One Step Ahead

Australia's anti-spam watchdog, the Australian Communications Authority (ACA), has declared Australia's anti-spam laws a success, claiming that major spammers in Australia have stopped their activities since the Spam Act was introduced three months ago.

This is a joke, right?

Although the ACA might be patting itself on the back about Australian spammers reducing their activities, this hasn't made one iota of difference to the amount of spam that Australians are getting. All independent reports say that the level of spam continues to increase.

The ACA is looking only at the spam it's empowered to act on (which is spam sent from Australia), but that's a narrow-minded view. It's certainly not what most Australians would have expected when the Government loudly proclaimed that its anti-spam laws would mean the end of spam. It's the old "The operation was a success, but the patient died" excuse.

Most of the spam originates in the USA, which has passed spam laws that make spam legal. Unless the USA outlaws spam, that situation won't get better for e-mail users anywhere.

The Australian Government's welfare department Centrelink has come under fire from welfare groups, who accuse its Web site of being more than a year out of date. Because of the out-of-date information, the Web site was reporting outdated policy decisions that misled pensioners about their entitlements.

This shows that the Web is becoming an important communication vehicle for organisations, and should not be treated lightly.

An out-of-date Web site also affects the credibility of the organisation, as a Stanford University study of over 4,000 Internet users found.

Although North Americans dominated the World Wide Web in its early years, the rest of the world has rapidly come on board, and many other countries and languages are represented on the Internet. This has come to a head recently in Google's "Orkut" community system, where some English-speaking Americans are complaining about Brazilians dominating the community groups, writing in Portugese.

Well, that's just the way of the world! There are far more non-English-speaking people on this planet, and many of them are just starting to use the Internet. Orkut itself has almost twice as many Brazilian members than American members, so it's hardly surprising that it's dominated with Portugese messages.

An ACNeilsen.Consult survey showed that for the first time, most Australian small businesses with Internet access now have broadband Internet access. And most of those surveyed (over 85%, in fact) said that broadband access has given them greater efficiency and productivity.

E-books (electronic books that can be read on a screen) are the fastest-growing market in the publishing industry, according to a study from the Open eBook Forum. However, they are still only a very small part of the total market, which saw over 2.2 billion books sold in the USA in 2003.

It's good to see e-books growing in popularity, though we're a long way away from them coming even close to competing with printed books. Anyway, I don't think they are direct competitors. E-books serve a very different purpose from printed books, and people buy them for different reasons. I'll be talking about this in my presentation The Three Biggest Mistakes Authors Make With E-Books at the Professional Speakers Association conference in the U.K. in November.

Despite the fears of getting a deluge of spam by subscribing to e-mail mailing lists, a
study of over 1,000 lists found that hardly any of them were sending spam. The vast majority of them sent relevant information (in other words, what the person would expect when they signed up), and only 3 of the lists continued sending junk mail despite requests to stop.

This is good news for you if you've been worried about subscribing to e-mail newsletters on Web sites. If the site looks reputable, you're probably safe to give them your e-mail address. Of course, you still have to use your judgement, and if a site looks dodgy, it probably is!

Alastair MacGibbon, who has just joined eBay Australia as the head of on-line security, fears that naive and unsuspecting Internet users will soon become the targets of organised criminals. He points out that many companies use strict measures to protect their employees from Internet crime, but individual home users often don't get the same level of protection.

Yep, he's right! There's already plenty of evidence of spammers, scammers and virus writers turning their attention to individuals on the Net. And they are increasingly targeting people with criminal intent, not just flooding their in-boxes with Viagra advertisements.

Don't wait until it's too late. Make sure that you've got strong protection against these on-line nasties!

The latest research from The Customer Respect Group shows that big companies aren't doing enough to respect on-line customers. According to them, many leading companies just aren't bothering to respond to queries from potential customers who visit their Web sites. They found that 12% didn't respond at all, and a further 21% responded to only half the queries. That's one in three companies in total!

Imagine if that happened in a real store: You walk in to a shop, go up to a shop assistant to ask for help, and they didn't bother talking to you! That sort of behaviour is inexcusable in a physical shop, so why is it considered OK on the Internet? Well, of course it's not. And the survey also found that 20% of on-line shoppers will go directly to a competitor's site if they have a bad Web experience on yours.

I posted an entry last week warning about the inflated figures quoted by movie producers, record companies and software companies about how much money they're losing from illegal copies. Essentially, the figures are inflated because these companies usually claim that every pirated copy is a "lost sale", when in fact that totally distorts the picture. It's highly unlikely that everybody who made an illegal copy would have gone out and bought the real version instead.

Now the New York Times reports that a representative of the Business Software Alliance, which recently made such an inflated claim, admits that their figures are probably inflated by 10 times!

I told you so.

A Web site critical of Australian Prime Minister John Howard appears to have been taken down, after claims that it was created by a PR firm with links to the oppostion Labor Party. I read this story in today's on-line version of The Australian newspaper, but the electrons had hardly stopped vibrating before the Web site had been taken down from the Internet.

Two opposition political parties - Labor and the Greens - had linked to the Web site from their own sites and e-mail newsletters, but claimed that they were not the creators of the site.

I'm not going to get into the political debate behind this issue, and now that the offending Web site is no longer on-line, it's difficult to comment on the site itself (Actually, the site is still available if you know how to get to it, but the intent is obviously to remove it, so I won't go into the details here).

However, I'd like to point out just how careful you have to be when linking to other Web sites. If Labor and the Greens linked to the site, knowing it contained potentially libellous material, they were just plain stupid.

Linking to another Web site does give it an implied endorsement in most people's eyes, unless you say otherwise. That's why some Web sites even pop up a window when linking to an external site, warning users that they are going to an external site.

That's OK, but I don't think it's necessary to go that far. Just make sure that when you link to somebody else's Web site, make it clear why you're linking to that site - especially if there's any criticism on that site.

You've probably heard of the famous "Nigerian scams", which have been around long before e-mail, but have become more common since the widespread use of e-mail. You get an e-mail from some rich banker in Nigeria (or fleeing Iraq, or some other hot-spot), promising you untold riches if you help them get a large sum of money out of the country. Of course, it's a scam, but some people do fall for it. And some unfortunate victims have even been killed by the scammers.

This has been doing the rounds for so long that you might wonder why people keep falling for it. But the scammers are getting smarter and smarter, and are doing more and more to make themselves seem credible. Here's an excellent article from The Register, giving you a blow-by-blow account of how the scam works. It's well worth a read!

Australia is one of the worst offenders in illegal movie downloads, according to a recent survey. Almost one in five Australian Internet users have downloaded a movie illegally, and a similar proportion are buying less films now than they did in the past.

Take these results with a large grain of salt, because the survey was conducted on behalf of the Motion Picture Association of America, which has a vested interest in complaining about movie piracy. While I don't necessarily disagree with the results quoted, I do take issue with the dollar figures attached to some of these surveys. Some organisations extrapolate these figures to claim billions of dollars in losses. These figures are usually determined by calculating the equivalent value in legitimate movie sales. But this is a distorted number, because it's certain that not everybody who downloads music, movies or software illegally would have spent full price on the legitimate version.

The Internet has clearly established its place in mainstream society, but users are still worried about fraud when shopping on-line. In a survey of British Internet users, almost 3 in 4 users said that security was a bigger concern to them when shopping on-line than price, quality and convenience.

That's a staggering figure, and it just goes to show how little Internet companies have done to address their customers' concerns. Imagine if 3 in 4 shoppers in retail stores were more worried about security than price, quality or convenience! We'd have retailers falling over each other to prove that their order-taking system was the most secure on the planet. But when it comes to the Internet, businesses either don't know or don't care!

What does this mean to you if you're operating an on-line business? Simple. Do whatever it takes to make your customers comfortable and reassured about the security of their transaction. Publish a privacy policy, use a secure server, make the order process simple, offer a variety of payment options, give customers a telephone number to speak to a live person, publish a street address prominently, explain what happens to their credit card number, clearly spell out your delivery times, publish your refund policy (and make it strongly weighted in the customer's favour), offer a currency converter for international customers, make it easy to calculate shipping charges, ... Whew! That's all I can think of for now, but I'm sure you get the picture.

I mentioned in an earlier post that Microsoft's Internet Explorer had a serious security flaw that hackers are exploiting to capture on-line banking details from consumers. Microsoft did issue an update recently, but it didn't fix the flaw - it worked around it by upgrading the user's security level to maximum.

Now, Microsoft's own magazine Slate is recommending that users ditch Internet Explorer and use the Mozilla browser instead. It's a major admission from the world's biggest software company that the security flaws in Internet Explorer are embedded deeply in the software.

Well, I've been using Mozilla (and its predecessors Netscape Communicator and Netscape Navigator) for years, but I'm definitely in the minority. I would highly recommend a switch to Mozilla as your standard Web browser. It co-exists happily with Internet Explorer, so you can keep Internet Explorer as a back-up browser for those Web sites that insist on it.

Now the United Nations is throwing its hat in the ring regarding spam, according to an announcement from the International Telecommunications Union. The idea is that the ITU will encourage member countries to pass uniform anti-spam legislation, making it easier to prosecute spammers in their country of origin. Currently, a lot of spam crosses international boundaries, making it virtually impossible to prosecute the spammers.

Hmmm ... good idea, and I'd be the first to support it, but I really can't see this making any difference. The biggest spammer, the USA, has already passed its version of spam legislation, CAN-SPAM, which actually makes it legal to send spam. It's difficult to see the USA backing down from that position, even under international pressure.

Three months after Australia's anti-spam laws went into effect, many Australian companies are risking million-dollar-a-day fines by continuing to send unsolicited e-mail.

The Australian Direct Marketing Association recently conducted a survey of members, finding that 80 per cent of them were ignorant of the new laws. Many were still sending commercial e-mail to people without their permission - an offence under the new law.

I've seen this myself. Some of them were even from passing acquantainces who put me on their mailing lists without my permission; while others were from organisations who have clearly been trawling the Web looking for any e-mail addresses.

I report most of these offences to the Australian Communications Authority, and just this week they contacted me for a statement that they can use as evidence in future prosecution of spammers.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse, folks! You really must find out how to stay on the right side of the law. Otherwise, it could cost you your business or your house!

You can report violations of the anti-spam law to reportingspam@aca.gov.au.

Unfortunately, the new anti-spam laws won't stop spam - they will just make life more difficult for innocent people.