USA? It's the United Spam of America

USA? It's the United Spam of America

Hands up if you know which country is the biggest spammer in the world? No, not China; they're fifth. The winner of this year's inglorious gold medal goes to the US which generates over 14% of the world's spam emails, nearly triple that of Belarus, which lies in second place. Besides advertising dodgy products, many carry malicious attachments designed to make your computer _ and sometimes personal life _ miserable. If you were wondering when the first spam was sent, this is attributed to Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, who were lawyers that back in 1994 sent immigration service offers to all the Usenet groups at the time. The biggest problem in the US is the large number of unprotected computers that get used as spambot hosts.

According to a presentation at the recent Canalys Channels Forum in Bangkok by CEO Meg Whitman, Hewlett-Packard is getting into the 3D printer market and will have their first product out sometime near the middle of next year. The focus will be on printing faster and at a lower cost. As past masters in printer technology it will be interesting see what HP comes up with as all the CEO would reveal was that it involved a new technology. She added that they expect it to be about another three years before the technology really takes off. I expect it will be sooner than that.

I have received two emails from friends on Facebook detailing the problem of posting a photo and then finding it on another site. Facebook recently changed their privacy policies and default configurations to make Facebook by default less private for everyone. The current one is that any member of Facebook has access to everyone else's photos, Likes and comments. In order to protect you and your real friends, hover on their Facebook photo and when it pops up over Friends click Settings and uncheck Life Events, Comments and Like. Make sure they do the same for you.

The US Patent Office has been at it again, granting patents for things it simply shouldn't. As usual the decision has favoured Apple over its rivals based on Patent 7,479,949 for a "touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics". This has been interpreted as any multi-touch approach, which has been around for longer than the patent application. One possible conclusion here is that people at the US Patent Office only use and support Apple devices.

Microsoft messed up a recent Windows RT 8.1 update, leaving some ARM-based Surface RT tablet owners unable to boot their units due to an incomplete update process. Windows PC-based users didn't experience any problems apart from the occasional Surface device suffering the same problem. Since then there has been a safer version put on the Windows site for download and updates.

Microsoft's new Surface Pro 2 is out with a number of improvements _ except for battery life. According to a recent series of tests conducted over at anandtech.com, the device averaged 6.68 hours of life surfing the web compared to the older version's 4.72. Yes, it is better, but these two devices were still at the bottom of the list of those tested. The Surface RT was third worst at 6.81, if you are thinking the comparisons might not be fair. Comparing the MacBook Air to the Surface Pro 2 is reasonable, with the former giving 14.28 hours of browsing time _ more than double that of the Pro 2. In terms of battery efficiency, Microsoft has a long way to go.

In other Surface Pro 2 news, the people over at iFixit have completed a test tear down trial and the new ones appear to about as hard to fix as the old ones. The inside is full of thick sticky glue and over 90 screws giving it a Reparability Score of one out of 10. While it is still possible to swap out the battery and the SSD, it would take a lot of time, effort and care to do so. You will also need a glue gun to put it back together again. In other words, the new Surface Pro 2 is a continuing shift towards the throwaway rather than repair world that is rapidly becoming the standard rather than the exception.

Microsoft is also encountering problems with the new Internet Explorer 11 browser that shipped with Windows 8.1. It turns out that it has problems rendering Google web pages and even those using the Microsoft Outlook web system are having problems. The good news for organisations is that most of them have not bothered with Windows 8.1 or even Windows 8 for that matter. Microsoft is blaming Google for changing their search engine. Ironically, if users uncheck the "Use Microsoft Compatibility lists" option, things seem to go a lot better. Other browsers running under Windows 8.1 don't seem to have any problems.


James Hein is an IT professional of over 30 years' standing. You can contact him at jclhein@gmail.com

James Hein

IT professional

An IT professional of over 30 years’ standing. He has a column in Bangkok Post tech pages and has been writing without skipping a beat every week all these years.

Email : jclhein@gmail.com

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