The Wistar Institute is in the US and the publication list on this topic at the lead researcher's page goes from 1998 to 2003.
So what makes this new or Australian?
Desquenne Clark, L., Clark, R., and Heber-Katz, E. 1998. A new model for mammalian wound repair and regeneration. Clin. Imm. and Immunopath. 88: 35-45.
McBrearty, B.A., Desquenne-Clark, L., Zhang, X-M., Blankenhorn, E.P., and Heber-Katz, E. 1998. Genetic analysis of a mammalian wound healing trait. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 95: 11792 - 11797.
Heber-Katz, E. 1999. The regenerating mouse ear. Seminars in Cell & Develop. Biol. 10:415-420.
Samulewicz, SJ, Clark,L, Seitz,A., and E. Heber-Katz. 2002. Expression of Pref-1, A Delta-Like Protein, in Healing Mouse Ears. Wound Repair and Regeneration, 10: 215-221.
Gourevich,D, Clark,L, Chen P, Seitz A, Samulewicz S, and E. Heber-Katz. 2003. Matrix Metalloproteinase Activity Correlates with Blastema Formation in the Regenerating MRL Ear Hole Model. Developmental Dynamics. 226; 377-387.
Blankenhorn EP, Troutman S, Desquenne Clark L., Zhang X-M, and E. Heber-Katz. 2003. Sexually dimorphic genes regulate healing and regeneration in the MRL/MpJ mouse. Mammalian Genome, In press.
Leferovich, J., Bedelbaeva, K., Samulewicz, S,, Xhang, X-M, Zwas, DR, Lankford, EB, and Heber-Katz, E. 2001. Heart regeneration in adult MRL mice. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 98: 9830-9835.
Heber-Katz,E., Leferovich, J., and K. Bedelbaeva. 2002. Spontaneous heart regeneration in adult MRL mice after cryo-injury. Gene Therapy and Regulation. 1:399-408; Leferovich, JM and E. Heber-Katz. 2002. The Scarless Heart. Seminars in Cell and Developmental Biology. 13: 327-333.
Seitz, A., Aglow, E., and E. Heber-Katz. 2002. Recovery from spinal cord injury: A new transection model in the C57BL/6 mouse. J. Neuroscience Research 67: 337:345.
Seitz, A, Kragol, M, Aglow, E, Showe, L. and E. Heber-Katz. 2003. Apo-E expression after spinal cord injury in the mouse. J. Neuroscience Research. 71: 417-387.
You can get them for $280 each in lots of 25 which could put the price in the range for an ISP to offer at cost with a one year contract lock in (making their profit on the ISP service). And as with all electronics, the price will only get cheaper as the technology advances and as the production volume goes up if and when this becomes a popular consumer technology.
The article doesn't say that bill C-60 will make Google illegal. It says that one lawyer's opinion is that one sentence that is designed to limit Google's and other search engine companies' liability is worded wrong such that it could be interpreted as making Google's caching illegal.
Clearly that is not the intention of the bill, and that sentence will be rewritten before the bill is passed if other lawmakers agree that it has that implication.
> I've tried 3 different cards, all of which work on Amazon > US and Japan as well as various other sites. No go
Are you in a different country than your credit card bank or billing address?
Googling found many who can't get their credit card accepted by SkypeOut. Those who contacted Skype live support were told, as I was, the authentication had failed (no reason given, i.e., a glitch) which caused Skype to disable that card for that account for a few days to a week. I didn't see anyone say they got it to work when they retried.
I was outside the US trying to use a VISA card from a US bank, with a US billing address. On a hunch, I created a new Skype account and paid for SkypeOut on that while tunneling through an SSH connection to my US ISP's shell server. IOW Skype saw my browser coming from a US ip address. It worked without a hitch.
What I can't tell from this one test is if 1) sometimes SkypeOut payments just work; 2) they check if the ip address is the same country as the card's bank; 3) they check if the ip address is the same country as the billing address; 4) they don't accept payments from ip addresses outside EU and US; 5) something else I haven't thought of; or 6) some combination of the above.
Now that it works, SkypeOut works a dream for calling the US at cheaper rates and better voice quality than the best calling card I have found here.
There are lots of pr0n sites that try to get traffic with misleading meta tags and other embedded text to get hits for unrelated searches.
The cease and desist looks like a form letter. I bet the law firm has somebody running searches for their client's trademarks and firing off the letter to any porn site that shows up in the results. They would not bother to read carefully to find out that this porn site has a public members profile page singing Nintendo's praises.
Re:Installing on Windows....you're kidding, right?
on
SpamAssassin 3.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I did a lot of the work of getting SpamAssassin to build and run on Windows. My goal was to have SpamAssassin build and install on Windows using the unmodified sources before version 3.0 was released. It does that now.
SpamAssassin was written in Perl on Unix and Gnu/Linux, for use in high volume server environments. The installation for an ISP or for anyone running a *nix mail server is a piece of cake. Their users get their mail filtered without having to install anything on their own PCs.
The fact that it works on Windows at all is a bonus. It is an open source project. Would anyone like to volunteer to help with the next steps of getting the server daemon, spamd, working properly in Windows as a service; writing or adapting an existing mail proxy that would integrate SpamAssassin with mail clients such as Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail, Eudora, Outlook Express; packaging it up in a standard Windows install package?
Addressing the 5 points in the parent post:
1. Nothing has to go in the root directory. The instructions show an example of Perl having been installed in C:\perl and configuration going in directories underneath a C:\etc\mail directory.
2. Yes you have to install Perl. And a recent enough version that doesn't have certain bugs. And the required modules. SpamAssassin was written in Perl, which makes it useful on systems that have Perl, such as most Unix and GNU/Linux systems. If you install Perl and the modules on your Windows system then you have a system that meets the minimum requirements. If you have a Palm Pilot or or an Xbox or Windows without Perl then your system does not meet the minimum requirements and you are not going to even try to run SpamAssassin on it. In that case install SpamBayes, or get an ISP who uses SpamAssassin for your mail, or any of many other alternatives.
3. Making the doc files is easier in *nix. I'll file a request for enhancement suggesting that generating the HTML be made part of the Makefile and that it be made to work under Windows. The doc files are generated from the sources as part of the build, so they are not included in a source distribution, which is what we are talking about here. If someone built a binary distribution they would include the doc files.
4. That -D command line option stands for Debug, not D drive
5. The whole install proces consists of 13 steps, some of which are things like "download SpamAssassin", some of which are "if you are installing the old version 2.6x do this extra step", and some of which have to do with getting the required Perl and Perl modules. The actual installation pretty much happens in three lines of step 7. It really is quite easy for a build and installation starting from source files. A binary installation package would be a lot easier. Does anyone know how to package perl plus modules plus a built SpamAssassin into a Windows install package? If you do, feel free to volunteer.
The focus on usability and user friendliness is where it should be in this particular project, on the sysadmin who installs SpamAssassin on a server and on their end users who don't have to install anything at all.
If you have the ideas and the expertise to also make SpamAssassin more useful and friendly to the end user owner of a PC running Windows, please volunteer to help.
SSL, SSH, and VPNs are all susceptible to man in the middle attacks
Would you please publish your breakthrough discovery on Bugtraq? Many security experts would be interested in learning the details of a MITM vulnerability in SSL, SSH, and all known VPN protocols.
nobody has the technology today to crack 128 bit codes
"no one will ever need more than 4 megabytes of RAM."
A dictionary will help you understand the difference between today and ever.
no matter how much computer power you put behind it, you could never decipher a message encrypted in the QC system
Unless you put your tap in outside of the QC system, use a keyboard logger, bug someone's office, get a trojan horse into one end of the system, guess a weak password, etc., etc. In other words precisely the things you would have to do if you want any chance at cracking a system protected by current state of the art non-QC crypto running over inexpensive ethernet.
To sum up, QC is no big deal because 1) standard encryption to defeat wiretaps and 2) messages that can't be decrypted without the key
are inexpensive commodities.
And
3) QC does nothing to tell you who you really are talking to on the other end of that expensive secure untappable fiber, and that's the only part of the problem that is hard to solve.
The problem with this is not that it doesn't 'solve' any security problems, but that it does not do anything that is not already done well enough and cheaper using conventional methods.
I can already perform a transaction with my bank's server without anyone being able to eavesdrop or perform man-in-the-middle attacks or modify the transaction. SSL works, nobody has the technology today to crack 128 bit codes, and cryptographically strong pseudo-random number generators seeded with proper care are no less secure in practice than random numbers generated using physical quantum processes.
I can perform that secure transaction to my bank without having a special use untappable optical fiber cable installed between my house and the bank. What extra security would I get for the cost of the fiber and the quantum cryptography equipment? Protection from some mythical person who can crack AES or RSA?
The stake in the ground analogy has to do with concentrating on only one aspect of security while ignoring the rest. If you look at the whole picture, yes, the protection of the transmission line is one post in a fence rather than an isolated stake in the ground. At that point you can make sure that the post is not one foot high (like using DES for the crypto) but it may be that having it 10 feet high (AES/RSA) makes the fence strong enough and building it 100 feet high (QC over dedicated fiber) is just a foolish unnecessary expense.
Quantum cryptography is not at all the same thing as quantum computing. The former is just a very expensive way to make sure someone doesn't tap your line, something which can be done much more easily using SSL or SSH or any other VPN technology.
I would prefer giving them Macs or Linux boxes, but saying that would be redundant, so...
Let them run Windows if they want to... Just set up a backup image of a pristine system and automate reloading it daily. They can keep data on a separate disk or partition if they want to. They'll learn how to do that quickly enough the first few times they lose something to the daily cleanup.
Every so often you install the security updates and re-image the disk. Voila, no problem.
The high energy density and specific energy of gasoline just means that we don't have to be concerned about the size and weight of the gas tank. We also don't have to be concerned about the complexity, reliability, or lifetime of the gas tank. All those are the considerations that affect the design and the limitations of the engine and power train.
In an electric car the motor is simple, reliable, and will last as long as the car. The torque characteristics allow having almost no drive train, or even putting one direct drive motor per wheel. It is the power storage that limits what is possible, but there is still going to be room for batteries that weigh more and occupy more space than a gas tank. So it is not fair to directly compare energy densities of gasoline and batteries.
Lead-Acid batteries allow us to build electric cars that perform well as commuter vehicles with ranges around 80 to 100 miles between overnight charges. That range isn't quite practical for many people, as it doesn't allow for both commuting and using the car for daily errands. The Li-Poly batteries hit a sweet spot I've been waiting years for in which you can get more like 300 miles between charges. At that point it becomes practical to use the car for just about every purpose other than the long family vacation trip, which can be handled by the second car or the occasional rental vehicle.
Sure it could be. Here's the abstract from Eunsong Kim's talk about it two days ago at Penn State University, courtesy of our friend Google:
When liquid 4He is cooled below 2.176 K, it undergoes a phase transition--Bose-Einstein condensation--and becomes a superfluid with zero viscosity. Once in such a state, it can flow without dissipation even through pores of atomic dimensions. Although it is intuitive to associate superflow only with the liquid phase, it has been proposed theoretically that superflow can also occur in the solid phase of 4He. Owing to quantum mechanical fluctuations, delocalized vacancies and defects are expected to be present in crystalline solid 4He, even in the limit of zero temperature. These zero-point vacancies can in principle allow the appearance of superfluidity in the solid. However, in spite of many attempts, such a 'supersolid' phase has yet to be observed in bulk solid 4He. Here we report torsional oscillator measurements on solid helium confined in a porous medium, a configuration that is likely to be more heavily populated with vacancies than bulk helium. We find an abrupt drop in the rotational inertia of the confined solid below a certain critical temperature. The most likely interpretation of the inertia drop is entry into the supersolid phase. If confirmed, our results show that all three states of matter--gas, liquid and solid--can undergo Bose-Einstein condensation.
Nigerian scam spam is very different from most spam. It is a story that can be carefully written to use only words that are commonly used, assuming that the people who author them are able to go beyond their broken English all the way to use of statistically hammy correctly spelled text.
But how would you sell more inches on your male member enhanced with V*@gra to make money fast watching celeb teenie nymphos doing it on the farm while only using ordinary non-spammy words?
There are only so many ways to get someone to click here to get all the hot action and a long boring story full of erudite euphemisms is not one of them.
It would be interesting to see if your method of disguising spam can work on a wider range of topics.
Paul Graham mentions the technique in this article, pointing out that the Bayesian filters look for words that commonly appear just in spam or just in non-spam. The random words are common in neither, so are simply ignored by the filters.
As a technique, the random words would get past a filter that looks for some spammy to non-spammy word ratio. But that's not how the spam filters work.
The article is confusing because it does not define "active user reach". It's easier to understand in this 3 year old similar Neilsen study [PDF}. The table there makes it clear that "active user reach" refers to what percentage of the total population being studied (the "active users") are using the various applications.
The quote from the Nielsen analyst in the current article makes it clear that "active users" are Web surfers, which by definition are people who use browsers.
So the article says that 76% of the web surfers studied also use some other Internet applications, 34.43% of them use Windows Media Player, 20.27% of them use AIM, etc.
Note that this says nothing about what percent of the traffic any of that represents. It seems obvious to me that they cannot be counting email as an "Internet Application" for their survey.
Being Neilsen, they are only interested in applications that can serve advertising. "Reach" means what percentage of web surfers can be reached via advertising delivered through Windows Media Player, AIM, RealPlayer, etc.
it really came in useful is last month, when we moved to Wellington New Zealand
I've also moved from US to NZ (Auckland). We pay for bandwidth usage here. Getting DSL from Telecom NZ that is any faster than 128Kbps costs about 20 NZ cents per megabyte usage over a monthly quota. Vonage says they have a bandwidth limiting feature that keeps their usage down to 30kbps in each direction. That translates to 8.7 NZ cents per minute of bandwidth costs in addition to their monthly fees. Paying more monthly to get a higher quota DSL account with Telecom doesn't change the overal lnumbers much.
I call the US using prepaid calling cards from Chi-Tel at 2.8 to 5 NZ cents per minute depending on time of day. I can buy a card in just about any dairy or liquor store in the city.
How does ChiTel do it so cheaply? They use VoIP. Of course they don't have to pay 20 cents a megabyte for the bits they ship back and forth overseas.
I think this shows how fragile Vonage's business model may be, while still demonstrating the impact of VoIP technology. As some other posters have mentioned, Vonage may have found a niche that happens to exist right now, but that could change as the details of pricing structures, taxes, and regulatory laws change.
Slashdot Mirror
So what makes this new or Australian?
For alternate opinions on the book see this review by Rob Slade in RISKS Digest, and this short rebuttal of Slade's review by Simson Garfinkle.
Imagine what you could do with a Beowulf cluster of these!
You can get them for $280 each in lots of 25 which could put the price in the range for an ISP to offer at cost with a one year contract lock in (making their profit on the ISP service). And as with all electronics, the price will only get cheaper as the technology advances and as the production volume goes up if and when this becomes a popular consumer technology.
The article doesn't say that bill C-60 will make Google illegal. It says that one lawyer's opinion is that one sentence that is designed to limit Google's and other search engine companies' liability is worded wrong such that it could be interpreted as making Google's caching illegal.
Clearly that is not the intention of the bill, and that sentence will be rewritten before the bill is passed if other lawmakers agree that it has that implication.
So what's the fuss?
> I've tried 3 different cards, all of which work on Amazon
> US and Japan as well as various other sites. No go
Are you in a different country than your credit card bank or billing address?
Googling found many who can't get their credit card accepted by SkypeOut. Those who contacted Skype live support were told, as I was, the authentication had failed (no reason given, i.e., a glitch) which caused Skype to disable that card for that account for a few days to a week. I didn't see anyone say they got it to work when they retried.
I was outside the US trying to use a VISA card from a US bank, with a US billing address. On a hunch, I created a new Skype account and paid for SkypeOut on that while tunneling through an SSH connection to my US ISP's shell server. IOW Skype saw my browser coming from a US ip address. It worked without a hitch.
What I can't tell from this one test is if 1) sometimes SkypeOut payments just work; 2) they check if the ip address is the same country as the card's bank; 3) they check if the ip address is the same country as the billing address; 4) they don't accept payments from ip addresses outside EU and US; 5) something else I haven't thought of; or 6) some combination of the above.
Now that it works, SkypeOut works a dream for calling the US at cheaper rates and better voice quality than the best calling card I have found here.
There are lots of pr0n sites that try to get traffic with misleading meta tags and other embedded text to get hits for unrelated searches.
The cease and desist looks like a form letter. I bet the law firm has somebody running searches for their client's trademarks and firing off the letter to any porn site that shows up in the results. They would not bother to read carefully to find out that this porn site has a public members profile page singing Nintendo's praises.
I did a lot of the work of getting SpamAssassin to build and run on Windows. My goal was to have SpamAssassin build and install on Windows using the unmodified sources before version 3.0 was released. It does that now.
SpamAssassin was written in Perl on Unix and Gnu/Linux, for use in high volume server environments. The installation for an ISP or for anyone running a *nix mail server is a piece of cake. Their users get their mail filtered without having to install anything on their own PCs.
The fact that it works on Windows at all is a bonus. It is an open source project. Would anyone like to volunteer to help with the next steps of getting the server daemon, spamd, working properly in Windows as a service; writing or adapting an existing mail proxy that would integrate SpamAssassin with mail clients such as Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail, Eudora, Outlook Express; packaging it up in a standard Windows install package?
Addressing the 5 points in the parent post:
1. Nothing has to go in the root directory. The instructions show an example of Perl having been installed in C:\perl and configuration going in directories underneath a C:\etc\mail directory.
2. Yes you have to install Perl. And a recent enough version that doesn't have certain bugs. And the required modules. SpamAssassin was written in Perl, which makes it useful on systems that have Perl, such as most Unix and GNU/Linux systems. If you install Perl and the modules on your Windows system then you have a system that meets the minimum requirements. If you have a Palm Pilot or or an Xbox or Windows without Perl then your system does not meet the minimum requirements and you are not going to even try to run SpamAssassin on it. In that case install SpamBayes, or get an ISP who uses SpamAssassin for your mail, or any of many other alternatives.
3. Making the doc files is easier in *nix. I'll file a request for enhancement suggesting that generating the HTML be made part of the Makefile and that it be made to work under Windows. The doc files are generated from the sources as part of the build, so they are not included in a source distribution, which is what we are talking about here. If someone built a binary distribution they would include the doc files.
4. That -D command line option stands for Debug, not D drive
5. The whole install proces consists of 13 steps, some of which are things like "download SpamAssassin", some of which are "if you are installing the old version 2.6x do this extra step", and some of which have to do with getting the required Perl and Perl modules. The actual installation pretty much happens in three lines of step 7. It really is quite easy for a build and installation starting from source files. A binary installation package would be a lot easier. Does anyone know how to package perl plus modules plus a built SpamAssassin into a Windows install package? If you do, feel free to volunteer.
The focus on usability and user friendliness is where it should be in this particular project, on the sysadmin who installs SpamAssassin on a server and on their end users who don't have to install anything at all.
If you have the ideas and the expertise to also make SpamAssassin more useful and friendly to the end user owner of a PC running Windows, please volunteer to help.
SSL, SSH, and VPNs are all susceptible to man in the middle attacks
Would you please publish your breakthrough discovery on Bugtraq? Many security experts would be interested in learning the details of a MITM vulnerability in SSL, SSH, and all known VPN protocols.
nobody has the technology today to crack 128 bit codes
"no one will ever need more than 4 megabytes of RAM."
A dictionary will help you understand the difference between today and ever.
no matter how much computer power you put behind it, you could never decipher a message encrypted in the QC system
Unless you put your tap in outside of the QC system, use a keyboard logger, bug someone's office, get a trojan horse into one end of the system, guess a weak password, etc., etc. In other words precisely the things you would have to do if you want any chance at cracking a system protected by current state of the art non-QC crypto running over inexpensive ethernet.
To sum up, QC is no big deal because
1) standard encryption to defeat wiretaps
and
2) messages that can't be decrypted without the key
are inexpensive commodities.
And
3) QC does nothing to tell you who you really are talking to on the other end of that expensive secure untappable fiber, and that's the only part of the problem that is hard to solve.
The problem with this is not that it doesn't 'solve' any security problems, but that it does not do anything that is not already done well enough and cheaper using conventional methods.
I can already perform a transaction with my bank's server without anyone being able to eavesdrop or perform man-in-the-middle attacks or modify the transaction. SSL works, nobody has the technology today to crack 128 bit codes, and cryptographically strong pseudo-random number generators seeded with proper care are no less secure in practice than random numbers generated using physical quantum processes.
I can perform that secure transaction to my bank without having a special use untappable optical fiber cable installed between my house and the bank. What extra security would I get for the cost of the fiber and the quantum cryptography equipment? Protection from some mythical person who can crack AES or RSA?
The stake in the ground analogy has to do with concentrating on only one aspect of security while ignoring the rest. If you look at the whole picture, yes, the protection of the transmission line is one post in a fence rather than an isolated stake in the ground. At that point you can make sure that the post is not one foot high (like using DES for the crypto) but it may be that having it 10 feet high (AES/RSA) makes the fence strong enough and building it 100 feet high (QC over dedicated fiber) is just a foolish unnecessary expense.
Quantum cryptography is not at all the same thing as quantum computing. The former is just a very expensive way to make sure someone doesn't tap your line, something which can be done much more easily using SSL or SSH or any other VPN technology.
I would prefer giving them Macs or Linux boxes, but saying that would be redundant, so...
Let them run Windows if they want to... Just set up a backup image of a pristine system and automate reloading it daily. They can keep data on a separate disk or partition if they want to. They'll learn how to do that quickly enough the first few times they lose something to the daily cleanup.
Every so often you install the security updates and re-image the disk. Voila, no problem.
The high energy density and specific energy of gasoline just means that we don't have to be concerned about the size and weight of the gas tank. We also don't have to be concerned about the complexity, reliability, or lifetime of the gas tank. All those are the considerations that affect the design and the limitations of the engine and power train.
In an electric car the motor is simple, reliable, and will last as long as the car. The torque characteristics allow having almost no drive train, or even putting one direct drive motor per wheel. It is the power storage that limits what is possible, but there is still going to be room for batteries that weigh more and occupy more space than a gas tank. So it is not fair to directly compare energy densities of gasoline and batteries.
Lead-Acid batteries allow us to build electric cars that perform well as commuter vehicles with ranges around 80 to 100 miles between overnight charges. That range isn't quite practical for many people, as it doesn't allow for both commuting and using the car for daily errands. The Li-Poly batteries hit a sweet spot I've been waiting years for in which you can get more like 300 miles between charges. At that point it becomes practical to use the car for just about every purpose other than the long family vacation trip, which can be handled by the second car or the occasional rental vehicle.
Use a black felt pen. If you do it right you get to label the CD and defeat copy protection at the same time
Sure it could be. Here's the abstract from Eunsong Kim's talk about it two days ago at Penn State University, courtesy of our friend Google:
When liquid 4He is cooled below 2.176 K, it undergoes a phase transition--Bose-Einstein condensation--and becomes a superfluid with zero viscosity. Once in such a state, it can flow without dissipation even through pores of atomic dimensions. Although it is intuitive to associate superflow only with the liquid phase, it has been proposed theoretically that superflow can also occur in the solid phase of 4He. Owing to quantum mechanical fluctuations, delocalized vacancies and defects are expected to be present in crystalline solid 4He, even in the limit of zero temperature. These zero-point vacancies can in principle allow the appearance of superfluidity in the solid. However, in spite of many attempts, such a 'supersolid' phase has yet to be observed in bulk solid 4He. Here we report torsional oscillator measurements on solid helium confined in a porous medium, a configuration that is likely to be more heavily populated with vacancies than bulk helium. We find an abrupt drop in the rotational inertia of the confined solid below a certain critical temperature. The most likely interpretation of the inertia drop is entry into the supersolid phase. If confirmed, our results show that all three states of matter--gas, liquid and solid--can undergo Bose-Einstein condensation.
Nigerian scam spam is very different from most spam. It is a story that can be carefully written to use only words that are commonly used, assuming that the people who author them are able to go beyond their broken English all the way to use of statistically hammy correctly spelled text.
But how would you sell more inches on your male member enhanced with V*@gra to make money fast watching celeb teenie nymphos doing it on the farm while only using ordinary non-spammy words?
There are only so many ways to get someone to click here to get all the hot action and a long boring story full of erudite euphemisms is not one of them.
It would be interesting to see if your method of disguising spam can work on a wider range of topics.
Paul Graham mentions the technique in this article, pointing out that the Bayesian filters look for words that commonly appear just in spam or just in non-spam. The random words are common in neither, so are simply ignored by the filters. As a technique, the random words would get past a filter that looks for some spammy to non-spammy word ratio. But that's not how the spam filters work.
The article is confusing because it does not define "active user reach". It's easier to understand in this 3 year old similar Neilsen study [PDF}. The table there makes it clear that "active user reach" refers to what percentage of the total population being studied (the "active users") are using the various applications.
The quote from the Nielsen analyst in the current article makes it clear that "active users" are Web surfers, which by definition are people who use browsers.
So the article says that 76% of the web surfers studied also use some other Internet applications, 34.43% of them use Windows Media Player, 20.27% of them use AIM, etc.
Note that this says nothing about what percent of the traffic any of that represents. It seems obvious to me that they cannot be counting email as an "Internet Application" for their survey.
Being Neilsen, they are only interested in applications that can serve advertising. "Reach" means what percentage of web surfers can be reached via advertising delivered through Windows Media Player, AIM, RealPlayer, etc.
I've also moved from US to NZ (Auckland). We pay for bandwidth usage here. Getting DSL from Telecom NZ that is any faster than 128Kbps costs about 20 NZ cents per megabyte usage over a monthly quota. Vonage says they have a bandwidth limiting feature that keeps their usage down to 30kbps in each direction. That translates to 8.7 NZ cents per minute of bandwidth costs in addition to their monthly fees. Paying more monthly to get a higher quota DSL account with Telecom doesn't change the overal lnumbers much.
I call the US using prepaid calling cards from Chi-Tel at 2.8 to 5 NZ cents per minute depending on time of day. I can buy a card in just about any dairy or liquor store in the city.
How does ChiTel do it so cheaply? They use VoIP. Of course they don't have to pay 20 cents a megabyte for the bits they ship back and forth overseas.
I think this shows how fragile Vonage's business model may be, while still demonstrating the impact of VoIP technology. As some other posters have mentioned, Vonage may have found a niche that happens to exist right now, but that could change as the details of pricing structures, taxes, and regulatory laws change.