Netizens fall for the MobileSpam scam

A lot of Netizens would like to destroy MobileSpam.com. Disgusted by the company's plan to deliver "untraceable, unsolicited" commercial messages to wireless devices, they've left nasty voicemails on the company's phones and sent disparaging e-mails to the president, Neil McCauley. At least one has even started mobilizing friends, advising them to mount a campaign against the company.

"These people could ring the death knell for mobile commerce," he writes, in an e-mail to Salon. "They must be stopped."

The ire almost seems justified. Enabling direct marketers to call private cellphones and pagers is not the best way to win fans -- especially when the recipient is the one who has to pay for the message.

But calm down, folks, it's just a joke. There is no company called MobileSpam, nor is there a Neil McCauley. In fact, a prankster named Shawn Wallack launched the site, which has attracted over 150,000 visitors, two weeks ago on a lark.

"My goal was to raise awareness," he says, then adds, "Well, that was secondary, I wanted to trick a few bright people into believing something absurd."

Looks like it worked. -- Damien Cave [4:15 p.m. PDT, June 19, 2001]

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The Al Gore comeback tour

From the White House to Cobol World 2001?

It's no fun being a tried-and-true programming language like Cobol, living in the shadow of younger, flashier city-mouse cousins, like Java.

But you know it's bad when even your fans readily admit how unglamorous you are. "Despite Cobol's strengths, of which there are many, talking about Cobol to a group of software engineers illicits [sic] the same reaction one might get by talking up the Sex Pistols at the Queen Mother's birthday party," reads an e-mail promoting this fall's Cobol World 2001 conference in Anaheim, Calif.

While Cobol is alive and well, its image could use some burnishing, and what better person to add a touch of tech cachet to any programming language than Al "I-never-said-I-invented-the-Internet" Gore?

That's right: The former vice president and once and future almost-president himself will take the stage to sex up this developers' conference with a keynote speech, entitled "National Leadership in the Internet Economy -- a Global Vision."

Is Al Gore giving Cobol a lift, or vice versa? Either way, it hurts. -- Katharine Mieszkowski [2:20 p.m. PDT, June 15, 2001]

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Congratulations, it's a cyborg!

Bend over and get ready for your silicon injection. That's right: At long last, human chip implants have arrived.

The much anticipated "Digital Angel" technology, which we reported on last September in "Put that silicon where the sun don't shine" will be in beta testing starting this Friday, according to a report in WorldNetDaily.

Powered by body heat, the chip can be used to monitor not only a subject's location, but her heart rate and body temperature. Surely, it could have important medical and security applications, as well as Big-Brother ones.

And we thought implanting a chip in a pet ferret was weird. -- Katharine Mieszkowski [3:50 p.m. PDT, June 14, 2001]

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Yet another argument for global warming

"There's a great deal of evidence from psychology that sunshine helps put people in a good mood, and people in good moods make more optimistic choices and judgments. If people are more optimistic when the sun shines, they may be more inclined to buy stocks on sunny days."

--- David Hirshleifer, the Kurtz Chair in Finance at Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business, on EurekAlert -- [3:30 p.m. PDT, June 14, 2001]

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$300 for a 2-month-old webcast?

For several weeks now, we've been receiving spam pushing a Webcast of a "storewidth" conference organized by high-flying technology analyst George Gilder in April. The term "storewidth," coined by Gilder last year, is a gussied-up buzzword meant to describe the market space for products that deal with the problem of accessing huge amounts of information in an age of nearly unlimited bandwidth.

As spam goes, it's not particularly remarkable. We are informed, breathlessly, that demand to watch the webcast has been so high that access to it has been extended to June 18! All we have to do is register on the Gilder Technology Conference site and plug in our credit card info, and we can enjoy all 27 segments of the 21-hour "on-demand" webcast.

There is, however, no mention of how much this privilege actually costs until a would-be viewer has wasted several precious minutes inputting his or her vital statistics. Only then are we informed that news of the exciting future of storewidth technology can be obtained at the low, low price of $297.

Gilder's name must indeed command adulatory respect among the investing classes if the invocation of it can convince people to lay down 300 bucks to watch streaming video of CTOs touting storage technology products. But isn't there something a little crass about pimping a 2-month-old webcast via repeated e-mail spam? The Gilder Technology Report itself only costs $295 for 12 issues.

Then again, the whole enterprise fits right in with Gilder's normal modus operandi. First Gilder comes up with a good buzzword -- like "telecosm" or "storewidth." Then he uses that buzzword as an organizing principle with which to tout companies for investors and to host conferences (for $5,000 a pop). The ensuing press accounts and investor interest pump up Gilder's own speaking fees and help market the companies that he is promoting. And round and round it goes.

Gilder's smart -- there's no questioning that. But why does the whole arrangement seem like little more than a Make Money Fast scam? -- Andrew Leonard [4:40 p.m. PDT, June 13, 2001]

This just in -- Bush was an "excellent student"

How does a disinformation campaign begin in the 21st century? Try the "customer review" section of Amazon.

There are five customer reviews for Mark Crispin Miller's "The Bush Dyslexicon" currently posted at the site. Four are favorable, featuring comments such as "Mr. Bush isn't stupid, he's defiantly and dangerously ignorant. Everyone who cares about the future of our society should read this book." Another calls it "thoroughly researched and meticulously detailed."

But one reviewer, Scott O'Riley, dissents. "The Bush Dyslexicon" he declares, is a "smear job" that "takes more liberties with the truth than Bill Clinton with the word 'is.'" O'Riley then offers some startlingly new information for veteran Bush watchers. George W., it seems, was actually "an excellent student at Yale, but many of his tests were graded down at his request to keep him as 'one of the people.' This is never acknowledged by Miller. Bush has an occasional trip-up syntaxically, but this is widely believed to be his way to trying (sic) to talk on the common American's level, whose literacy is sliding down a Barney-cum-Beavis slope towards an abyss that will eventually make intellectuals like William F. Buckley incomprehensible to the public."

Hmm. Not even veteran readers of the conservative Web site FreeRepublic.com can recall ever hearing President Bush described as an excellent student. Nor does there appear to be any independent verification of the assertion that the modest president-to-be asked that his tests be graded down.

But no matter. Now that the spin is out there, launched from the unassuming confines of an Amazon Web page, how long can it be before it wobbles out through the rest of cyberspace and beyond? If FreeRepublic posters haven't heard the brainy-Bush theory yet, no doubt they soon will. And not long after that talk show hosts on radio and TV will be spouting the line, followed by a few op-eds in right-wing print publications. By the time the next presidential election campaign rolls around, we can expect our sadly misunderstood chief executive to be completely rehabilitated.

Or maybe not. Maybe the world will just shrug its shoulders at the latest piece of disinformation to spread its tendrils through the Web. After all, Mr. O'Riley doesn't seem to be quite the brightest bulb himself -- as he claims in his review, "Not only are many of the quotes fabricated, they are also made up."

Ahem. A sentence worthy of the master, himself. -- Andrew Leonard [1:45 p.m. PDT, June 13, 2001]

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Good news, evil boss: Sad workers work harder!

Cry me a big fat bottom line, you sniveling worker bees.

That's the depressing gist of a new study from two psychologists at the University of Alberta. The researchers found that workers who are sad actually work harder than happy ones. In other words, the path to profitability may be a trail of tears.

It's a finding that runs counter to the conventional wisdom among organizational psychologists that shiny-happy employees work harder. So much for Foosball tables in the break room and taking your dog to work. Wipe that smile off your face, cubicle droid!

The study, conducted by Dr. Robert Sinclair and former Ph.D. student Carrie Lavis, found that bummed-out workers apparently drown their sorrows in the task at hand. The sad sacks made fewer errors, and were therefore more productive than happy co-workers performing the same tasks.

But not so fast, all you managers at struggling companies -- you who've held multiple rounds of painful layoffs and now rub your hands together with glee, thinking about all the extra work you'll be able to squeeze out of your downtrodden worker bees. The authors of the study stress that making your workers unhappy won't make them work harder. "It is important to know that the moods were unrelated to the task," said Sinclair. "Unhappiness is coming from something else." -- Katharine Mieszkowski [4:10 p.m. PDT, June 12, 2001]

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