Stamp Column Archives

The Glassine Surfer Column Archive

This column originally appeared in the American Philatelic Society's monthly magazine, "The American Philatelist." Since then some of the information may be out-of-date depending on how far back you're reading.

April 2000

Other notably portions of the site are the use of the Governor-General frank stamp in rural Victoria, the birth of frank stamps in Victoria and a collection of information on other free post items from around the world.

Hans is a member of The Philatelic Society of Canberra and has been their exchange superintendent since 1980.  He has already published five parts of his catalogue on the free marks and frank stamps of Western Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland and is working on the balance.

The Frank and Free site is well designed, easy to use, and as you might expect the content is first-rate.

Frank and Free
http://www.tip.net.au/~hkarman/

Malicious Scripts

Just when you thought it was safe to surf the Web along comes another threat.  No, it's not a virus, not even a trojan horse.  The new security threat comes from malicious cross-site scripts.  

State-of-the-art web sites use scripts in countless ways to process interactive instructions between their site and your browser, and what makes the script problem troubling is that it is hard to detect, hard to remedy and hard to prevent.

The trouble starts when someone surfs onto an untrustworthy site hosting a malicious script.  Once accessed the devious script is on your browser, and it's intent might be to send copies of online forms you fill out on other web sites to the malicious developer or compromise your browser's cookies.

Developers and companies are working on solving this dilemma, but they readily admit there's no silver bullet for this situation at the moment.  Education is your best defense and don't visit untrustworthy sites.

CERT is a federally funded research and development center at Carnegie Mellon University. (CERT is not an acronym.)  They analyze vulnerabilities and publish technical documents and information on electronic security issues.  

Though rather technical, their warnings and instructions are generally written in plain English.  These links below explain the malicious script problem.

CERT
http://www.cert.org/tech_tips/malicious_code_FAQ.html
http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2000-02.html

There's also Websearch at About.com.  Chris Sherman runs a Web consulting and design firm and is the author of "The CD ROM Handbook" from McGraw-Hill.  His site aggregates content from around the Web, and he provides matter-of-fact explanations of issues such as this.

Malicious Scripts at Web Search
http://websearch.about.com/library/weekly/aa020800a.htm

US Stamp Identification

Dave Phillips is a collector in Columbus, Georgia, who runs a new Web site that's off to a great start.  Phillip's, an APS and United States Stamp Society member, is scanning his collection of US and arranging them in a US Stamp Identifier.

Ultimately, he hopes to have all US stamps, as well as Pitcairn Island stamps, on his site, and he plans on adding a section to help identify some of the more valuable stamps from their virtually identical cousins.

As Dave says, "I want the website to be a wealth of information for US collectors. Hopefully, I can get some younger people interested in collecting as well. I give a lot of stamps away to younger people who post messages in the stamp collecting forums, just to get them interested in collecting."

Phillips Stamp Site
http://www.stamp-site.com

APS E-mail Bulletins

The APS website has an e-mail update bulletin.  Sign up, and about once a month you'll get a site updates and news, as well as special member offerings, new online services, and APS news with direct links.

Free APS Bulletins
http://www.stamps.org/

Hoppy Easter

It's time for spring cleaning, so it's time to toss out your old screen saver and replace it with a new Easter Bunny screensaver.  

This little screensaver can be set for multiple bunnies bearing baskets to hop around on a scenic woodland background.  You can customize it a bit, and if it's not exactly professional and high tech, your kids'll love it.

If a freeware hopping bunny screensaver doesn't prove your PC sophistication, nothing will.

Easter Bunny Screensaver
http://www.screensave.com/easterbn.htm

Share your favorite stamp sites.  E-mail them to me.  By sharing you can help others and help give these Net-philatelists the recognition they deserve.  Thanks again for reading the "Glassine Surfer" and be sure to visit the APS website.

Have a Happy Easter and Passover, and may your home team always win.