Another year almost shot, where does the time go ? Anyway, on with notes for Monday meeting chaired by Emil Joseph. First up, Neville Anderson wanted to discuss a matter in tip.general concerning Kim Saunders' TIP Users Data Base. Quoting Kim, "It is basically an index of all TIP users. You can search for a user by username, first name and last name, so it provides a convenient mechanism to finger out peoples emails from their names, and vice versa. Like finger but better." Is there a privacy issue here ? The information is already available, albeit in another form. There does not appear to be any complaint about "Who's on TIP", which has been accessed more than 28000 times. It was noted some ISP have "who is on my ISP", but restricted to subscribers of that ISP. Perhaps, limiting the access to TIP members may calm the "privacy" lobby. All food for thought that led to the next topic. SPAM, how to avoid it. Well it is a never ending battle between you and the spammer, so first of all look at the way they work. Once upon a time, the spammer would collect e-mail addresses simply by going through all the Newsgroups and picking out e-mail addresses. Then the e-mailer got smarter, and sent postings with joebloggsNOSPAM@pcug.org.au, but the spammer set his robots to work to look for NOSPAM and its variants, and he still got you address. So the battle raged. Take note of Newsgroup postings and see the endless varieties of variations to e-mail addresses, and select the one you think may be best for you. Remember, from TIP, you must have the @pcug.org.au part intact, but the bit before the @ can be changed, this stops you from using an invalid valid e-mail address like rcook@pcug.org.uk in lieu of rcook@pcug.org.au but you can use; seebelow.for.real.address@pcug.org.au. Another camouflage is to use ROT13. My address is rcook@pcug.org.au and using ROT13 it would be epbbx@pcug.org.au and some where in the post you will have to let your recipients know to apply ROT13. Of course that is only part of the story, you are still going to receive spam, and despite advances in mailers, filtering and so on, the best defence is the DEL key, two taps and its gone to the big bit bucket in the sky. In the US of A, there is a law which makes it an offence to send unsolicited FAXes, and there is a proposal to also make it an offence to send unsolicited e-mail. Searching the net using Alta Vista or Yahoo or any other search engine for that matter is an art if you want to do it efficiently. For best results, it is suggested you read the Help that comes with the search engines, and they are all different. Emil gave some examples; If you searched for ; blue green monster, you would get a listing of every page with blue in it, every page with green with it and every page with monster, a lot of pages. If you searched however for; "blue green monster" you would only get those pages that had the expression "blue green monster" , not so many pages. you could also do a search for +blue -green +monster and here you would get every page that had blue and monster, but if the page had green in it, you wouldn't get it despite the fact it may have had blue and monster. Phew...... please read the help files Yahoo allowed you to search differently, for example if you wished to find Swiss telephone directory in Italian, then you would search.....Country...Switzerland...Services and hope like mad that the phone book is there. The Canberra Times reports that Yahoo has been given a Virus that will activate on Christmas day. Don't go yahooing around on Xmas day I would suggest. Some members were concerned about a recent TIP directive concerning mail, and leaving it on the server. You can normally have up to 2 Mbytes of mail, it can be extended for short times up to 10 Mbytes, but if the time period allowance is not observed, or there is an attempt to stuff more mail into you mail box, things start to fall over. After some discussion, worried members were no longer worried. Emil then gave a run down on good general information sources. These were; Syte in the Weekend Australian ICON in the Saturday SMH PC User, more particularly, the CD Roms that come with it. They have tutorials on all essential Internet programs, very very helpful With that, Emil moved into the training room for the practical demo part of this mornings meeting. I do not know when the next Internet SIG will be held, either watch this space or your copy of Sixteen Bits. In the meantime, may Christmas and the New Year be a pleasant time for you all Owen ps..my spell checker wanted to change spammer to spanker ?? -- ****************************************************** Coffee & Chat Page, inluding archives of past meetings http://www.pcug.org.au/~rcook/c&c.htm These Archives are now searchable. ******************************************************
Return to the Index or the Coffee and Chat Page