On Message with Ben Gross

How 2 Guys’ Iowa Connection Took Big Telecoms for a Ride - WSJ.com: The Wall Street Journal describes the history and explains how freeconferencecall.com exploits the high call termination rates of rural telephone companies in order to provide “free” service to consumers. Many consumers are now charged flat long distance rates and therefor other phone companies absorb the termination charges. A number of the large telephone companies are now suing to change the FCC rules on rural termination.

E-Mail Is Easy to Write (and to Misread) - New York Times: Daniel Goleman at NYT covers recent academic research in social neuroscience, management, and social psychology that explains why email often fails to convey nuance and emotion leading misunderstandings in personal and business settings.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Spam weapon helps preserve books: A project at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is using CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) for a new socially beneficial project. CAPTCHAs are typically deployed to prevent spammers from abusing web signups and mail forms, but CMU is using crowd sourcing to help key in out of copyright texts that are not viable to scan in using OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Currently the service says users are deciphering 1 million words a day.

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