Specifications

TECHNOLOGY TRENDS & NEWS ANALYSIS
0
10,000
20,000
30,000
40,000
50,000
60,000
70,000
80,000
2007*2006*2005*2004*2003*2002
Wi-Fi hot spots in the U.S.
M
* Projected. Source: The Yankee Group, July 2003.
The number of public
wireless access points in
the United States in 2007 is
expected to be 24 times
the number available in
2002, according to market
research firm The Yankee
Group. By far the majority
of these Wi-Fi hot spots are
expected to be in densely
populated areas.
Wireless Hot Spots:
On the Rise
www.pcmag.com SEPTEMBER 16, 2003 PC MAGAZINE
25
IGNORING THE TIDE
Even as the Recording Industry
Association of America (
RIAA)
faces off with online music-
swapping sites, two-thirds of
the 2,515 Americans surveyed
who trade music online say
they don’t care whether the
music is copyrighted, accord-
ing to a study by the Pew
Internet & American Life
Project. Through July, accord-
ing to the study, the RIAA had
issued almost 1,000 subpoe-
nas requesting information
from
ISPs to identify music
swappers.
LOST AND FOUND
Apple Computer cofounder
Steve Wozniak and his com-
pany Wheels of Zeus have
developed wireless location-
monitoring technology for
tracking children, pets, and
objects. The electronic tags
use
GPS and radio technology
and should come to market
next year. They will be able
to issue alerts by phone or
e-mail when, for example, a
child arrives at school or a
dog wanders beyond a gated
area.
THE NEXT NAPSTER?
The Motion Picture Associa-
tion of America, which repre-
sents seven major movie
studios, has unveiled a series
of antipiracy spots for release
on television and as previews
in movie theaters. The spots
ask Internet users not to
download copyrighted movies
that they may find online. The
spots include celebrities (such
as Ben Affleck), studio security
guards, and theater workers.
www.pcmag.com/pipeline
WANT TO MAKE A FRIEND ONLINE?
You can if you go to www
.speak2me.net and chat with
Ladder Digital Education’s Lucy, a
virtual person. Although online
bots such as Lucy aren’t new,
Lucy is backed by
A.L.I.C.E. Brain, a
natural-language engine with a
40,000-entry database of
responses to phrases. The tech-
nology is a two-time winner of the
Loebner Prize—sponsored by
philanthropist Hugh Loebner—for
the “most human computer.”
Lucy is also attracting com-
mercial partners. Ladder Digital,
Oddcast, and Pandora Bots are
working with
A.L.I.C.E. Brain to
develop online e-learning agents
and get businesses to build their
own database-driven bots.
“Companies can deploy tutors
this way and reduce customer
service costs,” says Adi Sideman,
CEO of Oddcast.
So what is Lucy’s favorite
movie? A.I. Artificial Intelligence,
of course.—Sebastian Rupley
The Human
Computer
mining whether to scan content,
limiting attachment size/type,
and enforcing encryption.
Delaying mail delivery does
not stop spam, which is why the
C60 will include a licensed ver-
sion of Brightmail’s antispam
server beginning in September.
Used in conjunction with
Brightmail, IronPort hopes that
reputation filtering and mail
queuing will reduce false nega-
tives—spam
messages that
don’t get stopped.
Antispam
tools often use
rules to identify
unsolicited mail,
but spammers
are always com-
ing up with tech-
niques to outwit
the spam stop-
pers. By holding
mail from questionable sources,
IronPort’s gateway gives the
antispam engine time to update
its rules. Mail from reputable
sources will be passed through.
The C60 costs $55,000 and is
targeted at large corporations.
But IronPort plans to integrate
reputation filtering with less
costly appliances for smaller
businesses in the near future.
—Ben Z. Gottesman
Y
our reputation precedes
you. This is the idea
behind a new weapon in
the war on spam and e-mail
overload from IronPort Sys-
tems: reputation filtering. The
IronPort C60 Messaging
Gateway appliance controls the
flow of e-mail coming into your
network based on the reputa-
tions of the senders. Reputa-
tions are primarily established
using data
collected from
more than 11,000
organizations
that participate
in IronPort’s
SenderBase
network.
With this
data, Senderbase
can identify mail
that appears to
be coming from
spammers. The more likely a
message is spam, the longer the
message is held in the delivery
queue. Or it may not be deliv-
ered at all, depending on rules
set by the C60’s administrator.
The more untrustworthy a
sender appears, the more strin-
gent are the restrictions applied
to that sender. The restrictions
include throttling the maximum
message acceptance rate, deter-
The Value of a Good Name
A new approach in the war on spam.
“The more
untrustworthy the
sender appears,
the more stringent
are the restrictions
applied to that
sender.”
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