computer (Page 10)

Spam could make up the majority of e-mails by the end of 2002, according to data from e-mail service providers. The mail of internet users is fast becoming clogged with ads for pornography, money-making schemes and health products. In July, according to Brightmail, unsolicited bulk e-mail made up 36% of all e-mail, up from 8% about a year ago. Getting our e-mail has becoming a daily drudgery, because we have to sort through these obnoxious and annoying messages.
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U.S. intelligence officers believe images on the pro-Islamicwebsite Azzam contain secret messages. This has inspired somecomputer users to check images on the site carefully forsigns that they have been altered using free programsavailable online.

However, Peter Honeyman, a computer expert at the Universityof Michigan, says that after closer examination, most of thesuspicious flagged images have been cleared. He says, “Youget a lot of these. We call them false positives.”

Honeyman says that in order to confirm the existence ofhidden messages, it?s necessary to crack the password usedto insert the message. This is done by searching through allthe millions of possible passwords until you find the rightone. It requires a large amount of computing power.
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During the Cold War, authors would sometimes discover that their books were being published underground and distributed clandestinely to interested readers in the Soviet Union. No one in the West ever saw these books, or got any royalties from them, but it was heartening to be part of the spread of art and information in a controlled society.

There is still media censorship in China, as well as some other Asian and Middle Eastern countries. And we also have something new: the internet.

A group of hackers called Hacktivismo is using their skills to do good things, for a change. They?re creating tools to help people get around internet censorship in countries where information is controlled by the government.
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By monitoring the flashes of LED lights on electronics equipment and the indirect glow from monitors, scientists in the United States and the United Kingdom have discovered ways to remotely eavesdrop on computer data.

Optical signals from the little flashing LED (light-emitting diode) lights, which are on everything from modems to keyboards, can be captured with a telescope and processed to reveal all the data passing through the device, according to Joe Loughry, a computer programmer at Lockheed Martin Space Systems.
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