Technical difficulties - technology and the media - Editorial

Information technology is an amazing thing. Last week, while searching through the online bookstore, amazon.com, I discovered an "automated search agent" service they call Eyes. Type in a keyword -- "magazine" for example -- and Eyes will automatically e-mail you whenever a new book is released with that keyword in the title. Yesterday I received the following e-mail:

"Hello from Amazon.com Books! As you requested, we are notifying you of new books matching the following criteria: keywords include `magazine.' The new books are listed at the end of this message. If you're interested in any of these books, you can order them online at http://www.amazon.com/. Your most humble automated search agent, Eyes."

The e-mail listed a few new books, some of which looked intriguing such as The Popular Magazine in Britain and the United States of America, 1880-1960. It's a valuable service delivered by a nice, polite search engine. I like it almost as much as I like the Oxbridge mediafinder site on the Web (www.mediafinder.com), which allows me to search their database of magazine titles and publishers.

But not all my experiences with e-mail list services have been so gratifying. A few months ago, I tried to cancel a similar automatic e-mail service from an educational group. Unfortunately, a server went haywire and sent my repeated cancellation requests to everyone on the list -- mainly nasty reporters and cynical media analysts. What followed was a series of confusing and insulting e-mail exchanges. Misery loves company, so I found it interesting to note that Argus Clearinghouse has reportedly stopped accepting electronic submissions for Web-based directories because of the thousands of phony "spam" submissions it receives. Of course, receiving annoying directory submissions is one thing, but having your Web site electronically vandalized, hacked or "publicly compromised," as the experts say, is another matter altogether. The Web site, www.hacked.net, tracks Web page hacking incidents, including lots of political troublemakers sticking it to government agencies in places like Indonesia and Jakarta. It's interesting reading, nonetheless.

Lastly, a particularly memorable technology anecdote appears in the January/ February issue of Columbia Journalism Review (www.cjr.org). In the article "Can hackers break into print?" reporter Arik Hesseldahl details the controversy surrounding a September 22nd Denver Post column in which Denver Broncos quarterback John Elway is quoted discussing his pierced chest, which is adorned with a "discreet gold ring." Unfortunately for the Denver Post, the conversation was completely fictitious, according to CJR, and was sent to the newspaper's editorial computer system by a remote modem -- apparently by a hacker.

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