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McAfee wants to pay you to read spam
Have you ever wondered what would happen if you actually replied to all the spam and unsolicited emails you received? Well, McAfee is looking for five volunteers to spend 30 days doing just that as part of a 'Super Spam Me' research project.
The challenge is part of an academic study into the potential dangers of responding to those ‘great offers’ which pop up in your inbox from completely unknown sources (usually scammers and cyber crooks). The study aims to highlight the scams and risks web users across the world are exposed to everyday living their lives online.
The five participants will be paid £300 in return for letting a team of academics read all the spam they receive for a month.
If you are interested in taking part, please send an email giving details of your age, gender, occupation, daytime phone number and the average number of hours you spend online to superspam@redconsultancy.com
Free fax-to-email service
An Italian company is offering a service that will allow you to receive up to three faxes free a month via your email box. The service, called Messagenet, gives you a London number and forwards any faxes it receives. You have the option of paying five euros a month for receiving an unlimited number of faxes, in which case you pay an €18 fee upfront, and €60 upfront for a year's charges. The company also offers cut-price rates for sending faxes.
How to save your life
PCW reader Simon Sharma believes our Digitise your Heritage feature (PCW, January) did not go far enough in that it gave few ideas on how to put a front end onto to your files. He is just about to launch what he calls a Whole Life Viewer, that he says will allow you to view you life as a "seamless cross-referenced multimedia presentation" complete with voice annotations. Sharma describes it as "inverse genealogy software."
You can download a trial at his website, where the product will be available shortly for £34.50. Also available there is a free booklet called How to save your life.
IBM makes light work of links
We were so busy at PCW Towers last week putting the next print edition to bed (as we say) that we had little time to look into the details of IBM's announcement of a 'breakthrough' photonic modulator that could lead to supercomputers the size of a laptop.
The term photonic modulator sounds alarming, but functionally it is simply an ultra-fast shutter capable of blocking or unblocking light billions of times a second. It can also be seen as an interface between digital electronics and digital photonics, converting electronic information into light information.
5.1 headset for gamers
Saitek has released a gaming headset packing its own sound card that the company says provides the full 5.1 surround sound experience. The £69.99 Cyborg 5.1 has six drivers that the vendors says "deliver precise and directional audio" to make games more realistic. It also has a noise-cancelling boom microphone for talking to other gamers online.
The Eee PC could have both Apple and Microsoft watching their backs
Microsoft is reported have prepared a cut-down version of Windows XP for the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project aimed at providing a sub-$100 machine for developing countries. It has apparently taken a year of work - and the new £199 ultra-mobile from Asus suggests that
Microsoft may need to exploit it for purposes closer to home, like covering its own back.
The Asus Eee PC as sold runs Linux, with a suite of open-source programs like the OpenOffice.org suite that cover most of what people will need on the move. Equivalent Windows-based applications and Windows XP (which will run on the Eee PC, according to Asus) would cost more than the machine itself.
At current software prices there is no way anyone could offer a Windows-based machine at the Eee PC price. If, as we suspect, machine like the Asus uncover a huge potential market they could at last push Linux into the mainstream as a general-purpose operating system.
Until Linux does hit critical mass in this way, it is going to be let down by its driver support. So releasing a trim version of XP might be a good defensive move by Microsoft.
But ultra-mobiles are not the only application area in which Microsoft faces increasing competition for open-source and commercial rivals. The days it can name it own price may be coming to an end.
Meanwhile, Apple is rumoured yet again to be preparing to release an ultra-mobile and we await with trepidation the prospect of Steve Jobs claiming to have invented the format. But we have long urged the company to apply its design flair to true portables that are more than toys.
However if more Taiwan vendors start churning out mobiles at under £200 they could have Apple on the run, too.
Smallest 11 notebooks put under the microscope
We've just published our mammoth ultraportable group test containing 11 branded laptops.
We asked every big manufacturer in the UK for a sub-2KG notebook and the response was extraordinary.
One of the biggest, Dell, sadly couldn't get its laptop in on time. Its XPS M1330 arrived a month after our request – but it certainly looks attractive.
This time around we spent a considerable amount of time weighing the notebooks and comparing it to manufacturer's advertised figures. It was surprising to see just how much manufacturers' figures differed from ours.
Web watch on homes
Service provider Be, now owned by cellular operator 02, has launched a £5-a-month home monitoring service that will text or email you if it detects an intrusion. You switch the system on simply by pressing a button on a keyfob remote as you leave home. A wireless camera is connected directly to the Be network and can be assessed from any online computer.
The service can also be set up to send a picture to your phone in the event of an intrusion. Subscribers can also view up to 100 alarm incidents. There is a set-up fee of £150. You can see a video here,
Our Green agenda goes out the window
The number of Britons preferring to unwrap a green gadget this Christmas is down by 21 per cent compared with two years ago, according to new research.
Fujitsu Siemens says 1 in 4 Britons, of the 1000 questioned, wanted to give or receive an environmentally friendly gift.
I would suggest fewer people care about buying environmentally-friendly electronics because it's almost impossible to gauge just how green a gadget is.
Fujitsu Siemens itself claims to be one of the greenest manufacturers in the world, but even it won't say how much carbon dioxide is produced for each computer it makes.
Likewise it's difficult to find out how ethical a product is. United Pepper, who's fair trade webcam we reviewed, doesn't give a scale of how much better its wages and working hours are compared to other Vietnam workshops.
The Fair Trade association doesn't even recognise United Pepper, so there are no checks and balances either.
The final nail in the coffin is that United Pepper's webcam produces very poor image quality compared with non-fair trade products.
All in all, if 1 in 4 respondents say they would prefer a green product, then only a fraction of those will actually make an effort to buy a green product.
A step forward would be the Fair Trade association starting to brand fair trade electronics, something not currently in its remit. Another big step forward would be a big PC manufacturer holding its hands up and saying just how much energy, and therefore CO2, it takes to put a PC together from start to finish.
Twin-tuner PVR for under £50 - while stocks last
Those still using VHS tapes to record TV shows will be interested in Goodman's latest offer.
The company is selling its GHDD1785DVBT PVR, which includes two digital tuners and an 80GB hard drive, for just £49.99. There is, however, a catch - there are only 50 of the half-price PVRs available.
An 80GB hard drive isn't great for a PVR and will only store around 40 hours of TV, but at this price you really can't grumble that much.
Head to the Goodmans site at 10am on Monday morning (10th December) to be in with a chance of buying one at the cut-down price - they'll go on a first come first served basis.
Free IP switchboard for Windows
A new Windows-based software switchboard is easier to use than competing Linux-based PBXs, owner 3CX says.
The change to software PBXs reduces cost and improves functionality by integrating Voip services side-by-side with the regular BT phone line. A free package called Asterisk has taken pole position, but it's primarily Linux only whereas 3CX's Sip-compatible software can be installed on all major Windows operating systems, including Windows XP.
3CX says being Windows based is a big benefit because the setup is a breeze compared with Asterisk, its graphical interface is a doddle to use and it integrates well with Windows networks and applications.
OQO ultra-mobiles come to London
Californian-based OQO was showing off its tiny ultra-mobiles in London last night. OQO was experimenting with these small formats before Microsoft announced its Origami ultra-mobile platform and so I was disposed to approve of its products, which I had seen only in photographs.
