 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Editorial Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au |
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I never tire of reminding members that user groups are mostly run by your fellow members, with relatively little paid help. In our case, we have office staff, some Internet consultancy, and a contracted magazine producer but the rest "happens" because we have some very special volunteers who do a great job. In addition to the "titled" positions, the other volunteers help as and when they can. Simply responding to a message from another member is one such way you can participate. Writing for PC Update is another avenue - write to pcupdate@melbpc.org.au with your thoughts.
On the other hand, volunteers need to be nurtured and supported by fellow
volunteers. Leaders from many user groups report that they have lost good people because they were shabbily
treated, taken for granted, not consulted, you know the rest. It is bad enough for an ignorant member to
criticise a volunteer but it hurts more when a fellow volunteer says the same thing. I have seen this happen
in our user group at various times in the past 16 or so years, but sometimes we have to learn from our
mistakes.
HaHaHa
One of the recent Trojans infecting some computers is received as an e-mail from someone named Hahaha. The subject line is "Snowhite and the Seven Dwarfs - The REAL story!". The content of the message is some badly spelt drivel. If you get this e-mail, do not take it personally or open the attachment. The latter contains the nasty Trojan, which will damage your computer and send a copy of the Trojan to everybody in your address book.
Those of us on the Internet admin team get at least one of these every day, which is one of the hazards of the job. I use Outlook 2000 (not Express) and I keep all my Microsoft software patched by visiting the Microsoft Web site regularly. Therefore, I cannot see or save the attachment. Unfortunately, other e-mail software is less forgiving and exploits the tendency of people to click on an attachment without thinking.
If your software supports "rules", you can create a rule to delete all
messages, for example, from HaHaHa. I did this when earlier versions of Outlook did not block attachments
ending in .exe. Equally, you should not send someone a benign .exe file without first compressing it into a
.zip file. Around Christmas, a greeting card site was sending electronic cards as executable files, and many
people had no way to see them.
Yahoo or Hotmail
One way to reduce junk e-mail is to obtain a free account at http://my.yahoo.com or http://www.hotmail.com. When you fill out a form, you should supply such an address, so that your real address does not fall into the hands of junk e-mailers. If your ISP rules permit, you should also use such an address when posting news articles; your ISP should welcome the prospect of less incoming junk e-mail.
I prefer MyYahoo for this purpose because it supports POP3, namely the
method used by your software to pick up e-mail from your ISP. I use Outlook 2000, which enables me to check
e-mail at several ISPs in turn with one click. Many recent programs have this feature.
Underground
I'd like to point you to an excellent book that has been around for some years but whose text has been released to the Internet as an e-book. Underground by Suelette Dreyfus is available at http://www.underground-book.com/. With the help of some excellent technical research by Julian Assange, the book uncovers the murky facts of hacking/cracking, phone phreaking, computer-security and law-enforcement issues during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Underground features incidents involving hackers/crackers in Australia, USA and Europe. The writing style is reminiscent of Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg - a fly-on-the-wall docu-drama that recreates conversations, emotions, and events. Dreyfus has done an excellent job of capturing the essence of a topic that is usually given the most superficial treatment in news accounts.
I have had Internet access since the mid-1980s, have run some BBSs and had my own column on online topics in The Age in the mid-1990s. The book spans the same period; so, many of the names and events mentioned in it were familiar to me. The technical snippets were particularly interesting, as I have administered Unix boxes at a basic level and could empathise with the sysadmins whose computers were being accessed. Even if you do not have a technical bent, you will enjoy reading about the human angle.
I am fortunate that I came across the URL on a Sunday morning when the
family was away, as it took me the rest of the day to read it from cover to cover (figuratively speaking, of
course). You may prefer to order the paperback (ISBN: 1 86330 595 5, Publisher: Random House Australia)
online.
Reprinted from the March 2001 issue of PC Update, the
magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
