Maybe I'm just getting old and cranky, but it seems that 2003 has been a banner year for technostupidity. With that in mind, I've created the e-gregious awards (Egrets for short) honoring malfeasance, incompetence, and extreme Dilbertness in the electronic realm. To be fair, I've also noted those who deserve kudos for doing good in a world gone bad.

And the first Egret goes to...

The RIAA
I could go on about the Recording Industry Association of America, but its own actions speak volumes: suing a 12-year-old for illegal file swapping is about as low as you can get. Ultimately, record companies don't sell music; they sell the plastic the music comes on. The RIAA isn't interested in protecting copyrights; it's interested in protecting an antiquated business model for distributing plastic.

Kudos: To Apple's iTunes for demonstrating that millions will happily pay for music minus the plastic and to the Electronic Frontier Foundation for teaching MP3 swappers how not to get sued.

Microsoft
Over the past year, the Redmond behemoth has turned the phrase "Microsoft Trusted Computing" into the world's biggest oxymoron. Critical security patches have become so frequent that the company has scheduled monthly releases. Yet last July, the Department of Homeland Security picked Microsoft as its primary software provider. Anyone else find that troubling?

Kudos: To Dan Geer, former CTO for @Stake, who coauthored a paper that trashed Microsoft's security and got fired shortly thereafter. Big surprise: The Cambridge, Massachusetts, security firm has close ties to Bill & Co.

Spam Inc.
It's bad enough that they fill our in-boxes with ads for pills and porn; now the Spam Cartel is attacking antispammers. Last April, a group of South Florida sleaze merchants filed suit against nine antispam advocates. The court dismissed the case, but not before defendants racked up a $75,000 legal bill. At around the same time, unidentified spammers launched a series of denial-of-service attacks against these very sites, putting some out of business.

Kudos: To attorney Pete Wellborn (a.k.a. the Spammer Hammer), who prevailed in the case and lopped $40,000 off his usual fee, and to Spamcon, which set up a fund to help defray the defendants' legal expenses.

Slammers, scammers, phishers, and crammers
Online criminals deserve their own special Egret. The roster of cyberdelinquents is too vast to name here, but a few stand out--from phishers that pose as legit businesses to steal your credit card information to telemarketing outfits such as Mercury Internet Service and TrueYellowPages.net that ding you $30 a month for useless Web services and hide the charges on your phone bill.

Kudos: To the Federal Trade Commission for doggedly pursing the worst offenders--such as Mercury, against whom the agency has filed contempt charges for ignoring a March 2001 order.

The DMA
The Direct Marketing Association earns its Egret for believing that techniques used in sending junk snail mail should be applied to e-mail--despite overwhelming evidence the two are wildly different. Even many of the DMA's own members privately admit the organization is out of touch with modern marketing. Still it slogs on--helping to water down federal antispam legislation and fight the FTC's do-not-call list.

Kudos: To the legions of antispammers (the sane ones anyway) and organizations such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center that are leading the charge in the fight against spam.

No regrets
Here are two final kudos: To CNET, for allowing me to rant for two years about topics in the realm of Internet access. And to my readers, for putting up with it.