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This article quotes no figures, supplies no details. It's unverifiable,

The same could be said of almost every newspaper article, all news heard from the radio, and most news seen TV!

Well, usually on TV and sometimes in newspapers there will be a figure... but it's pretty easy to imagine a bar chart showing a bar twice as high for the unsubscribed account.

The article does supply a number of details, including where he created the two test accounts, roughly what he did with them to make them publicly visible to spammers, an assurance that exactly the same public postings were made with both accounts (including an admission of a mistake and having to repeat the same postings with the other account to keep them the same). Other details included the number of days until spams started to arrive, descriptions of some of the spam, the origin of one of the more obnoxious spammers (postmasterdirect.com) with specific details about number of messages repeated. A detailed description of one of the responses to the unsubscribe form with about 30 other unsubscribe checkboxes was also given.

That's quite a few details, for an article you say "supplies no details". Maybe you meant "raw data" (which is not commonly supplied in news reporting, but rather a summary of analysis of that data).

and it's provided by a .com with an interest in producing content. Its credibility is precisely and only that which you choose to invest in it.

Oh yeah, sure, Stephen Bell probably just made it all up. That's quite a conspiracy theory, since the test as described would not have cost anything and have been pretty simple to do. Computerworld did have an interest in publishing an article, and probably did pay Bell to do this simple study and write the article.

But if you're calling Bell a liar, consider that YOU have not even claimed to do a study as Stehpen Bell did. YOU have not quoted any articles, studies or provided any details.

All you've done is trolled. As a troll, you have an incentive to make obnioux posts and flatly refuse to believe any evidence contrary to your (absurd) position. It is you, not Stephen Bell, who is making everything up. If that is not the case, why don't YOU find the results of some study.... even a casual one like Bell's, that supports your position that responding to the unsubscribe links does not increase spam.

"We then set about religiously unsubscribing from the invitations sent to one of the addresses, but not those sent to the other. We've had it running for three weeks at date of writing and more than twice the volume of spam has come back to the 'unsubscribed' mailbox as to the untouched one."

well, google returns a likely candidate as the very first result if you search for "windows security flaw patch finally released". A link to the story is here.

It got Microsoft's "critical" rating as it allowed local or remote users to execute code with operating system privileges.

Now admittedly this one (MS02-024) "only" took five months to be patched but that's still completely unacceptable - and that's just the first result out of 9.720 search matches. FUD? I don't think so.

Bank.nz was the most recent new 2ld proposal. It failed at the voting stage; 56% of voters supported it, but 70% is required.

Voting results are here.

It's actually the second time the NZ Bankers Association has proposed it - it didn't make it in 2000 either. There's an IDG article about it here.

Here (New Zealand) all broadband ISPs have data caps (eg. 10Gb free per month and 10c/Mb after), but many only apply this limit to international traffic, and offer free national traffic.

This means that the ISP is fast for international traffic because it isn't full of people leeching warez from america, and fast for national traffic because there is a lot of national broadband infrastructure.

It also means that I download my stuff from people in the same country --- and let those who do have unlimited access for whatever reason (eg. works at a big ISP) do all the importing, and then several people download it from this person's web server, and then everybody else can grab it from the national P2P network, which is not subject to throttling like the international networks.

Since ISPs introduced these caps, my P2P usage (and that of many others) has increased. The ISPs save money and provide better service too, the only losers are the vampires who continuously download without giving anything back.

Upwards and onwards!

I imagine ISPs in the USA may offer similar free-for-this-state traffic, and cap inter-state and international traffic..?

There no moving parts to WiFi, so there's nothing to ever wear out. And the "media" is even cheaper than $1 floppies -- it's free!

Hmmm, now the only problem is geting companies to agree to a standard for the devices so there's no drivers. And some standard protocol so that everyone can always interchanged data. How many decades will that take? *grin* I suppose you shouldn't toss out your 3 1/2 " drives just yet...

They're getting 12km hops using solar powered relay stations.

You don't need many neighbors cooperating with you to hop all the way to a T3 or better with this.

Considering Opera only has 0.6% of the market share for browsers, 4.5% is quite impressive.

But consumers don't like it.

You get situations like this, and you discover that if you do what all the advertisements seem to say is the advantage of their high-speed solution (insert graphics of speeding progress indicators and streaming video here) your bill mounts up quite quickly indeed.

The word "punani", West Indian slang for the female genitalia, has been popularised recently by the British TV comic Ali G.

I'm in Auckland, New Zealand, where the current time is GMT+13. It's almost 6pm local time, and I'm just trying to psych myself up for the New Year's party that's due shortly.

IDG NZ have set up a nice Y2k news site. Also, according to Dave Winer has commented that Dave Gilmore (spelling, URL) has prepared 2 columns, depending on whether or not we have local power.

I'm currently more worried about the beer supplies holding up until the shops re-open on Sunday. Donations of Heineken gratefully accepted