Suggestions that the dangers of computer warfare have been overdone don’t stand up to the emerging realities

The video is a generator tearing itself apart after a cyberattack. Happily, it’s a simulated one set up by the US Department of Home Security in 2007 – but it shows the sort of things that cyberwar, and in particular the Stuxnet worm, the first one known to be attacking machinery in this way, is aiming to do.

What’s quite scary about the video is that (sanctioned) hackers who did it were only told the domain of the system.

The Stuxnet worm would do much the same to the generator: it interrupts the processes which monitor events, so that high-speed machinery effectively goes unmonitored and out of control.

Is that real? In 2009 Fox News (yes, we know) reported that: “The US power grid has been hacked by foreign spies … Russian and Chinese cyberspies not only got into our electrical system but left behind computer programs that could be used for future attacks.” The Department for Homeland Security issued a vaguely denial-based denial – “not aware of any incidents where the grid was compromised”, but it was hardly convincing: “the vulnerability is something we have known about for years”. See below:

Cyberwar isn’t new – Russia is believed to have used it before its invasion of Georgia to knock out websites and, perhaps, infrastructure. Napoleon famously said that an army marches on its stomach, but these days it thinks over the internet.

And in the US, Lockheed Martin has put this (rather flashy) video together about cyberwar – in which it says that one of the biggest enemies is “foreign governments”.

“Economic espionage has always been a threat”, explains Eric Cole, chief scientist of cyber security at Lockheed Martin. Which recalls, of course, the Titan Rain attacks against the US and UK governments in 2006/7. Cole is confident, by the way, that he’s going to have work for the next 30 years in advising on how to evade these attacks.

Is Stuxnet the way forward? And if it is, what does that imply?

One cause for slight concern in all this is the fact that Siemens’s SCADA system, as targeted by Stuxnet, runs on top of Windows – which offers all sorts of openings for zero-day vulnerabilities. One can’t help feeling that North Korea’s decision to try to develop its own operating system based on Linux was wise: not only does it save money, but it might have some resistance to attempts to infiltrate its systems via worms like this. Though if you’re dealing with national spy agencies determined to infect your systems, that may be a futile hope.

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I’ve had some curious conversations about AOL acquiring TechCrunch (I nearly inadvertently wrote TechCrunch acquiring AOL… perhaps file that under Arrington/wishlist) but tech blogs have been eerily devoid of deeper comment on analysis on the deal beyond backslapping and congratulations.

As Kellan tweeted: “Could TechCrunch after 5+ years writing about the biz, possibly be naive enough to believe, “Nothing will change, just more resources!”?

I expect most entrepreneurs would feel they were taking their professional life in their hands if they spoke out against TechCrunch. And while, yes yes, it is a powerhouse for the startup community as I said yesterday, many people have said that they question how healthy it is for one blog to have so much influence. Arrington is so woven into the startup scene that this deal represents success for ‘one of us’. No-one wants to poop that party, especially when star struck by MC Hammer. Seriously.

Check out ilovepopula’s TechCrunch AOL anthem on Soundcloud: “TechCrunch belongs to us,” he sings.

Privately, those in the know are questioning whether Arrington will survive the three year tie-in he’s signed. “Three years is to long,” one said. “I give him a year, even with the money on the table.”

Om Malik, who broke the story about the deal, last night wrote that Arrington is both a ruthless competitor and extremely loyal friend, which I think means that the only way he can cover news about TechCrunch itself is to do it ‘straight as a straight thing’. That’s much the same for the rest of the tech blogs.

Malik did give us a good infographic on Arrington’s road to millions, as well as the nugget that the price was at least $25m, and possibly as much as $60m. The really interesting story will be finding out what Arrington does next.

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The brains behind the OpenlyLocal site assesses where we’ve got to with local government spending. It’s a mixed bag – and some of the worst is really bad
• Datablog: see who has released what

Oh no, not you again. Photo by Cristóbal Cobo Romaní on Flickr. Some rights reserved

By Chris Taggart

Now that the guidelines for the publishing of local council spending data have been published, it’s a good point to take stock of how councils are actually, well, publishing the data. And the picture is none too pretty.

Out of the 66 councils (of a total of 434) publishing data (they have until January to start doing it), only 32 are publishing it in the correct format – as a comma-separated file which means it’s easy to open in spreadsheets or import into database, or reuse in mashups. The rest are using a variety of tricky formats (e.g. Word, Excel files) that make it problematic at best to use the information as data, and to combine it with other data, so that it can be compared it over time, and with other authorities.

The worst offenders are those publishing it as PDFs, a document format that is ideal for printing (which was what it was designed for), and terrible for extracting data from.

I’ve been told privately by some staff working for those authorities that they’ve been instructed to use PDFs precisely because it will make reuse more difficult.

I should declare an interest here. I run OpenlyLocal, which opens up local government data, and also helped draw up the guidelines on behalf of the Local Pubic Data Panel on which I sit. We’re also importing all the spending data and matching it up against companies and charities, and releasing the result as open data.

A good example of how two councils can take completely different approaches to the same thing comes with Trafford Council and Birmingham City Council. Both have published their information within the past couple of days.

Trafford published theirs as a CSV file, and using standards set out in the guidance, which means that it can be instantly compared with any other council using the same guidance (and, incidentally, published on their excellent open data page listing large amounts of data that can be reused without restriction). They are also looking at publishing previous years’ spending in the same format, to make it easy to see how spending has changed over time.

Birmingham on the other hand published theirs as a PDF on a confusing and messy page. However, not only is it not reusable as data without manually extracting it from the PDF file, there’s none of the richness of the Trafford council data. No department names, no supplier ids, no descriptions of what the payment was for, and no classification. Comparison by category or by department is therefore impossible. They also seem to have silently redacted information, meaning that it’s impossible to challenge whether a payment to supplier should have been redacted, as you’ll never know it was made.

[Charles Arthur notes: with some effort, though, it has been transformed into a spreadsheet by Paul Daniel.]

The scary thing is, however, is that Birmingham is by no means the worst., and in fact there are many councils publishing the information not only as PDFs, but as PDFs with no licence for reuse, and with very little data in it. Special mention here should go to Hammersmith & Fulham which trumpeted its publication in June of spending information for Jan-Mar, albeit as a near unusable PDF, but since then hasn’t published a thing.

However the award for the council with the most useless spending data is the London Borough of Wandsworth, in south-west London. First, the information is stuck in a PDF (and for the techies out there: it’s been published with headings on each page, meaning that extraction is more tricky than usual).

Second, there is no licence for reuse, meaning that the website Terms & Conditions apply, in this case “Intellectual property rights arising from this site and its contents belong to the council. Use of the contents is limited to private and non-commercial use purposes only and may not be further exploited without prior written permission of the Council.”

Third, the information consists of a supplier name and an amount (presumably a total for the month). No date. No reference. No department. No category. No supplier id. No description. No classification.

Somehow, this is not what the Secretary of State had in mind, I think when he ordered councils to open their books to the public.

One ray of hope: Eric Pickles, the secretary of state, is expected to make an announcement on Friday telling councils that they must obey the guidelines. It will be interesting to see if it is retrospective – and how quickly it has to be implemented. But something really needs to change in some places.

Charles Arthur adds: one of the points of the Free Our Data campaign was that publishing data like this would create opportunities for organisations like OpenlyLocal to create businesses doing things with the data that councils couldn’t or wouldn’t do. Look at what’s happened with the number of apps for finding Boris Bikes in London, for example: that’s a commercial opportunity for app writers created entirely from making the data free. (And it has the byproduct of encouraging the use of the bikes, so everyone wins.)

When local councils try to obstruct that, it holds back the private sector – and nobody benefits, not even the councils. We’ll seek an interview with Mr Pickles on this matter in the future to see whether he sees it the same way – and what action he might take.

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Manuel Castells hails ‘phenomenal’ societal impact of the internet and social networks – and says they made Obama election possible

By 2014, the number of mobile internet users will surpass the number of users browsing the internet via a desktop computer, says a former adviser to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and member of technology panels on the United Nations.

Professor Manuel Castells told a conference on web science at the Royal Society this week that the internet is a “key technology of freedom” for those able to access it, predicting that the planet will achieve “quasi-universal coverage of internet access as my generation fades away”. In that time, he said, a “major disparity in the quality of connection around the world is a major issue of policy” for governments to tackle.

The timescale for the shift echoes comments made by John Herlihy, head of global advertising operations at Google, who earlier this year said “In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant”, predicting the mass adoption of smartphones.

Speaking about the “phenomenal” societal impact of the emergence of social networks, Castells said the number of users – 500m on Facebook alone – is only at “the tip of the iceberg”. “The deepest social transformation of the internet came in the last decade with social networks,” he said, adding:

“Increasing sociability, increasing happiness, an increasing feeling of being autonomous – all this relates to use of internet. The most important thing in this is that it’s not anonymous – this is real people doing real things, sharing things. They’re not just friends, they’re contacts also. They’re doing things together, they’re not just chatting.

“Social networks are living spaces. People share with limited emotional effort. This is a constantly networked world that evolves with human experience, and individuals choose the terms of their co-evolution. Entrepreneurs build these sites, not corporations. The important thing is that even if people go into these sites, they can’t do whatever they want. People will create another and take all their friends with them. The entry barriers are so low, the capital [outlay is] almost nothing, and [the barriers to entry are] so diffused.

“If Facebook becomes nasty people disappear. This is constructed by individuals who organise, and their companies are in the business of selling freedom – if they don’t give it people go away. This is transforming social movements and politics,” Castells said.

He cited the example of Barack Obama’s election as one which could not have happened without the internet. Obama’s Democratic Party campaign is credited as the first that attempted to connect directly to the voting public through social websites such as Facebook and YouTube.

From the outset, Obama’s campaign is said to have galvanised and organised the young American vote while rivals – and some pundits – tried to centre his candidacy around race.

On Facebook, Obama had more than 2 million supporters; the Republican party candidate, John McCain, had just over 600,000. On Twitter in 2008, when the service was just a year old, Obama had 112,000 people following his campaign trail; McCain had 4,600.

Many have acknowledged that Obama’s election marked a significant shift in the way elections are fought, but Castells is one of the most-qualified people to make the judgement.

He said the election of Obama would have been an “unlikely” event if it wasn’t for the internet, and said that the right-wing US Tea Party is already exploiting online campaigning methods pioneered in the States by the Democratic Party.

“The unlikely election of Obama – which was a hope of many – could not have happened without the internet,” Castells said. “But the Tea Party movement is already using the internet in extraordinarily effective ways.”

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Wordpress.com isn’t getting 30m Live Spaces users – think of a much smaller number. No, smaller than that. And Microsoft isn’t getting Wordpress to shift to Azure either. (Updated)

Perfect kit for finding Windows Live Spaces users. Photo by windy_ on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Is Wordpress.com getting all those Windows Live Space users really that much of a coup? There was plenty of excitement on the Windows Live Space blog and the Wordpress.com blog about how “30 million” (say it in a Dr Evil voice) blog would get moved over from Windows Live Spaces to Wordpress because, um, well, nice weather we’re having… Nobody seemed able to explain quite why. Or, in other words, Microsoft had signally failed to monetise those blogs. (Couldn’t it have done what Mark Zuckerberg did with Facebook and just let it grow? Anyway.)

Now Joe Wilcox at Betanews says he has obtained copies of internal Microsoft emails which suggest that 99% of those 30m blogs are “dead”.

The email exchange dates from 28 September, Wilcox says, the day after the announcement. Wilcox says he’s not naming the participants because that might mean trouble for those involved. (Er, yes.)

As Wilcox sagely notes,

“It’s not unusual for companies like Microsoft to overstate statistics that aren’t otherwise easily confirmed. There’s often huge PR advantage in larger numbers, and reporters tend to assume the figures are correct, particularly when they can’t otherwise easily be confirmed. Often lowly public relations employees make these kinds of decisions. In this case, the number means much to WordPress.com, which could conceivably double in size over six months if just half of Windows Live Spaces bloggers migrated to the Automattic service. As of September, WordPress.com hosted 13.9 million blogs.”

“However, according to a senior Microsoft manger e-mailing colleagues: “The net is: 300k sites are expected to migrate of the 30M ‘blogs’ — most are dead. Wordpress is adding somewhere in the order of zero servers to handle this capacity. This was a ‘who has the best online service for blogging for our customers’ and had nothing to do with technology.”

But it turns out there’s a little more to this than meets the eye. Microsoft would dearly love Automattic – the company behind Wordpress.com – to shift to using its Azure cloud system (it’s like Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Compute system, better known as EC2). Last November at its Professional Developer Conference Microsoft suggested (or let it be thought) that Wordpress/Automattic is hosted on Azure, or would soon be moving over. From the transcript: “One company I’d like to highlight is Automattic, developer of WordPress. WordPress is one of the most successful and pervasive blogging systems in existence today, used by tens of millions of bloggers worldwide. WordPress is also a tremendous ISV who’s been working extensively with Windows Azure during the CTP….”

But that isn’t the case at all.

As the Automattic blog pointed out soon afterwards in an FAQ: “Q: Are you moving WordPress.com to Azure?
A: No. WordPress.com, which is Automattic’s hosted blogging service, is going to stay on its existing infrastructure. Martin Cron from the Cheezburger Network launched a new blog Oddly Specific on Azure, which some people confused with Automattic.”

The existing infrastructure, since you wondered, being Linux/Apache LiteSpeed (which says it’s “Apache-interchangeable” – thanks @mutante in the comments)/PHP/MySQL.

And that’s the crux, as Wilcox points out, of those internal emails. The Windows/Azure sales people are wailing: “Waah! Everyone is reading that there are 30 million blogs moving from Live Spaces on Azure/Windows to that damn Linux!” So the managers at Microsoft are trying to calm them down by saying that hell, there weren’t that many people using them anyway.

However, neither end of the argument looks good for Microsoft’s online efforts. Either it’s giving up on a huge monetisation opportunity… or it never made any impact in blog hosting. So, choose your embarrassment, Mr Ballmer.

Update: in the comments Paul Kim, Automattic’s VP of user growth (and the Wordpress side of the excited blog comments of the other day) says: “We don’t have an exact estimate for how many Spaces bloggers will move over to WordPress.com in the next 6 months, but in the first 48 hours we’ve completed close to 50,000 blog migrations which is very promising. (If there are only 300,000 actual active blogs (1% of 30 million), we’ll be able to determine that very soon.)”

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A flag went up last week when Inc Magazine published a piece called “The Way I Work“, by Mike Arrington. When has he ever taken time out to big up his own business?

It indicated, five years after the tech news site started, Arrington pausing for a rare moment to take stock of the TechCrunch state of things, and he made a nod to a change in pace – moving to Seattle to be nearer his parents and to demand a little more time for himself. He recaps the moment when he was spat on by an entrepreneur at a conference in Germany, and an episode of death threats – testament to how furiously influential TechCrunch had become to the startup scene, and how Arrington’s takes-no-prisoners style won him as many enemies as friends.

Regardless of his personal style, TechCrunch is a powerhouse of tech reporting. Arrington prides himself on breaking news about web startups and tech giants first, regularly bulldozing PRs and entrepreneurs to get his way.

In the end though, it was Om Malik who got the story – TechCrunch has sold to AOL. It started with a rumour; within a day and a half it was all sewn up and Arrington had signed the papers live on stage at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference in San Francisco.

What next for TechCrunch? It’s a high prestige buy for AOL, which is trying to boost its editorial operation under new chief executive Tim Armstrong. Being bought by AOL was the kiss of death for Bebo, but under Armstrong the company appears to have more focus; Armstrong insisted Bebo and ICQ were offloaded, but, along with the TechCrunch deal, also bought online video network 5min and Think Labs, who build social networking tools.

Arrington stops slightly short of waxing lyrical about AOL, but is clearly a fan. His post on the deal says he intends to stay with AOL for “a very, very long time” and that the team has incentives to stay on for three years. Given that TechCrunch is only five years old, that might turn out of to be a very long lock-in when things get less formal and, with familiarity, more contemptuous.

Peter Rojas, the founder of Engadget – which AOL bought in 2005 as part of Weblogs Inc – told The Atlantic last night that working with AOL’s management back then “it was pretty difficult to get stuff done … at that time AOL was saddled with way too many layers of management”. AOL today is a very different place, he says, but the state of being an entrepreneur can be hard in a big company.

When signing the papers on stage, Arrington asked the audience if he should go ahead or not – an unscientific 60% said yes, 40% said no. Which says something for the makeup of the audience. Arrington sold for around $25m, of which he is the major stakeholder. CNBC says the deal was more like $40m, but it is likely to be a $25m cash and the rest dependent on Arrington staying for three years. He’d also turned down offers from Yahoo and CNet.

On stage with Armstrong in a rushed announcement, Arrington quips: “We can just use the Bebo agreement as the basis for the deal – is that OK with you?”

Knock yourself out on the video:

Robert Scoble, Dave Winer and former TechCruncher Marshall Kirkpatrick, piled in to congratulate Arrington (Sarah Lacey was the only discreet critic, tweeting “sad“). But AOL will have to allow Arrington a significant amount of space in which to operate. Arrington is more capable of commanding that space than anyone, but place a bet on how long before he gets itchy feet and needs to build something new. After the thrill of the deal, where do you go from there?

I doubt Arrington craves stability, even if he is umbilically tied to TechCrunch. He calls himself a blogger, but he’s more a very driven entrepreneur. Few industries change faster than technology, and if there’s a new market and a new opportunity Arrington will rightly want to be in there. He’ll have to wait three years – and that’s a very long time in tech.

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Plus Apple v Nokia (again), design questions, smartphones v tablets and more

A quick burst of 8 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Apple bites back at Nokia lawsuit >> BBC News
“Apple has begun legal proceedings against Nokia in the UK, accusing the mobile giant of infringing nine patents related to smartphone technology. It is an extension of a lawsuit filed in the US in December 2009.”
We’ll wait for Steve Jobs and Stephen Elop punching each other outside the High Court.

Digg and the Deathly Redesign >>| ZDNet UK
Jack Schofield on Dgg’s maybe-impendingg deathh: “If Digg dwindles into insignificance, it won’t be the first popular web site to fail. However, it may well end up illustrating some useful points. First, if you have a user-driven site, it may be suicidal to try to take it in a direction that’s opposed to the one your “power users” want it to go. Second, it may be suicidal to redevelop your whole infrastructure and launch a new site in such a way that, in case of disaster, you can’t go back. Third and last, appearances don’t matter anything like as much as web designers think. Real users don’t go to web sites because they look pretty but because they enable them to do things they want to do.”

BT Openreach announce 159 new fibre broadband exchanges >> thinkbroadband
“BT have announced a further 159 exchanges today which will see faster broadband made available using Fibre-to-the-Cabinet technology. The new exchanges are part of Phase 6 of the roll out of fibre-based broadband which offers speeds of up to 40Mbps using technology installed in road-side cabinets.”

Asteroids. On *any* web page you ever want. >> Eric Rothoff
Oh, lordy – it’s a bookmarklet so you can apply it to any web page. First Pac-man, then Facebook, now this. How will productivity ever recover. Note his hint: good for zapping ads.

What happens when it’s all glass? >> (37signals)
” I wonder if Apple will soon lose their perceived industrial design edge. It’s not that they aren’t incredibly good at it — they are the best in the business — it’s that industrial design is trending towards transparency. It’s all going glass. Everything is turning into a screen, from edge to edge. Once it’s all about glass, it’s all about software.
“Luckily for Apple their software is outstanding. But, I think over time great software is less of a competitive advantage than killer hardware only because software, across the board, is getting better quickly.” (Thanks @whereistom for the link.)

New Tablets More Smartphones Than PCs >> Gartner Blog
“In my opinion, the tablet is moving to become a PC without the hard keyboard–so a soft keyboard is needed. For that 10″ is the minimum. These devices 7″ or smaller are really big smartphones.”

The “legal blackmail” business: inside a P2P settlement factory >> Ars Technica
Great background piece on ACS:Law case.

Tweet This Milestone: Twitter Passes MySpace >> WSJ
Last month the four-year-old micro-blogging service surpassed MySpace in unique visitors to become the No. 3 social networking-type service in the world, according to new data from comScore Inc.”

You can follow Guardian Technology’s linkbucket on delicious

To suggest links, tag articles on delicious.com with “guardiantech”

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Cecilia Mascolo thinks of mobile phones rather differently to most of us. To her the mobile, as the most definitive, ubiquitous personal device that we carry, can give unique insights into our state of mind.

Mascolo has been part of a team at University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory exploring mobile phones as ‘sensors’ that can monitor how the user’s emotions change according to their location, surroundings, relationships or the time. EmotionSense integrates information gathered through different features of the phone – location through GPS, movement through the accelerometer, proximity to bluetooth devices as well as excerpts of conversations – to create an impression of how someone is feeling.

Photo by Son of Groucho on Flickr. Some rights reserved

At the core is an audio sample library – the ‘Emotional Prosody Speech and Transcripts Library’ – which represents 14 categories of emotions. Excerpts from conversations are compared to this library and then overlaid with data on location and so on, illustrating trigger points for stress or mood at home or work, in crowds or alone and at different times of day.

Dr Mascolo, working with fellow computer scientists and psychologists, is keen to emphasise that EmotionSense does not monitor phone calls, but excerpts of real-world conversations that are deleted as soon as the analysis is completed. This is not a tool for spying, but a very specific development for psychological research, said Mascolo.

“This is very significant because mobile phones are carried by people continuously and they forget who forget [about being surveyed], so new psychological studies can happen over long time scales and with large samples – something they are not yet able to do.”

It’s still early days for this technology, which Mascolo stresses is an academic prototype rather than anything being developed commercially, or, as yet, anything that could make decisive psychological conclusions. But as a proof of concept it has succeeded so far, presented at the Ubiquitous Computing conference in Copenhagen today. Phase one used a small research group of 18 volunteers, using Nokia 6210 Navigator phones running EmotionSense software, over a 10-day period.

But initial results showed that 70% of the EmotionSense results tallied with what the volunteers had reported in a more traditional self-reporting survey. Grouping its analysis into either sadness, fear, anger, neutral or happy, EmotionSense found the home unsurprisingly triggered happy responses in 45% of results while being at work was responsible for 45% of ‘sad’ recordings. Evenings prompted more intense emotions and volunteers were less expressive when in larger crowds.

Phase two of development will focus on making the programme more energy efficient and exploring how additional features of the phone could be used to expand the tool. “The point is where is this technology going, how can we make it safe, secure and unobtrusive,” said Mascolo.

So what are the all important applications for this technology? Researchers are next moving the focus towards well being – what are the triggers for stress, and depression, for example? And all from your mobile phone.

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Former users of the Spinvox text-to-speech service got an unwelcome message on Tuesday – suggesting that their mobile phone number was sold or stolen. But by who?

Photo by whatleydude on Flickr. Some rights reserved

If you used to be a customer of, or signed up for a trial with, Spinvox, then on Tuesday you probably received a text like the one above. (I had been offered a trial, though I never signed up, and never actually used the service; and enquiring on Twitter had responses from many other people who fitted into the same category.)

An odd situation. How did Vox Sciences – a small British company – know that the people it was sending these texts to were former Spinvox clients? Surely there would only be a few ways for that to happen:

1) Nuance, which bought Spinvox’s assets, sold the customer details of former Spinvox customers and triallists, and especially their mobile numbers, in a job lot to a some mobile list broker.

2) A former or present employee of Nuance/Spinvox got hold of the “Spinvox former customers” list and sold it to a list broker, or to Vox Sciences.

3) Someone not associated with Nuance or Vox Sciences got hold of the former customer list, with numbers, and sold/passed it to a list broker/Vox Sciences.

(Are there any other alternatives?)

Trying to find out who has actually done what turns out to be remarkably difficult. Nuance appears to have next to no representation in the UK. It’s notable that, having acquired Spinvox, it has done absolutely nothing with the brand or technology (such as it was) that I’m aware of.

I have called Nuance’s offices on two different days, and left messages with Vanessa Richter who is its (Belgium-based) European PR asking her to get in touch; she hasn’t. Nobody at Nuance in the UK was available to discuss the matter.

At Vox Sciences, things weren’t much better. I first spoke to Tushar Joshi, who is listed as the contact on the whois details for voxsci.com; he said he didn’t know of any mobile campaign, though he’s the technical (rather than, say, marketing) director. He did have one intriguing question: “Are you registered deaf?”

The reason for asking that being that speech-to-text services are extremely useful for the deaf, and so the Spinvox list might somehow have gotten onto that. Though we quickly agree that it didn’t make sense – what with my not being deaf, apart from anything.

I next spoke to Ken Blackman, who described himself as a director at Vox Sciences. “We get our numbers from all sorts of list brokers,” he said. But that didn’t explain why it was targeting former Spinvox customers, did it? No, he agreed.

He said he would investigate what had happened. That was late on Tuesday; since then I’ve not heard from him. Another call to Vox Sciences’ offices on Wednesday indicated that he was uncontactable.

So we’re left with a mystery: how did the Spinvox data get to Vox Sciences? Did Nuance sell it or leak it? And is either method really the way that a company wants to act if it wants to retain the respect of its former customers?

And does Vox Sciences think that this is going to improve its reputation? For a three-year-old startup, we can see that the list must have looked like a bunch of very tasty prospects. But judging by the sentiment on Twitter, that’s not quite how it’s worked out – especially because the text ended with “reply VOX STOP” to stop mktg. Gee, I have to use a text to make you, who haven’t identified yourself, go away? Thanks a bunch.

Update: James Whatley, who did work for Spinvox for two years, has a blog post on it. He’s not enamoured either.

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A new study finds that legitimate marketing emails often get blocked by ISPs or email providers (updated with Gmail data)

Photo by Bruno Girin on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Marketing emails are increasingly being consigned to spam folders or simply dropped without delivery to the consumers they are emailed to, a study by the consultancy Return Path has shown.

In the first half of 2010, around 1 in 8 marketing emails – from bona fide companies rather than pumped out by spammers – never reached their intended recipients, the study says.

The proportion of such emails that done get there is rising: in the second half of 2009, the figure was about 1 in 9 emails not arriving.

The study by Return Path shows that Demon, the UK’s oldest ISP, is the hardest for marketers to reach.

This will of course have marketers weeping into their Appletinis – but customers of the ISPs may be happy. What’s at issue is quite how desired such emails are. Many sites will sign you up to emails, or say that you haven’t opted out, or buy email lists from elsewhere and act all surprised when you contact them to complain. And as there’s no equivalent of the Telephone Preference List (which also works for mobiles) for email, having a public email can be a trial.

Guy Shelton, vice-president for European Sales and Service at Return Path, said ISPs are just trying to do their jobs. “ISPs are battling extremely hard to protect their customers from the scourge of spam,” he said. “Marketers have their work cut out to prevent themselves from becoming friendly fire casualties in ISPs’ war on illegal unsolicited bulk email.”

Indeed, given that around 98% of email traffic is spam, it’s not surprising if ISPs are dumping lots of similar-looking stuff heading for their customers.

Still, they have it harder in France, where only 84.1% of those emails reach the recipient; in the UK it’s 86.5%; and in Germany it’s 87.0%, though Germany tends to regard them much more as spam.

There’s one glaring omission from Return Path’s study, in our eyes: what does Google, which has a growing email service, do? We have asked them and will add the response here if and when we get it.

In the meantime – we’d be interested in your tales of marketing emails gone astray. Or perhaps not gone astray enough.

(Note: revised to add Gmail data.)

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