Journalism Research and Random Meanderings

Friday, November 19, 2004

Techno-savvy killer abducts child - torments Mother by e-mail 

My heart goes out to this child's family and friends.

Mainichi Interactive - Top News: "HEGURI, Nara -- A photograph of a murdered girl sent along with a chilling e-mail message to the girl's mother appears to have been taken inside an enclosed space, such as a car or room, police investigators said Friday.
The photograph of murdered 7-year-old girl Kaede Ariyama, was sent to her mother on Wednesday evening along with a message that said, 'Your daughter is mine.' Kaede's cell phone was used to send the message."

....

"On Wednesday evening, when Kaede went missing, police said several calls were made from her cell phone to her mother, but all of the calls were cut off after one ring. It has already been learned from Global Positioning System (GPS) data that the calls were made from a location close to Kaede's home."

GPS capabilities were built into phones as a safety feature. I wonder if the little girl's phone was bought for that reason. Here's a chilling thought. Did giving the child a cell-phone make the parents feel like they didn't have to be there in person?

There's one part of this that definitely isn't technology related. Eye-witnesses saw the girl talking to a stranger in a car before she disappeared. Giving her a cell phone didn't teach the child to be wary of strangers.

PB

You think you have spam problems? 

"[Microsoft] Chairman Bill Gates gets up to 4 million e-mails a day and most of them are spam, one of his associates says."

In Technology News: Security: Bill Gates Inundated with Spam: "Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said in Singapore the 4 million e-mails are really just a fraction of what's sent to his boss, since he has an entire department charged with filtering out the junk, the BBC reported Thursday."

These people have too much time on their hands. I suppose it's not too much trouble to add Balmer's and Gates' e-mail addresses to an address list but it's an exercise in futility. Does anyone think for a minute that Gates et al would actually succumb to the faint urge to see if those penis enlargement ads are for real? That's assuming of course that spammers have normal thought processes.

How rewarding is this? Somebody works their way through college or university and gets a job with Microsoft only to find out their job is checking that Bill Gates' spam filters are working and swimming through an endless list of messages to see if a real message got filtered out. I wonder what the turnover rate is in that department?

PB