Have you ever been on the receiving end of a recorded call that starts off “Your car’s warranty is about to expire….” The first time I got one of those calls it scared the daylights out of me. I had thoughts of my transmission dropping out while driving my kids around. My kids aren’t mechanics and neither am I so we’d be in quite the pickle. The calls keep coming to your phones, home and mobile. How annoying is that? All I could think was that these guys are spamming me through my phone.
Well, there’s good news. Next Tuesday the feds will make it illegal for telemarketers to use robocalls. “American consumers have made it crystal clear that few things annoy them more than the billions of commercial telemarketing robocalls they receive every year,” FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said in a news release. You got that right! Just like spam we don’t have the time or patience to deal with this junk. The feds also enacted CAN-SPAM a few years back to deal with spam messages. It’s estimated that close to 90% of all email traffic is junk mail. Hopefully, the robocalls perpetrators won’t decide to move their operations offshore and use crazy call-routing schemes to keep the pressure up to persuade consumers they need new car warranties.
After next Tuesday I can rest a little easier. I won’t have to screen my calls as diligently as before. I only wish this law had included the annoying political phone calls that come around each election cycle. Oh well, no law is perfect but it’s a start.
In an effort to generate large volumes of spam, a latest phishing attack is targeting South Carolina college students and staff, the FBI reports. The scam is asking for the student’s user ID and password which is needed for a server repair – do not respond.
Anyone suspect of any phishing scam should not respond to the email. They can report a suspicious email to the FBI at www.ic3.gov.
This latest warning reminds us that the spam industry is a lucrative business and we all need to be vigilant with regards to protection. The current volume of malicious emails flowing through the internet is above the 90% level. Obviously, we would recommend using managed email security company with advanced spam filtering as a first line of defense against these type of attacks.
Hurricane Bill is churning in the Atlantic and threatening Bermuda and the East Coast. Hopefully it will weaken and not cause any damage. Most businesses prepare to protect themselves from the damage these storms can inflict. However, there are numerous accounts of businesses being ill prepared to continue operating after the storm has passed because of an oversight in their business continuity planning.
Email is a preferred communication method. However, email continuity is often overlooked as part of the complete business continuity planning process. Hurricane winds, flooding, fire, etc., can knock an email server out of commission.
Mailprotector’s services – spam filtering and hosted exchange – provide business continuity in the event of mail server outages. Our Scan and Forward service provides mail queuing for up to 7 days if your mail server goes offline for any reason. Once your mail server is back online then your queued messages will be delivered. What if your on-premise mail server will be off-line for longer than 7 days or you need immediate access to your email? We can provide our Advanced Scan and Store service that gives you access to your email via a secure webmail console.
The value of our mail queuing was underscored by one of our customers back in July of 2007. England had been experiencing some of the worst flooding on record, and the shutdown of electricity substations in their region was ordered as a safety precaution. This meant that they had to power down all of their UK-based servers. Mailprotector’s availability protector kicked right in and bailed them out:
“Thanks to Mailprotector’s automatic message spooling we were able to build a replica environment in our US datacenter and be back up and running this morning without any customers experiencing loss of inbound emails.”
Mailprotector’s services are ideal for business continuity and should be made a key component for your business continuity planning.
Concerned citizens and privacy groups have been up in arms of late after hundreds of people have claimed they received unsolicited spam email from the White House.
The mass email written by senior presidential adviser David Axelrod contained a heavily biased message that defended President Obama’s health care proposals and encouraged supporters to help rebut criticism circulating on the Internet.
Opponents of President Obama’s health care plan who received this and other spam messages from the White House have argued that they never signed up to receive email from the White House, and have been outspoken with their concerns regarding their privacy. After a few days of silence in regards to the email list, the White House finally released an official statement to Fox News on Sunday which stated:
“The White House e-mail list is made up of e-mail addresses obtained solely through the White House Web site. The White House doesn’t purchase, upload or merge from any other list, again, all e-mails come from the White House Web site as we have no interest in e-mailing anyone who does not want to receive an e-mail,” the statement said. “If an individual received the e-mail because someone else or a group signed them up or forwarded the e-mail, we hope they were not too inconvenienced.”
Some recipients of the spam have said that they have never even browsed to the official White House Web site. The White House claims that the email may have been sent to such unwilling recipients as a result of on-line petitions from advocacy groups. On-line petitions can contain both the name and email address of the those who sign the petition, and the White House may have added the email addresses from submitted petitions to the White House distribution list.
The White House has stated that it’s Web site managers will seek out and block on-line petitions so that those who wish to receive email from the White House may sign up to do so on an individual basis only.
As we approach the end of summer, Mailprotector Security Center reports that spam rates remain high. During the last four weeks, the spam rate for all email traffic flowing through the Mailprotector security system reached one of the highest levels at 96.1%. The report also notes that the preferred method of attack from spammers is the Dictionary Harvest Attack – DHA.
Also known as a “Directory Harvest Attack”, the DHA is becoming a much more frequent occurrence. The most important commodity for a spammer is a valid email address. As users become more cautious about the disclosure of their email address, valid addresses are becoming harder to come by.
In a typical DHA the spammer will use a “dictionary” of hundreds of thousands of common names and name combinations to continually query a non-secure email server. The spammer will not attempt to send a message, but simply ask the receiving server if it will accept a message for the particular address. The spammer then waits to see if an error message is returned. If one is not, then the spammer now has a valid email address that can be used and sold to other spammers.
As part of our exchange spam filtering service, Mailprotector provides comprehensive security from DHA and other SMTP-based server attacks. Head over to http://www.mailprotector.net to learn more about this and other services that Mailprotector offers.
Yesterday, Google unveiled a preview of their new search engine improvements, codenamed “Caffeine”. You can take it for a spin yourself here (http://www2.sandbox.google.com/). The Google team promises the new search tool will improve the speed, accuracy, size, and comprehensiveness of Google search.
So why would Google bother with a big update to their search technology? They are already dominating the search engine industry. From a developers perspective, I think there are a couple key principles we can learn from Google on this.
Never Be Satisfied
First, never be satisfied that your system is as good as it can possibly be. There is always room for improvement. Matt Cutts, a software engineer at Google, jokes that the half life of code at Google is six months. Meaning “that you can write some code and when you circle back around in six months, about half of that code has been replaced with better abstractions or cleaner infrastructure.” I love this. Most people stop at the “If it ain’t broke, then don’t try to fix it” level of quality, but I prefer to think in terms of “Just because it is working doesn’t mean that we can’t make it better.” Google is always looking for ways to make their product better, even though they are already the best in their industry.
Improving Your Product From The Inside Out
Second, not all improvements are about new bells and whistles and fancy looking user interfaces. Sometimes the best thing a company can do to improve their product is focus on the core of that system and improve it from the inside out. This is what Google is doing with the “Caffeine” release. If you set the sandbox version next to the current live version of Google, you will hardly be able to notice a different to the interface. Matt Cutts himself admits, “The Caffeine update isn’t about making some UI changes here or there. Currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure.” Google is improving their product from the inside out.
Some are speculating that this update has something to do with the recent release of Bing.com from Microsoft. Perhaps it does, but you really have to give Google credit for staying focused on what it does best, being a search engine, and continuing to improve that first.
Today’s thoughts are a follow-up to two previous posts.
Regarding OS discrepancies
First, a couple of readers questioned my comparisons on my iPhone 3Gs vs. BlackBerry Bold vs. Windows Mobile showdown because they thought I should be using the Windows Mobile touch screen version (not the smartphone version). All I can say is that I compared the most popular devices with whatever OS they came loaded with. I have used the touchscreen version – an iPaq in 2005 with Quad band GSM, Bluetooth and WiFi. I have to say that I liked the overall usage, but I had to buy the voice recognition for $30 extra and the unit was a bit of a brick. I need a device that will slide into a pants or jacket pocket and ride around unnoticed.
Marketing madness
Secondly, some of you may remember my musings on the marketing offers of our local banks and whether offering a free 2-liter of coke or box of cookies would really do much to drive hordes of new customers through the doors. Well, sad to say, I have another one.
This one falls straight into the “WHAT were they thinking” category. I’m riding in to the office this morning and hear a radio ad talking about a restaurant in a nearby city that had re-opened. They go on to say “Come on by, and don’t forget that kids eat FREE all day Saturday with the purchase of any adult meal here at…” are you ready for this?… “Hooters.” REALLY!!! Hooters!! Kids eat Free!! Wow, let me gather up my middle school son, my daughters and wife and lets head on over to Hooters on Saturday.
I guess it gives me hope that if all of my business pursuits completely fell apart, I could always get a job in marketing.
Speechless….
We’ve now looked at our devices in the 3 major functional categories, but what about all the other little applications out there? What about the things we want our ‘phones’ to do that we don’t even know about yet. This is where we have to consider how well our device functions as an overall platform that can be extended and built out.
Today’s hands down winner in the Platform category is:
iPhone
Honestly, I don’t even need to dissect the differences here. One word says it all “App Store”. After less than a month I use my iPhone to track my run times distance and routes, listen to Pandora, update Facebook, ping a server, buy movie tickets, make Skype calls, match paint colors, etc, etc, etc. Apple made a brilliant move by opening up the platform for 3rd party development and sale through the iTunes app store. ’nuff said.
So where does this leave us in an overall analysis?
In my opinion the iPhone is the clear and convincing winner.
iPhone
From what I understand of the first 2 generations of iPhone, I probably wouldn’t have liked it, but the speed, storage capacity (mine’s a 32G), GPS and voice dialing of the 3Gs make it the complete package. I can’t imagine using anything else. (I must admit though, that my first unit crashed and had to be replaced. If anyone from AT&T is reading this, please tell your customer support that you shouldn’t be charging me a 10% restocking fee on an exchange of a bad unit! But, that’s AT&T – a totally different review.)
My final confirmation of iPhone’s magic was in an anniversary gift to my wife last month. When I gave it to her she told me to take it back…she didn’t want it. She’s not a techie and just wants basic functionality because she will NEVER read a manual or user guide. Two weeks later I couldn’t pry it out of her hands. She’s texting, staying up with friends on Facebook, paying bills and taking pictures and videos of the kids. She’s thoroughly enjoying the benefits the phone has brought to her life and she’s never read a single instruction. In fact, it could ALMOST replace a computer for her. She just started using it and she now does over half of what she used to do on her computer on the iPhone.
Blackjack I (Windows Mobile)
My daughter has my Blackjack I and loves it. She uses it to make calls, check email and (of course) for texting. If you’re looking for a basic phone with some PIM capability and over the air syncing this is probably your best bet.
Blackberry Bold
As far as Blackberry goes, I honestly have to say that you would have to pay me to use it…a lot. It has an awesome keyboard but that was pretty much it. I was thoroughly disappointed and have no idea what the crackberry addicts see in these.
In the end, these are all just my opinions and observations. Yours may be totally different. That’s why our Hosted Exchange 2007 service supports all three devices. To each his own.
by David Setzer on August 6, 2009 · 1 comment
Ok, now that we have the serious productivity issues out of the way lets look at how these devices stack up against each other in the area of entertainment.
Today’s winner is…
iPhone (did we really even think it would be close?)
Here’s the Lowdown
Blackjack I (Windows Mobile)
First, let’s look at Windows Mobile. I tried to use Cingular/AT&T’s video service to no avail and even loaded some MP3’s on my phone before an international trip. The videos were just too small and I was forced to use Samsung’s headphones because they didn’t have a standard headphone jack. The internal memory was too small, so I added a 1GB micro SD card which gave me some more music, but I generally didn’t have time to decide on which music I should take on a trip. I found myself always trying to guess what mood I’ll be in and I hated that. After one or two attempts I finally just gave up trying to use it as a music player.
The Blackjack’s camera had a delay that was so bad that it is virtually non-functional. I rarely took pictures.
iPhone
The iPhone is, of course, at it’s heart and iPod which beautifully syncs with iTunes. The only reason I started using iTunes to begin with was that a friend bought the red U2 iPod because he liked red and didn’t really care about the $50 credit for U2’s box set (which I gladly accepted and used). I’ve had a couple Nanos, but they’ve never been big enough to hold my whole catalog.
I am an ardent opponent of today’s DRM. While I wholeheartedly support a content owner’s right to profit from their work I also believe in the licensee’s Fair Use rights. I was very pleased to see Apple start offering DRM free downloads like Amazon and will be abandoning any last vestige of non iTunes based players on my systems. I love that my 32GB 3Gs can hold my whole catalog of music AND podcasts, so I always have whatever I want with me. No more carrying a separate player. I’ve even started using one of those old cassette adapters to play it in the car even though it’s hard to take a call and listen to music.
The iPhones focus selection camera along with editable video and Facebook app is great. I’m taking all kinds of web quality pictures and video of the kids and my trips. When you don’t want to carry a higher quality still or video camera the iPhone is a nice substitute.
With it’s iPod heart and App Store games this one was really a no brainer. Music…movies…TV…Autofocus Camera.
BlackBerry
The only thing I can say about the BlackBerry is that it had a Texas Hold ‘Em poker game that I liked and a nice flash on the camera. Does it play music? I don’t think it’s supposed to entertain.
While communication and productivity are definitely top concerns. Entertainment capabilities and device consolidation are making this category more important.
Stay tuned for tomorrows final installment when we look at the overall platform and extendibility of each device.
Well, now that we have our winner in the Phone category, let’s look at the “smart” part of a smartphone which was originally centered around personal productivity. I’m going to focus on the three traditional apps – Email, Calendar, and Tasks.
First though, the winner in the Productivity category is:
iPhone
How’d this one break down you ask?
I have a combination of POP, IMAP and Hosted Exchange accounts. (By the way – if you aren’t using Mailprotector’s Hosted Exchange 2007 with unlimited mailbox storage, you should be!).
Blackjack I
The Blackjack I was my first experience with true over the air Activesync syncing of my contacts, appointments, and tasks combined with true push email and I was HOOKED. If you haven’t experienced it, you’re missing out. Windows Mobile did a good job of syncing my data in real-time. With full push syncing enabled I could go two nights use without a battery charge. I didn’t like though that I couldn’t increase the amount of email stored on the device. It always seemed I needed to see an older email that wasn’t on there.
The calendar function was also a bit clunky. I never could operate it fast enough to schedule an appointment while talking to someone and it was difficult to scan calendar information.
Apple iPhone Gs
Apple definitely got the email interface right with the iPhone. I love the ability to control how much email is stored on the device and to easily switch to other Exchange folders. Since most of us use our email box as a bit of an information store this comes in very handy. I can always find what I need.
All my contacts stay sync’d just like Windows Mobile but I don’t seem to access them as much and the Calendar function is awesome. The interface is easy enough to use that I can search the calendar and schedule an appointment without delaying a conversation. The other day I scheduled a follow-up dentist visit while checking out and it didn’t require a conversation pause.
The one drawback I’ve seen with the iPhone is substantial battery drain with my hosted Exchange account in direct push mode….barely makes it through a day. I’ve put in on a 15 minute fetch and don’t really notice any delay.
Lastly regarding the iPhone, I have to say that if there were a OneNote app for iPhone it would be Da Bomb! for productivity. I know there are other apps out there but I absolutely love OneNote and how it has organized all my random ideas and notes. I have heard some rumor that a couple of MS partners are working on one. If it is a true over-the-air OneNote sync app then watch out.
Blackberry Bold
With Blackberry email I’m not sure I can give you the best analysis because I was too insulted by the monthly price to send all of my mail through BlackBerry’s single point of failure that has had more than one outage. Microsoft has the model with ActiveSync. So, I used a third party product based on SyncML (which ActiveSync is as well) called AstraSync. It handled over the air contact and task syncing nicely but would not handle Notes like Windows Mobile.
The Bold didn’t display HTML email like the iPhone but I understand that is coming. It seemed the BlackBerry display was somewhat “unix”-like too. It was very boring while the iPhone display made it easy to scan messages. I have to say though I did LOVE the little blinking light on the BlackBerry. I could tell if I had a new message without picking up the device or activating it.
The BlackBerry calendar wasn’t bad. It was hard to create a new appointment but the calendar scanning was easier than Windows Mobile.
One other thing…
Finally, I have to mention the keyboards since this tends to be the place we use them most. My Blackjack ‘tic-tac’ keyboards were good. I could write an SMS or very short email comfortably. I have to say I’m still getting used to the iPhone screen based keyboard. The auto-learning auto-correct software is good but it’s still making best guesses about what you ‘meant’ to type instead of being easy to type what you mean. I guess that’s the trade-off for the screen real estate In other applications. I do have to say that the BlackBerry Bold keyboard is unbelievable. I could type all day on it. I found myself banging out long emails with ease. Definitely the best thing BlackBerry has going is that Rolls-Royce of a keyboard.
Ok, that’s it for today. I know I didn’t mention much about tasks but I just don’t use an electronic task list much. A small flip pad is still my best management there. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s take on these devices in the Entertainment category.
