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This would be an awesome conference to attend! I'd love to get the heads up on the future of technology. Curious? Check out Christopher Ruddy

Wallace & Rines' revamped spambone was to do just that. It didn't pan out.

Bio. Spamford didn't start his life of evil selling spyware. He got his nickname from being one of the early big spammers, but he'd been evil before that. The reason you don't get inundated with junk faxes is that Spamford was also one of the early big junk faxers, and this annoyed enough people that Congress made a law against it. It hasn't gone away entirely, but it's at least a relatively well-defined problem, and the economics at the time were such that a law could make it relatively uneconomical.

Methinks you protest too much. I see a kind of corporate parallel to that old loser Sanford Wallace, remember him? Back in the early days, he was an unabashed spammer, unapologetic, and completely full of himself. But it didn't all that much time before the collective 'net at large figured him out, blocked him, and ran him out of town.

A short time later, he arrives back on the scene trying to trumpet himself as an anti-spammer expert. But we remember. We know that this rebirth is just a little too convenient.

I see the same thing here. Years of spyware, hijacking users machines, difficult to uninstall, free version hidden, always having to "upgrade"... And all of a sudden you are the good guys now?

I have a long memory. I wish you luck, but RealPlayer 10 will never see the inside of any machine of mine. Maybe I'll have a look at RealPlayer 13 in a few years time. That is, if the company has not died (from self-inflicted wounds, of course).

For those of you who are not a molecular biologist, there is a particularly well written and approachable source of background information on prion disease available. Deadly Feasts is an excellent primer on the subject of prion disease and the history of the prion as a medical research mystery. It's very well written, but don't read it if you want to keep eating beef.

There is also an online interview with Richard Rhodes the author of that book, which comes with the same caveat.

The book was written several years ago. More recent information about current research and such is available at New Scientist.

Murray was born and raised in Newton, Iowa. He obtained a B.A. in history from Harvard and a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Saying 97 percent of the significant figures in sciences come from the west is like saying 90 percent of shark bite victims happen within 100 meters of the shoreline,

So where is Sanford Wallace these days?

According to this article, he now runs a non-spam autoresponder service. But there are a good 150 hardcore spammers who took his place.

0x0d0a didst speak thusly:

The SEC also went after Rice, the guy that hired her. Everything got covered. I've seen attempts to sue spammers, to complain to them, to flood their phones, to complain to local police/attorney general. Nothing does much...except this. Seems that the first effective clean sweep against a spammer that I've ever seen -- and it was done by a black hat. Frankly, I'm quite pleased.

Actually, not quite the first clean sweep...

The first clean sweep I am aware of, or rather clue-by-fouring en masse, was of a particularly notorious spammer (both Usenet and email) by name of "Krazy" Kevin Lipsitz (notation in the Spam Timeline here: http://keithlynch.net/spamline.html).

Krazy Kevin was one of the parties that directly lead to confirmation of accounts--he used to use Compuserve throwaway accounts in particular, as I recall, to promote his magazine scheme.

It came out after a while on many net.abuse forums that not only was he spamming, but he also failed to deliver magazines...

Eventually the State of New York spanked him in probably one of the first court precedents in regards to spam. (Reference here: http://www.oag.state.ny.us/internet/litigation/leb edeff.html)

This all happened around '96 or '97...Krazy Kev was busted around 1997ish.

"Krazy Kevin" no longer is spamming, and apparently makes much of his living now being a professional gourmand (he apparently holds a world's record for consuming the most amount of pickles in a five-minute span, and is a regular contestant at the Nathan's hot-dog eating contest)...at least it's a bit more honest a way of life than spamming, I suppose. :) (More about Krazy Kev going honest, in a sense: http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/WolfFiles/wolffi les204.html) Still selling magazines too, but hopefully people get them now :)

Sanford, aka "Spamford", Wallace also was whacked into sense between being sued by both AOL *and* Compuserve (pre-merger) and getting ordered not to spam them (info on that lawsuit here: http://www.netlitigation.com/netlitigation/cases/c ompucase.htm)--and having literally been nearly banned from the Internet entirely and causing one of the major "backbone" sites of the Internet to be nearly universally shunned as well (the Agis.net UDP around 1996--Wallace and the nancy.com spammers were almost completely responsible) after it ended up being the last site on the Internet to deal with him...

In fact, Sanford Wallace has the rather dubious distinction of not only having been the reason behind many states' proposed antispam statutes, not only does he have the dubious distinction of having also been a junk faxer before he went into spamming and being almost singlehandedly responsible for the US law prohibiting junk faxing, but is singlehandedly responsible for much if not most of the early case law in regards to spamming...

After having realised the errors of his ways around 1998 or so, he started running an opt-in mail service for a while and (in a theme that seems to recur among reformed spammers) also apparently does entertainment, specifically, he's a DJ (more info here: http://www.canismajor.demon.co.uk/antispam/sanford .htm; info regarding his present company here: http://www.annonline.com/interviews/970522/biograp hy.html)...

(Now, mind, I've just included the first two cases I can recall off the top of my head involving people being sued directly for stuff related to spamming...)

About ten years ago, Rodney Brooks (also of MIT) flipped AI on its head with his "insect bots," which took a bottom-up (instead of Minskyesque top-down) approach. Brooks put a cheap microprocessor and servo motor on each of six "legs" of a lowly bot, and programmed each leg unit to do extremely simple things like check whether the leg was bumping against something, and if so, to lift it. Repertoires of behavior learned from the environment were then stored and re-used when similar stimuli presented themselves again. What happened after a short time was that far more complex behaviors than were programmed "emerged" from the collection of puny processors and actuators. With just a few lines of code, the damned things could navigate complex environments (like a back yard) that completely foiled Minsky-style bots run by minicomputers and millions of lines of instructions. (Brooks coined the phrase "fast, cheap, and out of control" to describe not only his bots, but the behaviors they "invented" by walking around.)

George Dyson (Freeman's son) wrote a book a couple of years ago called Darwin among the Machines that is as good an explanation of machine-evolved intelligence as I've seen. It's packed with illustrative stories from both within and without the discipline. Look here for Dyson's own commentary and some good links. Hans Moravec, director of Carnegie-Mellon's Field Robotics Lab, also writes very convincingly, if speculatively, about the evolution of machine intelligence, in his recent book Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind . It's a fascinating read.

After what's been learned in the past decade about how machines can become intelligent, Minsky seems to me a bit like Lord Kelvin. Kelvin made tremendous contributions to science, especially in the fields of heat theory and thermodynamics, but in his later years, became mired in defending some pet theories that were way past their prime. He railed bitterly against Darwin, claimed the Earth was only a few million years old, and refused to accept radioactivity. One of his biographers observed that for the first half of his career, he could no wrong, and for the second half, he seemingly could do no right. Minsky, alas, has in some ways shared this fate.

"about American submarine espionage during the Cold War"..."The most interesting chapter reveals how an American sub secretly tapped Soviet communications cables beneath the waves"

His bio:
Formerly a senior engineer at Lockheed Martin, Robert Zubrin is the founder of Pioneer Astronautics, a space- exploration research and development firm. Currently chairman of the executive committee of the National Space Society, Dr. Zubrin is the author of more than one hundred articles on space propulsion and exploration, and is widely regarded as the nation's leading theorist of Mars travel.

Another interview and more info on Dr. Zubrin is here.
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some links follow in case you're too lazy to hit google. but most of these are not current - 1995-1998 seem to be the ranges. this could just be google's problem, but again i think a slashdot interview with her would be in order.

• http://www.eff.org/homes/fena.html
• http://www.annonline.com/interviews/97080 4/
• http://www.script ing.com/davenet/stories/LoriFenaonMcCainKerry.html
• http://www.salon.com/21st/straight07.html
• http://people.aol.com/peop le/970728/features/internet.html