Brought to you each week by
the 84 Online Team, a loose collection of volunteers from around the Kentuckiana
region.
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Vol. 3, No. 15
04-17-03
Regular readers of this Newsletter know that I am a harsh critic of the twin Evil Empires known as the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. These are the organizations that have spent the last several years purchasing US Senators and Representatives with huge sums of campaign contributions in order to push through such repressive legislation as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Their long-term agenda has always been total control over and even access to every digital electronic device that you own or may buy in the future. Not even the “Shop With Me Barbie” talking cash register is safe from the dynamic duo’s lust for power.
They were dealt a huge setback last fall when their main mouthpiece, Fritz Hollings (D-Disney), lost his Chairmanship of the powerful Senate Commerce Committee. The MPAA, in full panic mode, began quietly accelerating their purchases of key State level Legislators in order to start the second wave of their attacks on your rights.
Unfortunately they were successful in a handful of States before anyone in the IT Industry caught on. Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wyoming have all passed legislation known collectively as Super DMCA.
These laws are all based on MPAA “sample legislation” that they foisted on their Legislative lapdogs fully formed. Some States adopted this sample word for word into the shiny new Bills, which seems a bit like plagiarism and a violation of copyright all by itself but I digress.
Some of these laws are so broad in their coverage that they make important and often essential devices and programs illegal. As an example Michigan’s law with its “throw out the baby with the bathwater” language makes encrypted email, firewalls and cable/DSL routers illegal.
Basically anything that masks the source or destination of transmitted data (like a firewall or NAT router), enables the reception of encrypted data (like PGP email messages) and the recording of such encrypted data (like your PC or, in the case of Tivo and Replay, digital TV recording devices) is now banned by law. So you corporate types trying to protect sensitive customer data like credit card numbers or Web hosting services attempting to prevent hacking of their customer’s Web sites should immediately move your servers to a State that doesn’t have such laws.
And you renegade Zone Alarm users? Off with your heads!
I’m sure you see where I’m going here. Once again Special Interest groups (the MPAA in this case) have hijacked the people you voted into Office to represent you and have paid them to represent the contributors instead. Once again people who have trouble setting the time on their microwave ovens are passing laws over technology that is so foreign to them it may as well be written in Sumerian.
These same people, in their ignorance, will make your personal, financial and medical data vulnerable to hackers and cases of Identity Theft will skyrocket. In their rabid rush to please their Big Media masters they will make each and every citizen of their respective States open to all kinds of online thievery, all for a cash payout to advance their political career.
You can access a ton of information on this subject at http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/states/, http://news.com.com/2100-1028-994667.html?tag=cd_mh, http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/privacy/story/0,10801,80245,00.html and http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/superdmca.html. In this case the sky may actually be falling.
Until next week, cover your heads,
Kevin Mefford, Editor
Download
of the Week
Hello to all the 84Online subscribers! This is my first
contribution to the newsletter, and while I realize that it isn’t something for
everyone I thought I might share a download that I have found to be very useful
and educational at the same time.
This week’s download is a very large file, really only
meant for the broadband users. In fact it is an entire operating system. It’s
called “Knoppix” and it is a Linux distribution that runs completely off of a
CD.
What you download is an image, and that image is
somewhat like a picture that your Nero or EZ-CD Creator software will burn onto
a CD so that your PC will be able to use the disc.
The Knoppix operating system is a distribution of Linux
and I have offered it here for multiple reasons. First, it is very easy to
install. Just put the CD in the CD-ROM drive and turn on your PC. Knoppix does the rest. Second, it does
not remove or replace any files on your hard drive. The benefit is that you can
use (or learn) Linux without changing your Windows PC, and when you are finished
just shut it down and it will eject the CD. Then you can reboot into Windows
just like you always have.
Connecting to the Internet with Knoppix is also easy. It
will set itself up automatically on DHCP networks, and with no input from the
user it can be online in minutes.
For more information, try http://www.knopper.net or http://www.knoppix.net
I hope you enjoy this week’s download. There are quite a
few mirrors for you to choose from. For most of us in the area I recommend the
mirror at Purdue University.
Thanks for subscribing and have a great
week!
Troy Overton
(Editor’s Note: If your PC doesn’t boot from your CD
drive you may need to change the boot up options in the BIOS Setup. Usually this is located in the Advanced
Chipset settings. If you need help
with changing this you should email us.)
Mac Tip
of the Week
iChat
Tips
Sometimes the easiest things to do on the Mac are
the most overlooked. The standard way to add people into your buddy list in
iChat is to click on the "+" icon the buddy list window, or use the menu bar.
But if you are chatting with someone and wanted to add him or her to your buddy
list there is a really simple way. While you are on the chat screen (Not the
Buddy List Screen) with the person, click on the leftmost button, the one with
the silhouette icon. That will open a side drawer with the persons name and
their personal icon. Just drag and drop their name into the Buddy List window.
That’s it. Just like a Mac application is supposed to work!
Just for
kicks while you are in a chat window with someone, you can drag and drop any
picture into the background and that becomes the background of your little chat
window. I have no idea why this would be useful, but it sure is cool to look
at.
Recommended Download
Cocktail
Note: The following is meant for Apple Macintosh
Computers ONLY. It will NOT work on Windows based
computers.
Cocktail is a nice little application that can be
used to run system maintenance and other tasks. You can use Cocktail to manually
run the maintenance tasks that are supposed to run daily, weekly, monthly etc.
It basically takes all the various tasks and puts them in one neat location with
a simple GUI. It also has some specialized tasks such as enabling Journaling,
network card speeds, etc. This is especially nice for laptops since people tend
to not leave them on overnight when OSX normally runs its maintenance tasks.
Best of all it is free, but you are encouraged to donate if you like the
software.
You can download Cocktail at: http://www2.dicom.se/cocktail/index.html.
Hash
hash@ucanweb.com
Email
Question of the Week
Q: I am running Windows 98 SE and Outlook
Express 6.0. Recently when looking through the menus of OE I accidentally
clicked on
Block, under the Message group. I found out the hard way
that rather than giving me a dialog box it just blocked the message I had
been sitting on. If it had been Spam I wouldn't have minded. However, it was
from a sender I did not wish to block. I cannot find how to unblock this
sender. Hope you can help me. In trying to unblock this sender, I messed
up and blocked another one.
A: In Outlook Express, look under TOOLS >>> Message Rules >>>Blocked Senders List, click on the "names” you want to remove from list, then click REMOVE.
That should
take care of the problem.
Michael Champlain
If you have
tech support questions or ideas and/or submissions for our newsletter please
email them to bob@iglou.com.
Copyright 2003,
The 84 Online Team. All rights
reserved. Publication, rebroadcast
or storage is prohibited without prior consent, however you may freely forward
this publication to friends as long as A) it is forwarded in its entirety and B)
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Information
provided in this publication is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind,
either expressed or implied.
Although the information provided is known to work on most systems, it
may not work on ALL systems. Make
use of any information supplied at your own risk.
The 84 Online
Team is a group of volunteers who provide support for the 84 Online radio
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