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Apple Thanks Its Lucky iPods
The Wall Street Journal said "The agreement marks the beginning of a truce in a long-running battle between the three largest providers of instant messaging, a service similar to e-mail that allows computer users to send and receive text messages in real time. The deal could also advance a push by Microsoft to take on International Business Machines Corp. in the corporate market for instant messaging."
Justify My Mail
More on the approaches those companies are taking: "Two systems being tested now are Yahoo's DomainKeys standard and Sender ID, which is backed by Microsoft and the Pobox.com e-mail service. Sender ID has attracted the most interest. It counts on the fact that though e-mail headers are easy to forge, IP addresses – the unique set of numbers attached to every Internet domain – are not. ... DomainKeys takes an approach that is based on public-private key cryptography." See washingtonpost.com's coverage from last month on this topic.
Even if you can swallow the spam, can you handle the fact that your company might be watching your e-mail? "About 30% of 140 businesses with more than 1,000 employees check outgoing mail, says a June survey by Forrester Consulting, the first time it has issued such a report," USA Today reported. "The regulatory climate has intensified, and if you're not careful, you could be subjected to lawsuits or an SEC investigation," media and technology lawyer Steve Weiswasser told the paper. "It's life in the post-Enron age."
The Wall Street Journal yesterday ran a piece about the lack of privacy in e-mail communications. Bottom line: Be careful what you write in your e-mails; it could easily become evidence. "But by ruling that e-mails' mode of transmission – hopping from computer to computer – doesn't fit the definitions in federal wiretap laws, the First Circuit Court of Appeals late last month vastly increased the number of strangers who might have legal access to messages, privacy advocates say. Some fear the ruling could leave consumers open to more intrusions, from marketers who could mine the content of messages, to lawyers who could more easily subpoena e-mails in divorce cases and other litigation," the article said. So what are e-mailers to do? "If you're really concerned about security, try the solution used by privacy-conscious techies: encryption. Software packages, such as the freely-available PGP distributed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, encode messages in such a way that only the intended recipient can decipher them," the article said. "Encryption could represent a 'sea change' in Internet privacy if enough users adopt it, says Jonathan Zittrain, an assistant professor at Harvard Law School."
EBay's New Tune
Bloomberg wrote more: "Digital River Inc., an Eden Prairie, Minn.-based company, has been selling software on the auction site under a pilot project, eBay spokesman Hani Durzy said yesterday. EBay is allowing sale of downloadable software by vendors after previously banning such offers because of problems with pirated software sales. The 90-day test, which ends this month, allows preapproved sellers to list software for sale if they demonstrate they are authorized to make such sales."
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