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Complete Computer Services, Inc.
2412 Oceancrest Blvd
Far Rockaway, N.Y. 11691
(718) 868 - 3000
hardware & software * sales & service since 1983
- We have a new name
- How To Start A Web Site
- Has Digital Matched Film Photography?
- Accepting Payment On-Line
- More Scumware
- Fraud and the Internet
- Watch Out for this "IRS" Scam
- How to Beat Ebay by Breaking the Rules
- The End of HTTP?
- Have Privacy Advocates Gone Overboard?
- AOL Spam?
- Ultra Wide Band: X-ray Vision?
- Search Engine Smarts
- Just for Fun:
Microsoft to Split
Book Publishers Prevent Unlicensed Reading
Ebay Unveils the "Zero Click" Bidding program
- Useful Sites
The real difference between good digital cameras and good film cameras are not terribly noticeable to the average person. It is not, as some believe, the sharpness of the image. As the number of megapixels of digital images increased, it reached the point where it hardly matters. Can you really spot the difference between a 3, 4 or 5 megapixel image? Unless it's printed at a large size, probably not. But the real difference lies in the way a digital camera captures color. The pixels of a CCD can only really recognize one color at a time. By using three colored filters, digital cameras record images in three colors. Firmware in the camera tries to match those colors to the true shade of the original. It must perform as many as 100 calculations to arrive at the closest match. This can cause inaccuracies and also limits the camera's ability to function in low light. The result comes close enough to fool most human eyes but real photographers and enhusiasts are not entirely thrilled with the differences in coloration between the original and the digital image.
Dr. Carver Mead, a pioneer of the modern computer chip industry, believes that the day has come when the difference between film and digital is all but gone. His start-up company Foveon, plans to ship a new type of digital sensor that experts agree may match or surpass the photographic quality of film. The sensor will have approximately 3.5 million pixels, but because of a new technique in how it handles these pixels, it is actually the equivalent of a 7+ megapixel camera. Foveon's sensor measures how deeply photons of light penetrate the imaging material. Different colors penetrate at different depths. The result is much higher resolution, accurate color-matching even in low light and no need for calculations to compensate for missing pixels, which would result in image distortion.
Digital Video
One of the reasons I do not recommend digital video cameras as something to be used for both video and still images is because of a simple problem of mathematics and resolution. A high resolution still image is at least a megabyte in size. It takes a second or two to store such an image. Video images are viewed at about 60 frames per second. To be able to save one frame as a still digital image, the camera would need to store each frame as a high resolution image using a megabyte of storage. It would have to store about 60 of these in one second. We simply don't have that technology now. So videos are stored at much lower resolution. That's fine. When viewing a moving image, your eyes don't notice that it may be just slightly blurry when compared to a still photo. But if you were to freeze one frame and try to print it, you would be very disappointed at the result. So why don't the manufacturers make a camera that uses low resolution for video and high resolution for stills? Because, as you just saw, the technology for high resolution requires a complicated lens and firmware combination. It is difficult to marry that combination with the completely different low resolution requirements of video.
Because the Foveon's technology is completely different and does not require the firmware to carry out these calculations, it can switch from low to high resolution much more easily. It is possible that a true digital video and still camera using the Foveon sensor will be forthcoming.
The Foveon sensor is being manufacturer by National Semiconductor, one of Silicon Valley's oldest chip companies and an investor in Foveon. Sigma, a Japanese manufacturer, plans to begin selling the first Foveon-sensor cameras later this month for about $3,000. If this new sensor is adopted, it could appear in more popular brands of digital cameras by next year at lower prices. Eastman Kodak is already in talks with Foveon about incorporating their sensor into some of Kodak's line.
Paypal:
"Payment services--like PayPal--don't do much to protect their customers from fraud and, by reputation, often don't help investigate it, either." ... David Coursey, ZD Net
ZDNet Auction Fraud Story 3/13/02
If you visit our Paypal page, you will find our latest story. Proof positive that there is NO BUYER PROTECTION. A buyer paid a seller with paypal and received nothing. Despite proof that the seller operated under different names on ebay, all of which were subsequently NARUd, despite coming up with a number of other buyers who were similarly cheated, despite a newspaper story on the issue, despite finding a buyer who had not only been cheated several months earlier - she had received a refund from Paypal, Paypal refused to take action. Several days after I reported the story and posted it on the auctionbytes forum and after the victim posted it on auctionwatch.com, the seller's Paypal account was finally closed, several months too late. Other than repeating the tired line that recovery is not guaranteed, Paypal's representative, Damon, has not explained what happened. If, as he first tried to claim, the seller was honest and the buyer was lying, why was the seller's account eventually restricted? If the seller was crooked, and there seems to be an abundance of proof of this claim, why did Paypal allow him to keep his account open for several months after the first fraud claim was alread paid? Why did the knowingly allow more buyers to be scammed? As I continue to warn folks, the only way to be safe when buying with Paypal is to use your credit card and be prepared to charge back. The safest way to use Paypal as a seller (still not 100% safe) is to accept only non credit card payments. Of course if everyone followed this advice, Paypal would become as useless as its protection plan and customer service.
Another class action lawsuit
In addition to the one filed by Jacoby & Meyers, here is one filed in California. Let's see how Paypal fares when the lawfirm is on their home turf.
A class action suit has been filed in federal court on behalf of a nationwide class comprised of all persons who opened an account with PayPal, Inc., or its predecessors, or had money electronically transferred from or to an account with another financial institution in connection with a PayPal transaction. The complaint charges PayPal, Inc. with violations of the Electronic Fund Transfer Act and California statutory and common law. The complaint alleges that PayPal fails to provide customers with necessary information, such as an address and telephone number, so that customers can easily report erroneous financial transactions; that PayPal unlawfully freezes its customers' accounts; and that PayPal fails to fully compensate customers damaged by erroneous financial transactions.
The complaint seeks to correct PayPal's unlawful practices, and to recover damages on behalf of class members. Plaintiffs are PayPal customers and are represented by the law firm of Girard Gibbs & De Bartolomeo LLP, which has extensive experience in prosecuting class actions and other lawsuits involving consumer financial services. For more information, please contact Plaintiffs' counsel:
GIRARD GIBBS & De BARTOLOMEO LLP
Eric H. Gibbs, Ann Saponara, James A.N. Smith, Rosemary M. Rivas
Telephone: (415) 981-4800 Facsimile: (415) 981-4846
URL: www.girardgibbs.com
E-mail: girardgibbs@girardgibbs.com.
Billpoint: If you visit Our Payment Service Ratings, you will find the latest updates from The Auction Guild to the Billpoint mess. Ebay has now taken full control of Billpoint from Wells Fargo. TAG believes that WF was glad to give it to ebay in the wake of numerous complaints. Ebay has tried several tricks, some of them questionably legal, in an effort to force sellers to accept Billpoint. TAG's advice and mine: stay away.
Billpoint's new seller protection plan.
In the wake of many complaints and competition from Paypal, Billpoint has come up with the following:
Chargeback Protection: Sellers will not be held liable for chargebacks due to fraudulent use of credit cards or false claims of non-shipment if you follow the Chargeback Protection rules below:
The payment is for an eBay listing
The payment is completed by a buyer with a U.S.-issued credit card and a U.S. shipping address that matches the credit card billing address
The seller is not notified by eBay Payments within the first 24 hours after credit card authorization that there is a risk of fraud
The seller ships within 7 days of the credit card authorization
After notification of a chargeback from eBay Payments, the seller provides the following proof of delivery within 10 days:
For items $250 and under, the seller provides delivery tracking information or the signature of the person who accepted the delivery
For items above $250, the seller provides delivery tracking information and the signature of the person who accepted the delivery
For items shipped to a post office box, the seller provides delivery tracking information and the signature of the buyer.
Please note that the Chargeback Protection Policy only applies for payments initiated on or after March 13th, 2002. For complete details of the Chargeback Protection Policy, refer to the Credit Card Chargeback Protection section of the User Agreement.
Guaranteed Electronic Checks: eBay Payments will stand behind every Electronic Check transaction and will assume 100 percent responsibility for transactions that have been cleared and authorized. After eBay Payments issues a payment confirmation to you, the seller, your payment is guaranteed. You will never have a returned check or returned check fees for that transaction.
What does this mean? Like the seller said, "My prices on out of stock items are even lower than my competitors'." Maybe ebay decided that since Paypal gets away with offering a protection plan and not standing behind it, they can offer a better one and not stand behind that. Only time will tell. But borrowing right from paypal, their protection does not extend to "quality of goods." Scamming buyers have learned that this claim is all it takes to win. Billpoint also requires that the credit card address be the valid one for that card, and as I have already demonstrated, it is possible to use a New York credit card and give a fictitious Chicago address. Billpoint will happily take that false address and pass it on to the seller. So my non-recommendation for Billpoint still stands.
C2it: You can't beat the price: free. You can't beat the extras: $10 to the buyer on their first payment and $5 to the seller for the referral. You can't beat the protection: buyers have charge back rights and honest sellers are protected from charge back. You can't beat the customer service: 24 hour, toll-free support. You can't beat the company behind it: Citibank, a major bank with an established customer service department. Unlike some of the fly-by-nights who have come and gone, Citibank won't be folding up anytime soon (though this does not guarantee that C2it won't close.) So what stops this service from becoming number one? For some reason, despite spending millions on building up a service that is costing them money, C2it refuses to take the final step to make this a legitimate service. They refuse to see that putting third-rate hacks in charge of the code results in a barely useable web site. Too many people still complain of being unable to sign up, unable to send money or having the site crash frequently. Top notch programmers do not release buggy code. Top notch progammers do not put changes out to the public without testing. Top notch programmers don't take months to correct problems in production systems. C2it is a great service when it works, which is about 80% of the time for about 80% of the users. For a company with the reputation of Citibank, this is an embarassment. With Billpoint and Paypal slugging it out for market share, this is C2it's chance to become a contender. Someone should go into the locker room and wake them up.
From a reader's letter:
"I got a new kind of scumware for you. You can get infected at www.lop.com . Some how this site was a pop-up on some other site I visited and maybe I clicked on the wrong thing. Anyway, Zone Alarms with the settings I had did not stop it from infecting my computer. So far, what I have found is that it put links to its advertisers all over your computer.
"1. It added about five icons to my desktop window that links to their sites.
"2. It has caused the accessory bar on IE 5.0 to be implemented with links to their sites. I have not figured out how to eliminate this problem. Turning it off does not seem to affect it because it just shows up again when IE is re-launched.
"3. What really tees me off is that it has added favorite folders and sites to my favorites file on IE. This is not just one or two but many including an Adult folder with 8 sites and a Gambling folder with 9 sites. A "On Lifestyle" folder has 12 sites and 3 folders with an additional 10 sites."
Several things may help. First, we've covered "home page hijacking" before, and the fixes we've discussed might help break Lop's grasp on your system:
Fixes
We've also covered Scumware in general, and anti-scumware resources, at this site and here's a new (to me) anti-scumware site Scumware.com
. Host file invaders:
Before I include the except from Fred Langa's article, I have to explain what a DNS and Host file are. As you may be aware, every web site actually has a numeric address pointing to the server. Rather than tell folks to visit http://64.243.216.163, we can tell folks to visit ygoodman.com or ccs-digital.com (since they are both the same site, they both have the same numeric address.) Somewhere along the route, your connection will find a DNS entry that matches ygoodman.com with 64.243.216.163 and send you to the right place. Suppose my web server host goes out of business or decides to raise his fees tremendously or provides poor customer service. I can decide to take my business elsewhere. But now my address might change to 12.345.678.90. What I (or rather my new host) has to do, is go out to the main DNS entry points and change the old address to the new address. The changes proliferate across the net and eventually everyone will find the site in its new location. There will be a period of a few days where some folks will see the old site and some will see the new site, depending on which DNS file they are looking at.
Why doesn't everyone use the same DNS file? Imagine if this file were located on a server in New York. This means that everyone across the world would all have to connect to this server in New York and look up each entry as they surfed the web. The server would get overtaxed and crash. Now no one could surf anywhere. So the process of having DNS files on multiple servers updating each other is the best method.
To speed things up, some servers maintain their own local DNS file, called a Hosts file. If the system finds a local hosts file, it does not have to go out looking for one on the Net. The problem with this is that unlike DNS files out on the Web, most local Hosts files are not updated automatically. So if your favorite web site changes addresses, you will continue to be taken to the old site. Almost every PC has a hosts file. The only entries this contains is one for the local computer. When I am testing out code before posting it to my web site, I can refer to my local computer as http://127.0.0.1. I can refer to specific files on my machine as http://127.0.0.1/sitedirectory/filename.asp. It is a lot easier to go into my hosts file and add an entry that defines this as ccs. Now I can say http://ccs and it will go to the file. I can also add entries for sites I visit frequently. By using my local hosts file instead of going out to the Internet DNS file, I will shave a few seconds off the connection.
the Langa article
IP addresses *do* change--- and they're supposed to be able to. The Web operates via "dynamic" naming, where a human-friendly name (such as "www.langa.com") is actually an alias for a numeric address (in this case, 64.41.108.95). The numeric address can and will change from time to time as a site is moved or reconfigured.
People with out-of-date addresses hardwired into their Hosts file can no longer connect to any site whose address has changed--- the Hosts entry is permanently pointing them to a dead location!
There's lots more information on Hosts file abuse at this link. The reason I bring it up now is a new twist on that technique. It's a fake email greeting card notification that contains a link you're supposed to click to see the actual card. But when you click on the link, you get an error message saying something like "Sorry, We are closed for scheduled maintenance. Please come back in a few hours to view and send your postcards."
The error message is fake. What really happens is that the page runs a script that creates a new Hosts file that associates the names of many popular sites--- hotmail, yahoo, google, microsoft, icq, msn, netscape, aol and dozens of others--- with the numeric address of a spam/p o r n site: Any time you enter, say, "www.microsoft.com," the Hosts file kicks in and substitutes the spam/p o r n address, and your browser then obediently takes you there instead of to the site you intended.
Good anti-scripting security will prevent the script from running in the first place. But here's how you can recover from this or any kind of Hosts file abuse:
If you have trouble connecting to a site you know should be there, or if a site that should be OK is delivering content you know is not normally part of that site, use NotePad to examine the contents of your Hosts file in the Windows directory.
If you're on a LAN, your system administrator can tell you if you really need entries in the Hosts file, and what they should be; delete any others. And if you're not on a LAN, chances are you don't need the Hosts file at all. Rename it HOSTSBAK or something similar, reboot, and see what happens. Chances are, the only thing that will change is that you may be able to connect to sites that were giving you trouble. But, if it turns out you do need the Hosts file, just rename it back to Hosts.
If you wish, you can also try setting your known-good Hosts file to Read-Only, so no software can alter it without your knowledge. (By the way, HOSTS.SAM is a fake sample HOSTS file placed in the Windows directory by default. It's not involved in any of the foregoing; you can ignore it.)
Just in case it gets taken down, below is the first paragraph
Net thieves find new way to nab cash
Merchant accounts switched to cash with stolen credit cards By Bob Sullivan, MSNBC
Feb. 12 — Internet thieves have seized on a powerful new way to turn stolen credit card numbers into stolen cash, MSNBC.com has learned. Instead of stealing merchandise by charging it on a stolen credit card, the simple scam involves breaking into Internet merchant computers and virtually “returning” merchandise. Funds issued as credits to hacker-controlled debit cards can then be withdrawn at cash machines. MSNBC.com has learned criminals are stealing $1,000 at a time this way from unsuspecting merchants who use Authorize.Net credit card processing, the largest online payment processor. Authorize.net denies the practice is widespread, or even terribly effective.
Just how bad is online fraud?
Just in case it gets taken down, below is the first paragraph
No one really knows how safe your credit card data is By Bob Sullivan, MSNBC June 25 — Just how bad is the problem of online credit card fraud? The experts seem to disagree wildly. Jupiter Communications, in a recent report called “Over-hyped and Misunderstood: The Fraud of Online Fraud,” accused the media, other analysts and computer security firms of overexaggerating the problem. It’s only three or four times worse than real world fraud, the report said. But other analyst firms peg the number at more like 10 times worse. Meanwhile, no one can really answer the question that’s most dear to the hearts of consumers: How likely it is that your credit card will be stolen if you use it online?
Just in case it gets taken down, below is the first paragraph
The dark side of online shopping
Trail of fraud leads from Amazon.com to Thailand By Molly Masland, MSNBC
June 24 — When Internet investigator Don Garlock’s bank account was mysteriously cleaned out in early June, the last thing he expected was that the search for the culprit would take him on a shadowy trail through cyberspace. The clues began at online retail giant Amazon.com and led to a ring of alleged hackers in Bangkok, Thailand. Along the way, Garlock picked up crucial lessons about the perils of online shopping, even at sites that claim to be “100 percent safe.”
That e-mail is not from the IRS. Any e-mail received of this nature should be saved so that a computer forensics investigation can be conducted to determine the originator. Law enforcement personnel should remain cognizant of this latest identity theft ploy. More information is available to Law Enforcement at Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association
Guess what? This is a violation of an ebay rule stating that you can not post a URL in feedback. And how did ebay respond? They removed the ENTIRE feedback, her negative one against me and my positive one to her (I left feedback as soon as she paid.) So now I have moved up a point and she has moved down a point. Why? Because I broke an ebay rule.
This is absolutely amazing. Ebay would not act when I contacted them directly to point out the problem. They did not care that a defamatory and untrue statement was posted right on their site. But they did care about something that was posted on a completely different site. The logic of this escapes me, but not the lesson. The lesson is: if you want to get a negative removed, respond to it with a URL or an obscene comment and ebay will remove it for you.
In the future, I will not leave feedback until it is left for me. I worked too hard for my perfect ratings to let some lunatic ruin it at will. If this is somehow not in the "spirit of ebay," they have only themselves to blame.
HTTP is the protocol used all over the Internet and with good reason. It was a great way for a program at one end (the browser) to make a request from a program on the other end (the server). Because millions of people are using it constantly, it does a pretty good job of managing the load due to its "broken links" concept. This concept works by sending small packets of information at a time. Those of you who have worked on a Network have probably run into the situation where there were too many users and some were asked to log off. This can happen even if the users are not even working. This is because once a connection is made, it stays connected and taking resources even when nothing is being requested. An Internet connection is a series of broken links. When you request a web page, the server sends the elements of the page separately, so you can get the text, then an image, then another image. Sometimes you will even be missing a few images because the connection was lost along the way.
Think of a network connection like a telephone conversation and an Internet connection like a CB conversation. When you dial someone on the phone, that connection stays open even if you both stop talking. When you chat on a CB, nothing takes place unless one of you is talking. In between, other conversations are allowed to go on. The Internet was set up to allow many people to make requests, which the servers fulfill in short pieces. Its shortcomings become apparent when people make requests that take a long time to complete. What if you made a request which would take the server an hour to gather and return? Your connection would probably die long before you got results. The mailing program I use to send out this newsletter takes longer each month as more folks subscribe. The server often timed out before completing the list. I then had to restart the process from the next name on the list. So now I break up the process at the outset.
This is why many companies are looking into a replacement protocol for HTTP, something which will allow them to initiate requests that can run for a long time on the server side and still find its way back to the originating machine.
Here is a synopsis from the story by Dave Coursey:
I am always surprised at how important some people think they are. And how paranoid they can be. If you're one of these folks, let me ask you this: Why do you think anybody cares what Web sites you go look at? And why do you think your cable broadband provider would want to record all this information? A lot of people seem to go overboard, especially where online privacy is concerned. YOU HAVEN'T STOPPED shopping at grocery stores that use UPC scanners, have you? Or avoided department stores that accept credit cards? Like a Web log, these technologies can also match you to your purchases and interests.
Comcast, the big cable-television and broadband company, seems to have found out the hard way that no good deed goes unpunished. A few days earlier, the company found itself compelled to promise to stop recording the URLs its customers visit when they're surfing the Web because the paranoiacs among us jumped up and down and whined about having their privacy invaded.
COMCAST RESPONDED, pointing out that all this is covered by its terms of service agreement and that none of the information had been used to identify any customer personally. Nor had it been used by anyone outside Comcast; further, it was intended only for quality-of-service assessment and other technical measurements.
So Comcast has been vilified, essentially, for trying to improve its customers' experience when using its broadband service. What Comcast did was set up a Web caching server, which is a place that stores commonly requested Web pages so they can be served up more quickly when Comcast customers want to access them. Creating the cache required determining which pages needed to be cached, and that required watching what customers were requesting. You can't cache it if you don't know it's likely to be needed.
Comcast apparently held on to this information to use it in internal technical studies, but has now promised to stop doing this. I should mention that it's impossible to run a caching server without knowing what pages are being requested in order to populate the cache. The folks there didn't think they were doing anything wrong. Heck, they thought they were doing something right. And what do they have to show for it? Heckling and headlines--none of them positive. Except, perhaps, for this column. Because I think Comcast deserves a break.
AOL folks complain about getting lots of spam, though AOL denies sharing their information. AOL blames it on the users going into chat room or viruses stealing them from other users' email lists. In this story, an AOL user gets a new ID to deal with the spam problem. But as soon as she logs into the ID for the first time, she finds her first message - spam. How did the spammers find a brand new ID that had never been used? The author offers some possible answers.
in case the article gets taken down, here is a synopsis
Ultrawideband: How it could watch you in your boudoir by David Coursey, AnchorDesk, Wednesday, February 20, 2002
The Federal Communications Commission last week approved a new wireless technology called ultrawideband, or UWB. It's being touted for use in connecting PDAs, cell phones, and other peripherals by both local area and personal area networks. Its champions also see a role for it in collision-avoidance radar systems for cars and trucks. Or in medical imaging systems. Or in finding buried objects. The list of its possible uses goes on until you get to the most controversial of apps: "seeing" what's going on inside a building from the outside.
Ultrawideband is a technology that transmits radio signals for very short intervals, or pulses, across a very wide range of frequencies. Typically, a UWB system will be spread across as much as 1GHz of radio spectrum. Because of this, UWB can be quite secure and impervious to interference. But because it's so wideband, UWB has the potential to cause interference for a host of other users of the radio frequency spectrum.
FOR THIS REASON, the FCC has limited both the power and the frequencies available to UWB. Power will be low--too low for many applications, critics say. Some uses of UWB have already been tested. A company called XtremeSpectrum has developed technology to transmit data at 100Mbps--about 100 times faster than Bluetooth--across the same short distances Bluetooth was designed for. This would allow devices such as digital cameras to connect to computers at very high speeds--and the same goes for PDAs or other peripherals that are now connected to your PC via a cable. A video player could transmit a movie wirelessly to a television set. Other applications await future FCC action that could raise the power levels so UWB could be used effectively outdoors to create larger networks. I've heard that for various applications, UWB could transfer data as fast as 500Mbps. Another radar application would be a system to help you avoid crashing your car into the vehicle ahead of you or into a stationary object. The same type of system might also be used to better time the release of an airbag in a crash.
Then there are the applications where UWB is used as a "radar-imaging" device closer to ultrasound. Its main purpose--the FCC has specifically limited it to this--would be for public safety applications. FIREFIGHTERS COULD USE the technology to find victims inside a smoke-filled building even before they went inside. Police could find a hostage--and pinpoint the hostage-taker(s)--using the same type of device. Public safety officials, however, have criticized the FCC for limiting the output power of UWB devices such that imaging is possible from only about 20 feet away. That's hardly enough to allow a SWAT team to "image" a house full of terrorists.
This doesn't mean you should expect it soon. It can take years for FCC approval to turn into a real industry. But with the tremendous interest in all things wireless and UWB in particular, I am betting on an exciting future--whatever UWB turns out to be.
Once it was unthinkable that companies could buy their way to the top of the listings produced when you type in a phrase like "digital cameras." But advertisers' bargaining power has increased in proportion to the economy's decline, helping them claim a choice piece of search engine estate. All major search engines have partnered with a PPC (pay per click) or designed their own PPC, even Google.
Will this put the Search Engine Specialists (like me) out of business? Not yet. Those unfamiliar to the process will not know how to bid, where to bid and what to bid on. To get at the top and stay at the top, you still need the services of someone who can put you there and keep you there.
Irving Weiss, sales@SearchEngineSmarts.com
For the heck of it, I used the search engine and entered "digital+camera". It did not eve ask me which category I wanted. It went out and retrieved over 5,000 sites. The first were a resume of a photographer, a boring account of someone's vacation (he used a digital camera, so I guess that made it relevant) and other useless sites. Not even one digital camera review or sales site on the list.
I emailed the writer to suggest that she do some research before gushing about such an awful site. She responded later to say that she never wrote the article. She has contacted the search engine for an explanation of how this went out in her name.
I guess this search engine has as good a grasp of marketing as they have of searching.
NEW YORK -- Publishers from all across the country met this week at the first annual Book Publishers Assocation of America (BPAA) meeting. Many of the booths on the showroom floor were devoted to the single most important issue facing the publishing industry: fighting copyright violations. From "End Reader License Agreements" to age-decaying ink, the anti-copying market has exploded into a multi-million dollar enterprise.
"How can authors and publishers hope to make ends meet when the country is rapidly filling with evil libraries that distribute our products for free to the general public?" asked the chairman of the BPAA during his keynote address. "I call it anti-competitive business practices hoping to bankrupt the entire publishing industry. We must fight these anti-profit, pro-copying librarians and put an end to this scourge!"
Everybody in attendance had their own plans for eliminating unauthorized copying. One publisher has already started to print "End Reader License Agreements" on the cover of all his books. "By opening this book you agree to the following terms..." the license starts. It continues, "You may not share, sell, rent, or loan this book to any other person. You may not read this book aloud, quote passages, or make copies of any length without the express written permission of the publisher. You may not write or distribute negative reviews of this book under any circumstances..."
Not everybody agreed with this legalistic method. "Laws were meant to be broken. But anti-copying devices are much more difficult to circumvent. Take my patented MacroInk technology, for instance. My books are printed with a special ink that completely fades when exposed to light for more than 30 minutes. This gives a single reader plenty of time to read each page, but when the second freeloading reader comes along, all the pages are blank and unreadable. With this invention, I'm going to cut off the air supply of every stealing... er, I mean 'lending' library in the world."
Another publisher unveiled his "CactusWordShield®" device, a combination lock that prevents the book from being opened without registration. "It's quite simply, really," the inventor explained. "When a user purchases a CactusWordShield book, they can open it freely exactly five times. Beyond that, the lock will engage and the user must obtain the combination by registering their book through the mail. Then they can open the book 50 times before the combination changes and the book must be re-registered. This mechanism allows us to track usage of the book and dispatch our team of lawyers if we suspect that more than one person is illegally reading it."
At one Birds-of-a-Feather meeting, a group of publishers discussed the possibility of "greasing the wheels of government" to get Congress to enact stricter copyright laws. "We need a bill that requires all newly published books to include some form of anti-copying technology," said one executive. Another commented, "First and foremost we need to eliminate the Library of Congress. Why should Congressmen have free access to our work? We need to make them pay like everybody else!" In his closing speech, the BPAA's chairman seemed to sum up the feelings of most of the publishers in attendance. "Won't somebody please think of the children of authors?" he bellowed before a crowd of nearly 10,000. "If everybody and their brother can obtain quality books for free from libraries, then authors and their families will starve. If everybody and their brother can loan their books to friends without purchasing additional reading licenses, publishers will no longer be able to buy gold-plated toilets. We can't let that kind of dystopic future materialize. We must smite our enemies now while we still can!"
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I am now using it for two purposes. First, I don't have to check several email accounts regularly to see if I have mail. Mailmoa now does this for me. Second, I don't have to wait for every spam message to be downloaded and some of them take a long time with their annoying graphics. I review the retrieved subject lines in the mailmoa window and delete the spam unread.
Process Listing. This site has a list of hundreds of processes that may be running on your machine. Take a look and see what you might want to eliminate.
Drivers This site has the URLs for hundreds of drivers and DLLs by manufacturer and category.
push the freakin button Ever have a button or dialog pop up that you just want to close? This little program can be set to do it for you.
clipcacheplus Keeps a list of all the items you copied to the clipboard so you can bring any of them back.
Trend Micro Anti Virus Site - a virus scanner that works off the web
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