Advertisment

It’s Time to Can the Spam

author-image
DQI Bureau
New Update

Make Money Fast. Fire Your Boss. Hot XXX Teen Cuties. Find Out Anything About

Anyone. Along with dubious stock tips and offers for Viagra online, these

unsolicited and unwanted e-mail messages flood my in-box.

Advertisment

Spam, named for the venerable tinned meat product, is part of the dark side

of the Internet revolution. Nettlesome junk postal mail is restrained by the

expense of sending it. Telemarketing calls, which are even more annoying, are

expensive, too. But e-mail spam is virtually free of cost to the sender, so

there is little to keep it from growing.

There’s not much that individuals can do to limit the junk. Spammers rarely

honor the offers they provide to take recipients off lists, and unlike postal

mail, there is no legal requirement for them to do so. Mail programs, including

Microsoft Outlook, AOL, Yahoo!, and Hotmail, offer not-very-effective tools to

deal with junk mail. The spammers always stay one step ahead of the tricks the

programs use to identify junk. As a result, automatic filters tend either to

misidentify spam as legitimate mail or, worse, brand real mail as junk.

Open-access abuse

Advertisment

There are, however, steps that the Internet community could take, both on its

own and in conjunction with governments, to control the problem. One simple

measure is fixing a flaw in the design of the Internet. The Net was designed as

a friendly, cooperative tool for academics, and it was set up so that if a

University of California at Los Angeles mail server was down, a researcher there

could send messages through a server at Stanford University. Today, such

"open relays" make it easy for spammers to disguise the source of

their mail and avoid being nailed for abuse of accounts by their own Internet

service providers.

A sort of Net vigilantism is gradually shutting down relays. Organizations

such as the Mail Abuse Prevention System and the Open Relay

Behavior-Modification System publish lists of servers used as relays by spammers.

Subscribers refuse to accept any mail coming from the listed servers. Since this

stops legitimate mail as well as spam, any ISP that ends up on the list comes

under intense pressure from unhappy customers and will block the offender. It’s

rough justice, but it works.

Other approaches require government intervention. In the US, it is illegal to

send an unsolicited ad by fax. What puts some teeth in this prohibition is a

requirement that every fax carry a legitimate phone number from which it

originated, creating easy grounds for action against violators. Similarly, every

piece of e-mail should be required to carry a valid return address instead of

the bogus addresses spammers use. This won’t stop spam, but it could

drastically reduce it, as it has junk faxes.

Advertisment

Success will require international action. Increasingly, the spam I see

appears to originate overseas, especially in Eastern Europe, though most of the

goods and services being offered are American. Spammers may be using open relays

abroad, foreign ISP accounts, or just fake foreign addresses, but the problem is

clearly international and may have to involve bodies such as the International

Telecommunications Union.

A final area for action is plain old law enforcement. Many of the services

advertised are obviously illegal. You don’t get stuff like this in your

mailbox because postal inspectors enforce mail-fraud laws. But there’s no

law-enforcement agency interested in fighting illegal spam. We need one.

Spam is more than a nuisance. The volume clogs mail servers and fills inboxes

with junk. And the slimy nature of most of



these mailings is a threat to legitimate e-commerce. It’s time to end the
spammers’ free ride.

Advertisment

By Stephen H Wildstrom

in BusinessWeek. Copyright 2001 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc

Recharging

These dog-like robots built by Sony were the football champs at the1999 RoboCup in StalkholmNow

that the underpinnings for smart robots are falling into place, researchers in

dozens of corporate and academic labs are racing to develop working models that

within a few years may become our cohabitants and co-workers.

Advertisment

Personal robots won’t even approach their full potential in this decade,

but robot makers have already fielded many commercial previews. Although

sometimes clumsy and unpredictable, service robots are functioning as guards in

warehouses, delivering hospital food trays, and carrying documents from one

office to another. The Japan Robot Association (Jara) estimates that by 2002,

some 11,000 service robots will be deployed, 65% of them in hospitals and

nursing homes. By 2005, give or take a year, Jara projects that health-care

robots will be a $250 million market. As for personal bots, a panel of industry

and academic experts last year predicted they will be as common as PCs and cell

phones within 10 or 15 years.

One of the first robo sapiens on the market will be Honda’s Asimo, a

1.2-meter-tall android that resembles a child astronaut. It strides confidently,

climbs stairs, and negotiates corners. It can turn out the lights, and to show

off, walk a figure eight or compete with Sony’s SDR bots on the dance floor.

The hitch is that Asimo currently is blind, deaf, and dumb–and must be

remotely controlled. This fall, for an undisclosed fee, Honda will start renting

Asimo to companies and museums for use as a visitor’s guide.

Personable

Advertisment

Sony has already proved that mechanical companions are a promising market.

Now, sales of entertainment robots, it believes, are primed to explode. These

include electronic critters like the $1,500 Aibo, which can learn tricks and

respond to voice commands. The latest model looks like a lion cub. Over the next

five years, an expanding menagerie of mechanical pets from Sony and others could

whet consumer demand. And then, around mid-decade, Sony’s acrobots should hit

the market–probably at prices comparable to a high-end PC. Come the 2010s,

predicts Toshi Doi, head of Sony’s Digital Creatures Lab, each of Japan’s 46

million households will have two or three robots, including a humanoid.

Researchers everywhere are equally fascinated by the potential of home robots

and cyber-companions. Ironically, some European and North American labs are

counting on biological approaches to help produce mechanical beings–a tack

called evolutionary robotics. The basic idea is to raise a machine like a child,

letting it learn from its own experiences and sensory impressions, rather than

feeding it canned software written by humans.

MIT’s Cog and Kismet are probably the most famous of the self-educated

bots. Cog is the brainchild of Rodney Brooks, head of MIT’s AI Lab. This

humanoid torso has been learning to interact with its surroundings and with

people since its "birth" in 1993. Cog has mentally progressed to the

crawling-infant stage–although its legs have yet to be attached. Cog’s face

is less expressive than Kismet’s, but even so, it can be engaging. Its camera

eyes track moving people, and it establishes eye contact with people facing it.

Advertisment

No matter how personable Cog may seem, fulfilling Brooks’s dream of a robot

with human-level intelligence remains on the distant horizon. Still, many

experts believe truly smart robots are inevitable, given the ever-growing power

of computer chips.

Frustration

There are a lots of BEAM proponents in Europe–and many researchers there

also share Japan’s view of the near-term need for personal robots. For

example, Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute has developed Care-O-Bot, to help

elderly and infirm people maintain independent lifestyles. It can guide and

support people who are unsteady on their feet, run errands around the house, and

operate home electronics.

In the US, though, getting the funds to turn robot research into a going

business has been a problem, laments Joseph Engelberger. Widely hailed as the

father of the industrial robot, Engelberger co-founded Unimation. 40 years ago

and created the factory-robot industry from scratch. After cashing out in 1983,

he founded HelpMate Robotics to build service robots. His flagship: wheeled

cabinets that scurry around hospitals, distributing medicines and patient

records. But Engelberger always had his eyes on domestic robots because the

market potential is clearly far bigger.

In 1997, HelpMate built a two-armed, wheeled prototype for NASA to evaluate

as a helpmate in space. Engelberger intended to adapt it for home use, since its

touch-sensitive hands and two arms could make beds and prepare meals for

seniors. But it was not to be. He couldn’t raise the $5 million he needed to

bring it to market, and financial problems forced him to sell the company in

1999. This lack of interest in robotics puzzles the Japanese. Many reckon it’s

because Hollywood often depicts robots as monsters, whereas the Japanese view

them as helpers.

As a result, Japan has amassed a formidable stockpile of robotics knowhow,

producing twice as many as the rest of the world combined.

Furthermore, Japan has an army of young, savvy robotics experts. Close to

half of its 4,500 registered robot engineers are focused on AI or related

disciplines aimed at enhancing robot intelligence.

Song and dance

Shoestring budgets at Waseda University and other academic labs nourished

Japan’s early robot dreams. Now, well-heeled Japanese corporations are

transforming research into commercial products. Backed by ample resources,

corporate engineers are now busily refining sensors and rewriting algorithms to

create more sophisticated machines.

As margins dwindle on consumer electronics and industrial equipment, Japan’s

manufacturers are desperately seeking new genres of products. Smart robots that

combine a virtuoso entertainer, flawless social secretary, compliant

maid-butler, patient listener, and multimedia communications system could be

just the ticket. Such companions could record the passing years and regale

people with intricately detailed multimedia stories of family triumphs and

personal exploits. Anything that owners forget, their cyber-companions would

remember.

The chief blemish on Japan’s bullish outlook is that buyers might expect

too much from the first crop of bots. Early androids may not have enough finesse

to poke around inside packed refrigerators, and people might be wise not to

trust them to iron shirts. "Just because robots can sing and dance doesn’t

mean they’ll soon do everything," cautions Shigeo Hirose, a robotics

professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology. Aibo the robo pet has proved they

don’t have to. Robots can ease their way into our lives, step by mechanical

step.

By Irene M Kunii and Otis Port in BusinessWeek. Copyright 2001 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc

Advertisment