As a member of this list, you are also entitled to free tech support. Have a computer-related question or Internet-commerce question? Looking for the best place to buy something, particularly digital cameras? Just email.

I also have another email that goes out about twice a week consisting of inspiring stories and the best humor collected from several other jokelists and sites, including Dave Barry and Scott Adams (Dilbert creator). If you would like to get that email, just let me know. Jokes are screened for "family" acceptability.

Win $10,000! Why don't you tell your friends about my site? Each referral gets you another entry in a contest for $10,000. Just click this link and fill in your friends' email IDs. They will get an email stating that you recommended my site. When they click the link in the email, you will get even more entries into the contest.

$10 off any order

Citibank's C2it is offering $10 back on your first payment. If you have not yet signed up for C2it, do so now and get $10 off your first purchase.

Visit my site www.ygoodman.com to see some cute Javascript effects and a look at ASP in action. If you want to know how they work or a source for more free scripts, just email.

Visit my Lycos auctions for digital cameras, smartmedia cards, cdrw drives and media.

Digital camera bargains This month's digital camera values are the Toshiba PDR-M65 (3+ megapixel zoom for $425 after $100 rebate), Ricoh RDC5300 (2+ megapixel zoom $375) and Agfa CL cameras (1.3 megapixel camera and webcam at about $100). I have a number of liquidators and surplus merchants that I contact for closeouts. It is difficult to update my web site because these items come and go. I currently have several digital cameras at prices well below any Internet site. I have also tracked down the manufacturer of the hard to find battery for the Fuji MX series, Toshiba PDR series and Kodak DC4800 and have some in stock at $35, which is about half of the retail price.

Universal charger: I am very excited about this new product. Not only does it charge the proprietary Fuji/Kodak/Toshiba batteries, it also charges camcorder, cell phone and laptop batteries in Ni-cad, lead acid and nimh. Because of its deep discharge option, it can even restore old camcorder ("memory") batteries to new life. It has an alarm that warns you if the battery is inserted incorrectly and a temperature gauge which shuts the charger down if the battery gets hot. $60 (retail is $99.95). Special: Battery and charger, $100 including shipping.

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

- Our new look
- Just for fun
- An Interesting Idea
- Send free faxes from the Net
- New Virus Warnings
- Reg Cleaner
- Internet shopping site update
- New credit card rule warning
- Payment Services: Is Billpoint worse than Paypal?
- Inconsistent Paranoia
- FBI arrests scammers across the country
- Search Engine Smarts (part 2)
- useful sites and freeware

Our New Look

If you have visited the site recently, you probably noticed our new look. This is due partially to the use of ASP to create dynamic pages and partly to some great tips we found at BigNoseBird.Com, a great resource for html tips, javascripts and so much more. Take a look at our new online catalog, a catalog created with an access database and some ASP coding. If you want to know more about ASP, click the link on our site for an article.

Just for fun

This is for those of you who enjoy lurking or participating in the free-for-alls found on Internet forums. I restored an old backup tape and found a thread from an old forum, probably on Compuserve. Based on the subject matter being debated, it is probably over 30 years old. Read these nostalgic musings from a gentler era, when etiquette ruled and folks stuck to debating the topic rather than trashing the poster. Things sure have changed. Or have they? the archives.

Just for fun

Several people emailed me and hundreds of others a warning about a new virus. They claimed that no virus checker will catch it. It will activate on June 1 and destroy all the information on my hard drive. How can I tell if I have it? Do a file search for a particular file and if it is there, delete it immediately. Don't just put it in the recycle bin. Make sure I empty the recycle bin as well.

Several things bothered me about this email. First, there was the panic. I don't often get a dozen emails in one day warning me about a virus, unless of course, the email itself is a virus. But this one did not contain any attachment. So it dawned on me that the virus of this email was contained in the message. The file I was being instructed to erase was a file required by windows. Second, the only way to get a virus on your computer is to use an infected diskette, download a suspicious file or run an attachment sent via email. Most of us no longer use diskettes. We don't download files except from trusted sites and then they pass through our virus checkers first. And we should no better than to run attachments sent via email unless you absolutely know what the file is.

A while ago I sent out a joke about the "Honor Virus." The email states, "the writer of this email doesn't know how to write a virus so please help. Send this message to all your friends, then erase your hard drive." Of course, that one was a joke. But this new email was based on the same concept. Can folks be so gullible that they would trash their own system because someone else emailed them to do it? Obviously, the answer is yes, as a number of panic emails I later received from folks who did just that, proved.

Once again, I remind everyone that the Internet has also become the playground of thieves, scammers and fools. Urban legends that no one believed years ago are taken for gospel just because someone spread them over the net. Folks have invested in worthless stocks based on anonymous email tips. Don't be in a hurry to believe everything you read or get in email. And certainly, don't rush to spread it.

By the way, if you do decide to email lots of folks, use the BCC (blind carbon copy) option, which hides their email IDs from everyone else. Even more annoying than getting spam, is getting spam with several pages of email IDs in the header.

That said, here's another virus warning: There's a dangerous program called Windows that has infected millions of PCs. As soon as your start your computer, it hogs all your resources and forces you to upgrade your computer constantly. It keeps expanding, filling up all your disk space. It slows down your productivity. No virus program has successfully erased it. Do a file search. If you find any files beginning with WIN, or any directories named Windows, Win95, Win98, Winnt or Winme, erase them immediately. Then buy a Mac, which is invulnerable to this virus.

An Interesting Idea

One of my readers sent me an interesting idea. He provides laptops to employees of the company. As employees come and go, so do the laptops. It there was a way to program that laptops so that they would stop working every 90 days or so unless they were brought back to the office and reprogrammed, it would prevent this problem. I suspect that it would have to be a hardware solution. A software solution could be defeated by reformatting the hard drive and re-installing the operating system. If anyone has heard of something like this, please let me know.

Send free faxes from the Net

If you can get to the net, you can send or receive faxes free. In the past I mentioned Ureach and Efax, both excellent services. However, as with many advertiser-sponsored Internet services, they are no longer free. Here are some sites that still are: Send a fax to Montreal.
Receive faxes in your email.

Reg Cleaner

In my opinion, and I believe I am not alone, one of the curses of the Windows 95/98/NT operating systems is the registry file. Whatever happened to the days when you can install or uninstall a program without worrying that it would trash your entire operating system? Whatever happened to the days when you could update your hard drive to a larger one and just copy over the applications without re-installing every one off the original CDs or floppies? Whatever happened to the days when you uninstalled an application by simply erasing its directory? Today many apps install themselves in the Achilles' heel of Windows, the registry file. If something goes wrong with that file, your system could be trashed. Even if nothing goes wrong, as you install and uninstall files, entries are put into the registry and often not erased. I can't count the times someone complained of their system running too slowly and I examined it to find that it was loading all sorts of program studs that the owner no longer used. One of the worst culprits is AOL. Many times I have encountered this problem: the user installed AOL for the trial but then decided to remove it. Now each time he boots up, he gets 4 or 5 messages about missing DLL files and has to hit the enter key several times. The instruction to load these DLLs is in the registry. But editing the registry is no easy task.

One way to get rid of this problem is to re-install windows on top of the existing installation. All your settings and applications will continue to work but this annoyance will go away. However, this takes time, disk space and loads many files you don't need and have probably already erased, such as the Online Services. It would be much easier if you could just find the registry entries that load these DLLs and remove them.

A free program called regcleaner lets anyone with some common sense examine and change the registry. First, it reminds you to make at least one backup of the registry files before proceeding. Then it shows you all "orphaned" DLLs that it finds and recommends removing. You can choose to follow the program's recommendation (which I have done with no ill effects) or look for the specific ones that have been annoying you and leave the others alone. Regcleaner.

Have we got a deal for you!

My wife and I decided that it was time to say goodbye to a dear, departed family member - the living room sofa we "inherited" when her parents moved to a smaller apartment. Though "only" 30 years old, (240 years old in sofa years), our 5 kids and the many cousins and friends who used it as a trampoline have finally put an end to its misery. And thus began the search for replacement furniture. You can read the entire saga, including my challenge to beat the neighborhood "bargain maven," who claimed that he could find stores that would beat any Internet price. The end result was that I discovered the same chair he had purchased at a "discount" at an even better price, including the shipping cost. I now have one of these luxurious chairs in my living room and if we can't agree on a sofa soon, my wife and I will be at the divorce lawyers arguing over who gets custody of the chair. I love this chair so much that I arranged with the distributor to offer it right on my site. Since he only accepts credit cards, I have placed the order form and information on the site for you to fill out. If you are looking for a luxurious rocker/swinger/swivel/recliner with matching swinging ottoman in bone white or black delivered to your door for $199.95, Click here for the full story.

By the way, if I start taking longer to answer your emails, it's because I have a hard time getting out of this chair once I settle in.

Internet Shopping Site Update

Cyberrebate, the site where everything is 100% free after rebate, has just declared chapter 11. I wondered how they could make money giving things away. I guess they lost a little bit on each transaction but made it up in volume. If you have recently ordered from them or are still waiting for a rebate, contact your credit card and charge it back immediately. The way a charge back works is that the merchant (Cyberrebate) will be contacted to answer your complaint. If there is still someone in the office who plans on sending out the rebates, your charge back might be denied. However, chances are that no one will dispute it and you will just receive your rebate as a credit on your card.

Buy.com, the "Internet superstore," has done it again. Several times in the past, they happily took my orders and sent me emails to let me know my order was on its way, but it was several weeks to months before the item was finally in stock. I learned that this was not the place to shop for something you needed in a hurry. Eventually, I just stopped going there. That's why I was surprised to receive an email that said, "Your order is on its way." I checked my account and discovered that an order I placed in NOVEMBER was finally being sent. I no longer needed the item. In any case, the price had gone way down, but of course they were charging me the old price. I contacted them to learn that I had to ship back this item at MY expense. Even worse, they would refund me the purchase price, but expected me to pay THEIR cost of shipping. My emails to them went unanswered. I finally threatened to charge it back and they suddenly woke up and credited me for their shipping (but not mine). I have previously written articles about sites that try to compete based on price alone. If I had really needed the items I ordered, I would have been in trouble. Fortunately, I already knew of Buy.com's habit of taking orders for items they did not have in stock and could not even guarantee receiving. One of the reasons that I don't have automatic order processing on my site, but require that customers email me, is to avoid just this sort of problem.

New credit card rule warning

MBNA, one of the larger credit card banks, has just sent their account holders a letter. It states that they will be treating "person-to-person" payments as cash advances. This could mean that paypal payments will be subject to an up-front fee as well as interest from day one, with no grace period. Neither MBNA nor Paypal was able to give a clear answer to what this means. So don't assume that using your credit card with a payment service will be free to buyers any longer. If you do use a payment service like Paypal for purchases and have an MBNA card, you might want to consider a) getting a different card or b) switching to Achex, which uses your bank account. If you are getting a different card, you might want to consider getting a Citibank card. After the three month free period, C2it will only charge 1% if a Citibank card is used. So far, Citibank has no plans for treating C2it payments as cash advances.

Still trying to contact customer service...
There is little news on Paypal. They seem quite content to allow things to continue as they have. This means that for 99% of their customers, things will be fine. But for that last 1%, the same problems will continue with the same poor response or lack of response. I found one incredible post where a customer has his account restricted with no explanation. After a long runaround, he finally complained to the company that insures Paypal. The next day, his account was unrestricted, still with no explanation. He received an email from Paypal asking him to rate his experience with customer service. He really laid into them (and judging by the tone of his narrative, he did not hold back). The next day, his account was permanently closed for unexplained violations. This is not the first time I have heard of Paypal being vindictive. The many folks who accounts were restricted for complaining about the restriction of Inetstar comes to mind. Read the details on my newly updated Paypal page.

And yet another post of a fraudster cheating folks on ebay and accepting payment through paypal. article. So it seems that Paypal's fraud prevention is still sorely lacking and Paypal is still a favorite service with con men. Don't expect the buyer protection to help. Paypal states right on their site that you only get your money back if the seller has funds in his Paypal account. What are the chances that after cheating folks, the crook will leave the money sitting in his Paypal account?

The big news is that Billpoint may have become "too big for its britches." There have recently been a flood of posts about charge backs happening months later when Billpoint sent the seller the WRONG CUSTOMER NAME. It takes incredible incompetence to charge a credit card using a completely wrong name. There have also been posts about the same customer making multiple charge backs, claiming fraudulent use of the card. Two things I will say for Paypal: 1) they send the seller the customer's verified name and address and 2) if a customer claims fraudulent use of the card, Paypal will freeze the account. But Billpoint's attitude seems to have become: Why bother to verify when the seller eats the charges? TAG (the Auction Guild) has already recommended that sellers stop accepting Billpoint credit card payments until the service beefs up its security. View the details at Payment Ratings.

Inconsistent Paranoia

If you want to be paranoid, as least be consistent about it. I have recently seen many posts from people complaining how someone used their credit card without authorization to open an account with a payment service. They were outraged that the service allowed the charge to go through.

"Is that all it takes?" they complain, "someone knowns my number and can immediately start placing orders? We want tougher security. We want the service to ask for information only we would know."

So the service listened. Now when you open an account, some services ask for your social security number. They match this with information that is already available to financial institutions to make sure it is correct. But the whiners are not through complaining.

"I'm not giving my social security number to anybody!"

Forget that you have given it to every company you ever worked for, going back to your first summer job at 14. Forget that it appears on every bank loan you have ever taken, every mortgage paper you ever signed, every credit card you ever applied for. You expect Paypal, Billpoint or Citibank to let you open an account without providing this "top secret" information. But you also expect them to able to stop crooks from opening an account in your name because crooks will have to provide additional information. Exactly how is this to be accomplished? Should the sign-on process now include a statement: "If you're a crook, please enter your social security number. Otherwise, this is optional."?

I have recently had to deal with some people who had no problems sending me, a total stranger, their credit card information (one even emailed it in without my asking) but refused to sign up for the secure service of Citibank's C2it because they would have to give their social security number. One of them even had a Citibank credit card. Why don't they understand that Citibank already has their social security number? This is what Citibank is using to verify that the person opening the account is actually the cardholder.

It's okay to be paranoid, but at least be consistent.

FBI Arrests Scammers Across the Country

After a lengthy investigation of Internet fraud, the FBI pounced, arresting folks from New York to California for a variety of Internet scams. FBI Story

Search Engine Smarts, part 2, by Irving Weiss

Last week we spoke about how Goto has monopolized search engine results and taken advantage of their monopoly by increasing costs. They will get away with this, as can be seen by the results of a poll conducted by a well respected website Search Engine Watch . I tried canceling a client's account with Goto but so far I have not been able to do so and they keep auto charging his credit card. Even the email to them went unanswered.

It seems I will manually have to go to each of the thousand individual keywords that I bid on and delete them. This time we will focus on two less popular PPC (pay per click) engines, that also have their listings display in prominent search engines. They are Sprinks, whose listings appear in About.com and FindWhat, whose listings appear in Excite. The ROI (Return On Investment) of these PPC engines can be significantly higher as keywords tend not to cost as much and there is no minimum bid. The drawbacks of Findwhat and Sprinks are that their interface is not as easy to use as Goto and their monthly reports are somewhat cryptic. Also, Excite may close its doors as Go.com has done and there is a potential of wasted effort and a lost deposit. See their financial results at this site.

Next issue we will focus on the other smaller PPC engines who have many devious ways to rob you of your money.

Irving Weiss can be reached at searchenginesmarts@hotmail.com and 718-337-6907. He helps businesses achieve top rankings in major search engines.

Useful sites and freeware

the Langa Letter tips and tricks on using your PC, emailed to you absolutely free. I have included some of his tips in my previous letters.

I hope this letter contained useful information. Please email ccs@ygoodman.com with any comments.