If The Truth Fits

I wouldn’t really describe myself as being an Apple fanboy, and I wouldn’t necessarily say that I’m an iPhone fanboy, I know it has a fair few failings, but I’m afraid that you’re going to have to let me gush for just a minute about the shiny slab of magic in my pocket.

This morning I downloaded the updated version of the Google Mobile app (here’s an iTunes link if you want to check it out yourself) to my phone because I’d heard quite a lot of buzz about it. That buzz related to being able to conduct searches using voice recognition. I’ve never found voice recognition software to be particularly accurate, and if you ever see me in public Googling with my voice rather than tapping away at the keyboard you have my permission to strangle me until I can no longer conduct voice searches which will almost certainly be based around pop culture facts just so that I can settle bets amongst my friends.

On a quick side note, having an iPhone has almost become a threat. If I’m sat in the pub with my friends and someone says something slightly dubious, like, for example “when scared, a squid will balloon to twice its size and turn red,” all I have to do is mutter “I have an iPhone” and all of a sudden their confidence and bravado will be shattered, because people now believe Google results more than their own memories. Hopefully, as smartphones become more prevalent in society, there will be less BS spoken in bars around the world, though being the guy that just sits there fact checking what people are saying all-night between sips on your beer is hardly a good way to be the life and soul of the party. Also, I try and keep my iPhone in my pocket as much as possible when I’ve had a drink or two, because as we’ve discussed before, drinking and e-mails do not mix.

I don’t believe that the ability to search the internet is someone that will catch on too quickly (maybe one day when everyone is comfortable with using those stupid bluetooth microphones), but I think its pretty amazing that ‘we’ seem to have reached a point in technological evolution where we can do things that were in science fiction not so long ago. Imagine if you told someone in the 80s that in about twenty years time that they would be able to pull a phone out of their pocket (that wouldn’t be the same size and weight as a brick) speak into it, without speaking to someone else, and the answer to your query would then be displayed on a screen, how do you think they’d react? Oh, and then you told them that the phone could also hold and play hundreds of hours of music and video. Hell, when I was a kid, I was impressed that ‘they’ could get Tetris to fit onto a wristwatch!

Oh, and in case you missed it, a spider has gone missing on the International Space Station, and that is a genuine story, not the set up to a low budget scifi movie.

Whenever I see a piece of spam pop up on in my e-mail client, its a slight annoyance, but I just accept that its ‘one of those things’ and that we can’t stop it being sent to my inbox, but hopefully a filter will be able to stop me from having to read it. I guess that there are people that are more pro-active than me, because instead of just trying to stop themselves from reading the spam, they’re trying to stop those billions and billions of junk e-mails even being sent to your inbox.

According to this article from the Associated Press, a company called McColo Corp. was shutdown last week after it turned out that they were the half of almost half of the world’s spam e-mails. Spam accounts for 90% of all e-mail sent around the world, so if these guys were responsible for half of all spam, that means that there is about 45% fewer e-mails being sent around the world right now. I know that sounds really impressive, but the article goes on to say that you can never really kill the spam monster, within a few days or weeks there will be just as many e-mails circulating around the world telling you about some great v1agra offers that you should really be interested in.

I don’t think I’ve actually opened or read a spam e-mail for at least a couple of years. I use Gmail and it seems to catch just about everything and put it into the spam folder, which I’ll give a quick browse to check that it hasn’t been overzealous and picked up something I actually want to read, then I might have a swift chuckle at the titles of the spam mails, and click delete all. I’d always presumed that everyone else did the same, but apparently not. 1 in 12,500,000 spam e-mails actually result in someone signing up to that porn site, buying those cheap medications from Canada, or, of course, trying to pick up some little blue pills on the cheap in the hope of stirring things up in the bedroom. Those figures come from the results of a study by computer scientists at University of California, Berkeley and UC San Diego, who decided that the only way that they could get accurate data about spam was to actually spam people, and in a 26 day period they sent 350 messages, yielding them just 28 sales, a record that even poor ol’ Gil Gunderson from the Simpsons wouldn’t be proud of, but apparently that’s enough of a hit-rate for big-time spammers to rake in a couple of million dollars a year, and whilst they can bring in that kind of cash I’m sure that they won’t be stopping any time soon.

Oh, and if you thought that you had it bad when it came to annoying spam clogging up your inbox, think about poor Colin Wells, who has around 44,000 spam messages going through his server every day. He used to spend up to two hours a day tapping away at the delete key, but seems to have got things under control now with some effective filters, so if there’s one lesson that you can learn from this article, its that whilst spammers never quit, neither do the good guys, and you can almost always take back control of your inbox.

A quick apology and explanation about the lack of posts of late. At this very moment I’m typing from a house in the South of France (right next to the sea!) where I’ve been working for the past week, and will be for the next couple of weeks. The work day here from from about 8:30 to 19:00 and its usually pretty physical stuff, so by the end of the day my brain isn’t ‘all there’ if you know what I mean. Also, I haven’t got as much time as usual to be checking out the news to see what’s happening in the world (I have literally no idea how the stock markets are doing), so that’s why you haven’t been getting your daily dose of my opinions recently.

One story that I have seen in a few places is a rather unusual one that concerns property rights. I know, property rights, you know this post is going to be a barrel of fun. Oh, it also concerns murder, ahhh, you’re hooked now aren’t you. Okay, its not actual murder, its virtual murder, but despite the murder being virtual it is having some very real ramifications.

In Japan (of course), a 43 year-old woman who was ‘divorced’ by her online husband in a MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Role Playing Game) called Maple Story may face time in jail after logging onto her former “husband’s” account and killing his character. Yes, apparently in Japan doing something like that could result in you going to jail, or getting a rather hefty fine at the very least. I’m sure that if it happened in the UK it either wouldn’t make the news, or would be a laffer on page 9, but the police would probably have better things to do. Not so in Japan, where digital life has very much integrated with ‘real’ life and these matters are taken pretty seriously. In cases like this it isn’t actually the ‘murder’ itself which is the crime, its the woman illegally accessing the man’s account, but that wouldn’t be as interesting of a story now, would it?

Personally, I’m undecided as to whether I can really think about this act as a crime. If I opened an account to play Maple Story, and then someone hacked into it and killed virtual Andy I’d probably be quite annoyed, but I wouldn’t think it was a crime. However, if I had played it for months and months, going around completing quests and making friends, I’d probably be pissed off if one of those people I’d met hacked my account and took their revenge, maybe not to the point of calling the police, but still pretty pissed off. If someone hacked into my e-mail, that would be a crime, if they hacked into my Facebook profile, it would be inconvenietn but probably not a crime, if they hacked into one of my websites, I’d be scared to death of losing many years work, and it probably would be a crime, but I don’t think anything could be done about it so I wouldn’t get the authorities involved.

As you can probably tell from this article, this news story has confused me greatly. I spend a lot of my time working on the internet writing articles, blog postings, and designing websites every so often, so I know exactly what the guy was going through when his character was killed (I’ve lost work in crashes before), and yet I can’t quite bring myself to think that someone should go to jail (or even receive a fine) for a virtual murder.