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10-16-03
Spam, that scourge of inboxes everywhere, is running rampant. Some sources suggest that currently as much as 50% of all email is unsolicited bulk email and that figure may jump to 80% within the next few years.
We’ve covered different ways
to protect yourself from Spam (way back in June ’01 at http://forums.84online.net/showthread.php?s=b8af7fa95da23ba93f42b04d7be06c1c&threadid=178),
including using free secondary email addresses like Yahoo or Hotmail on the web,
but often the person “leaking” your precious email address isn’t you. Your friends may be more of a threat
than you could possibly imagine.
Have you ever received an
email from a friend, forwarded to hundreds of people multiple times that had
your email address listed in the header amongst the horde of others? Spammers love an email like that. They use special software to “harvest”
each and every one of those addresses to add to their ever-growing group of
targets.
Sites that offer to “send
this article to a friend” or “send a friend a greeting card” are another common
source of Spam. Some of these sites
will sell their email databases to marketing firms, which in turn start sending
everyone in the database offers for all kinds of junk. I’m not trying to make that Get Well
Soon e-card you got last week sound ominous but…
Yet another threat are
newsletters that ask you to “suggest this to a friend” opportunities. Again, there are some pretty shady
operations out there that will sell any email address they can get their hands
on to make a buck.
Obviously I’m not trying to
paint every e-card site or newsletter as a potential vector for Spammers. Quite the contrary, most are completely
aboveboard and adamant about not divulging ANY email addresses. A good example is the Privacy Policy at
Fred Langa’s site (http://www.langa.com/privacy.htm). No legalese here, just plain
English.
“If you do choose to input
optional personal information on these sites--- such as providing an email
address to subscribe to the LangaList newsletter or to obtain your BrowserTune
results by email--- this information is NEVER, EVER given out, rented or sold to
advertisers.”
On the other hand, sites
like www.amberalertsonline.com
(thanks to Kyle Harmon for a timely email about this) show the depths to which
Spammers will stoop to garner fresh meat.
Kyle, quite rightly, calls them “soulless
bastards.”
The amberalertsonline.com
domain is registered to the Ride Marketing Group, who’s Privacy Policy is as
different from Fred Langa’s as apples are to
oranges.
“Survey
Information. The Company collects
information from individuals when an individual voluntarily completes a Company
survey or order form or a registration page either online or offline, or by
means of online or offline surveys or order forms or registration pages operated
by third parties (collectively, a "Survey"). (As used herein, "online" means
using the Internet and related technologies, and "offline" means by methods
other than online, including in person, in the mail, using telephone and cell
phones, and other methods of communication including future technologies.) In
the Surveys, the Company or the third party (the "Third Party") may ask an
individual to provide various information to the Company, which may include his
or her name, email address, street address, zip code, telephone numbers
(including cell phone numbers and carriers), birth date, gender, salary range,
education and marital status, occupation, employment information, personal and
online interests, and such other information as may requested from time to time
(together, "Survey Information"). Completing the Surveys is completely
voluntary, and individuals are under no obligation to provide Survey Information
to the Company or Third Party, but an individual may receive incentives from the
Company or a Third Party in exchange for providing Survey Information to the
Company.
Third Party List Information. The Company collects
information from individuals when an individual provides information to a third
party, and the Company subsequently purchases or otherwise acquires the
information from the third party (the "Seller"). Such purchased information may
include an individual's name, email address, street address, zip code, telephone
numbers (including cell phone numbers and carriers), birth date, gender, salary
range, education and marital status, occupation, industry of employment,
personal and online interests, and such other information as the individual may
have provided to the Seller (together, "Third Party List Information"). When
acquiring Third Party List Information, the Company seeks assurances from the
Seller that the Seller has a right to transfer the Third Party List Information
to the Company and that the Seller has a right to provide promotional offers to
the individuals whose personal information is included on the list. Other
Information. Other occasions when the Company requests personal information
include (1) when an individual is making a claim for a prize or seeking to
redeem an incentive offered by the Company or by a third party, (2) when an
individual requests assistance through Company's customer service department,
and (3) when an individual voluntarily subscribes to a Company service or
newsletter (together, "Other Information").”
The Privacy Policy at the
amberalertsonline site is no better, containing such juicy tidbits as
“AmberAlertsOnline.com
values your e-privacy. Our subscribers' email addresses will not be shared with
any third party except (i) where such third party has demonstrated to
AmberAlertsOnline.com that the subscriber is a customer of such third party and
not just a prospect, and (ii) if compelled to do so by proper judicial or
governmental authorities. With the exception of email transmissions conducted by
a third party to its customer database, all email transmissions will be
conducted by AmberAlertsOnline.com. AmberAlertsOnline.com maintains all
personally identifiable information in its proprietary database.
AmberAlertsOnline.com does, however, provide information such as name, postal
address, zip code, age, gender, etc. to third parties for non-electronic
media.”
In other words, this company,
in the guise of performing a public service by posting Amber Alerts online and
via email, will actually make your email address available to “3rd
parties”.
“Soulless bastards” is an
understatement.
They hope to harvest new
Spam targets by offering a “tell a friend” section at the bottom of the page,
giving you space to sacrifice three friend’s email addresses up for
exploitation.
These are extreme examples,
one promising to protect your privacy at all costs and the other offering to
sell it at the drop of a hat.
Policies will vary from site to site, and there’s no way to control a
friend’s behavior, but you can at least protect your own friends from
Spammers.
When forwarding an email be
sure to delete all the addresses in the original email message. Read the Privacy Policy before entering
a friend’s email address in a website and never EVER sign a friend up for some
service or newsletter (not even this one).
Call or email them with a link to a website or newsletter signup and let
them make up their own mind.
If you care for your
friend’s email addresses as carefully as you care for your own maybe they will
return the favor and all of us can reduce Spam…
Kevin Mefford,
Editor
This week, instead of doing
comparisons with the other operating systems out on the market, I'm going to
tell you about the programs that Linux has that you may not know
about.
The other
programs:
So what programs does Linux
have that a typical computer user be interested in? You might just be
surprised:
·
GnuCash
This one is for
those Quicken fanatics out there.
GnuCash is a checkbook program that works just like Quicken. It even uses the standard Quicken qif
files, so you can import your Quicken data and begin working
immediately.
·
Digital Camera
Utilities
Linux comes with a digital camera tool that allows you to view,
copy, and transfer your digital pictures from your camera to your
computer.
·
PDA Utilities
Have a Palm
device? No worries, as Linux comes
with a variety of programs that allow you to access your Palm easily and
efficiently.
·
Scanning and OCR
Have a
scanner to scan important documents and/or photos? No problem, Linux has you covered. Want OCR with that? It has that too, keeping you from having
to retype your documents.
·
Media Players
Linux has a
wide assortment of media players, for CD audio and MP3 to DVD and a wide variety
of digital media such as QuickTime, Windows Media, and
more.
·
Automatic Software
Updates
Just like Windows and Mac OS, Linux comes with the ability to update
the OS with a few simple clicks of the mouse. You tell Linux what you want to update,
and it will download and install the files for you. No mess, no
fuss.
·
Instant Messaging
Are you
a user of IM software such as AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo
Messenger? Linux has several
instant messenger clients available, both independent and vendor
supplied.
·
PDF viewers
If you need
to view Adobe PDF files, have no fear.
Not only can you get a PDF client from Adobe but there are several
independent programs available that view PDFs as
well.
Keep in mind that these
programs only begin to scratch the surface of what Linux has to offer. There are plenty of programs available
for a wide variety of tastes and requirements by computer users
everywhere.
So is Linux ready for the
desktop? I tend to believe so. I've been personally using Linux has my
desktop for over a year now. So
what is the upside of using Linux on the desktop? There are two: it's free, and it's
constantly evolving. Linux will
only get better as time goes on and as it grows in
popularity.
Ed
Engelking
This
article was written on OpenOffice Writer, a free word processing program for
Windows, Mac and Linux that is completely compatible with Microsoft Office. Try it today at http://www.openoffice.org/.
For those of us who’ve ever deleted a file or even formatted a hard drive full of important data by mistake, the experience is less than enjoyable. Weeks or months of work can be lost by a couple of clicks in the wrong place. {C Inspector File Recovery can save you from such inadvertent disasters.
This free program, available
from http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/download.htm,
supports all versions of FAT (12/16/32) and NTFS and will recover files from
virtually any drive as long as the drive is accessible.
Q: Not sure if this is the right email
address or not but here goes...I have a HP Pavilion ze5185 laptop, running
Windows XP Home version with the student Office upgrade (Word, Excel,
Powerpoint, Outlook). We went
wireless in the office earlier in the spring and are using D-Link DWL-650+
wireless cards. In the setup
procedure, it said the card had not passed XP testing, but to ignore and install
anyway. Since then, my laptop will
just shutdown randomly without warning and when it boots back up, it will tell
me a device driver caused the problem.
I've uninstalled and reinstalled the software, I've gone to XP update
page and checked for new drivers, and have even backed up everything and done a
system recovery and reloaded my files, all to no avail. Any
thoughts?
A: D-Link has released new drivers for your
card that are WinXP certified and will hopefully address the problem you are
having. Here's the link:
http://support.dlink.com/Products/view.asp?productid=DWL-650+#
If that link doesn't work,
just copy and paste it into your browser. Hope this helps and thanks for
listening.
Matthew
Dattilo
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