This hardly seems like news, except that Apple messed up by allowing people who received free, promotional copies of paid apps to rate those apps. If Apple were to prohibit that and also remove any such ratings then that should solve the problem.

I appreciate your listing what you think is a better solution. Why would your editor not whitelist your e-mail address through the Postini Web-based config page? I have not used SpamAssassin for three years now. It does not seem to have changed too much since then. Back then in 2006, I was using SpamAssassin for a medium sized business client. I had it configured with all of the possible options: Using all of the DNSBL lists that were available at the time except for SPEWS and couple of other very aggressive ones, using Razor/Pyzor, Bayesian filtering, extensive whitelists of their customer contacts, and frequent updates to SpamAssassin itself. I went through and configured and tested all of the features and monitored it to make sure that it was working. It never approached the level true positives that we achieved when we switched to Postini. There were lots of false positives too, more than we ever had with Postini. Plus I spent some serious time maintaining SpamAssassin that I no longer needed to spend with Postini. For people with new Postini accounts, I think that it is important to check their Web-based junk mail folder weekly and whitelist any false-positive messages they find. But once you have done that for a couple of months, I find that there are very few false positives after that. I spot check my Postini junk mail folder every two or three months just to make sure there are no false positives that I need to whitelist.

Would you be so kind as to tell us which open source anti spam solutions you think are nearly as good as Postini? Thanks.

I use a hosted Exchange e-mail provider who uses Postini to filter spam and very little spam gets through. I definitely recommend using a service that uses Postini. I use ExchangeMyMail but I suspect that there are other good ones out there. I went with this company about three years ago because they were one of the few that would sell individual hosted Exchange e-mail accounts. It's definitely been worth the $10/month for a hosted Exchange account with Postini filtering.

Here is a very good Detroit News article about this that has some additional background: 'Spam King' pleads guilty to fraud. It seems like he should be jailed immediately pending sentencing, especially since he pled guilty. I hope the scumbag dies in prison.

Even better is the way that AT&T and Verizon Wireless seem to operate now: If you have a two-year contract, they will let you upgrade your phone and receive the usual subsidy discount after 17 to 20 months, so that you are more likely to choose to upgrade your phone and stay with them for another two year commitment, as opposed to waiting the full two years before you could switch to another provider without penalty. So I recommend that anyone who wants to upgrade to call AT&T and see how long it really is before they can upgrade and receive the subsidy.

Did he open the Z drive for them to inspect, or was the laptop in standby mode with that drive already open? If the government was stupid enough to lose the evidence, he should not be required to reproduce it for them.

I couldn't agree more about the desire for slightly higher resolution. Maybe when Windows 7 comes out, because the screen resolution limit is based on Microsoft not allowing companies to sell Windows XP directly on larger screen machines, correct? Sony went way too far with the resolution on their new P series notebook. And I wish they would make different sized batteries that can fit the same notebook so that I could have a small one for home use and a bigger one for mobile use.

Good luck on outdoing Wikipedia. Wikipedia passed EB in relevance a long time ago. I think that the best outcome would be if the Wikimedia Foundation or Google could buy EB and open source its content. Ditto with the Oxford University Press or at least the Oxford English Dictionary. Too bad that EB is a privately held company. I would love to have EB's content merged in with Wikipedia's even if they had to run banner ads to finance the purchase. I don't really think it would be so bad if Wikipedia ran banner ads to help finance their expansion.

For the password manager model in MSIE7, didn't they change it from IE6 so that you can click on a user name field and it will display a drop-down list with all of the recorded passwords? In some ways, that made it better than Firefox and the other browsers that automatically fill in recorded fields on page load. In IE6 you did not really need to know the complete user name either, just the first letter of the user name, which was a not as good as how they made it work in IE7.

It seems very obvious that the people who developed Windows Vista don't never to use their own product. What else can explain some of the stupidest fucking product decisions ever made? It's just unbelievable how Microsoft's latest and greatest operating system took a giant step backwards from Windows XP. The fact that network transfer speeds from Windows Vista over gigabit Ethernet averages around 5MBps for me when similar transfers from my XP machine if six times faster. This is after I installed SP1 and I'm not running multimedia applications in the background. Before SP1, the transfer speed would sometimes go down to 1MBps. Just unbelievable. WHAT THE FUCK WERE THEY THINKING? I've got a couple of notebooks running Vista. Whenever I first turn them on, their hard disks whir away for 10 minutes or so doing the shadow backup/system restore thing it does, WHETHER IT'S RUNNING ON BATTERY POWER OR NOT. Way to go, dumb fucking shits. This is after I figured out how to stop its incessant disk defragmenting. The tech. press has said it much better than I could: Microsoft broke tons of existing applications without adding any real innovation to Vista.