One of the problems with web-based email systems, is security, as the subscribers to iVillage have found out to their cost.

A very scary chemical called Acrylamide could prove to be the cause of many cancers, according to Jenni Russell of The Guardian.

Her investigation points to a potentially huge food scare that could revolutionise the way everyone on the planet eats.

Will anyone bother to take any notice?

BT have finally lost their claim to the ownership of hyperlinks.

The Copydesk has commented on this twice in the last few months, back in June and also in February.

Then we’ve got Nominet reconsidering an idea to put contact details of .co.uk domain owners on the whois database.

Could it be possible, that the industry are truly seeing sense over genuine internet issues, or am I just going mad?

Finally, someone in the music industry has seen sense.

From September, HMV will offer music fans the option to listen, download or burn a number of music tracks for a monthly fee of £4.99.

It’s a huge step for the future of online music.

I have to agree with Jason’s reaction to James Gleick’s dismissal of weblogs, aired at a talk promoting his new book, What Just Happened.

I picked up Gleick’s Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything two years ago, and thougt it was a terrific read, but I think he’s off the mark when it comes to weblogs.

To a certain degree, he’s right about the quality in newspapers being missing from weblogs, but this is mainly due to the fact that individual weblogs tend to focus on a narrow scope of topics, much in the way specialist columns do in a newspaper.

However, weblogs are often produced by a small number of people (often one single person) and do not have the resources at their disposal, as, say, the New York Times, or The Guardian.

Weblogs are still in their infancy at the moment, but as publishing tools and web search indexing improves, they are sure to become a strong focus of the internet.

Certainly, I think group blogging (like The Copydesk) will be among the most popular forms of weblogs, since they offer a broader scope of topics from a variety of contributors.

Grant Morrison predicts super-heroes as the norm by 2050 and encourages educational establishments to embrace comic-books as a means to raise literacy levels.

Brilliant, witty and utter genius from the Glasgow-based comic-book writer… who still owes The Copydesk 200 Words, as it happens…

Found on LinkMachineGo.

It’s always a little bit disappointing to read a so-called ‘technology correspondent’ writing a news article in layman’s terms, and trying to offer almost worthless strands of advice about a topic most people don’t fully understand anyway.

In his How to keep your life junk free article at BBC News Online, Mark Ward prattles on about safe use of your personal email address on the internet but takes far too long to get to the point and ultimately fails to administer any half-decent advice on how to thoroughly prevent spam.

For example: “And those who own a web domain should not put their personal e-mail address on it. It will be harvested by robots that trawl the web.”

Ooooh – scary robots. My-my.

On this very website, I use a domain-based email address which allows users to contact the site directly. It doesn’t do anything fancy; yet it’s on the site (and has been for over a year), and it never, ever receives any spam.

How did I do it?

Simple:

Firstly, I put the email address into a form. The form is located inside a ‘no robots’ pop-up window and the address is encoded in an HTML based character-set, so that those nasty ‘robots’ have difficulty extracting it.

It’s not rocket-science. In truth, most malicious crawler ‘robots’ can’t be bothered trying to figure out what you’ve done and leave your site alone anyway.

As for registering for newsletters (and with potential spammers), I always use my domain with a prefix related to the site I’m registering with, such as microsoft_mail@copydesk.co.uk – which doesn’t really exist as an email address.

Any emails sent to what_ever@copydesk.co.uk recieve an auto-responder message advising them that they have sent a message to a dead account, then the message forwards itself to an undisclosed Hotmail address where it is automatically junked unless I say it’s from a valid contact.

A chap called Brock Enright offers a service in New York where people can be kidnapped for kicks.

“Each kidnap is different, to cater for the particular tastes of the individual.

“Clients are mostly bound and gagged and taken away for a period of incarceration that lasts for hours, or even days.”

How long do you reckon before it becomes a reality TV show?