Email Mushroom Clouds

The UK and Europe are introducing half-baked anti-spam legislation designed to protect individuals (but not corporations) from spam and unsolicited approaches over telephone.

I had an idea to set up a company who would charge a small monthly fee to individuals in return for then sending (spamming) clear and personalised instructions to every commercial entity in the country on behalf of the individual along the lines of "Please do not send me unsolicited spam and permanently remove me from your database.", and these instructions would be sent every month or every time a new business or trading entity became registered or incorporated.

TPS and other preference service registers help to an extent but actively and regularly instructing every business in the land to not contact you would go a long way towards killing off spam using a recursive and fabulously ironic method.

Tyrewall Security

Flickr represents a good step-up evolution in the ASN stakes since it incorporates a chat capability thus doing away with the need to find, install, learn etc. external IRC apps in order to be able to communicate live with your buddies. This is a major usability plus. Whether it replaces IRC in total remains to be seen but...

Mailblocks, the spam-proof email service I've been using for a couple of months is fantastic at stopping spam emails from getting to me but the challenge/response method it uses to achieve this results in at least one extra email for every item of spam it processes. Whilst this works very well, it effectively doubles the amount of email traffic on the Web where, if everyone eventually moved to this method of controlling spam, we'd double or triple the amount of spam related traffic going about. Not sure that's a good thing. A bit like placing barbed wire and mines around the perimeter of your home, a highly effective method of controlled entry but one which also f**ks up your neighbourhood.

I have a cold virus, slept for 3 hours over lunch, feeling like shit. This is not good, I'm spending two nights in London this week whilst at a software trade show where I need to be sharp. And awake. Yes, awake would be a plus.

I probably won't drive to Vienna after all. Shame.

Speaking of which, I get a new car on Tuesday, my outgoing car has Satnav and for the last couple of years I've added many business addresses to it's programmable database. Effectively, whomever gets the car after me has a customer database on wheels if I don't remember to purge it beforehand. So, no longer do you have to infiltrate iron clad networks to hack into sensitive company information, just empty the car park. This is quite a profound and unexpected consequence of our quest for digital lifestyle perfection and the fundamental data/meta pervasiveness it demands.

#joiito Flash Mini-Mob / Field Art Trip

The Weather Project (which is only on show until the 21st March, so hurry if you want to see it - which I'd strongly recommend you do) at the Tate Modern, London. The full clickable image is a composite of four photographs taken using a Canon 300D, vertically stitched using Panavue and then downsampled for the web - the master composite image is a 9MB JPEG, 3000 x 5000 pixel image - i.e. not web friendly.

This was the rather austere venue for an almost impromptu gathering of various UK #joiito channel irregulars. After basking under the cool sun for an hour we walked for what seemed like 8 miles until we eventually found a pub for lunch and drinks. Good fun and interesting web/blog discussion and debate was had by all. Including giving Suw Charman a hard time about the Welsh language and about how in written form, it was hard to tell it apart from corrupt data packets.

Two new gold stars on my blogroll for bloggers, Suw Charman and James Cox.

Sean B. Palmer has uploaded his photos from the meeting here.