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Inside this issue:
Lessons of the Recent Virus and Blackout
What would you do it your system crashed and was unrecoverable? How can you prevent it?
First, make sure you have a good anti-virus program and that you use it. Simply installing it and never using it is not good enough. Second, remember that an anti-virus program is not a cure-all. Even if it does recognize the virus (and most new ones are not recognized until after they have hit), it doesn't do anything until AFTER the virus is sent to your machine (it may prevent it from running, but it often does not prevent it from getting there in the first place. Anti-virus programs do not stop hack attacks, where hackers get into your PC through the back door. So the best protection is preventative - stop the virus from getting to you in the first place. Do not run any attachments sent to your email unless you know who sent it to you and why. If you get it from an unknown person, don't run it. If you get it from a friend, make sure you know why. If your friend's PC was infected, it may be sending you the virus automatically without your friend's knowledge. Do not use an email program that automatically executes without a pre-filter. Later in this issue I mention a few email programs that can retrieve your email and filter it for spam before your email program looks at it. You can delete suspect mail before it hits your PC.
There are programs that monitor your PC against any activity that appears foreign. They will not let a program access the Internet from your PC without your consent. They will "hide" your presence from hackers and destructive web applications. These are called firewalls and many are available free. Take a look at Zone Alarm from Zonelabs.com.
A surge protector protects your system against an overload due to a surge in power. It does not protect against a far more common problem - blackout and brownout. Blackout is a temporary loss of power. If your system shuts down while it is writing to the drive, it can cause damage to the file being written. If that is your important file, like your list of auctions, payments received, etc, it could be pretty devastating. But the damage can be even worse. In order to save time, information is not written to the drive the second you enter it. It is often buffered - kept in a holding area and written to the drive in bursts. So you can be entering customers, items, prices, etc and all of this is being held in the buffer. In the meantime, the operating system has opened some files in preparation for writing to them and removed the end-of-file-marker - a special character that signifies the end of the file. Then it begins to write the information. Your client file grows from 1 megabyte to 1.1 megabytes. Your invoice file grows as well. The final step is to close the files, add the end-of-file-marker and then record in the FAT (file allocation table - a roadmap of the drive) the locations of the sectors which make up the file. If these steps are not completed, the damage can be horrendous. Files have been increased, sectors have been moved and the map does not show these changes. Now you will open your client file and some clients will be missing or worse, information comes up that looks like garbage because the map is pointing to sectors in a completely different file. A surge protector won't help here.
A brownout is a dip in power. Sometimes due to a drain (particularly in summer when air conditioners are running), instead of 110 volts, only 90 volts are coming through or the power is dipping, moving between 110-90 volts over and over. There is enough power to keep your appliances running but they are not running properly. Your TV screen may be growing brighter and dimmer. (One of my customers discovered that in the summer her color monitor becomes green on hot days.) Your stereo may be playing slightly slower. And your hard drive may be rotating at the wrong speed. Everything may appear to be working until the problem is discovered. Brownouts can cause appliances to burn out. Computers are particularly sensitive. You may start getting memory errors or hard drive failures or general errors retrieving data. Again, surges won't help.
There is only one cure for power problems and that is an uninterruptible power supply (UPS). This is actually a battery that powers the computer when normal power is not sufficient. There are two versions. A standby model runs off the outlet unless it senses a power problem. Then it kicks in within several milliseconds to keep the computer from being affected. These models can be found for as little as $40 and are sufficient for most people. A typical computer needs about 300va. The larger the supply, the more powerful a computer it can handle and the longer the power will last in the event of a blackout. Before trusting one of these, I recommend that you plug your system into it (after the battery has had a chance to charge up) and then pull the plug out of the wall. The alarm should begin beeping to indicate that it is on emergency power but the computer should keep right on going. Make sure the computer stays on for at least 5 minutes. This means that if you are working and there is a complete power failure, you will have at least 5 minutes to power down normally and protect your files. Naturally this may not help if there is a power failure and you are not around to bring down the system, but you should not walk away from your machine while in middle of writing files. Some UPSs also connect to the computer via a data cable and can send a signal to the machine to power down if there is a power failure. Some also provide surge protection for the phone cable. Many people don't realize that lightning striking the telephone and entering the computer through the modem is a common cause of computer failure. There are also models where the computer works directly off the battery and the battery is recharged from the wall. These units tend to more a lot more expensive. Because the battery is constantly being drained, they also don't last as long and have to be replaced periodically.
If you can't find a reasonable UPS locally, feel free to email us. Our distributors have a number of models and we can find one at a warehouse near you. Belkin, a well-known manufacturer of computer equipment, offers a 350va, 190 volt UPS (good for about 15 minutes in the event of a blackout) with 8 outlets, telephone protection and software to interface with your computer so it can be powered down in the event of a failure for under $50. A 4-outlet 325va model is available for $40. Both of these models, as well as others from TrippLite and American Power Conversion, offer $25,000 coverage if your computer is damaged by an electrical problem while protected by one of these devices. It's a small price to pay for protection.
Finally, we come to backup. It's amazing how many people don't do it. It takes 5 minutes to protect hours, days or weeks of work. As I keep telling my customers, the computer is replaceable, the information is not. If your hard drive goes, it will cost hundreds of dollars to have a company restore the information - if they can. So no more excuses. If your backup program is too complicated, get another one. If you're still backing up to floppies or even tape, join the 20th century (you'll still be behind, just not as much) and get a writable CD drive, Zip or Jazz. Remember that most backup devices still have one very big drawback. You will need to have a configured system in order to restore. Imagine if your XP hard drive crashes. So you install a new drive. You still have to install XP, the drivers for the system and the drivers for your backup device before you can restore. That can take hours. So what is the best method?
1) CDRW drive with an image: Using Norton Ghost or Bootit NG (see below in the software section), create an image of your system on to a CDRW disk. You can then use this image to restore your entire system. All you need is a boot floppy that can bring up your CD drive and the program you used to create the image. Both Ghost and BootIt NG will create this floppy for you. The problem with this approach is that as your drive grows, the image grows too, often requiring many CDs. Creating this image becomes tedious. You can, of course, create one full image and then just back up changed files. I recommend for numerous reasons that you divide your hard drive into logical drives, called partitions. C: should contain only Windows and those programs you use often, such as Office. D: can then contain your data. E: can contain games and programs for which you have the install CDs. You can then image C: on to a CD, image D: on to another CD and not bother backing up E: at all. Another advantage to partitioning is that logical drive errors are far more common than physical errors that destroy the disk. If a logical error damages data on your C: drive, your D: drive should still be fine. You can image your C: drive on to D: and your D: drive on to C: so that you have an extra copy of each. Because an image only stores actual data and not all the empty space and it uses compression, it is far smaller than the original drive. A drive of several gigabytes can yield an image file small enough to store on a CD.
2) In my opinion, the only 100% effective method of backup is to have two hard drives in your machine, one of them in a removable bay. Using Ghost or Boot It NG, you duplicate one drive to the other. Each evening, the last thing you do is run a batch file (remember DOS batch files?) to Xcopy changed files from your main drive to the duplicate. Then remove the duplicate and put it away. You are now protected against disaster. A power failure, a fire, even a theft of your computer shouldn't be devastating because you have everything on another drive. If your main drive goes bad, simply boot from the second drive and Ghost it over. You will be up and running in minutes. Some of my clients and I have firsthand knowledge of the benefits of this approach. With hard drives selling for a dollar a gigabyte and removable bays available for $15, it's a very small price to pay for security.
- 160 gigabyte hard drive for $80 due to free shipping, two instant rebates and a $30 coupon, all of which could be used together on this one item
- a highly rated scanner plus several packs of pens and markers and 100 CDRs which all together cost $38 after free shipping and several rebates
- a CDRW drive FREE after two rebates
Because of the nature of these offers, you have to act quickly. Therefore we are launching our new bargain list. If you subscribe to this list, we will email you when we come across one of these offers. Just drop us an email.
While politicians are debating anti-spam laws and do-not-call lists, they should also make it illegal to deliberately load spyware on someone's machine. Unlike some of the spam and pop ups you get, where the creators can pretend they thought you wanted it, the lengths these programs go to avoid detection proves that their makers know they are not wanted.
Folks, let me remind you again, there are only two ways to stop the scourge of spam. 1) NEVER buy anything that you heard about through spam. No matter how good it sounds, if it takes spam to tell you about it, you are dealing with a dishonest person even before you begin. You are dealing with a person who thinks nothing of stealing your time and the bandwidth of other ISPs to hawk his products. Why deal with a crook? 2) If we really want to put spammers out of business, we should retaliate. We should order their products. But use fake names, false addresses and credit card numbers of cards that have been cancelled. Let them wade through thousands of orders looking for legitimate ones. Let them pay fees of 30 to 50 cents per order, validating cards that won't work. Imagine if each time a spammer sent out a million emails, he received a million fake orders that cost him days and $300,000 to process. He would be out of business pretty quickly.
But placing a legitimate order with a spammer only rewards him and guarantees that you and everyone else will continue to receive even more spam.
But the cameras are not really "disposable" (the idea behind them is). They actually are digital cameras that have been modified and tweaked so that 1) the memory can not be removed, 2) the photos can not be downloaded and 3) the photos can not be erased. For $11, the customer is actually renting the camera which has the capability of taking 25 photos. The camera must then be returned to the store for processing.
I don't casually use the phrase "the most amazing invention of the 21st century" and sure enough, I won't use it now. What does come to mind is more along the lines of "Are these guys insane? This is incredibly wasteful and stupid." There is no question that a low-end film camera takes much better pictures than a low-end digital camera. And a low-end film camera can be found for around $5. And the processing can be done anywhere. So why would someone spend even more money to rent a camera that takes a worse picture and can only be processed in a few select places?
The main reason people buy digital cameras is because there is no film to buy. The memory is reusable. When I am asked to justify spending $300 for a digital camera, I reply with this:
Calculate how many rolls of film you shoot. Multiply that by the cost of the film and developing. Take one more factor into account: with a digital camera, since the photos cost nothing, you can shoot more and get a larger selection of shots to choose from. You can see immediately if the shot came out and if not, retake it while you have the chance. With a film camera, since you are concerned about the cost of each print, you typically don't take more than 2 of any shot. You don't find out until later that they didn't come out and you missed opportunities. I was a terrible photographer before I got my digital camera. Because at least half my photos weren't worth keeping, I didn't take too many. Now I take hundreds and everyone thinks I'm fantastic until I explain that maybe 1 in 10 actually makes it into the album.
So here comes a camera that is more expensive than film and takes a worse picture. What is the incentive for buying it? It can't be to save money on film when it's a single-use camera. Here comes a company that is going to all the expense of taking a digital camera and limiting its features. What's next? "Disposable" computers? If one followed the same logic, you would rent a computer but you could only save 5 megabytes on it, you couldn't make a copy of your work, you have to return it to one specific store if you wanted to print your work and they only use dot-matrix printers.
- Despite all the claims of "safety," a scammer was able to steal thousands of dollars using Paypal even while he was on the lam and being sought by authorities. Even as he moved from motel to motel, using fake IDs, he was still able to steal money, using Paypal. As the original article about his arrest stated, checks and money orders mailed to him were returned, stamped "addressee unknown." Only those who used Paypal were scammed.
- Even while he was being sought, he was able to continue creating ebay IDs and posting auctions.
- Buyers thought they were safe because he claimed to accept credit cards. But he actually used those cards to create additional IDs on both ebay and AOL. The article doesn't mention the problems the actual cardholders had when they were billed and/or investigated for crimes committed using their ID.
In short: if a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is. Don't expect that Paypal or ebay will protect you. Despite the claim that using your credit card is the safest way to shop the net, it may be even worse than sending a check. If you don't trust someone with a check, why trust them with your card? The risk and cost of identity theft is much higher.
The only caveat with Spamihilator is that it only works with programs that run from your local PC. If you use a web-based program to check your mail, it won't work. Here's how it is set up (Spamihilator gives you detailed instructions): If your email ID is abc@myemail.com, this is the ID you give Spamihilator. In your local program (Eudora, Outlook, Mailwasher, Eprompter) you change the ID to mail.myemail.com&abc and you change the mail server from mail.myemail.com to localhost. When your email program tries to access email, it sends the request to localhost, which is a port on your PC. This port is being monitored by Spamihilator, so it goes into action and checks the actual email server. It filters out the spam and forwards the rest to your email program. Naturally, this will not work if you are using Yahoo, Hotmail or other web-based program to retrieve your mail. The web-based program can not check your local PC, so Spamihilator will never go into action.
What is the advantage of Spamihilator over Mailwasher? Though Mailwasher does mark email as spam, it still makes you look at it, mark it for deletion and then hit process. I emailed the Mailwasher folks with some suggestions but they replied that they didn't think these were beneficial. One of these suggestions was that if the only mail retrieved was marked as spam, Mailwasher should not even notify the user. It is annoying to hear that tune that tells me I have mail and I check only to find that it is all spam. Why Mailwasher feels that folks want to be notified that they have spam is beyond me. I also suggested that it delete messages flagged for deletion automatically when it next checks for email (as eprompter does) instead of making you hit the process button. Sometimes I choose to bounce a spam message and Mailwasher tells me it can't bounce the message because the email ID is invalid. If Mailwasher can identify this, why can't it automatically delete that message? The Mailwasher folks told me that to do this automatically would slow down the program. It seems to me that it takes less than a second. If Mailwasher retrieves ten emails and I had to wait a whole five seconds while it checked the headers and deleted the garbage, I wouldn't mind. Those five seconds would save me a minute of reviewing, marking and deleting them myself.
Eprompter has no spam filtering at all but eprompter does have a few features that Mailwasher does not. When messages are marked for deletion, this is done automatically the next time the program checks for new mail. Eprompter also lets you forward mail and compose new messages. So I use Eprompter to check for mail and reply to non-critical email and I use Spamihilator to remove the spam.
Spamihilator does have some areas for improvement. The most annoying is that for some reason it removes the message content before sending the mail to my local program. I end up with just the headers and nothing else. Since it does this with both eprompter and mailwasher (and both work when Spamihilator is off), I know where the problem lies. I just don't know why. I can go into Spamihilator's training area, where all the messages wait until I decide to mark them as spam or non-spam (or until Spamihilator deletes them after several days) and I can click any message to read it. So the content was retrieved but for some reason, not sent. Another annoying feature is if a message was accidentally marked as spam and I choose to restore it, Spamihilator will continue sending it to my mail program until I delete it. If my mail program activates 5 times, I will get 5 copies.
If Spamihilator only activated itself at intervals of say 15 minutes, I wouldn't need a local mail program at all. Spamihilator could check my mail, filter out the spam and let me read the messages. I could then use my web-based mail program when I actually needed to respond. But right now, the combination of Spamihilator, Eprompter and Earthlink's own anti-spam feature has reduced the time I waste on spam by about 90% and with several hundred spam emails coming to me daily, that's a noticeable saving.