<IT WORLD> Spam - the last frontier By Martin J
Young
HUA HIN, Thailand - The world's most
popular social network this week reaffirmed its
ambitions to quash the dominance already enjoyed
by the Republic of Google. Facebook will be
offering a messaging service that co-founder Mark
Zuckerberg claims will merge texts, online chats
and e-mail into one central hub for users of the
website without becoming an "e-mail killer".
Google's Gmail has become the
fastest-growing web service this year, with an
estimated 190 million users. It has been widely
viewed that the new service from Facebook, with
over 500 million users, will be in direct
competition with Gmail as well as Microsoft's
Hotmail or Live which has over 360 million users,
Yahoo Mail with over 270 million, and AOL's
offerings.
The new service, called
Facebook Messages, will enable a more
"conversation-like" method of communicating
between the people
within the social network
or in the new "social inbox" feed. Instead of
sending an e-mail from person A to person B or an
SMS to person C, the new system will allow several
people to send, receive and view messages, images
and data at once from within their Facebook
account.
All members of the site will be
offered an @facebook.com e-mail address and
bidding for some of them has already started on
Ebay. An additional feature to the new service
will be the ability to store conversations in an
archive, though aside from the ability to prove
that uncle Biff really did write something six
months down the line it may just serve as
additional clutter to already burgeoning inboxes.
The killer blow will come if the new
service can tackle spam effectively. At present,
no e-mail provider has managed to get the balance
right. Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo all have sturdy
spam filters but, as anyone who has tried to send
an e-mail to one of them from a corporate domain
will know, they tend to throw out the baby with
the bath water and be a little over-protective,
often dumping legitimate e-mails along with junk.
Facebook has not been without its share of
spam, phishing and privacy violations, so the
success of the new messaging service may well be
tied to how well it can filter the digital wheat
from the chaff. The company has recently acquired
a number of start-ups including Zenbe, an e-mail
systems provider, and the social network
FriendFeed to assist them with the new
development.
Internet A report
released this week has revealed that a huge chunk
of potentially sensitive data was rerouted through
China in April. About 15% of all web traffic,
including that to and from the US Army, Navy,
Marine Corps, Air Force, the office of the
Secretary of Defense, the senate and the US's
National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was
"hijacked" by state-run China Telecom.
Security experts at McAfee stated,
"E-mails, instant messages and VoIP [Voice over
Internet Protocol] calls could have been
intercepted and logged, data could have also been
changed as it was passing through the country as
well. The possibilities are numerous and
troubling, but definitive answers are unknown."
It is still unclear whether the diversion
was intentional, whether the Chinese government
played a role, or whether it was the result of a
technical fault at the telecoms company. The flaw
lies within vulnerabilities in Internet routing
protocols that are responsible for the transfer of
data from one server to another to reach its
destination in the shortest possible time.
Security experts have warned that it is not a
question of if it will happen again but when.
Hardware AMD is ramping up
pressure on rival chipmaker Intel by touting new
technologies and products at its sixth annual
Technology Forum and Exhibition in Taipei. With
the aim of cementing its dominance in the graphics
market, the company is planning to merge GPU and
CPU cores into Accelerated Processing Units (APUs)
under its Fusion vision which could shake up the
PC industry.
The new Fusion APU microchips
will offer better power saving and more computing
horsepower than their predecessors. They will be
targeting the netbook, tablet and mobile device
markets and going up against Intel's Atom
processor.
New top-of-the-line graphics
cards were also introduced; the Radeon HD 6000
series packs a punch for the PC gamer. The
marketing spiel included some fancy terminology
such as DirectX 11 capabilities, stereoscopic 3D
gaming, visual acceleration technology, and
Blue-ray 3D acceleration.
Science Those particle-smashing
boffins at the European Nuclear Research Center
have been breaking more scientific barriers and
boldly going where no one has gone before by
managing to capture anti-matter for the first
time. The 38 atoms captured are hardly enough to
power the star ship Enterprise or wipe out
a city, but they do spell a great leap forward in
particle physics.
Anti-matter is produced
when energy transforms into matter, positively
charged nuclei and negatively charged electrons
switch to become a reverse mirror image of the
particle with a negatively charged nucleus and
positive electrons. A large amount of energy is
released when anti-matter particles come into
contact with each other, making the material very
unstable and difficult to contain.
Martin J Young is an Asia Times Online correspondent based in Thailand.
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