Have you ever wondered which top-level domain another planet would have if it were to be collonised?  Or, for that matter, does the International Space Station have one?

Would all domain names get longer, to become eg. www.cymeradwyo.net.earth?

To be honest, that probably not the World’s biggest problem at the moment, but if it was there would be one problem that would have to be solved first.  How do you get the internet protocols to work over large distances?

With large, I mean L A R G E - light years, for example.

At the moment, if you send an e-mail around the globe, say from the UK to Australia, then it is broken up into small chunks called “packets” and routed between various internet nodes to get there.  Not all of the message necessary goes the same way, the packets are put back together in the right order when they arrive.

Of course, this all happens very fast and you probably don’t even notice it.  But with larger distances you might still be waiting for one part to arrive.

This problem has, apparently, now been solved - as the BBC News website reported.  It all sounds very simple, storing the data until the next node can be contacted.  But it does present us with two rather important questions:

- how much data is a node likely to have to store?

- if that is the future, what do internet nodes do at the moment if they cannot relay the data?  Do they just throw it away?

It’s always a shame when a great piece of software is discontinued, and this week whilst installation a new WordPress site I was shocked by a message on the Spam Karma screen - the “major announcement” was that development of the plug-in was being discontinued and the software would pass over to a GPL project.

I first discovered Spam Karma through a post on the Notes from Spain forum around the time I first started using WordPress. It’s a plug-in that really belongs in the software by default, as a popular blog gets spammed on a daily basis. Unfortunately, it’s not.

Spam Karma uses a clever set of rules to decide if a comment or trackback is spam, and I don’t think that any spam has ever got through on the installations that I support. There have have been some false positives - about 1 or 2 per year!

But I can understand the problem - the software is non-profit, so however passionately you develop it the time eventually comes where you decide to call time and move on to other projects.

The author’s blog gives one of the reasons as the current development of WordPress. I think WordPress is a great piece of software as well, but I do agree that the frequency at which the upgrades appear has recently become a little bit overwhelming. There have been times where I seem to be in a cycle of upgrading installations, and before I have finished the next version is released.

Let’s hope that this is not the end of the story for Spam Karma, and that some good programmers take over the project and keep the blogosphere free of spam.

Earlier this week we celebrated 15 years of the world-wide-web, today is apparently the 30th anniversary of the first spam mail, even though the name was only coined 15 years ago.

I can’t say exactly when I received my first spam mail, it was possibly at university at around the time the name was first used. But at the time it wasn’t so much of a nuisance as I didn’t receive that much e-mail.

Even when I started work in Germany, I don’t remember there being that much spam mail around, which was probably a good thing as the internet lines were still very much modem- or ISDN-based. On the other hand, perhaps that was why there was not such much of it around?

But I do remember that suddenly around the year 2000 there was a sudden influx of it - and it was a real pain at the time. With spam filters still in their infancy, it was a case of using every trick possible to block the mails from reaching the mail server. Most web-based freemail providers did not have spam filters, and as someone who picked up their mail on the move the slow GSM access combined with the number of spam mails made it a chore to download headers and then remove the spam before downloading the e-mails that I wanted.

After that both the mail programs and the providers woke up and started working on their filters. These days, seven years later, and I use a combination of provider- and program-based filters, as well as my own hand-written ones. As a result I receive very little of it, and the ones that I do receive do not make it to my mobile devices. I even advise other people on how to avoid it for a living!

In fact, I probably have more problems with unwanted telephone calls than with spam mails. And should anything get through after all, then I can always blog about it…