Sickening spam stats

No surprise that the CAN-SPAM Act is deemed a failure by critics, but an IDG News Service status report does provide some eye-opening numbers about how much worse the spam problem has gotten since the law went into effect at the start of 2004:

Postini Inc., an e-mail security service provider, said the percentage of legitimate non-spam e-mail it sees dropped from 22 percent of all e-mail at the beginning of 2004 to just 12 percent by December. The company processes 2.4 billion e-mail messages a week.

MX Logic Inc., another antispam vendor, found 67 percent of all e-mail to be spam in February. By November, 75 percent of all e-mail was spam, according to MX Logic.

Salon on 2004 in tech

"When technology became cool again", Salon.com's roundup of 2004's most important technology stories, also provides some cool-headed analysis for some of the headline hype.

For example, in summarizing the impact that blogging had on the national elections, Farhad Manjoo points out that Howard Dean and other candidates who relied heavily on blog financing lost despite all the talk of revolutionizing politics: "Was the entire online political effort something of an illusion -- a mere echo chamber of blue-state optimism, all sound and fury, signifying nothing? Alas, it sure seems that way now. "

Other topics covered include the coming of age of the wireless Internet, the Kyoto Protocol, e-voting security, Firefox reigniting the browser wars, the ongoing campaign against file sharing, California's decision to fund stem-cell research, outsourcing, a reality check for hydrogen-fueled cars, and the growing Big Brother potential of Google.

Of the latter, Andrew Leonard writes:

When any individual or company becomes that omnipresent and all-knowing, there's usually justification for wariness. At Salon we've been pulling for Google since the very earliest days, because we have consistently found the company's offerings incredibly useful and because we believe that the executives of Google are sincere when they say they want to do the right thing. But if a different crew were running the Google ship, and economic circumstances began to force their hand, it's chilling to think of just how much information Google knows about us. It knows what we search for, whom we e-mail, who our friends are, and soon, what books we like to read. That's quite a dossier, and it's scary.