Microsoft already owns Hotmail.com, MSN.com, and Live.com. Yahoo owns Yahoo Mail. Due to outsourcing by consumer entertainment companies Yahoo also owns most email service under domains including sbcglobal.net, rogers.com, ameritech.net, and dozens of others. Roughly half the addresses subscribed to mailing lists on my servers are under that list. That fraction is fairly typical. After the merger, Microsoft will own nearly half the email addresses in North America. That will put it in a position to start making subtle changes to the format of email messages, and give it the leverage to take control of the public email system.

Yahoo also owns Yahoo Groups, formerly Egroups, which is by far the most popular domain for hosting electronic mailing lists.

Chances are your Green local's mailing list is on Yahoo Groups. Likewise whatever local issue groups you work with. Why? Because they're really easy to set up, and because you didn't read the fine print you thought they were "free."

Public corporations don't give things away for free. Broadcast television gives away programming to get you to watch commercials. You're not the customer, you're the product! The advertiser is the customer.

Yahoo bought Egroups during the Internet boom as a quick and easy way to buy "content" and "mindshare." It holds a copyright on everything anybody ever posted to a Yahoogroups list. It owns your Yahoo profile and the rosters of your lists. It gets to mine and sell that data. It gets to terminate your service without notice and without recourse. And it could start charging for the service next week. Have you backed up your Yahoogroups message archive? Could you if you wanted to? What would be the impact on your organization if one day its Yahoogroup disappeared?

Now go through the previous paragraph, and replace "Yahoo" with "Microsoft." Does your organization do anything Microsoft might not like? What makes you think your list will survive if Microsoft buys Yahoo?

Department of Justice Seal Department of Justice
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
THURSDAY, JANUARY 3, 2008
WWW.USDOJ.GOV
CRM
(202) 514-2007
TDD (202) 514-1888

Alan Ralsky, Ten Others, Indicted In International Illegal Spamming And Stock Fraud Scheme

WASHINGTON - A federal grand jury indictment was unsealed today in Detroit charging 11 persons, including Alan M. Ralsky, his son-in-law Scott K. Bradley, and Judy M. Devenow, of Michigan, and eight others, including a dual national of Canada and Hong Kong and individuals from Russia, California, and Arizona, in a wide-ranging international fraud scheme involving the illegal use of bulk commercial e-mailing, or "spamming."

Charged in the 41-count indictment are:

Alan M. Ralsky, 52, of West Bloomfield, Michigan

Scott K. Bradley, 46, of West Bloomfield, Michigan

Judy M. Devenow, 55, of Lansing, Michigan

John S. Bown, 47, of Poway, California

William C. Neil, 45, of Fresno, California

Anki K. Neil, 36, of Fresno, California

James E. Bragg, 39, of Queen Creek, Arizona

James E. Fite, 34, of Whittier, California

Peter Severa, age unknown, of Russia

How Wai John Hui, 49, of Vancouver, Canada and Hong Kong

Francis A. Tribble, of Los Angeles, California

Appearing in court for arraignment today were defendants Scott Bradley and Judy Devenow, who were arrested today. Defendant How Wai John Hui was arrested in the Eastern District of New York on Jan. 2, 2008. The remaining defendants are being sought.

Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher of the Criminal Division said, "The flood of illegal spam continues to wreak havoc on the online marketplace and has become a global criminal enterprise. It clogs consumers' email boxes with scams and unwanted messages and imposes significant costs on our society. This indictment reflects the commitment of the Department of Justice to prosecuting these spamming organizations wherever they may operate. I would like to thank the many prosecutors and agents for their extraordinary efforts leading up to the indictment."

U.S. Attorney Stephen J. Murphy said, "Today's charges seek to knock out one of the largest illegal spamming and fraud operations in the country, an international scheme to make money by manipulating stock prices through illegal spam e-mail promotions. I commend the excellent investigative work of the FBI, Postal Inspection Service, and the IRS-Criminal Investigation Division. I also wish to recognize the significant support and expertise provided by the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice."

The charges arose after a three-year investigation � led by agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with assistance from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the Internal Revenue Service � revealed a sophisticated and extensive spamming operation that, as alleged in the indictment, largely focused on running a stock �pump and dump� scheme, whereby the defendants sent spam touting thinly traded Chinese penny stocks, drove up their stock price, and reaped profits by selling the stock at artificially inflated prices. According to the indictment, the defendants used various illegal methods in order to maximize the amount of spam that evaded spam- blocking devices and tricked recipients into opening, and acting on, the advertisements in the spam. These included using falsified �headers� in the email messages, using proxy computers to relay the spam, using falsely registered domain names to send the spam, as well as making misrepresentations in the advertising content of some of the underlying email messages.

The indictment also alleges that the defendants tried to send their spam by utilizing a cybercrime tool known as a �botnet,� which is a network of �robot� computers that have been infected with malicious software code that in turn would instruct the infected computers to send spam. The indictment charges that the defendants earned profits when recipients responded to the spam and purchased the touted products and services. Hui�s primary role in the scheme was to act as a conduit for Chinese companies who wanted their stocks pumped by the scheme. Ultimately, investigators estimate that the defendants earned approximately $3 million during the summer of 2005 alone as a result of their illegal spamming activities.

During the course of their illegal spamming operation, the types of products and services that the defendants pitched evolved over time, as did the types of illegal spamming techniques they employed. The 41-count indictment covers three distinct, but interrelated, conspiracies to capture this evolution in their business practices. The indictment charges the defendants with the commission of several federal criminal offenses, including conspiracy, fraud in connection with electronic mail (CAN SPAM), computer fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. It also charges the defendants with criminal asset forfeiture, as well as charging one defendant with making false statements to law enforcement.

The case is being prosecuted by First Assistant U.S. Attorney Terrence Berg and Trial Attorneys Thomas Dukes and Mona Spivack of the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C.

###

08-003

When we set up your website, if you prefer, we can provide you with the capability to provide multi-lingual content to the voters who browse your site. Providing multi-lingual content requires that we patch the base code to accomodate this requirement. That also means that the core code running your site will be somewhat older and more difficult to upgrade as new versions come out. But if your community speaks Spanish and English, or French, Farsi, Tonga or Tamil or some other language, this can be an obvious trade-off to make.

Your website won't automatically translate your content for you. That still takes real live humans who know both languages involved. But we can provide a framework for you to publish your campaign's content in the multiple languages which make sense in your community.

After you have checked with us to ensure that we're hosting your site on our MultiLingual enabled code base, a few simple steps can get you on the way.

As usual when adding new functionality to your site, you want to start at: admin/build/modules. When you get there, enable the Locale Module, which is described as "Enables the translation of the user interface to languages other than English." While you are here, make sure that Menu and Taxonomy are also enabled. If you will be using Views, you can go ahead and enable that as well.

That is only the first step. And it won't provide links for multi-lingual content, but it will let you install translation files used to translate each snippet of instructions which our content management system provides for administrators and end-users.

Next use the admin/by-module page to access first the admin/user/access#module-locale page where you can make sure that your administrative users role can administer the translations for the user interface. Then link to: admin/settings/locale, where you can provide for each language you wish to support. With the Add Language tab, go to admin/settings/locale/language/add and use the form to add an existing or a custom language. Back on the Localization -> List page, enable your new language.

Then use the import tab to get to the admin/settings/locale/language/import page. That page will provide a link to: http://drupal.org/project/translations, where you can download a copy of the translation files for each language you enabled. Be sure to choose the drupal 5.x version of the translation files. Use a tool appropriate for your OS to decompress the translation. (On windows, try 7-Zip at: http://www.7-zip.org/). Then use the form on the admin/settings/locale/language/import page to upload in turn each .po file extracted from the archive.

When you've done this, you can change the default langauge and see the user interface translated after submitting the form. Switch it back and go on to the next step.

Go back to the admin/build/modules page, again. This time enable all seven modules in the Localizer section. If you won't be using Views, you can leave the Localizer Views module unchecked. Submit this form to save these changes.

Next use the Administer -> User Management -> Access Control menu option to get back to the admin/user/access page. Once there give every user role 'access localizer' privileges and your site administrators' role the 'administer localizer' privileges.

Now, back to the menu to follow this path: Administer -> Site configuration -> Localizer. That should get you to the page at: admin/settings/localizer.

Use this form to set the basic configuration options for your multi-lingual support. Enable Multi-Lingual support, review the other default settings and submit this form. When you do 'Save Configuration', additional options will appear once the page has refreshed. Review those options as well and choose the languages you want to display for each user role 'Multilingual content display options'.

If you want to use the 'Switch by hostname' option, that will require additional configuration by our server administrator. You'll need to give us a call (using the phone numbers in the footer) to make that happen. But you can get the process started without it.

Save this configuration again.

Now use the Administer -> Site Building -> Blocks menu to go to the admin/build/block page. Enable the 'Select language' block, choosing a region and weight for it. Then use the 'Save Blocks' button at the bottom of the form.

Now, choose an alternate language from the menu and make sure that the CMS' stock menu items and get appropriately translated. Switch back if necessary to continue.

Now we're ready to add some translated content.

With your site configured in this way, every time you Create Content, you should get a 'Locale:' selector at the top of the content entry form. Set the langauge for this node and enter your story or event or other content as you normally would. Now after you submit your new content, you will now see a new 'Translations' tab on any node you can edit. You can use that tab to offer a translation in another language, which will be linked with this node, so that when folks switch from one language to another, your content will be translated just as the user interface is. But before you hand this over to a translator, go ahead and use that tab to create a new node to contain the translation. By default it will contain the copy from the un-translated node. And your translator can work directly in their browser, translating your existing content one sentence and paragraph at a time. And until they do, those browsing the Spanish language version of your site will see the untranslated content in English. (Or whatever languages apply to your site).

"The same secure, stable, free software which runs CF's servers which host our clients' sites also runs our desktop computers," said Hugh Esco, a partner in the web application hosting and development firm, serving the needs of Green Parties, their candidates and Green minded non-profits. "The scope and pace of development within the Free Software community leaves few reasons to consider the proprietary alternatives. And the risks to our own freedom and the environment leave plenty of reasons why we ought to reject the proprietary options."

Governments, businesses and non-profits around the world have discovered the benefits of Free and Open Source Software, which encourages collaboration and synergy in application development. And any number of distributions of the Gnu/Linux operating system offer a desktop work environment which now rivals anything offered by Microsoft.

"As Greens we understand the importance of making economic decisions which support shared ownership over the infrastructure which runs our businesses, facilitates our communication, work and play," said Esco. "A migration to Free software tools offers us so much more than an extended life for old hardware. It permits us to re-assert control over the machines which have become such an integral part of every aspect of our lives."

The Green Party of England and Wales today backed an international call from the Free Software Society (FSS), New Internationalist, Friends of the Earth International and People and Planet in calling on social activists and progressive organizations to join with them in rejecting Microsoft's Vista operating system, and to encourage instead the adoption and use of free open source software (FOSS).

The advent and use of free software is a promotion of the computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSS categorically state that free software 'is about freedom, not price. It is software whose authors intentionally extend users the freedoms to study, copy, modify and share their work. While proprietary software functions by dividing people and using technical restrictions to block communication between them, free software was created with individual freedom and social solidarity in mind.' (1) Derek Wall, Green Party male Principal Speaker, backs the call. "Free software offers social activists an alternative to what a system like Vista represents. Using free software, we can further social and environmental justice without supporting growth based on waste, control and short-term profit."

He continued, "I would urge social movements to develop a migration strategy, including a commitment not to move to Vista."

Green Party female Principal Speaker Sian Berry added, "Along with signing up to the Free Software Foundation's call for more NGOs to take advantage of the benefits, The Green Party are extending this call to governments too. With every government hiring IT companies to create separate, proprietary systems, a lot of private profit is created. However, the governments will not own the source code at the end of the process and the companies can charge the same to each government they sell their software to.

"Under an open source model, governments instead collaborate with each other and pay IT companies to develop open source systems. This means the problem can be solved once and then implemented everywhere without charging taxpayers again and again for the same thing. Upgrades and further developments can be funded and carried out collaboratively too, and this can lead to enormous savings overall.

"Using more FOSS in government could do more than save money and development time, it could also free us from having to get involved with arms companies like Lockheed Martin, who are now in the final round of selection to run the 2011 UK Census." (2)

Groups and individuals who support the statement are being asked to add their own signatures at http://freesoftwarefreesociety.org. The statement will be used to encourage non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to develop policies in support of free software, and, through the collection of free software adoption success stories, encourage the development of organizational migration plans to free software.

To read more about Sian's views on FOSS, go to her New Statesman blog at http://www.newstatesman.com/200708280002

ENDS