ALKHOBAR, 11 June — Many of my friends with MSN Hotmail accounts received a less than amusing note in their inboxes from the powers that be at Microsoft. It read:
“We are sorry to inform you that as of July 16, 2002, we will no longer be able to offer POP Mail Retrieval to our Hotmail users with a standard free account. This means that you will not be able to aggregate e-mail from various accounts into a single Hotmail account.
“If you would like to continue to use this feature, you can sign up for MSN Extra Storage. MSN Extra Storage costs only $19.95 a year.”
Well, what to say? It has been obvious for about a year now that “free” is a term that will be associated with the Internet less and less in the future. If you are really desperate to keep your Hotmail account then you will have to fork over $20 to get a reasonable e-mail service. In fact, users who are being offered the chance to sign up for extra storage are among the chosen ones. Hotmail fans in some places, like Australia, are simply being left out in the cold.
Something that many people don’t remember though is that there are many other free web mail services such as Yahoo, mail.com, maktoob.com, etc. Check them out. Most of these other free services receive far less spam then Hotmail simply because they aren’t targeted by mass mailing services. And don’t worry. Lots of free mail services have instant messaging, anti-virus, calendars and other great features. If you just want to check your POP Mail accounts while you are away from home or office, use the services of e-mailanywhere.com. It’s fast and free.
Next, I would like to thank everyone who reformed their mailing habits after my column on the subject two weeks back. I was truly amazed and grateful. Two days after the column was published I noticed that suddenly I was no longer receiving mail that began with massive numbers of e-mail addresses. E-mails from across the Kingdom and beyond informed me that many of my readers had been deeply touched by the column because they are wading through tons of spam every year just like me. I must admit though that some of the mails while serious in intent were hilarious in content. It seems that spammers are desperate to modify our bodies but most of us aren’t willing.
I say most of us, because in the midst of all the mail that came in that week there was one note from “Hani” wondering if the services that offered to increase the size of the male apparatus were really credible. Actually, I had never thought of it since I wasn’t interested. I’d always approached spam from the point of view that these were unsolicited mails. The fact or fiction aspect had not been a concern.
So in true journalistic style, my investigation began. I went to my favorite search engine, Google, and typed in the phrase that would give me all the possible information on the male enlargement situation. A total of 147,000 possible entries came up in the search. Before any women start snickering, later on I typed in a phrase that would bring up entries concerned with enlargement of the mammary glands. That search turned up 115,000. It appears that there are a lot of folks out there with size issues.
In any case, I found that there are an amazing number of potential methods to increase the male apparatus. Some claim to use natural herbs. Other sites offered instant pumps and pills. If those didn’t work there was always hypnosis or surgery. What’s out there sounds funny but it’s really frightening.
Just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s harmless. Conium maculatum is a very natural herb from the carrot family, but it still killed Socrates. Many of the herbal preparations that promised enlargement had substances that were either harmful when ingested alone or potentially fatal when combined with common medications. Some of the devices could cause permanent tissue damage.
I finally came across a very interesting article at: webmd.lycos.com/question_ and_answer/article/1685.51993. It answered the question of what’s effective. The article was written by urologist Ken Goldberg, MD. He doesn’t recommend any pills, herbs, or hypnosis. In fact what he does recommend for most men is weight loss. Goldberg’s advice means that, generally speaking, those offers that promise enlargement are not only unsolicited, they are fraudulent.
What to do? The Saudi authorities still can’t do anything. We don’t have laws to deal with online crime. However, since many of the fraudulent e-mail offers originate in the United States they can be forwarded to [email protected] where they are collected and if a case can be made, the scam artists will be shut down. To learn whether the US Food and Drug Administration has issued a warning against a website selling health products click to fda.gov/oc/buyonline/enforce.html. For the latest information on consumer protection in the areas of e-commerce and the Internet, see the US Federal Trade Commission’s site at ftc.gov/bcp/menu-internet.htm.
And while we are discussing the subject of enlargement, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) has put out their “Seventh Annual Global Software Piracy Study,” the results of which were not very encouraging. For the first time in the study’s history, the world piracy rate increased in two consecutive years, 2000 and 2001.
International Planning and Research did the analysis as part of an ongoing study about software piracy for BSA and its member companies. The purpose of the study was to review the available data and utilize a systematic methodology to determine the worldwide business software piracy rates and the associated dollar losses. Software piracy was measured in the study as the amount of business application software installed in 2001 without a license.
The overall global piracy rate was 40 percent in 2001, up from 37 percent in 2000. Both years were up from the low set in 1999 at 36 percent. Actual dollar losses due to piracy declined 6.7 percent from 2000 to $10.97 billion. This decline in dollar terms was not an indication of a decrease in the incidence of piracy. It had more to do with the fluctuation of the dollar in currency markets and the global recession, which reduced the market for technology spending, coupled with the downward trend in software pricing.
It had been hoped by the software industry that piracy would continue its gradual decline. Unfortunately it is now seen that there is a “core level” of piracy which may be more persistent. Also in 2001 it is thought that software piracy rose in response to the pressure to reduce corporate spending in light of the economic downturn.
The study theorizes that future declines in software piracy will depend on market forces. “Compliance with software licensing,” read the BSA study, “is at risk of being considered an economic luxury that can be abandoned in difficult times.”
According to the BSA study, North America and Western Europe experienced smaller dollar losses due to piracy in 2001 compared to 2000, mostly attributable to a combination of the lack of economic growth and lower prices for software. Dollar losses in Asia/Pacific and Eastern Europe increased, as each region was relatively less affected by the economic slowdown and software piracy continued at historically high levels. Dollar losses rose in the Asia/Pacific region to over $4.7 billion making it the region with the highest dollar losses due to piracy.
There were no significant shifts in regional piracy rates in 2001. Eastern Europe, at 67 percent, was once again the region with the highest piracy rate. Eastern Europe has been the region with the highest piracy rate in every study since 1994. Latin America was again the region with the second highest piracy rate at 57 percent, ahead of the Middle East and Africa at 52 percent and Asia/Pacific at 54 percent. North America continued to be the area with the lowest piracy rate at 26 percent, a slight increase over 2000. Western Europe continued as the region with the second lowest piracy rate at 37 percent. The Middle East was the only region that had a reduction in the rate of piracy, declining from 57 percent in 2000 to 51 percent in 2001.
The 25 countries with the highest software piracy rates in 2001 were:
Vietnam 94 percent, China 92 percent, Indonesia 88 percent, Ukraine/Other CIS 87 percent, Russia 87 percent, Pakistan 83 percent, Lebanon 79 percent, Qatar 78 percent, Nicaragua 78 percent, Bolivia 77 percent, Thailand 77 percent, Bahrain 77 percent, Oman 77 percent, Kenya 77 percent, Kuwait 76 percent, Bulgaria 75 percent, Romania 75 percent, El Salvador 73 percent, Guatemala 73 percent, Paraguay 72 percent, Nigeria 71 percent, Malaysia 70 percent, India 70 percent, Zimbabwe 68 percent, Honduras 68 percent.
For the purpose of the BSA study, the Arab Middle East was not separated from Israel. Looking at the study more closely, the three largest economies in the Middle East — Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel — each saw a decrease in their piracy rates, with Turkey recording the largest drop from 63 percent in 2000 to 58 percent in 2001. Saudi Arabia went from 59 percent in 2000 to 52 percent in 2001. Israel, which according to the study has the lowest piracy rate in the Middle East, saw the lowest reduction in piracy from 41 percent in 2000 to 40 percent in 2001.
It is important to note that a low piracy rate does not necessarily correspond with a low amount of retail software revenue lost to piracy. Lost revenue depends on the overall value of a nation’s economy. For example, the United States has a piracy rate of just 25 percent but in the United States retail software revenue lost due to piracy was $1,807,709,000. That was the highest amount of any nation in the world. In Japan with a piracy rate of 37 percent, retail software revenue lost due to piracy was $1,721,050,000. China, with the second highest piracy rate in the world, is also at the crisis point in terms of retail software revenue lost due to piracy with $1,662,404,000. In the Middle East, Israel had the highest amount of retail software revenue lost due to piracy at $45,429,000. For Saudi Arabia the retail software revenue lost due to piracy was $20,013,000.
Detailed charts on this page contrasting the various piracy rates and revenues lost globally, are courtesy of BSA.
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