail aims to work like an anti spam filter where, unless the spam filter is instructed to trash Centmails too, it will assure delivery of emails to recipients' mail boxes.

The other long term goal of this plan would be, say the researchers, to reduce the amount of spam in the whole electronic mail world.

Centmail is not a new idea though. There have been a few similar efforts in the past like Goodmail, Microsoft's Penny Black project, and an IBM project called Charity Seals to name the most prominent ones.

But all wilted because most users couldn't accept the idea of paying for emails while many thought paying for emails is similar to putting a barrier in the way of sending emails.

Centmail is different, say the Yahoo researchers, because the plan has the concept of charity attached to it. "CentMail, begins as a charity fund-raising tool: Users donate $0.01 to a charity of their choice for each email they send. The user benefits by helping a cause, promoting it to friends, and potentially attracting matching donations, often at no additional cost beyond what they planned to donate anyway. Charitable organizations benefit and so may appeal to their members to join," says its white paper.

The researchers also add that economic approach-based filtering -- that Centmail is -- would be more effective than the others like domain and content based filtering because those do not put the burden of high costs on spammers and cyber criminals.

However, some disagree. According to a security expert, to stop any type of denial of service (DoS) attacks, spams, malware, etc. at or even close to their source of origin requires unforgeable network identity. This means that a filtering system must have the capability to identify a computer from where the spams are originating.

"The simple and the horrific problem of the whole of Internet is that it is largely an anarchic space, and does not know how to identify unforgeable network identity," said the expert.

He added: "The problem we have today is not some mail servers sitting on the Internet firing out lots of mails to everyone. That happens and but we are pretty good at blacklisting 80 percent of such servers."

"But the dangerous problem of spam and malware these days is that they come out of botnets -- computers hacked and taken control of by hackers without the knowledge of the actual owners). And the problem with botnets is that they leave no trace of who is actually controlling them."

He fears that even if Centmail does succeed in cutting spam initially, "it would be only for a few weeks maybe for a few months after which spammers would be able to update their systems to be able to make use Centmail to their advantage as well."

 

Now that China's controversial Green Dam has been damned - at least for now, following a furious public backlash, could it be a harbinger of changing times in China? Maybe! For, although the Chinese Government has said it has delayed the implementation of the compulsory implantation of this Government-controlled web-content filtering software in all computers to be sold in China - and have not quite scraped the mandate yet, it is still another instance of the fact that China is increasingly losing control over the spread of information.

Bowing to China's 300 million booming netizens who, along with foreign PC makers like as Dell, Sony and HP- refused to accept this measure lying down, China just pushed back Green Dam's deadline indefinitely. This is not the first instance of China's weakening grip though. Just about a month back China's Communist Party failed to handle the clampdown on the spread on information of the rioting in Xinjiang over the Internet. And ineffective too was the Government's clamp down on the social networking sites ahead of the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen in June this year. Since 2004, the Government has also given in to many smaller citizen-initiated movements conducted over the Internet.

Experts say that even as popularity of the net in China makes China's Communist Party wary, it has also realized that censorship is proving increasingly counter-productive. Not only has dealing with affluent and information-based society become complex for the Party, the power of ICT may have become stronger than the world's largest authoritarian regime.

Photo: Green Dam in action: Flickr UK images blocked even if you are logged in... (Tomek Augustyn/ CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic)

As the August 14 deadline approaches for applications for the first of three phases of federal broadband stimulus funding, many telecom companies apparently are going for their share of money. But  experts say that small businesses, organizations and communities should also aim for a share of that pie.

In fact, some broadband advocates are saying that the best way to make use of the grant money would be to make it available to end-users who actually the face the problems of non-availability or inadequate availability of broadband.

That's what Craig Settles, an municipal broadband strategy consultant says. "I am very much in favor of putting money in the hands of local communities because I feel they [the actual users] would have the best ideas of what their needs are and to decide how to roll broadband out."

Craig is not the only one. Chris Derrington, the founder and CEO of Rural America Onshore Sourcing, the Wisconsin-based IT company that is using lower-cost rural-based professionals to provide outsourcing services to US-based companies. This way, they don't have to send projects offshore or use expensive urban vendors. He also feels that if the grant is grabbed up mostly by the larger, privately-owned telecom companies, most rural areas would be short-changed.

"I think the best way to spend that $7.2 billion would be to hand it over to smaller telecom companies or even rural co-operatives that could be formed specifically for rolling out the broadband," says Chris. Chris should know because his business depends solely on the availability of broadband in the rural areas. And he says that he has a database of 300 people who live in 12 different cities and to whom he could offer work if only they had high-speed broadband access.

Meanwhile, the tight window for submitting grant proposals that has left many scrambling to file out the paperwork is already making it very difficult for such smaller entities to meet the deadline. "The application process is not easy; it requires a lot of paperwork, mapping, etc and I think only those applicants who have been preparing for this since February would be able to file," says Craig.

This means that there will not be many, because even though the details of the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009 were known in February, the official notice of funding came only on July 1.

"Given that the 130 pages of rules that had to be understood and adhered to for the application, which according to Government's own estimate requires 120 hours, the six-week window is too short for most applicants," says Craig.