This week the world marked an anniversary that has changed the face - and other anatomical regions - of email inboxes everywhere: the first known spam email was sent 30 years ago on Saturday.

But the message sent on May 3, 1978, by a marketer for the now-defunct DEC computer company to around 400 people on the west coast of the United States wasn’t called spam, and the sender dispatched it without ill intent.

How things have changed.

Spam got its name from a skit by the television show Monty Python’s Flying Circus, in which a group of Vikings in a restaurant that serves all of its food with Spam tinned meat sing a song repeating the word ad nauseum, says Brad Templeton, who has thoroughly researched the subject.

“Thus, the meaning of the term at least: something that keeps repeating and repeating to great annoyance,” Templeton, who was dabbling in the internet in the 1970s - when it was still the US government-run Arpanet - says on his website.

These days spamming is a sophisticated operation that affects millions and jams ill-prepared email inboxes.

The percentage of spam sent to account holders on Gmail - the email service offered by Google - quadrupled between 2004 and 2008, climbing from 20 percent to around 80 percent.

“To give you some sense of scale, we have tens of millions of users worldwide,” Gmail’s Jason Freidenfelds said, adding that only about one percent of spam gets through Gmail’s spam-filtering system, according to user feedback.

Spam methodology has also changed in the past 30 years.

Whereas the sender of the first spam had to type in each recipient’s address individually, today the job is often done remotely using cyber-monsters called botnets.

Botnets have hijacked around 30 percent of personal and office computers with inadequate security features and use them to dispatch thousands of spams each day, Templeton said.

“The recruited computers wait for commands that come through anonymous channels and tell them to send spam email to 1,000 people, all unbeknownst to their owners. The people who do this control millions of computers around the world,” Templeton said.

“Don’t look to the guy to your left; don’t look to the guy to your right. It’s you,” he said ominously.

Spam content and motives have also evolved since the 1978 message, which was an invitation to a product launch.

Read entire article… »

NEW YORK ~ Microsoft’s failed attempt to buy Yahoo will send it searching for new allies and likely see Yahoo’s share price plummet, leaving internet giant Google the big winner, analysts said.

Microsoft announced at the weekend that it had given up its quest for the struggling internet pioneer Yahoo, which rejected Microsoft’s offer even after it raised the original bid by US$5 billion to more than $46 billion.

The announcement ended three months of overtures by the software giant, which wanted to merge its internet resources with Yahoo’s worldwide offerings to gain ground on undisputed online advertising juggernaut Google.

Google, meanwhile, has increased its share of the internet search engine market and multiplied its innovations. The firm recently also announced a way to refine its image searches, based on technology that recognizes images, not text.

Analysts believe moreover that the Microsoft-Yahoo talks have benefited Google, and suggest Microsoft did well to cut them short.

“Microsoft did the smart thing - they walked,” said Silicon Valley analyst Rob Enderle. “Yahoo’s stock price is going to come down like a rock on Monday.”

Experts were surprised that Yahoo did not accept what was considered a generous offer and predict that its stock price, bereft of the prop of Microsoft’s bid, will plunge even further.

Before Microsoft’s offer on February 1 to buy Yahoo for $31 per share, Yahoo was trading at just $19 and was on the decline, having lost 33 percent of its value since October 2007.

“Yahoo is going to have to convince the market they are worth more than they were before the Microsoft offer,” Gartner analyst Van Baker said.

Analysts are also questioning whether Microsoft is not banking on Yahoo’s share price dropping so it can make another, possibly lower, offer.

Read entire article… »

Malaysian Police Raid Blogger

KUALA LUMPUR ~ Malaysian police raided the home of a top internet blogger after he posted an article implicating the deputy premier and his wife in the murder of a Mongolian model, reports said.

Raja Petra Kamaruddin, founder of the popular Malaysia Today site, said police officers questioned him and seized his computers over the article, “Let’s send the Altantuya murderers to hell,” the Star daily reported.

The newspaper said Raja Petra was being investigated as a result of the article implicating Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak and his wife in the case.

Official ‘Suspended over Porn Hits’

TOKYO ~ A Japanese official has been suspended for clicking on pornographic websites 780,000.

The 57-year-old man, who has not been named, was allowed to keep his job despite accessing adult sites a massive 170,000 times in July alone - an average of 17 clicks a minute if he worked a normal eight-hour day.

He was suspended from his job as deputy head of the land registry division in Kinokawa, a rural city south of Osaka, for three months and demoted to a lower position, domestic news reports said.

Films to Hit iTunes

SAN FRANCISCO ~ Apple says it has deals with Hollywood studios to make popular films available for its hot iPods and iPhones via its iTunes online store as soon as the movies are released on DVDs.

Films available in the United States from iTunes due to the deals include Academy Award winners Juno and There Will Be Blood.

The roster of studios signed on with iTunes includes 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios Home Entertainment, and Sony Pictures Entertainment, according to Apple.

Hackers Harpoon US Execs

SAN FRANCISCO ~ US federal court officials warned this week that hackers are emailing phony subpoenas embedded with malicious software to high-ranking executives to steal valuable corporate information.

Thousands of powerful US executives have received the bogus emails that contain links which, if clicked on, install software letting hackers take control of computers and swipe passwords or other sensitive data.

Internet security insiders refer to the attacks as “whaling” because they use social-engineering trickery involved in “phishing” but target individual “big phish” instead of casting nets in a sea of internet users.

It may seem unfathomable, but DNA testing has shown the towering Tyrannasaurus rex’s closest living animal relatives include the humble chicken, a new study has found.

The research published this week in the journal Science marked “the first use of molecular data to place a non-avian dinosaur in a phylogenetic tree that traces the evolution of species,” the journal said.

“These results match predictions made from skeletal anatomy, providing the first molecular evidence for the evolutionary relationships of a non-avian dinosaur,” co-author Chris Organ, a postdoctoral researcher in organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University said.

“Though we only had six peptides - just 89 amino acids - from T. rex, we were able to establish these relationships with a relatively high degree of support,” he added.

“With more data, we’d likely see the T. rex branch on the phylogenetic tree between alligators and chickens and ostriches, though we can’t resolve this position with currently available data,” he added.

Scientists long suspected birds, and not more basal reptiles, are dinosaurs’ closest living relatives. But that hypothesis had rested largely on morphological similarities in bird and dinosaur skeletal structure.

The bits of dinosaur protein were taken from a fossil femur found in 2003 by John Horner of the Museum of the Rockies in a fossil-rich stretch of land spanning Wyoming and Montana.

Human beings for 100,000 years lived in tiny, separate groups, facing harsh conditions that brought them to the brink of extinction, before they reunited and populated the world, genetic researchers say in a study.

“Who would have thought that as recently as 70,000 years ago, extremes of climate had reduced our population to such small numbers that we were on the very edge of extinction,” said paleontologist Meave Leakey, of Stony Brook University, New York.

The genetic study examined for the first time the evolution of our species from its origins with “mitochondrial Eve,” a female hominid who lived some 200,000 years ago, to the point of near extinction 70,000 years ago, when the human population dwindled to as little as 2,000.

After this dismal period, the human race expanded quickly all over the African continent and emigrated beyond its shores until it populated all the corners of the Earth.

The expansion marked the end of the Stone Age in Africa and the beginning of a cultural advancement that has led several archeologists to consider it the start of modern man, with the advent of language and complex and abstract thought.

The migrations out of Africa are estimated to have begun some 60,000 years ago. But little was known about the human trajectory between Eve and that period.

Published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, the study analyzed the maternally-transmitted mitochondrial DNA of human populations in southern and eastern Africa who appear to have diverged from other groups 90,000 to 150,000 years ago.

The researchers said paleoclimatological data suggests that Eastern Africa went through a severe series of droughts between 135,000 and 90,000 years ago that may have contributed to population splits.

Read entire article… »

TOKYO, Japan ~ The monthly discomfort many women see as a curse could pay off someday as Japanese researchers say menstrual blood can be used to repair heart damage.

Scientists obtained menstrual blood from nine women and cultivated it for about a month, focusing on a kind of cell that can act like stem cells.

Some 20 percent of the cells began beating spontaneously about three days after being put together in vitro with cells from the hearts of rats. The cells from menstrual blood eventually formed sheet-like heart-muscle tissue.

The success rate is 100 times higher than the 0.2-0.3 percent for stem cells taken from human bone marrow, according to Shunichiro Miyoshi, a cardiologist at Keio University’s school of medicine, who is involved in the research.

Separate in-vivo experiments showed that the condition of rats who had suffered heart attacks improved after they received the cells derived from menstrual blood.

Miyoshi said women may eventually be able to use their own menstrual blood.

“There may be a system in the near future that allows women to use it for their own treatment,” Miyoshi said.

Using one’s own blood could solve a major problem in the use of cells - a patient’s immune system rejecting them.

Miyoshi said menstrual blood could be used to build stockpiles of cells which have a variety of matching HLAs, or human leukocyte antigens, a key part of the human immune system.

The cells can be stored for a long time in a tube the size of a finger and cultivated when necessary, he said.

“In proper storage, we would be able to stock up a tremendous count of cells in a small space. If they are not used for 100 years, they could stay there for 200 years or 300 years” waiting for a perfect match, he said.

In a strict sense, the connective cells harvested from menstrual blood cannot be called stem cells, which can turn into any type of cell in the body, Miyoshi said.

Read entire article… »

A genetic variant common among East Asians masks the use of performance-enhancing testosterone prohibited in top-level sports competition, according to a new study.

Athletes with a slightly different expression of the same gene, by contrast, run the risk of being falsely accused of doping, said the study.

The standard test in professional and amateur sports for uncovering illicit testosterone use measures the ratio of two chemicals in the urine.

The level of testosterone glucuronide (TG), a by-product of testosterone in the body, is compared to the level of epitestosterone glucuronide (EG), which remains constant even when the power-boosting hormone is injected into the blood stream.

Any ratio above four-to-one is seen as suspect, according to the International Olympic Committee.

But depending on how many copies one has of a gene known as UGT2B17, the results of the test can vary by 20-fold, allowing drug cheaters to go undetected or yielding “false positives” for clean athletes.

A team of researchers led by Jenny Jakobsson at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm injected 55 male volunteers with 500-milligrammes of testosterone enanthate, a substance banned by virtually all sports federations.

Read entire article… »