Death By Email Blog

Virginia Anti-Spam Law Unconstitutional

The U.S. Supreme Court let stand a Virgina Supreme Court ruling that Virginia's Computer Crimes Act violates First Amendment rights because it blocks all unsolicited bulk emails, including those containing political, religious, or other speech protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.  Virginia's attorney general said Monday that his office will rewrite the state's anti-spam law, reports the Associated Press.

The Virginia law had national significance when it was passed in 2003 because so much of the nation's email passed through servers based in Virginia, such as those maintained by America Online.  Even if the senders were in other states, Virginia's law applied if the mail was routed through Virginia.

Festival For Those Rejected By Email

Have you ever forgotten to hide the members of that distribution list or hit reply to all?

When the Sarasota Film Festival sent a rejection email to the 350 filmmakers who did not make the cut, displayed the email addresses of everyone who was rejected.  Oops.  All of a sudden, the rejected started contacting each other.

"I have never seen this many emails in my inbox, in such a short period of time. I must have hundreds in just the last few days from other filmmakers, that was weird enough, but then out of nowhere," wrote one of the filmmakers in the Cinematic Happenings Under Development (CHUD) blog.

As a a tongue-in-cheek response, the rejected got together and created their own film festival at the same time and location. More than 150 of the 350 rejected films will be screened.

"We're making this big vat of lemonade out of the lemons of rejection," said Susan Gervasi, whose film, "On the Trail of Jack Thorp," will be screened.  (Sarasota Herald-Tribune)

The Sarasota 350, as the film makers have come to be called, created an assortment of “rejection” accessories, including T-shirts and its own Facebook page.

(Tip of the hat to Bradenton Herald.)

New Jersey's High Court Keeps Governor's Email Confidential

Well, the fight appears to be over in New Jersey and open government has lost.

The New Jersey Supreme Court on March 18 refused to hear the latest appeal from state Republicans on the release of the email messages between New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine and the former head of Communications Workers of America Local 1034, Carla Katz, who was also his girl friend.

The refusal to hear the case means that the ruling from an appeals court that executive privilege shields the messages from the public.  The court battle was essentially one between executive privilege versus the Open Public Records Act.

Republicans sought the correspondence to determine whether Corzine’s relationship with Katz unduly influenced his decisions relating to the contract, said the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. The trial court initially ordered the documents released as government information under the state’s Open Public Records Act, but that order was overturned by the intermediate appeals court.

Its opinion stated that the plaintiff, New Jersey Republican State Committee Chairman Thomas Wilson, had a "limited interest” in the messages that was outweighed by the need for confidentiality of government sources of information, reported the RCFP.

U.S. Attorneys in Madoff Case Submit Congo Scam Email

While gathering emails from Bernard Madoff's victims to show the extent of his crime for Judge Denny Chin, the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York included what they may have thought was one particularly incriminating message:

From: [redacted]
Sent: Saturday, March 07, 2009 6:38 PM
Subject: REPLY ME

My Name is Mr. [redacted] but my origin is from Republic of Congo. I have an inherited fund I want to invest in a business in your country with a help of a local. I don't know about what business but I found it wise to invest the funds in your country with your collaboration with me.

Ever since I move to Dubai due to the problem in my country, I have not been able to invest the funds in Dubai due to security reasons. Now I am seeking foreign assistance to transfer the funds in your country based on the news of their development.

If you can assist, I am willing to give you 10% of the funds that is US$3.5Million. You will understand that my entire life and future depend on this money and I shall be very grateful if you can assist me. The major thing I demand from you is the absolute assurance that the funds will be safe and you will not sit on it when it is transferred into your account.

I don't think that I need to print the rest of this email.  (You can find it at the source: Talking Points Memo.  They found it on page 36 of the evidence.)

If the US Attorney's office has never seen an African scam email, then I want to know what spam filter they are using?  Or, did Madoff sell Viagra too?

BTW, if you want to read all of the emails yourself, follow the links at CNBC.

Harvard Economist Blames Twitter For Current Recession

Harvard Business School Professor Martin Schmeldon released results of research findings that suggest that excessive Twitter use may have caused the current economic downturn, according to a blog posting today.

"We see the rapid rise of Twitter usage in 2008 correlating very strongly with a tremendous decrease in American productivity," said Schmeldon. "Our regression analysis on the data suggests a causal relationship that may actually be larger than the impact of the much-touted subprime collateral debt refinancing triggers."

Employees who might otherwise be working productively and contributing to the economy can instead create Tweets, such as "I just realized I clipped all of my nails today except for one" or "My co-worker is drinking pepsi . Pepsi!!! I want some. Stupid Lent," reports the blog posting.

The posting goes on to say ....

Beltway insider and renowned economic advisor, West Tirrettia, believes Schmeldon's study could have some implications for economic policy that comes out of the current legislative session. "Congress has duly taken note of this research," said Tirrettia. "We may see some Twitter moratoriums coming in future stimulus bills. It's really just a question of whether lawmakers are willing to put their necks out against something that has become very popular back home in their constituencies."

The statistical validity of Schmeldon's research has been questioned by many statisticians and economists, including Pat Sooshisif, an associate professor of public policy at the Yale School of Management. "I think an informed reader of this research paper should be able to determine that Schmeldon wasn't engaging in serious statistical analysis of this data," wrote Sooshisif in the March 2009 issue of The Journal of Economic Perspective and Analysis. "Schmeldon cites a dual inflection point in December 2008. The stochastic confidence interval for that assertion is very low, and it is our conclusion that the z-factor is not statistically significant." Professor Schmeldon did not return repeated calls seeking comment on this research.

Clearly, we have proven the value of economic analysis and statistics.  :-)    (Tip of the hat to Sandy Bendorf.  Thanks for pointing it out.)

Email Might Produce The Scandal's Smoking Gun

A newly released email may tie a high ranking Pennsylvania House Democrat to the so-called "Bonusgate" scandal.  The scandal, reported earlier in this blog, is about state employees being paid for campaigning.  But, former Pennsylvania House Democratic Leader Bill DeWeese and others claim that they knew nothing about state-paid bonuses for campaign work.

The email, which was given to defense attorneys and printed today in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, may suggest otherwise and could become a "smoking gun" in the case.

"I can't thank you enough for the bonus for campaigning. I am speechless as most of us are," reportedly wrote legislative research analyst Karen Steiner to DeWeese and then-House Democratic Whip Mike Veon.

"U R welcome," came the response from DeWeese's email account. 

"Given the volume of email that comes to him and given that some of it is handled by staff, Bill does not recall this email," said spokesman Tom Andrews to the Tribune-Review. "At the time responding kindly to one of many 'thank yous' for Christmas bonuses would have been a routine matter."  DeWeese has not been charged with wrongdoing.

Emailed Suicide Note Before Police Killed Him

Moments before being killed by police, an armed man sent an email to his wife to say that he was going to commit suicide.  48-year-old Charles Bradley Campbell armed himself and entered a Las Vegas hospital emergency room early Wednesday.  A nurse called 911.  Police responded and ordered the man to put down his weapons.  He was fatally shot when he pointed his gun at officers, Henderson police said to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Police say that Campbell emailed his ex-wife in Washington state that he was distraught.  She contacted the local police, who then contacted authorities in Las Vegas. Two crisis intervention police officers arrived at Campbell's southeast Las Vegas home about the same time he entered the hospital several blocks away. (Associated Press) 

Happy 20th Birthday to the World Wide Web!

It was 20 years ago today (as Sgt. Pepper would say) that the World Wide Web was invented.  And, no, Al Gore did not invent the Internet.  Actually, it was Tim Berners-Lee, a software consultant working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) outside of Geneva, Switzerland.  On March 13, 1989, he wrote "Information Management: A proposal."

This is the document that defined terms like "hypertext" and "hot links."  It talked about "browsing: for information.  In other words, it saw the future.

"We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities."

"The aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it after wards. The result should be sufficiently attractive to use that it the information contained would grow past a critical threshold, so that the usefulness the scheme would in turn encourage its increased use."

It was many more years before the Mozilla web browser would actually appear,  But, the world wide web began twenty years ago today.  Happy Birthday.  Our lives are not the same.

One Ring To Rule Them All

After dominating the web search business and taking a commanding position in the email market with Gmail, Google now intends to lead the world of phone and voicemail too.  Google Voice, announced today, will provide a single phone number to unite all of your phones, free domestic calls, searchable voicemail "for life," and many enhanced calling features like call blocking and screening, voicemail transcripts, call conferencing, and international calls. It also has launched free unlimited calling within the United States with international calling at a small fee.

I believe that this is a disruptive event.  There are free calling companies, like eBay's Skype.  There are unified ring companies.  There are fee-based call transcription companies.  But, none of these companies have been able to take on the telephone company infrastructure.  Google has that ability.  It could wipe out the small companies and take on the establishment.

The new product is the outgrowth of Google's acquisition of Grand Central in 2007.  The original product was designed to solve the problem of having more than one phone number (home, work, cellphone and so on):

• Missing calls when people call on one phone while you are near another.  (For example, last night my daughter called me on my cell phone when I was at home and the cell was in another room.)
• The need to check multiple voicemail accounts and phone answering machines.
• Changing phone numbers when you switched cities or jobs.
• Missing calls when your schedule changes.

How do they solve it?  Sign in to voice.google.com, pick up a new phone number in your local area code, and assign your various phone numbers to it. (The service will start in a few weeks, but Google has a waiting list available until then.)  When users call one number, all of the phones will ring.

But, Google has done more -- much more.  The most impressive is the use of speech recognition technology to transcribe voicemail messages.  The transcribed messages will be sent to your Gmail account  -- for free.  So, the promise of a unified mailbox becomes one step closer to reality.

"But wait, there was more," the David Pogue of the New York Times reports about his test of the service.  "Each time you answered a call, while the caller was still hearing “one ringy-dingy, two ringy-dingies,” you heard a recording offering four ways to handle the call: “Press 1 to accept, 2 to send to voice mail, 3 to listen in on voice mail, or 4 to accept and record the call.” If you pressed 3, the call went directly to voice mail, but you could listen in. If you felt that the caller deserved your immediate attention, you could press * to pick up and join the call. This subtle feature saved time, conserved cellular minutes and, in certain cases, avoided a great deal of interpersonal conflict."

You can have customized incoming messages for different people.  Want a sexy greeting for that special person and a serious greeting for business calls, no problem.

And, Google Voice is a head-on competitor to Skype for free domestic and low cost international calls.  Internet calls work differently on Google Voice than on Skype. Rather than starting a call from a computer, a specialized phone or an application on a mobile device, Google Voice users call into their voice mail service from any phone.  Once there, they can push a button to get a dial tone and call a different number.

If you want to learn more about Google Voice, I recommend bypassing the normal ways of searching and go directly to the support pages at http://www.google.com/support/voice/bin/topic.py?topic=16495.  The topics include:

Google Voice Basics

• Phone types
• Accessing the website from a mobile phone
• About Google Voice
• How it works
• Requirements
• Answering calls
• Making calls
• Customizing greetings and settings
• Navigating the website

Google blog postings include Here Comes Google Voice and Moving to Google Voice.

Google Voice takes a major step in unified messaging and internet calls.  It will change the industry.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
FROM GOOGLE AY https://www.google.com/voice/about

Google number - One number for all your calls and SMS
Call screening - Announce and screen callers Listen in - Listen before taking a call Block calls - Keep unwanted callers at bay SMS - Send, receive, and store SMS Place calls - Call US numbers for free Taking calls - Answer on any of your phones Phone routing - Phones ring based on who calls Forwarding phones - Add phones and decide which ring
Google voicemail - Voicemail as easy as email, with transcripts
Voicemail transcripts - Read what your voicemail says Listen to voicemail - Check online or from your phone Notifications - Receive voicemails via email or SMS Personalize greeting - Vary greetings by caller Share voicemail - Forward or download voicemails
Voice features - More cool things you can do with Google Voice
Conference calling - Join people into a single call Call record - Record calls and store them online Call switch - Switch phones during a call Mobile site - View your inbox from your mobile GOOG-411 - Check directory assistance Manage groups - Set preferences by group

Nielsen Says Social Networking More Popular Than Email

One out of every online 11 minutes is spent social networking and blogging sites, with such "Member Communities" growing twice as fast as the other leading online sectors (search, portals, PC software, email), according to a new report from Nielsen Research.  Report highlights say:

• Social networks/ blogs now 4th most popular online category – ahead of personal email
• These sites account for one in every 11 minutes online
• Facebook has the highest average time per visitor (three hours 10 minutes) amongst the 75 most popular brands online worldwide
• The total amount spent online globally increased by 18% between December 2007 and December 2008
• In the same period, however, the amount of time spent on ‘Member Community’ sites rose by 63% to 45 billion minutes; and on Facebook by a massive 566% – from 3.1 billion minutes to 20.5 billion.
• Facebook has added almost twice as many 50-64 year olds visitors (+13.6 million) than it has added under 18 year old visitors (+7.3 million).

"Social networking appears to be snatching away users' online time formerly spent with email," reports AdWeek.   "As online paradigm shifts, advertisers must find a way to add value, rather than follow the 'push' model."