Playing catch-up: Where the Internet meets the telephone

It's the day after Thanksgiving, customarily a slow day at the newspaper and a good time to catch up on things left hanging for the last couple of weeks — like e-mailed newsletters I've been meaning to read. It's sort of like panning for gold. There's a lot of junk, a fair amount of valuable particles and now and then a nugget that makes the effort worthwhile.

Here are a few keepers:

Google has launched a service to provide information by phone, the Boston Globe reported Nov. 15. It's not for everyone, including me, but those of you who are comfortable with text messaging on your cellphones might try it out and let me know how you like it. You don't have to have a fancy phone, but it does have to have text messaging capability. You dial 46645 (GOOGL) and then send a short question. The Globe story suggests "pizza" plus your ZIP code to get a list of pizza restaurants. You can look up phone numbers, get price quotes, even have words defined. You can get some results from a Web search by texting "g" for Google and a short query. It's in beta testing now, and it's free from Google, but you still have to pay the phone company's fee for test messaging.

The Weather Channel and its online counterpart Weather.com have launched a similar service that lets you get weather forecasts on your cellphone. Dial 42278 (4CAST) and text a ZIP code or city and state name. This service costs 75 cents.

If spam makes you so mad you could spit, you're going to choke when you read this. The latest intrusion into your Internet experience is spam via Internet telephony — you got it — SPIT. It's not much of a problem yet, USA Today reported Nov. 9, but as more people begin using the Internet to make phone calls, it is sure to grow. "Marketers can program their computers to send 1,000 voice messages a minute over Internet-telephony technology," the story says, quoting a rep from Quovia, a company seeking a patent to stop spit.

Internet telephony, or VOIP (voice over Internet protocol), is faster and cheaper than traditional calling, and if you aren't using it yet, chances are good that you will be within five years, unless spit kills it before it gets established. An estimated 1 million people will use it this year, more than seven times the number who used it last year, and by 2008, the number of VOIP users is projected to reach 17.5 million, according to the USA Today story.

Phish or cut bait: The Washington Post in mid-November had an excellent two-day series of reports on phishing, the practice of sending fraudulent e-mails to gain usernames and passwords for e-commerce Web sites, Social Security numbers, credit card numbers and bank account numbers, and the identifying information necessary to use them. I see these scams every day, and I can tell you they are getting more and more believable. Still, I thought I could recognize phishing when I saw it and know what was a legitimate e-mail and what was not. That confidence was shattered by The Post's "Catch A Phish" quiz, which I highly recommend taking. I was wrong about three of the 10 examples when I first took the quiz and missed one of them again today. Fortunately, I guessed that a legitimate e-mail was a fake — my philosophy about phishing is "when in doubt, doubt double." Read the series, take the quiz and never, never, never reveal any personal or financial information by clicking a link in an e-mail message.

Why can't we all have Bill Gates' spam filter? The Microsoft Inc. chairman gets 4 million e-mail messages a day, and most of it is spam, according to an AP story in the Washington Post, Nov. 18 . Gates' right-hand man Steve Ballmer says the boss has special technology just to filter his e-mail. If it's good enough for Gates, it's good enough for me. So c'mon Microsoft, let's have it.

If it's, Delf-HA, don't answer. I don't use my cellphone much, and I have enough fingers to count the calls I've received on it in one pass. But I've heard enough phones ringing in stores, at concerts, even in the class I teach at JSU to recognize that I'm reeling in the wake of a fast-moving cultural behemoth. After reading a Nov. 9 story on cellphone spam in PC World, I don't think I'll be increasing my cellphone use any time soon. Hackers somewhere in this wide world have written a program that allows them to use hijacked personal computers — yours and mine, perhaps — to send unwanted advertising messages to cellular phones. Delf-HA is a trojan horse that is sent over the Internet to infect PCs. Once infected, the computer sends e-mail messages to cellphone numbers generated at random. So far, it has only targeted Russian phone networks, but give them time.

That's not everything, but I've reached the limit of my tolerance. I'm getting depressed about the fight between those of us who want to use the Internet to exchange safe and useful information and those who want to use the technology to hurt us.