To print: Click here or Select File and then Print from your browser's menu

This story was printed from silicon.com, located at http://www.silicon.com/

Story URL: http://comment.silicon.com/weeklyroundup/0,39024756,39130381,00.htm

The Weekly Round-Up: 13.05.05
Squirrels get a taste for phone lines and 900,000 get a taste of spam blacklisting...

By silicon.com

Published: Friday 13 May 2005

"A bad workman always blames his tools."

So it has been said many a time. But why blame tools when you can blame squirrels?

This has been the strategy of one enterprising BT engineer who has blamed the fluffy-tailed rodents for gnawing through phone lines and cutting off customers.

We're not saying in this instance the engineer was said "bad workman" but it's certainly an innovative diagnosis for line problems which reportedly left one couple in the improbably named Finchampstead in Berkshire without a phone line for eight weeks.

BT has subsequently denied rodents were the cause, contradicting the anti-squirrel rhetoric of their loose cannon engineer who sounds like he perhaps had an axe to grind with our nut-filching furry friends.

The Round-Up has seen this story appear elsewhere - though admits silicon.com dropped the ball on this groundbreaking news - and would like to think the BT bod charged with issuing said statement did so with no little amount of enthusiasm.

After all, the Round-Up's sure they don't have enough to do already without dealing with important questions about squirrels.

The Round-Up is almost tempted to phone up and suggest we've heard tell that otters have disconnected much of the Grampians.

Or that a particularly pernicious warren of rabbits is responsible for much of the competitive pricing strategy of mid-tier broadband providers.

There is something of a precedent here for animal inflicted outages. In 2001 a shark was blamed for "eating the internet" when a submarine cable connecting homes in Singapore was bitten through and connections lost.

But customers of UK cable firm Telewest have no animals to blame for why they've been unable to send emails to certain recipients this week.

Telewest's 900,000 or so customers have all been blacklisted by the Spam Prevention Early Warning System (SPEWS), whose list is referenced by many anti-spam controls.

Telewest was singled out for such treatment because of the sheer number of PCs connected to its broadband services which have become compromised and recruited into zombie networks. Such infected machines are used remotely by spammers for the sending of bulk email.

Last month silicon.com revealed that some of Telewest's blueyonder.co.uk home users were sending hundreds of thousands of emails each day - a sure sign of an open relay, pumping out spam.

Despite such apparent warnings a spokesman for Telewest told silicon.com the company believes SPEWS' actions have been "a little heavy-handed".

And Matt Peachey from IronPort, whose Senderbase.org service revealed the extent of Telewest's spam problem, is inclined to agree.

Peachey told silicon.com: "I'm not surprised this has happened but I am surprised at the number of IP addresses which have been blacklisted."

By blocking all Telewest IP addresses the anti-spam group has certainly blocked the guilty parties.

Likewise if you walk around slapping enough people around the face you're eventually going to slap somebody who deserves it but it's not the most logical approach and you're going to annoy a lot of very innocent people.

The actual number of Telewest IP addresses identified as a source of spam is believed to be just 17,000.

Or to put it another way, that means there are around 900,000 innocent IP addresses on that list which are unable to send email to addresses whose own spam controls reference the SPEWS blacklist.

As such, SPEWS stands accused of using a bulldozer to crack a nut.

Telewest may be right in calling the actions of SPEWS "heavy-handed" but it certainly highlights the need for ISPs to take greater action against the threat of infected customers contributing to the global spam epidemic.

And there is not really any getting away from the fact Telewest has been incredibly remiss in monitoring the traffic which has been leaving its network.

It is frankly absurd that Telewest has been sending more email than AOL, for example, and that this is a situation which was allowed to go on to the point when SPEWS thought it essential to get involved. Telewest can't have thought it plausible that home broadband users on its blueyonder.co.uk addresses were sending hundreds of thousands of emails each day.

At some point those charged with monitoring such traffic must have noticed these figures.

It's even more incredible to consider that the bulk of this email was being generated by just 17,000 IP addresses.

It keeps coming back to that number.

SPEWS is wrong to blacklist the other 900,000 or so machines but Telewest is even more culpable for allowing those 17,000 to operate unchecked for any length of time.

Telewest is of course now trying to resolve the issue as quickly as possible but a little more action in the months leading up to this crisis point being reached would have gone a long way to ease their headache.

Speaking of headaches, the Round-Up isn't expecting any sympathy here but has been writing this with something of an addled mind having been at a backstreet karaoke joint until the wee small hours of the morning - courtesy of some very lovely PR types at HBL Media who plied the silicon.com editorial team with enough Sapporo beer to ensure we all embarrassed ourselves.

For the record, the Round-Up's star turn saw 'Hold me close' (David Essex), 'Suspicious Minds' (Elvis) and 'Panic' (The Smiths) all murdered.

And for a price the Round-Up could even be encouraged to 'out' the member of the team who revealed an alarming fondness for the apparently now disbanded UK boy band Busted.

Oh the shame.

Also getting 'busted' this week was a freelance journalist writing for tech site Wired who has been hauled over the coals for using a number of sources in her stories who have subsequently proven very difficult to track down.

Some have suggested they may even be made up. Certainly an investigation by Wired revealed the existence of at least 40 sources that could not be confirmed.

A number of her employers are concerned enough to have taken down stories by the controversial Michelle Delio.

According to Associated Press, an email from Delio showed confusion over why her "credibility and career is now hanging solely on finding minor sources that contributed colour quotes to stories I filed months and years ago".

Well, Michelle, the Round-Up thinks it could be because you've been accused of making up sources for news stories and have subsequently been unable to make a case for proving that isn't so.

Delio added there "isn't one story that contains fabricated news".

According to reports, all the sources named in the articles had common names. This might make them hard to track down, months and years down the line. If you were to make up some sources, how about giving them names such as Dwight Spiegelhacker rather than John Smith.

A good test is to imagine yourself saying: "What a name! You couldn't make it up!"

If that sentence doesn't sound out of place then you've probably got a good name.

There are some things an IT journalist hears in the course of doing their job that just shouldn't be interesting but are. This week the Round-Up learned that Oracle CEO and full-time playboy extraordinaire Larry Ellison buys his suits at Gieves & Hawkes on Jermyn Street.

Somehow the Round-Up knew he wasn't going to be an 'off the peg' at M&S kind of guy but it's nice to hear the wealthy or America aspire to some quality English tailoring.

And that information is bankable... silicon.com heard it first hand from Hector Doodlebugblaster.

OK, that's perhaps pushing things a little too far on the made-up name front but we did hear it from a very close associate of Larry's.

Microsoft has also gone for something of a makeover this week with news that its infamous blue screen of death is going to be red with its next operating system Longhorn.

True innovation. It's said a change is as good as a rest but frankly most users would opt for the far more preferable rest from system errors bugs and crashes.

Another party looking to get their hands on a new outfit is Sabre Holdings, owner of Travelocity, which is also looking to snap up UK dot-com bellwether lastminute.com.

lastminute.com rose to prominence during the heady days of the dot-com boom with posh totty Martha Lane-Fox and equally posh chum Brent Hoberman at the helm.

Now its big US rival has made it a £577m offer which has been accepted.

However, Brian Collie, chairman of lastminute.com, put down his holiday brochures and Ferrari sales guide long enough to say he isn't ruling out a counter-bid, expecting the Sabre offer to bring other suitors out of the woodwork.

A spike in lastminute.com shares may also suggest investors are hopeful of a higher bid.

Sabre, keen not to disenfranchise the folks this side of the Atlantic, have reassured lastminute.com that Brent Hoberman will remain as CEO - as well as assuming a similar role at Travelocity in Europe.

And finally, earth shattering news from market research firm Mintel.

Men like to chat on the phone more than women. In fact men are apparently twice as likely to pick up the old dog and bone and chat.

The fairer sex, claims Mintel, far prefers text messaging.

One analyst at Mintel told Reuters: "The fact that women are more likely to be texters could suggest that women now see mobile phones as extremely social tools. They can stay in touch with each other and make arrangements to meet without getting drawn into a long conversation."

The phone is a social tool. Very insightful. And to think all these years the Round-Up has been using its mobile phone to hammer in nails and as a paperweight.

The research also revealed 90 per cent mobile phone ownership among 13 and 14-year-olds. A true sign of the times.

Until next week, stay beautiful Round-Up readers.... and click on some news stories: