The number of unwanted, offensive and misleading emails sent across the globe went down by 75% to a mere 60 billion or so a day, according to spam filtering companies.

And the billions of dollars pumped into the fight through anti-spam software or legal battles have nothing to do with the breakthrough.

Instead, a ragtag band of researchers pulled off the unprecedented coup of drastically cutting the spam volume by  adopting a new strategy: going after mainstream US companies that can unknowingly help spammers, identity thieves and child porn purveyors by carrying their traffic on the internet, the Los Angels Times Reported.

McColo, a californian-based company played house to some of the world’s worst online victory criminal gangs and was booted off the internet following an investigation by Washington Post security researcher Brian Krebs.

The company’s online presence was extinguished after Krebs alerted McColo’s access providers Global Crossing and Hurricane Electric earlier this week to the criminal material it was pumping out over their networks.

Few expect the relief to last. The major anti-virus firm Symantec predicted a return to the previous level by Christmas. But the rare victory gives hope to those combating spam and other “malware” by showing that even as the bad guys get smarter, new strategies can make a difference.

Courtesy Times of India November 18, 2008

Google Inc has stepped up efforts to digitize dozens of historical newspapers and make scanned images of the original papers available online, the internet search leader said on Monday.

In a blog post on the Silicon Valley-based company’s website, Google said it is looking to make old newspapers searchable online by partenering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives.

The effort involves the archieves of dozens of newspaper titles and expands on a two year old effort by Google to work on a two major US newspapers – The Newyork Times and Washington Post – to index old papers in Google News Archive.

“Not only will you be able to search these newspapers, you’ll also be able to browse through them exactly as they were printed – photographs, headlines, articles, advertisements and all”.

The additional newspapers allow readers to see how newspapers of bygone days covered historical events. For example, the Pittsburg Post-Gazette’s coverage of Neil Armstrong’s (and Edwin Aldrin’s) 1969 moon walk can be found at http://tinyurl.com/man-on-the-moon/

“Not every search will trigger this new content, but you can start by trying queries like ( Nixon space shuttle) or (Titanic located). Stories we’ve scanned under this initiative will appear alongside already- digitized material from publications like the New York Times as well as from archive aggregators. Over time, as we scan more articles and our index grows, we’ll also start blending these archives into our main search results so that when you search Google, you’ll be searching the full text of these newspapers as well”.

The words software update and software upgrade are often confused to be one and the same.  The difference needs understanding.  Updates are also know as patches.  Updates often means small changes / corrections / bug fixing done to software.   Updates just gets added on to the existing software.  No new installation will be required.  Updates come totally free of cost.

On the other hand upgrades are major changes, new functions etc added to a software. Updates requires new installation and generally comes with a cost.   Upgrades can also be a number of patches bundled together.  Upgrades are also know as releases.

It becomes critical to understand the update / upgrade policy attached to a software at the time of procurement decision.