Stamp Column Archives

Glassine Surfer April 2004

Web Watch

Your local federal government wants to alert you to the troubles on the Web in a timely manner and has set up a seven-page mini-site called US-CERT. The Computer Emergency Readiness Team is run by Homeland Security's National Cyber Security Division (NCSD) to help protect the internet's infrastructure.

The site runs the National Cyber Alert System to warn of current and emerging threats, along with advice to protect your PC. Official virus warnings are posted on the site and there's a mailing list available.

In keeping with government practice, the mailing list technology is a bit old fashioned by Web standards. The majordomo mailing list program requires a bit of copying and pasting code in confirmation emails, but it's not too hard. As we all know, there's the "right" way, the "wrong" way, and the Army's way.

National Cyber Alert System
http://www.us-cert.gov/

Norton Anti-virus
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/

McAfee Anti-virus
http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/alert.htm

Remember the havoc of MyDoom, that virus that messed up e-mail in February. I was getting kiloware bags of them every three hours, but rather than download them to my PC for my anti-virus program to kill, I simply deleted the emails on my ISP's server.

A small freeware program called "Email Remover" saved me time and the anxiety of something going wrong on my end. After you install and set up your e-mail info in ER, you can see the size, return addy, subject line, and attachment status of your e-mail on your internet service provider's server.

At that point nothing has been downloaded to your PC. You then can decide which e-mails to delete and afterwards you can use your regular e-mail program to fetch the messages you've left on the server.

Email Remover
http://email-remover.com/

Another hedge against a flood of spam and viruses getting into your PC is to use a free web-based email service with spam filtering. There are many to choose from, and using them is easy.

Good services have some sort of system-wide filter, as well as a way to ban certain addys, and/or a restictive option to only receive mail from stated addies. The better webmail sites will sort your incoming mail into the folders of your choice as they come in, but they all have storage limits, so watch the little meters they use to measure your mailbox storage.

After signing up, be sure to set your spam and junk mail filters. For starters try out one or more of these sites:

Yahoo.com
http://www.yahoo.com

Hotmail
http://www.hotmail.com

Canada.com
http://www.canada.com/email/index.html

Fastmail
http://www.fastmail.fm

MyWay.com
http://www.myway.com

Mail.com
http://www.mail.com/

Mail.com operates e-mail services for many websites, and you can sign up for any of their client's e-mail services on the mail.com site. It might appeal to your ego or vanity, and it is fun.

And a final item. Just when you thought it was safe to surf, along come deskbars. These are free applications that let you search the web without a browser. Yea, that's right. But, why would anyone want to do that?

Well, it's a pre-emptive strategy in anticipation of Microsoft's next operating system, which will embed their MSN web search into the desktop. Such a thing could put Google on the shelf alongside the Netscape browser.

Deskbar
http://toolbar.google.com/deskbar/

Google is definitely "white hat," but beware of such -bars from obscure places. They're most likely adware and spyware devices.

Glassine Surfer

I'd like to thank everyone who hunkered down and told me what they're looking for in this column. Without your e-mails, this column might be all-Hawaii, all the time, so thanks for keeping me on the straight and narrow.

You can relay your news, tips, notes, and comments to me online through a new GS page. "Stamp News Tips" makes it as easy as hitting "send" to express yourself.  

The Glassine Surfer
http://www.glassinesurfer.com/newstips.shtml

The Glassine Surfer archive is online along with other stories, help, and links to stamp collecting sites. We host the Sociable Stamp Society chats online on Sunday evenings at eight o’clock eastern. Just click on “chat.”

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