TriNetre - Archive for March 24, 2004

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March 24, 2004
Singapore's population problem
[Society] @ 04:46 PM

While many countries like India and China are having trouble keeping their population explosion under control, Singapore trouble lies in the other end of the spectrum. With only 36,000 children born in 2003, Singapore government is discussing ways to increase the birth rate to at least 50,000 needed to sustain the population.

For a week or so discussion in the Parliament was solely devoted to this problem with various outrageous and humours ideas being proposed along with the usual ones like longer maternity leave, better child-care and tax incentives. Among the out-of-the-box ideas included annual "Love Campaign" in addition to the already existing "Romancing Singapore" drive, encouraging dating at younger age etc.

It would be really interesting to see how the government, which has been often accredited with runnig the country like a mega-corporation, deals with a human resource problem like this.

More news coverage


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Edit spec to kill RSS spam? No.
[Technology] @ 11:20 AM

Down at O'Reilly weblogs, Marc Hedlund writes in a post titled Anticipating RSS Spam:

My RSS aggregator looks for new items and lets me know when a new item appears on a feed I read. It's easy to imagine a very malicious feed that would just always make its entries appear "new" -- change them subtly, report that they were just written, or whatever -- so that its items would always show up in my aggregator -- but I'd just unsubscribe. This "Fake New Item" approach could be used more subtly, though, such that I'd be less likely to unsubscribe. Let's say a news site wants to include an advertising entry amongst its news entries -- they could set it up, say, so that the ad shows up as new four times a day.

Ending the post he asks his readers

More importantly, since this is still a young format, is there anything that should change now to stem whatever ideas we think will occur to the spammers a month or a year from now?

This is a troubling line of thought. Is it right to edit the specifications of a protocol to reign in the content that is carried by the protocol? Doesn't it sound a bit like killing the messenger instead of the message? Similar to RIAA's demand to kill the P2P technology because they can carry copyright infringing content?

RSS is fundamentally different from email in that it is eventually a "pull technology" (sorry, you purists out there). That in the end is the definite weapon to counter RSS spam when it happens. You, as a reader, get to decide which feeds to read. If you think a feed contains spam or has annoying pop-ups, put your foot down and unsubscribe. If a superaggeragator service supports spam enabled feeds, ditch them. I am sure a lot of other aggregators will be happy to serve you.


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