The End of Spam

SUDDENLY, EVERYONE IS TALKING about the end of spam as we know it.

The New York Times observed Sunday that anti-spam filtering software is "having an effect." Unwanted e-mail advertising messages are becoming increasingly cryptic, as spammers are forced to jump through spelling hoops to avoid keywords that will trigger spam filters. Symbols like the @ symbol substitute for letters. Dashes, exclamation points and other punctuation marks fill in as well -- anything goes, except for actually spelling the words that trigger filters. The words in spam messages are becoming unreadable and, therefore, useless to the sender.

Meanwhile, Microsoft Chief Software Architect Bill Gates predicted at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the end of spam in two years. He says Microsoft is working on solutions that include 1) automatic bounce-back e-mail requiring the sender to do a puzzle that only a human can do; 2) forcing the computer sending all e-mail to do expensive, processor-intensive computational busy work in order to boost the cost of sending millions of spam messages (I'll bet Intel likes this solution, too); and 3) giving recipients the option to charge senders for opening their mail.

The New York Times and Bill Gates say the days of spam are numbered. There. Don't you feel better now?

The reality is that aggressive, anti-spam defenses will most likely result in a more sophisticated spam offense. And the more vicious the spam war becomes, the more innocent bystanders -- namely, legitimate e-mail -- will be destroyed. I'm willing to bet Bill Gates $40 billion that he's wrong about ending spam by 2006.

Meanwhile, I've recently embraced rule-based filtering (using Outlook Rules) as a way to filter spam, but with a twist: Rather than looking for evidence of spam like the spam filters do, I look for evidence of legitimacy. It's easy to write rules to 1) move messages from people in my address book; 2) move messages from people with my work's, family's and other domain names in the address; and 3) move messages with the standard subject headings of newsletters I have subscribed to.

During the day, I pay attention to my second in-box, which now gets about 100 mails a day -- 100 percent legit -- and ignore my regular inbox, which gets about 300 messages a day, about 99 percent junk. Once every few days, I sort my "regular" inbox by subject, and start deleting en masse. When I discover occasional legit e-mails, I tweak my rules to move similar messages next time.

It's not perfect, but it works better than any store-bought solution. And the price is right, too.

Sweet Cell Phone In Time for Valentine's Day

A Japanese company is selling a box of chocolates that includes a chocolate replica of the Nokia 6650 cell phone. You can't make phone calls with it, but you don't have to pay a monthly bill, either.

Found Video

Philips Electronics is planning to mass-produce a slim, book-sized flexible display for viewing newspapers and magazines. It can be rolled up into a cigar-size tube and, if packed with tobacco, smoked. Here's the video.

Lying with Photoshop

They say people look like their dogs. That's especially true of these people, who have collided with their pets catastrophically in Photoshop.

Bad Robots

Jimmy Or of Waseda University in Tokyo has created a belly dancing robot. It features a robot spine that gyrates like actress Lucy Liu. But what's the problem we're trying to solve here? Is there a looming shortage of women belly dancers? Are robots somehow more efficient at it?

Tired of Spam, Ads and High Subscription Rates?

Mike's List on the Radio

Craig Crossman's Computer America features Mike Elgan every Thursday night. The show runs from 7pm to 9pm SVT (Silicon Valley Time). Listen to Computer America on your local Business TalkRadio station or over the Internet every weeknight. Don't miss Computer America!

Gotta-Get-It Gadgets

Synosphere's Blue Dock lets you use your Pocket PC or Palm PDA as your desktop computer. All peripherals, including mouse, keyboard, monitor and others connect into the docking station, and you can use it just like a PC -- but with even lower performance! The gadget should be available in Q4 and cost $249 -- which is about $50 more than a full Linux PC at Wal-Mart. Still, it's pretty cool for hardcore PDA enthusiasts.

A Japanese company is selling a mini-vacuum for keyboards that plugs into, and gets its power from, your PC's USB port. Your computer practically cleans itself!

NHJ Ltd introduced a hot gadget for couch potatoes on the go -- a wristwatch-type, liquid-crystal television. It's not just a tiny TV. It's also a GIANT WATCH. Like all good things, the NHJ TV Watch will be released in Japan only in April. Oddly, the TV is color, but the watch is black-and-white. You can watch just two hours of TV before the battery dies.

A new gadget called Person-to-Person Household Telephone Manager lets you screen, track, route, silence or block up to four landline home phones. A "parental control" feature enables dictatorial dads and micromanaging moms to schedule times when calls won't go to junior's phone. Calls can be routed to specific phones on the fly. A "silent mode" sends all calls quietly to the answering machine.

Wacky Web Sites

Write and send a message to friends. With yellow letters. In the snow. The web site Yellow Snow makes it easy.

Let's face it: Making movies isn't rocket science. Nor is it applied physics. The Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics explains.

The future isn't what it used to be. Especially in the world of car prototyping. The Modern Cars web site brings back the glory days of futuristic cars of the past.

Some songs at the top of the charts represent a long line of hits by an artist destined for superstardom. And then there are the one hit wonders, which are cataloged at -- where else? -- One Hit Wonder Central.

Click on stuff and watch plants grow. If only gardening were this easy.

Twisted Games

SimCity

Vertigolf

Knife Throwing

Pencak Silat

BBC Learning

FlySui 

Mystery Pic o' the Week

What is it? Send YOUR guess to [email protected] (be sure to say where you live). If you're first with the right answer, I'll print your name in the next issue of Mike's List!

LAST WEEK'S MYSTERY PIC: No, it's not a "PC-based manicure device," a "holographic monitor" or even a "huge ball of yarn" as suggested by some readers. In fact, it's a picture of researcher Anthony Dixon showing how he can "train" a camera to recognize and track different types of motion. His research aims to enable computers to recognized certain types of movement on a video feed, and alert people accordingly. For example, if a train derails or a person is climbing a fence, an alarm can be sounded. This area of research is called Video Motion Anomaly Detection, or VMAD. Congratulations to ME for coming up with a Mystery Pic so hard that no one guessed it!

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