As a member of this list, you are also entitled to free email tech support. Have a computer-related question or Internet-commerce question? Looking for the best place to buy something, particularly digital cameras? Just email.
This is not a spam list. The only email you will receive from us is a once-a-month notification that our newsletter has been posted. We don't sell, trade or in any way make your information available to anyone else. We don't accept paid advertising. The web sites we tell you about (other than ours) are sites we have personally tried. No one paid us to disseminate this information. There are thousands of sites offering incentives for referring people. You won't find them here. We only present sites (whether or not they have affiliate programs) that we have tried ourselves and feel you would benefit from visiting. We present information that will help you make the most of your Internet experience.
Inside this issue:
Spamcop and Blacklists: Solution worse than the problem?
Merchant Accounts: Beware of the Scams
Amazon Uses "Dynamic Pricing" to Charge Some Customers More
Credit Card Security Concerns
Better and Cheaper Flat Panel Displays
Company Claims Patent of All E-Business
Software and Sites Section
Mailwasher Revisited: Free Spam Fighter
Free Registry Cleaner
Everything you need to know about USB
Uninstall Anything
All-in-one Web Utility
Graphic Display
Create Boot Disks
Capture and Print Screens in Multiple Sizes
Here is the entire article as written, including some of the details which Auctionbytes cut in the interest of brevity:
In an effort to combat spam, companies are trying different approaches. Spamcop's system is to create blacklists of spammers. The problem is that Spamcop seems to accept the word of anyone who compains and makes no effort to verify the allegation. Numerous reputable publications, including Auctionbytes and the Langa Newsletter, have reported that their ezines emailed to opt-in subscribers were rejected as spam. The reason for this is because many spammers use fake emails IDs to send out their junk. I have received several complaints that someone received junk email about mortgages or "physical enhancement products" with my own email ID as the return address. This is a very simple thing to do and anyone who doubts it can send me an email and I will send them one back from their own ID. Any organization that sets out to accomplish what Spamcop claims to be doing, should have the common sense to understand this.
But Spamcop doesn't stop there. If they decide that a certain party is a spammer, they can block that IP address. As you probably know, the IP address might belong to an entire server with many sites on it. So if one person from a particular ISP is accused of spamming, everyone on that ISP might have problems sending email to Spamcop subscribers.
But recently Spamcop has gone even beyond this into an area which borders on censorship and outright extortion. They contacted my web host (the company whose server hosts my web site) and threatened to add their domain to the blacklist unless I was shut down for abuse. It took several emails back and forth before the actual complaint was revealled. I have a page on my site with tributes to the WTC heroes and anti-terrorist humor. WTC Tribute and Humor. Some group called American Intifada, got their members to report me to Spamcop for abuse because they took exception to some of the cartoons (which I did not create, but merely collected). So Spamcop has now become a tool that anti-American interests can use to censor sites they don't like. And here I thought McCarthy was dead.
Fortunately, my host agreed that I did nothing wrong and responded appropriately. Perhaps this issue is dead for now. But for those of you who subscribe to Spamcop, if you have stopped getting ezines to which you subscribed, if you have discovered that you are "losing" emails (because they may come from the same server that Spamcop has put on their blacklist), ask yourself if you really need someone else deciding what they will allow you to see. For real spam control, try mailwasher (reviewed later in this newsletter) or Cloudmark from cloudmark.com.
We have added some new and interesting items on our site. Have you ever heard a DVD playing in 3D surround sound? You don't just hear the sound, you feel it. You'll have to learn not to grab the phone when one rings in the show and not to duck when you hear glass shatter. Due to a special purchase, this amazing device is only $10. Protect your computer and modem from spikes. The GE Power Center sits under your monitor and controls 4 separate devices with individual power switches from spikes, surges and EMI noise. It also protects your modem. GE backs up this protection with $5,000 insurance if your equipment is damaged by a surge. This $39.95 device is only $18 with free shipping. We also have name brand stereo headphones for $5, a 6-in-1 USB media card reader for $25, a lamp that works off the USB port for $10, a charger for AA, AAA, C, D and 9 volt batteries for $18, optical mice, a 4-port USB hub, multi-colored CD cases and a USB/Firewire external enclosure for hard drives and CDRWs that works with PCs and MACs.
Items on Special
Six months ago, shortly after I had opened a $195 account with Charge.com, I came across a "no application fee" account with Aaacess.com, also called First Alliance. After speaking with Aaaccess at length both on the phone and via email, I was led to believe that they did offer such an account. Charge.com has a price guarantee in which they claim they will refund the difference if you find a cheaper account. I contacted them about Aaacess. Charge.com refused to believe that such an account was possible and would not refund my application fee unless I closed the account. So I closed my Charge.com account, received a full refund, and opened one with aaacess.com. I should have suspected something when there was a $49 gateway fee that had never been mentioned. Still, $49 was better than $195. So I opened the account.
I have been offering my customers discounts for using payment methods that don't cost me money. Six months after opening my merchant account, I find that most of my customers are using other means in order to save money. A traditional merchant account charges a monthly minimum of $25. This means that you pay $25 a month in charges even if you never process a transaction. This is in addition to a $10 gateway fee and a $10 statement fee. I was not processing enough transactions to warrant paying $45 a month. Then I found two companies offering no-minimum merchant accounts. I decided that I would rather pay 3.5% with no minimums, gateway or statement fees. That's when Aaacess hit me with a $250 cancellation charge. This charge had never been mentioned in any of our conversations. I called them, emailed them and faxed them to send me a copy of any document I had signed mentioning this charge. They have still not responded, other than to withdraw this amount from my bank account. When I finally got them on the phone, they referred me to another number which has been disconnected. They did not answer subsequent calls. I had my bank reverse the $250 charge and block them from further access to my account. So far they have not even bothered to contact me, a further indication that they know this charge was unfounded.
Don't fall victim to sleazy marketing tactics and hidden charges! Make sure you ask the right questions:
What does it cost to open the account?
Are there any monthly fees, statement fees, gateway fees?
Are there monthly minimums? What are the per transaction fees?
Is there any long-term commitment? Are there any closing fees?
The "cheapest" account may not actually be the cheapest. The account with the higher per-transaction fee may actually be cheaper than it seems. Make sure you take into account ALL the fees you will be charged.
For small vendors or new sellers starting out, a no-minimum account is the most cost-effective solution. For established sellers doing $1500 a month or more in credit card sales, these same companies offer a standard merchant account with what appears to be the lowest fees in the industry. One account also includes free bad check collection, free shopping cart and a secure page for order entry provided by United Bank Card. If you want a customized form for your own web site, the source code to our own ASP shopping cart or have general questions about adding credit card processing to your site, email us.
Click here for more info on No Minimum Merchant Accounts.
Amazon has been charging different customers different prices for the same item. Some allege that pricing was determined by the customer's address and previous purchases - in short - wealthier customers were charged more. Amazon denies this but does admit to having used "dynamic pricing."
Many e-tailers use some form of dynamic pricing. I noticed a while ago that I got better pricing at some sites when I signed in from my office machine than when I signed in from home. While discussing it with a colleague, I learned that the site placed cookies on my computers which recorded my buying history. Since I had purchased much more from the office than from home, my office machine was entitled to a bigger discount.
This type of marketing is not new or limited to the Internet. I give discounts on larger orders and to repeat customers. This is standard practice. What is not standard and in my opinion foolish, are the vendors who charge returning customers MORE than new customers. Reader's Digest gives a discount to new subscribers and for gift subscriptions (very silly considering that the people giving the gift are current subscribers. Reader's Digest is actually telling the customers that they are being charged more than others.) So one year I take out a gift subscription for my wife and the following year my wife takes out a gift subscription for me. My local paper charges $2 a week to new customers and $4 a week for renewals for 13-week subscriptions. So I cancel my subscription at the end of 13 weeks and they call me to offer the $2 deal. Companies that print checks offer a good deal to new customers and then double it for repeat orders. This approach boggles my mind. Most companies like to say "We have been in business for 20 years and have many repeat customers." For some reason, a few silly companies seem to want to advertise, "We gouge our good customers and prefer to send them to the competition." Dyanmic pricing is not something companies should use just because it exists. It has to be applied with thought and logic.
I was just reading your Nov 7th issue of the LangaList and found the part about credit card fraud interesting. [See Online Security With Bank Cards/Credit Cards]. The part about breaking into a restaurant and stealing all the slips from the credit cards caught my attention. Imagine if you could steal the slips from hundreds of restaurants across the country and not even risk breaking into a business.
I work in a paper mill. We get scrap paper in from several converting plants around the country, which is usually envelope trimmings and any other non-post-consumer scrap paper. One of these companies is in Omaha, Nebraska, which is also the home of some credit card companies. While unloading the bales I noticed a pile of slips at the side of the trailer that had fallen out of a bale. There were literally thousands of original credit card slips from restaurants all over the South. If I had been one to do something illegal (and no doubt stupid) I could have used a different number a day for who knows how many years before I would have run out of slips. This kind of put a damper on all the hype about taking your carbons when they didn't even take the precaution to shred the originals.
Like you, I use my credit card online but don't use a debit card anywhere. I feel as safe online as I do at a normal retail outlet, but am as careful online as I would be anywhere else. You wouldn't give your credit card to someone selling watches in an alley, so the same common sense applies online.--- Alan Patterson
Here is an excerpt of a story from Time Magazine:
A lowly help-desk worker at a software company that helps banks access credit reports online, allegedly stole passwords for those reports and sold them to a group of thieves at $60 a pop. That allowed the gang to cherry-pick consumers with good credit and apply for all kinds of accounts in their name. Cost to the victims: $3 MILLION and rising.
More than 700,000 Americans have their credit hijacked every year. Credit companies make 1.3 trillion annually and lose less than 2% of that revenue to fraud, so there's little financial incentive to make the application process more secure.
A lot of credit card thieves go Dumpster diving for those millions of "pre-approved" credit-card mailings that go out every day. Others steal wallets, taking only a Social Security number.
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So there you have it. 1) Identity theft takes place mostly off the Internet. 2) The cost to you can be a lot more than the $50 limit the credit card companies like to advertise. Online or offline, be careful where you use your card.
The LCDs in our cameras, computers, and cell phones may save space. But they aren't saving our vision. Les Polgar, president of Eastman Kodak's display products group, foresees a crop of cell phones and digital cameras this spring that will be much easier on the eyes through tiny, flat, active-matrix screens based on a display technology that Kodak has pioneered.
The screens are known as OLED displays. (OLED stands for organic light-emitting diode.) Instead of creating images out of liquid crystals, these displays form them from arrays of 300,000 sub-pixel-sized lightbulbs. (Note that a bunch of other companies--including Cambridge Display Technologies, DuPont, Lucent, and Philips Electronics--are also working on OLED technologies of their own; the question of who pioneered what is the source of some dispute.)
The LED part has been around for years. They work by passing a charge through a semiconductor, getting the electrons therein to release photons, and, thus, make light. Instead of silicon, the diodes in OLEDs are made out of the same organic (i.e. carbon-based) materials from which many polymers and other plastics are made. To create a working display, thousands of tiny organic diodes are layered against a thin-film transistor, or TFT - a big, integrated chip capable of individually controlling each single diode. An OLED display thus emits its own light. LCDs require a separate backlight. The image you see on your LCD is created when thousands of transistors open an aperture in a matrix of liquid crystals, allowing the backlight to shine through, like a window blind. That's the reason you have to face an LCD straight on to see it well, and why you can't see it well outside.
Because they're emissive rather than transmissive, OLEDs are sharper and brighter than LCDs. For this same reason, you can clearly see them even if you're peering at them from one side or the other. And that visual superiority isn't their only virtue. OLEDs are also:
Thinner and lighter. With no backlight and fewer layers of glass, OLEDs are little thicker than a dime--about a third the thickness of an LCD.
Better for video. Because OLEDs refresh about 1 million times a second--as much as 1,000 times faster than some LCDs--moving images are much crisper.
Less complex. OLEDs have fewer parts than LCDs. This makes them more rugged and, eventually, should make them easier to manufacture and thus cheaper.
OLEDs hold the promise of breaking one of the biggest bottlenecks in computing: our displays. Ever more powerful processors are capable of generating rich images without breaking a sweat. But a typical LCD or CRT monitor remains capable of displaying just 787,000 pixels--a fraction of the 6 million pixels of plain old paper.
The differences between a conventional LCD and OLEDs were plain to see. Even though they were playing the same DVD, a tinier 2-inch OLED display was obviously crisper, brighter, and easier to watch than the bigger 5-inch LCD right beside it. This smaller-to-bigger side-by-side comparison also suggests another big OLED advantage: Bigger isn't necessarily better. Because the visual detail and viewing angles are so superior on OLEDs, smaller is good enough. A 17-inch OLED TV may give you just as much viewing pleasure as one double the size.
The licensing fees are not standard. Amounts appear to be adjusted according to the victims' ability to pay. While some are speculating that large companies like ebay and Amazon will not be challenged, others claim that this company is amassing a war chest in order to eventually go after the big players.
Now a group of victims have teamed together to put up a fight. You can read about it at YouMayBeNext.Com.
In its 66th security bulletin of the year, Microsoft urged users to download a software patch from the company's Web site. The latest flaw could allow the owner of a PC to control his own computer. It might also prevent access by a hacker to the user's hard drive.
"In some ways, this is the most shocking flaw we've discovered," said Microsoft founder Bill Gates. "Without this patch, a Windows user will lose that traditional feeling that someone else is in control. It's always been a comfort to our users to know that a highly-intelligent being was out there, knowing what you're thinking, feeling and doing. We want our Windows customers to know that even when you're all alone with your computer, you are never *really* alone."
Holdthebutton.com invites you to hold the mouse key down as long as you can.When you release the button, it tells you how you rank compared to others. The longest record was a little over six hours. Someone needs a life.
Both programs allow you to check multiple email IDs and inform you when you have received mail. While Mailwasher supports POP3, MSN and Hotmail, ePrompter supports all three of those email types, plus AOL and Yahoo (as well as a number of other smaller email types, like Email.com, GO.com, Mail.com, USA.net). Yahoo is now charging for POP3 access and message forwarding, but with Eprompter you actually get it free. Both programs allow you to view the headers only, so you don't waste time downloading spam - particularly the ones filled with large graphics or containing viruses. With Eprompter, you have to make this choice in advance and you can't change it. If you set your preferences to download the headers only, you can not click on a message to see the rest of it. Mailwasher is a lot smarter in this regard, since by default it shows you only the headers yet still gives you the ability to view the rest.
Eprompter lets you delete the message unread. There are no options for blocking senders. Mailwasher gives you three options for each message: delete, blacklist and bounce. Delete will delete the message at the server so your email program will not download it. Blacklist will add this person to your blacklist so all future messages will be automatically marked for deletion. Bounce is a very interesting option, though it doesn't work all the time (which is not Mailwasher's fault, but the problem of how Internet mail is handled). Have you ever sent out an email and had it come back marked "undeliverable - address unknown?" Bounce returns this message back to its source indicating that your address is invalid. It may help get you off of some spam lists. But since spammers often use fake email IDs to send out their messages, the undeliverable message may not go to the person who sent the email.
Eprompter lets you send your own messages or reply to messages you have received. Mailwasher has no such capability. But Eprompter does not let you file messages in folders, nor does it keep a copy of sent messages. So while at times it is convenient to dash off a quick response to an email without loading a separate program, Eprompter will not replace your regular email program. Mailwasher calls up your default email program. The problem is it calls it up even if it is already loaded. Another minor annoyance is that Mailwasher does not operate automatically. After you mark some emails for bouncing and some for deletion, you must choose "process" to have it done. Eprompter will automatically delete the email you have marked the next time it checks for new mail.
Of the two, Mailwasher gets my vote. Since neither program will replace my regular email program at this time, Eprompter's ability to respond to emails is of limited value. Mailwasher's ability to filter spam, load the headers only but still show me the rest if I ask and bounce messages is far more useful. It seems to me that it should not be difficult to create a program that could do both and if it could also allow the user to file emails in folders and save sent messages, it could replace the regular email program completely.
MSConfig is a very handy utility for controlling which programs get loaded at startup. Microsoft did not provide it for windows 95 and removed it from Windows 2000. I have heard that the Windows 98 version will work under 2000 if copied to the windows\system32 directory. However, these two versions are made to work with those operating systems.
JV16 Powertools. Some registry cleaners are very meek and afraid to do anything. Others are too agressive and when they have finished, you will find that some apps won't work. JV16 strikes a good balance. It is freeware, though the author does request a donation if you find it useful.
Everything you need to know about USB
The above page is from Fred Langa whose newsletter I highly recommend. Langa Newsletter. Everything you need to know to connect USB under different operating systems and conditions. Some USB devices may not work properly under Windows 98SE when using an AMD CPU of greater than 350 mghz and a VIA controller. Microsoft Support Page.
Aurelitec - get rid of those unwanted programs even if Control Panel add/remove programs and the uninstall don't work. This program claims to be able to uninstall them anyway and it's Freeware.
Naviscope This program seems to be a very nifty all-in-one web utility. It blocks pop up ads and animation, speeds up your Internet experience in several ways, sets your clock from an atomic clock. You can't beat the price, unless they paid you to take it. It's free.
www.definitivesolutions.com This site has several nifty utilities for displaying different types of graphic files including AVIs, creating film clips and slide shows. BHODemon is a free program which checks your system for Browser Helper Objects. These are subprograms which work with your browser. Some of them can be helpful but others are Spyware, which watch what you do and report back or feed you ads. BHODemon will show you a list of the BHOs on your system so you can decide if you want to remove them.
Bootdisk.com This site is crammed with utilities for every operating system - even the old DOS. It has programs which create boot disks for many operating systems, recovery tools, anti-virus, etc.
Get over 500 megs of photo editing software, utilities and games on CD. We have been posting links to free utilities for well over a year. If you go to our back issues, you will find that some of these links no longer work. Some of these files are large and downloading them over a modem can be time-consuming. Some readers have asked if there is a way to get these on CD. The answer is Yes. We have downloaded and used the utilities mentioned here as well as many others. We have compiled a CD with over 500 megabytes of utilities and games, including several full-featured photo editing suites. Since we did not create this software, we do not sell it. We do however provide the CD for free with any purchase.
Most of the software is fully-functioning freeware. Some of it is shareware, which means it will either run for a limited amount of time or some of the features will be missing or it will nag you to register by sending the author a few dollars. Shareware is a great way to get good software out to the public without spending a fortune on packaging and marketing. Before shareware came along, there were a limited number of word processors and they all cost a few hundred dollars. Now there are products available on the Net free for private use and at low cost for business use that rival those sold by Microsoft and others for hundreds of dollars. Shareware lets you try a product before purchasing it. Support the shareware concept. If you download a product that you find useful, send the author the fee he or she deserves.
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