Wired News: ISP Files First Can-Spam Lawsuit
A California Internet service provider is putting the federal Can-Spam Act to its first test, two months after the law passed, by filing a lawsuit against the owner of home-improvement website BobVila.com.

Hypertouch, based in Foster City, California, filed the suit on Thursday claiming the owner of BobVila.com and its marketing affiliate BlueStream Media violated provisions of the Can-Spam Act by sending out e-mail advertisements containing missing contact information. The suit claims that BlueStream Media forged the header information that can help e-mail recipients identify where a message originated.

Under the Can-Spam Act, which is the United States’ first nationwide attempt at reducing the amount of spam clogging the Internet, all e-mail advertisements must contain valid headers and contact information.

Critics of the act, however, contend that the law is too weak to have any serious effect and point out that it overrides stricter state laws against spam.

Hypertouch President Joe Wagner and attorney John Fallat said that they agree with the critics, but that the lawsuit was necessary to show that ISPs are not giving up in the fight against spam.

“We’re dealing with what we’ve got,” said Fallat. “We want to send a message to legitimate operators like BobVila.com that if they hire spammers, they will be responsible for spamming.”

Chris Bryan, a representative for BlueStream Media, said that his company had not yet been served with papers for the lawsuit, and that it would release a statement soon afterward. He said the allegations against his company were false. “We are complying with the Can-Spam Act,” he said.

Representatives for BVWebTies, which operates BobVila.com, did not immediately return calls on Friday.

Even if Hypertouch succeeds in its case, the message to spammers and the companies that hire them might not be loud enough to make a difference. The ISP is asking for $100 in damages — the maximum allowed by the Can-Spam Act — for each of the approximately 100 messages that it claims were sent by BlueStream Media.

Under California’s previous antispam law, plaintiffs in an antispam suit would have been able to ask for awards 10 times as large. Individuals, too, would have had the right to sue — not just ISPs and government authorities.

In addition to statutory damages, Hypertouch is also asking for an injunction to prevent BobVila.com and BlueStream Media from sending out further messages that contain false headers or are missing contact information.

Unless other ISPs file their own lawsuits claiming additional damages, such a penalty would amount to little more than a slap on the wrist and an admonition to “get it right” the next time.

This, says Fallat, is a problem that is not likely to change any time soon. “A lot of times, in response to public pressure, politicians rush out a law that isn’t very helpful,” he said.

Still, he hopes the lawsuit will inspire other ISPs to take a more active role in fighting spam.

Politicians “took away the private right of action, but they did give ISPs the right to sue,” said Fallat. “Will this stop spam? No. But at least we’ll shrink it, hopefully.”

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A new disease, “Internet Syndrome”, is beginning to appear in China. Doctors say more and more psychological conditions, that have Internet related causes, are being diagnosed. It appears that this is restricted mostly to teenagers and that addicts are suffering symptoms like delirium, paranoia and psychosis. Often the affected person has been spending over 6 hours a day on the Internet. A Doctor Yu Haiting, the vice president of the No. 8 People’s Hospital in Zhengzhou, told the Xinhauanet news agency that he sees over two cases a week: “He cites the case of a 19-year old who, after surfing the next for five to six hours everyday for five years who had come to believe that “invisible pairs of eyes in cyber-space were peeping at him and examining him all the time”. Yu explains that sufferers are typically having difficulties with social interaction in the real world, and turn to the Net to avoid conflict with friends and family. “To start with, they turn to the virtual world for comfort and gradually become more reluctant to face life,” he said. Dr. Yu advises that teenagers restrict time online to no more than 3 hours per day and that parents spend time talking with their children to encourage them to engage with the real world.” Quote courtesy of the Register. China has been seen to aproach the Internet with caution and recently passed legislation to prevent people under 18 from using cyber cafes. It is speculated that the publication of these “Internet Syndrome” cases may be an attempt to persuade the Chinese population not to use the Internet.

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IBM has begun to produce PowerPC chips using a new manufacturing process that promises to improve their speed and energy efficiency.

The tech giant plans to announce on Friday that it has started mass production of PowerPCs on the 90-nanometer process, which refers to the average feature size on the chips. (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.) The PowerPC 970FX, which is used inside IBM’s blade servers and Apple Computer’s Xserve G5 server, is the first processor to be made with this manufacturing method.

Big Blue is expected to describe a 2.5GHz version of the chip made on the 90-nanometer process at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco next week. PowerPCs on the market today, produced on a 130-nanometer process, top out at 2GHz.

To make the new PowerPCs, IBM is combining layers of silicon on insulator (SOI) and strained silicon. Together, the two technologies allow manufacturers to improve energy efficiency or performance: They can either make processors that run as fast as current models but consume far less power; or they can produce chips that use the same amount of power but run at higher clock speeds.

Reducing power consumption is greatest challenge facing chip designers, said Intel Chief Technology Officer Pat Gelsinger and other industry figures. Different manufacturers are adopting different techniques to solve the problem, which has a couple of aspects. First, designers have to figure out how to get all that electricity into a shrinking piece of silicon. Second, the heat generated by this can cause malfunctions.

IBM has long been the primary proponent of silicon on insulator technology, which functions like a sponge. An insulating layer sits below the transistors inside a chip and decreases power consumption by preventing electricity from leaking out.

Invite Michael Kanellos into your in-box Senior department editor Michael Kanellos scrutinizes the hardware industry in a regular Enterprise Hardware column that ranges from chips to servers and other critical business systems.

Strained silicon, by contrast, removes layers and ridges in silicon, which in turn allows electrons to move faster. The concept, which involves inserting large germanium atoms deep in a wafer, was initially introduced in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but was mainly dismissed.

“In ‘85, ‘86 or ‘87, if you proposed this, people would die laughing,” said Bernard Meyerson, chief technology officer at IBM’s Technology group, in an interview last year.

Intel came out with its first chips containing strained silicon earlier this month, when it released Prescott. Intel, however, has not adopted silicon on insulator technology.

For future chips, AMD and other companies are looking at switching from silicon to metal for the gate oxide, a thin layer that helps control the flow of electrons in a transistor.

By Michael Kanellos
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

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How To Give The Last-Minute Gift of Blog
By Biz Stone

Okay, it’s officially the last minute and you forgot to get your sister’s roommate a gift. You’re going to their holiday party tonight and you can’t show up empty handed. What do you do? Fear not gentle bloggers, you’ll have a great gift. The gift of blog.

What friend, family member, or colleague wouldn’t want a beautiful new Blogger blog. Don’t they know that Blogger is “The fast, easy, and free way to publish and share your information online?” Well it is. And it’s damn sexy too. The following are instructions for how to set up a brand new, free, Blogger blog for someone as a gift and how to make it seem like you actually gave it some real thought. The giving-it-some-thought part is key to any successful last-minute gifting strategy.

Step 1 — Create A New Blog

First, go to Blogger.com and click the Start Now button. If you’re already a Blogger.com member, just sign in and click the “create a new blog” link. The idea here is to set up a new blog in your own name first. Go through the four steps of setting up a new blog. Keep in mind that the title, description and other settings will eventually be changed by the giftee.
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