ALKHOBAR, 31 August 2004 — Eleven o’clock on Saturday night the doorbell rang. “Who could it be at such an hour?” my husband wondered. “Perhaps one of the neighbors has some sort of emergency,” I remarked as he rushed off to check.
Outside the door in the hallway we found all our neighbors and a man from the National Census Data Collection team. He had rung all the doorbells to summon us so that we could all answer his questions, one after the next, and he could quickly be on his way.
“Do you know what time it is?” one of the neighbors asked. “Oh, yes sir,” replied the man with a small smile. “We can’t go around in the daytime hours ringing doorbells because the women are at home alone. So we work at night.” He then proceeded to take out his pencil and started noting down our answers to his questions.
The census taker only asked for the numbers of couples and their children living in each home. What about all the housemaids – legal and illegal? Don’t they count as people living in Saudi Arabia? What about aunts and grandmothers who might move about from house to house? The man left before any of us could question him on these issues.
I was horrified. In the 21st century Saudi Arabia is doing its national census with paper and pencil! Hasn’t the census committee heard of devices called PDAs or Pocket PCs? Without using automation and advanced IT applications from start to finish in the census process, how can we create an accurate census database covering 25 million people living in an area of over 1,960,000 sq km? I hope someone from the Census Committee will write and tell me that Saturday night’s census taker was a fake and our future national planning doesn’t depend on the accuracy of paper and pencil — but I fear the worst!
Here’s more bad news. Last week this column discussed some of the problems users are having with exploding mobile handsets. Well, this week Siemens released a warning about a software defect in its mobile phones in the 65 Product Series (C65, CX65, M65, S65, SL65), which in rare cases could cause hearing damage. Arab News checked the market and found that the Siemens 65 Product Series is readily, although illegally, available in the Kingdom.
Siemens advised that because of this software error, if a telephone call is automatically cut off because the battery has run down, the disconnection melody could possibly start to play loudly. In extreme cases, this volume could lead to hearing damage. Siemens helpfully added that this danger can only arise if the mobile phone is held up directly to the ear while the melody is playing.
In order to rule out any danger of damage to health, Siemens recommends deactivating the disconnection melody or the disconnection animation function. In addition, the phone call should be terminated as soon as the first “low battery” warning signal comes. To deactivate the disconnection melody, the user must first select the “Setup” item in the menu, then “Ringtones,” afterward “More melodies,” and then the “Shutdown melody” can be deactivated by selecting “Switch off.”
Siemens has already developed new equipment software that stops the software malfunction in the mobile phones in the 65 product series. The new update software versions will be provided free of charge in coming weeks. Consumer queries about all equipment will be answered through www.siemens-mobile.com/mobilescustomercare.
And now for all of you who are freaked out over camera phones, worse is to come on that front too. Lumileds Lighting is demonstrating new camera phone flashes utilizing specially engineered light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that are 12 times brighter than comparable light sources and dramatically improve picture quality. This will allow consumers to take high-quality cell phone pictures in low-light environments at distances of 1 to 2 meters. Basically this means that camera phones will be able to snap clear images by day — and by night.
A single Lumileds Luxeon Flash can generate up to 79 lux of light at one meter, compared to just 6-7 lux produced by conventional LEDs. This makes it the first camera phone light source that is capable of producing light levels comparable to the flash devices in digital still cameras. Coupled with the 1.3 megapixel and higher phone cameras now coming on the market, the Luxeon Flash improves picture quality many times over and brings new capabilities to camera phone users. Lumileds’ Luxeon Flash was recently introduced in Europe and globally, new mobile phones from major manufacturers will be equipped with the Luxeon Flash by year-end.
All right, that’s enough about mobile handsets. Time to move on to another subject dear to my heart — pornographic spam. I started to receive some really nasty spam that was making its way through my Internet service provider’s (ISP’s) spam filter. So I sent the ISP an e-mail asking what the problem was. They replied that since that each spammer had only sent one e-mail to the ISP’s servers from a designated URL, that URL hadn’t been classified as belonging to a spammer. Yes, the mail was certainly junk mail but the filter didn’t recognize it as spam because the URL was used just that one time.
This demonstrates a problem with the way traditional spam filters work. Spam filters generally search for URLs associated with spammers and block them. Anti-spam vendor Commtouch through their Spam Detection Center analyzed hundreds of millions of spam messages in the month of July 2004 and found that 88.42% were of new origin and 98.17% of the URLs advertised in spam messages were new compared to the previous month. Those numbers indicate that 88.42% of the IP addresses used to send spam messages were new in the month of July. This is very bad news for network administrators and ISPs who rely on traditional spam filters.
“The fact that 98.17% of URLs which appear in spam messages are new indicates that spammers can easily change the content of an e-mail message and URL despite the associated cost of registering a new domain. A new, active URL requires domain registration,” said Avner Amram, executive vice president at Commtouch. “The fact that spammers are changing the content of e-mail messages means that a content filtering anti-spam solution — like Bayesian, heuristic or URL filtering solutions, which use static rules or manual learning mechanisms — are reactive and will fail over time to handle the problem effectively. Spammers are slippery — when you look for them in one place they are already spamming from another and when you are blocking one spammer’s URL, it is already using another one.”
Help may be on the way. The Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy (ISIPP) has announced the creation of an international anti-spam council called the International Council for Internet Communications (ICIC). This is a private industry group consisting of high level executives and attorneys providing information and context regarding their respective countries of expertise and practice, and each having connections to one or more leaders in the industry in that country. Attorney Jean-Christophe Le Toquin of Microsoft’s Europe-Middle East-Africa office is a charter member of the ICIC. While Le Toquin is participating as a private individual and not as a representative of Microsoft, he certainly has some idea of the challenges facing Middle East networks currently sinking under the spam barrage.
When asked about the mission of the ICIC one council member replied, “We need to prove to spammers that if they take advantage of the borderless nature of the Internet, we too can take advantage of it, and demonstrate that by no means is the Internet out of reach of the law.”
Information about the International Council for Internet Communications is available at www.isipp.com or write to [email protected].
