Researchers from University of Calgary claim that the next evolution of will be smart SPAM, which will infiltrate your computer via spyware/viruses and ‘mine’ your emails. By creating emails based on the your actual messages you’ve previously sent, the spammers hope they will be more believable to readers.

I would argue, however, that such a situation would merely make services Gmail, more attractive. Firstly because they have a truly massive body of knowledge to use to fine tune their spam filters, and secondly because it is unlikely such spyware could infiltrate a web-based system. Even if a program was distributed that waited for someone to log on and then took over, Google could have it effectively neutralised in a matter of hours.

Stanford’s software in action: Input from GPS and many sensors feed the algorithms to determine the safe path (see tech report).

1. Install “email” (Gentoo users: emerge net-mail/email)
2. Edit /etc/email/email.conf (Gentoo users: as a minimum you must set REPLY_TO)
3. Test the commands. They are:
   cd /path/to/your/thesis/
tar -czf /tmp/thesis.tar.gz *.*
email --blank-mail --smtp-server mail.yourserver.com --from-name "your name" --from-addr you@youremail.com --subject "Cron: Thesis Backup (`date`)" you@gmail.com --attach /tmp/thesis.tar.gz > /dev/null 2>&1
rm -f /tmp/thesis.tar.gz

4. Now add this as a /etc/crontab entry. This example sends the backup at 7am each day.
   0 7 * * * unixusername cd /path/to/your/thesis/; tar -czf /tmp/thesis.tar.gz *.*; email --blank-mail --smtp-server mail.yourserver.com --from-name "your name" --from-addr you@youremail.com --subject "Cron: Thesis Backup (`date`)" you@gmail.com --attach /tmp/thesis.tar.gz > /dev/null 2>&1; rm -f /tmp/thesis.tar.gz

5. Final step is to create a Gmail filter! It would be nice if it was possible to stop the emails being downloaded via POP but I think this may require a filter that moves the incoming backup emails to Trash.

Obviously you don’t have to use this for backing up a thesis, it could easily be modified to backup whatever you want.
Note: I can’t see mention of TLS support in the client email, so that’s why I’ve suggested you use your own SMTP server rather than Google’s.

MusicMiner uses a Self-Organising Maps based technique (“Emergent SOM“) to determine and visualise music similarity:

The major advantage of MusicMiner is obviously you can use it on your own music collection and choose to play a particular song, whereas Pandora you can only define your interests and listen to see what is played. There is no guarantee Pandora will actually play that artist although usually it will eventually.

Another piece of good news for Linux users is the announcement of the Tapioca Google Talk-compatible client. While Google has made their IM network available to people of all OSes by using the Jabber IM protocol and open sourcing their VoIP backend, Tapioca is the first application to provide both for Linux. Awesome!

On the .NET side of things, apparently IKVM (part of the Mono project), allows programmers to use Java APIs into their .NET applications, so maybe there is some hope for using Weka and .NET. BTW don’t forget there are heaps of free great development tools around if you are taking the .NET path.

Update: Ok it turns out that although zxJDBC is a part of Jython now, it is still not included in the Gentoo package

Beyond just being interesting, companies such as BuzzMetrics and BlogPulse have realised that analysis of Internet activity will be a useful tool for many companies. They produce tools that mine blogs in a bid to capture consumer sentiment on particular product(s), for example to improve product marketing. Matthew Hurst of BlogPulse has an interesting blog with the odd post covering Internet blogging activity, such as this pre-Oscars analysis.

Another interesting data mining application is the one pioneered by Majestic Research. They provide stock research and earnings forecasts to analysts before actual company information is released. Using web-based data mining, they track the sales of the top consumer-sensitive web companies, and then use this information to infer the company’s performance. Nice!

Everyone can get in on the action, too. Even for small bloggers, it is quite easy to display context-sensitive Google AdSense adverts and make the odd buck from the online advertising revolution. AdSense is based on an auction system, AdWords, where advertisers have to bid for which relevant keywords will trigger their ads to be displayed. As such some keywords are worth significantly more than others. Some people say they are making a living from ad clicks. Take Darren Rowse, for example, a professional blogger who claims an income of $400,000 — just from revenue generated from ad clicks! This may sound too good to be true, and maybe it is – author and Google expert Harold Davis says it is reasonable to expect a profit of USD$10 per page per year from AdSense.