Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Friday 20 June 2003, 5:11 PM
Wednesday: Microsoft changes its spots
Wednesday 18/06/2003
The spam that broke the camel's back landed on a whole load of desks in Redmond recently. Like any big company, Microsoft suffers from the relentless onslaught of drab rip-off emails, and it has anti-spam filters in place. But not only did this one evade the robots, it purported to be from Microsoft itself, and to have important information about security updates. You can imagine how well that went down in the corridors of power.
And so, driven to distraction by the sheer cheek of it, Microsoft has pulled on its underpants over its trousers and set off on a one-company campaign to make the Net safe from spammers. Notwithstanding its rather ambivalent attitude to the problem before -- it campaigned to reduce the fines payable under proposed legislation, because it said that legitimate marketing emails could be deliberately misconstrued -- it's going for spammers in the UK and US with a battery of civil cases. It may not be a legitimate superhero, but it's more than capable of funding a trip to the courts, and anything that helps reduce its overdraft at the karma bank is to be welcomed.
But some things don't change. Try going to search.msn.com and looking for the search terms Microsoft and bloatware...
The spam that broke the camel's back landed on a whole load of desks in Redmond recently. Like any big company, Microsoft suffers from the relentless onslaught of drab rip-off emails, and it has anti-spam filters in place. But not only did this one evade the robots, it purported to be from Microsoft itself, and to have important information about security updates. You can imagine how well that went down in the corridors of power.
And so, driven to distraction by the sheer cheek of it, Microsoft has pulled on its underpants over its trousers and set off on a one-company campaign to make the Net safe from spammers. Notwithstanding its rather ambivalent attitude to the problem before -- it campaigned to reduce the fines payable under proposed legislation, because it said that legitimate marketing emails could be deliberately misconstrued -- it's going for spammers in the UK and US with a battery of civil cases. It may not be a legitimate superhero, but it's more than capable of funding a trip to the courts, and anything that helps reduce its overdraft at the karma bank is to be welcomed.
But some things don't change. Try going to search.msn.com and looking for the search terms Microsoft and bloatware...
Previous
