SPIT FOLLOWS SPAM AND SPIM
If email spam and its instant messaging equivalent 鈥渟pim鈥� are driving you up the wall, take a deep breath. Hot on their heels comes 鈥渟pit鈥�: voicemail spam via internet telephony. The term has been coined by Qovia of Frederick, Maryland, a firm that has begun marketing a spit filter to early adopters of internet-based phones. While the deluge hasn鈥檛 happened yet, Qovia warns that it is only a matter of time.
Internet telephony, also known as Voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), is the practice of making cheap phone calls by sending voice data to addresses on the net instead of routing calls over fixed phone lines (New 杏吧原创, 11 October 2003, p 24). Its popularity is increasing with the widespread roll out of broadband connections. Qovia believes VoIP will be irresistible to spammers because, as with email, messages can be sent to thousands of recipients in one go.
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The company warns that VoIP mail boxes will become clogged with salacious spit messages, while denial-of-service attacks, launched by armies of spitbots dumped on innocent computers, could block phone lines. Although Qovia has a vested interest, other experts say the firm鈥檚 prediction is probably right. VoIP has only escaped so far because slow uptake has not made spamming worthwhile. But by 2008, the number of VoIP subscribers in the US alone is likely to rise from today鈥檚 131,000 to 17.5 million.
GRANDSON OF THE DVD
Blue laser discs, the follow-up to DVDs, are not expected before the end of 2005. But already there are plans to make them obsolete.
Imperial College London is developing an optical disc format called Multiplexed Optical Data Storage (MODS) that will allow a double-sided, dual-layer DVD to store 1000 gigabytes, compared with the 27 gigabytes for the planned Blu-ray discs and 9 gigabytes for a DVD.
Where a DVD has flat reflective data pits representing 0s and 1s, MODS would work by sinking steps within the pits at hundreds of different angles and measuring the angles at which light is reflected, says Imperial College photonics expert Peter T枚r枚k. So each pit can store much more data than just a 0 or a 1. One MODS disc would be able to store all 178 hour-long episodes of Star Trek: Next Generation. If Imperial College and its collaborators can get funding to develop the idea, MODS could reach the market by 2010.
