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What's Hot Index

	All items preceded by a * are usually either new, changed, or updated items in the past 30 days.
	Item	Title	Date
*	Item #21	BODY PIECRCING & 1ST AMENDMENT vs. LPS Board of Education!	28-Dec-99
*	Item #20	Y2K Hoaxes & Nasties	28-Dec-99
*	Item #19	W32.Cholera Worm & W32.CTX Virus	12-Sep-99
	Item #18	KSWO False Reporting and Scaremongering	25-Jun-99
	Item #17	KSWO Y2K Reporting	5-Feb-99
	Item #16	NetMind Security Hole	13-Jun-98
	Item #15	What This Site Provides and Doesn't!	22-Mar-98
	Item #14	Virus Hoaxes Recirculating & Macro Virus Problems	3-Jan-98
	Item #13	Windows Based Systems CAN BE Remotely Crashed (Updated).	28-Jul-98
	Item #11	New Trojan On Internet	21-Apr-97
	Item #10	Netscape Vs. Internet Explorer Macro Virus Vulnerability	18-Apr-97
	Item #8	April 1st Jokes, Pranks, and Problems	6-Apr-97
	Item #7	Microsoft Internet Explorer Security Problem	24-Mar-97
	Item #6	More Internet Freebies	16-Mar-97
	Item #5	Internet Freebies	2-Mar-97
	Item #2	Yet Another Internet Virus Scare	17-Nov-96

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There's another internet virus scare. Fortunately, it's just that, a scare. There's no basis in fact behind it. The scare is perputrated by saying an E-mail msg containing the subject Irina contains a virus you will receive simply by receiving and reading the message. This is 100% false and a physical impossibility. So please ignore anything you hear about this. This is just a spin on the old Good Times internet virus which also never existed. (17-Nov-96) (index)

Watch your $$$ Part II. As with any commercial venture, many times advertisements can be misleading. A case in point. A recent mailing marked Urgent promised LD rates of $.09 per minute. It seems like I receive one of these every month. They sounds good but let's look at a typical offer closer.

There's actually a typical $4.95 monthly access fee to get this low rate. Your rate is actually dependent upon how much you use to include factoring in the access fee which is in fine print. In this case, even if I made 60 minutes a month in LD calls, my TRUE rate is actually 17.25 cents a minute. If I used only 30 minutes a month, it would be 25.5 cents per minute and if I used 120 minutes per month it only drops to 13.125 cents per minute. To even get close to the actual advertised 9 cents per minute, your LD calling would have to exceed 10 hours (600 minutes) a month which now gives you a 9.8 cents per minute rate before taxes *(.

Bottom line, compare your present rate with the advertised rate. A good way to do this follows. First, take a current and typical copy of your LD bill. Get your total LD cost to include any plan charges and subtract any discounts you received. Typically this total is on the last page but check to be sure. Don't forget intra-state LD calls which may be on another page! Now get the total LD minutes you used. Divide your LD cost by minutes used to get your actual cost per minute. For example, If all my LD charges totaled $12.83 and I used 93 minutes of LD, my actual cost per minute is 13.79 cents per minute (12.83/93=.1379). Now to compare it to the above offer we take 93 min X .09 which is 8.37 plus the 4.95 equals $13.32 which is 14.32 cents per minute. Not really a savings in this example. Compare, compare, compare and Buyer Beware! (29-Dec-96) (index)

There's more and more free services being offered on the information superhighway we call the internet. Many of these are provided by various sites on the web. But, are they really free?

First, I've found all the free services have some sort of string attached. The free services being offered include free e-mail, free space for web pages, e-mail forwarding, and more. However, they all have as a minimum one common denominator, a ton of advertising. You may find your entire screen literally filled with it in some cases and very little content to the page. I don't know about you but I'ld rather be receiving useful graphics for the time I pay my ISP instead of a lot of unwanted advertising!

Next, of all the free offerings, I do have to recommend one. It's called JUNO. It offers a free E-mail account(s)* with little hassle. It sets up easily and the little advertising you put up with isn't blatant. It also has two features in particular that I really like that more than compensate for the little advertising it does have. The first being you don't have to go through an ISP! It provides a ton of local access numbers that are toll free. If by chance you can't find one they still offer a 1-800 number to dial into.

**Now the best part. If you have a household or situation where you need several E-mail accounts but don't want to pay an ISP for several accounts, here's JUNO's big plus. You can open as many E-Mail accounts as you want. Each being password protected by user name. What this means is you can use the same computer for several e-mail accounts with each being protected by password. Those with teenagers can see how this will help. Instead of having to get them their own computer and ISP account, get a free e-mail account on the family computer. The other plus to this is you are not locked into the normal 8 character e-mail name on most services. You can choose whatever you want providing it's not all ready in use by someone else there!!

Now there is one service I have to ask that you use with caution based upon personal experience. They offer free E-mail accounts along with web hosting of a decent size and incentives to give you more space. I'll grant them, if you have the time, they are an excellent way to possibly gain more exposure to your web page. However, I've found there is a ton of hassle actually getting things set up. It's called GEOCITIES .

Why I don't like them is for several reasons. First, it's hard on most pages to get or find the meat of the page through all the advertising. Next, I do not recommend this as a first time setup for a web page beginner. Unless you all ready have some experience, you will get tripped up often. e.g. You've done everything you're suppose to and nothing works. More on this later.

The reasons I dispise it even more go like this. A. You'll eat up a lot of time with your ISP because of the ads and other things. B. I can't prove it but the symptoms are there (al la Prodigy). They seem to be performing some sort of unspoken censoring on uploaded pages. They may take days to actually appear even though a FTP session says they made it there. I sent E-mail to them at several levels about this and have never received an answer to date.

Though I've spoken bad about them, I can say a few good things about them. If you are willing to put up with the advertising, you can with some effort find a TON of useful info in members homepages. Additionally, they border on paranoia regarding the content of pages stored there. You can rest assured that the content is overall PG at worst and G overall. They close down everthing else once they hear about it. Namely, all family members would be safe visiting there regardless of their age for the most part. (2-Mar-97) (index)

Here's some freebies that are really worth visiting. These are also good family oriented sites for the most part also. Most don't allow anything worse than PG-13 at worst. One even let's you pick the content.

First, if you want to get more exposure for your site, it actually doesn't need to cost anything to get you entered into any of the popular search engines except your time. e.g. AltaVista, Lycos, Hotbot, Yahoo, etc. You can do it yourself! Don't be afraid. On many of the search engines, you'll find a clickable area that says something like 'Add URL'. Simply click and you're on your way. Most walk you through it pretty easy and quickly.

Alternatively, there are a couple web sites that help you add your site for free for up to 30 different engines at a time. There are two in particular. Add-Me and Submit-It which both automate the process for you somewhat. There is some overlap on who they submit to so keep track of who you submit to. In the end you'll be entered into approximately 50 different search engines so it'll be worth the effort. Your only cost being your time.... They both charge if you want additional places added but they also provide a link back to another site that also allows you to enter for free. Try them out. You'll be pleasantly surprised.

The only downside is that it does take awhile to add to all the sites. One plus is that around half the sites you add your URL/site to will provide E-mail feedback letting you know when your site has been officially added along with additional info so you can maintain your entry. This may be immediate to even a couple weeks. Please understand that many submissions are viewed by humans and the site may be receiving 1000+ submissions a day. Be patient. I'll be adding a list to many of the search engine sites when I get the time.

Another freebie that I really like is a service called NetMind. This is a truely novel concept and great accessory for those that love to surf. It basically works like this. You register with them those web page addresses you want to keep track of. Once a day or so,they send out a spider to visit your registered pages. If the spider finds that one of your registered pages has changed, you receive e-mail telling you so. This seems like a great way to make the most of your time. Instead of going thru your bookmark list and checking if the site has changed, you now receive e-mail only when it has changed. This way you have more time to explore what's out there without having to always revisit a page to check it.

Another freebie of sorts is a banner exchange program called Link Exchange. Like Netmind, you establish a passworded account. Link to them for details but in a nutshell it works like this. You put some HTML code they supply (It's safe) in your homepage. This basically randomly retrieves another sites banner with link on a small area of your page. You determine where on the page to put the code. For every time someone visits your homepage, they keep a counter to how many times you display other banners. For every two visits to your cite, Link Exchange now sends your banner to a registered site.

The key here is to register as soon as possible. Until you submit your banner and it's approved you can still accumulate points for your homepage visits. Likewise, until you submit your banner the only banners and links LE sends are to it's homepage. A pretty fair policy. Like I said, visit their cite for specifics. By the way, when you establish your account, you get to classify your site along with mention what type banners you are willing to receive. (16-Mar-97) (index)

It seems that there have been a few security problems found with Microsoft's Internet Explorer Package. They only apply if you are running Win95. Win 3.1x users are safe. Fortunately they have issued software updates to fix these potentially damaging holes. link to Microsoft Internet Explorer Security Update for the exact details and to download the update. I highly recommend Win95 users to do this immediately. (24-Mar-97) (index)

As always, April 1st has brought out the pranksters. New virus scares and other related problems. During the past week, I've heard of nothing actually new. Just rehashes of old items with new names and recurring problems that always seem to strike around now. In otherwords, nothing actually new. Take all the fearful rumors/messages you have heard and simply ignore them. Reacting to this drivel is what causes it to reoccur. Simply ignore it unless you hear it from a reliable source. (6-Apr-97) (index)

Create a MS Word document that's a .HTML document and embed a Macro. Now load the document into IE. It basically fails as the extra info in the .HTML doc isn't properly recognized as a legit extension to Html. However, load it with NS and boom. NS loads the doc with macro included/active and displays it. There may be a few garbage characters on the screen but it is loaded AND the embedded macro is recognized. See why I all ready mentioned to turn off the automatic linking to MS Word/Excel. Please take heed. This is contrary to my normal don't publish it till it's 200% verified but seems to stand on it's own right now from a technical point of view. (18-Apr-97) (index)

AOL4FREE.COM is easily identified as it's appx 963 bytes long. It is actually a .bat file compiled with the BAT2EXE utility. What it basically does is this. Change to the C: drive, change to the root directory and then executes DELTREE. The results are obviously bad. It also displays a nasty little message after DELTREE is finished. (21-Apr-97) (index)

For Win95 users, there is a patch to the registry. You can get the patch from Nobody located in Sweden. All you have to do is unzip the file, double click, then reboot for it to take effect. They also have a good file explaining the technical aspects of the bug along with the source code used to nuke Windows.

Also some more good news. Many responsible ISP's are implementing filters on their routers to sniff out and stop the offending packets entering their domain. The only downside to this is you will still be vulnerable from an attack from within. Win 95 and 3.11 users, remember to brow beat Microsoft into submission to issue fixes for you!!

(3-Jan-98 Update) WinNuke is still around. I want to do an informal survey of how many people are suffering or seen it's effects. Please answer the following two questions. A. If running a Win 3.11WFG, 95, or NT system, has your system ever locked up requiring a reboot while attached to the internet? Next, B. If yes, has it happened more than once and in the past 3 months?. You can mail the results to me using FORMMAIL.. Thanks in advance for your input.

(28-Jul-98 Update)Found a good source for WinNuke material. Actually, it's dedicated to the subject. I'm reluctant to put it up as unfortunately it also allows you to obtain the program itself which I an NOT happy about. However it is the most comprehensive site on the subject and deserves a link. (3-Jan-98) (index)

First, you need to practice Safe Hex!!! Providing you do, you'll usually never have to worry about the following two items. For more info on Safe Hex, click here.

The first big problem is the Internet Virus Hoaxes. People, please ignore any e-mail you receive saying anything about internet viruses. They just aren't there. All you are doing is creating more Spam. See Question 23 on my Myths & FAQ page for more detailed information on how to identify them.

The item that really has me ticked off at present are the Macro Viruses. A full description of what they are and how to prevent them is mentioned in Question 18 and Question 21 on my Myths & FAQ page. What makes these so bad is that while considered a virus, they aren't in the traditional sense. Viruses traditionally use the operating system to spread. Macro viruses use MS Word and Excel to spread. As long as you aren't using those two products, you don't have to worry about them. As I said, this situation is ticking me off. Go to News & Trends for a recent story. (3-Jan-98) (index)

If you need additional info about this, fill out my Feedback Form
(13-Jun-98) (index)

Overall, one of the rare times the media got the story reasonablly accurate regarding technology issues. Additionally, an overt attempt was made towards the end of the series to not create a panic environment. Good. But a promise was also made to continue reporting and updating in the meantime. Let's hope it's in the same spirit of this weeks broadcasts. (5-Feb-99) (index)

I've already seen a bunch of Hoaxes, possible and confirmed nasties, etc. Please do as I've always said. Practice Safe Hex, have the most current version of your AV software, etc. Don't be mislead about Y2K. (28-Dec-99) (index)

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To Bill Dirks