This week's New Scientist magazine (p. 6) has a short column about Xacct t5hat looks as if the journalists swallowed a press release whole and have puked it up almost undigested: "Using the Internet could become more expensive if service providers adopt new software that allows separate billing for emails, downloading graphics and streaming audio or video". It desceibes an unlikley scenario in which ISPs charge more per minute for high-quality video and less for low-quality or email. I'm not sure the journalist knows the difference between an ISP and a content provider. Yet another business that would be made obsolete by widespread use of strong encryption. Unless of course they mean to head that off at the pass by making ISPs charge more to transfer encrypted packets? When you look at their website http://www.xacct.com/usage.html you find a description of what seems like a pretty normal system monitoring application (although I'm sure it is wonderfully written) surrounded by what, when we were young and foolish, we used to call Marketdroid Waffle: "XACCTusage Family XACCTusage is a multi-source, multi-layer network usage metering and mediation solution that gives Network Service Providers (NSPs), including enterprise network (Intranet) operators, the intelligence to right-price IP services." Enough to make your teeth curl. The names of the people interviewed tickled my spoof detectors as well. "Anil Uberoi" and "Charles Arsenault" sound distinctly dodgy on this side of the Atlantic. Ken Brown