One of the things that constantly amazes me, is that people are so quick to blame Internet banking and E-commerce systems for any small issue that comes out, but these same people will install just about anything with flashy banners that appears in a web page add, and they will run anything that arrives in an e-mail, and many of them have never heard of Windows Update and don’t run an anti-virus program.

The last such item that appeared on the TV news here, was about a guy that had $6000 taken from his bank account. When it was looked into, they found a Trojan horse program installed on his machine, and that malicious program was the reason his banking details were stolen. What amazed me even more, was that the bank actually gave him back the money, even though it was his own ignorance that caused the problem in the first place. It had nothing to do with the bank at all.

If you use your computer for Online banking or E-commerce, and you run Windows without anti-virus, all patches and a anti-spyware program (or two), then you WILL eventually have your details stolen, and probably money as well. And it will be your fault. (And arguably Microsoft’s, and the malicious programmers writing this stuff.)

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Wired has an interesting story, the premise of which is that the blogging boom is starting to cost people their jobs. In the past 10 years, being caught with an e-mail you wrote which commented unfavourably on your boss or the company was probably the equivalent of this new problem. The companies in the story, primarily Delta and Microsoft, both fired employee’s based on images posted to their personal blogs.

So folks, if you plan on posting work related images on your blog, you might want to rethink it, or spend lots of time writing a .htaccess file that blocks your works IP’s from viewing your site, and probably stop search engines from spidering it as well.

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This tool enables network admins to roll out Firefox across a network of machines, just like you can with Microsoft’s stuff. Very handy.
The reasons for continuing to use IE are quickly running out.
See http://firefox.dbltree.com for more.

Franki

In what should be a surprise to nobody, a judge ruled yesterday that “the ‘good faith’ test under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was subjective, not objective”.

What that means in essence, is that a fair suspicion of copyright infringement is enough to demand a site remove content. But in the print world, actual proof of infringement is required. This is great news for shady types, as they should be able to get their competitors into trouble just by claiming they have infringing content on their site and then come up with a reasonable sounding reason for thinking they might have.

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For those of us that choose not to use any part of the Microsoft Virus Transport System, (henceforth to be known as Outlook, Outlook Express, Internet Explorer and Internet Information Services.) We sometimes are forced to deal with Outlook users that can’t seem to stop themselves from using RTF (Rich Text Format) files. Microsoft had an ugly habit of encoding the E-mail in a TNEF archive. TNEF is a proprietary format that non Microsoft E-mail clients can’t read, and so all we see is an attachment called Winmail.dat.

After finding myself in that unfortunate position last night, I decided to find out what I could do about it. I’m a big fan and user of Mozilla Thunderbird and it doesn’t understand Winmail.dat files any more then any other non MS program. Fortunately, help is at hand and I will now give a brief detail on how I got Thunderbird to give me my attachments and not just the winmail.dat file. (For a better option for Thunderbird users, see the update down the bottom “Lookout”)

First step is to head over to http://www.fentun.com/ and download the fentun.exe file. It says it’s only for Win95/NT, but it works great on both my Win98 and WinXP machines. Save that file somewhere, I just put it in my program files directory (c:Program Files).
Next step is to open Thunderbird and find an email with a Winmail.dat file, and upon finding it, double click on it, (the winmail.dat file I mean.) A “Opening Winmail.dat” box will pop up, and you should select “Open with” and click on browse, then simply browse to wherever you saved fentun.exe and select it. Be sure you tick the checkbox that says “Do this automatically for files like this from now on”.

That’s it, from then on, double clicking on a Winmail.dat file in Thunderbird will automatically open Fentun which will show you what files are in the archive and offer you an “extract” button. Just extract the file in question and bobs your uncle.

It seems like every time Microsoft comes up with another method to try and lock users into using their products, someone comes along and gives away a tool that allows us to get around it. Isn’t the Internet great? One day when I get lots of free time, (it could happen) I’d like to write a Thunderbird extension to automatically and transparently handle TNEF files, but don’t hold your breath as I’m way to busy to take on another project right now.
This little article is specific to Thunderbird (and Mozilla mail) but people with Eudora, Pegasus or any other non Microsoft e-mail clients will get Winmail.dat attachments too and the same process will apply to them as well. Fentun will work with any E-mail client that can call external programs to handle attachments, (pretty much all of them).

INSERT for THUNDERBIRD USERS There is a new extension under development called (appropriately enough) Lookout and it’s purpose is to integrate a Tnef reader into Thunderbird so it need not be an external application like Fentun. So for Thunderbird users at least, winmail is no longer a pain.

Blog is one of the “top ten” words being looked up and has been added to the dictionary. I am not sure if that is necessarily a good thing, and I am not sure the definition is even accurate at this point as many blogs are no longer simply personal (ours being a perfect example). I was reading the other day about the “blogoshere” and I see that is now on the verge of being a word as well. Is there just one blogosphere (as the article I was reading suggested) or are there many blogospheres (more like biomes or ecosystems)?

In the BBC breakfast new was some advice on how to deal with the latest scam in which a computer user’s Internet dialler is diverted to a premium rate or international number.

Amongst the list of advice was to consider changing your web browser and that a popular new browser is Firefox, which is less susceptible to security threats than Internet Explorer!

Also pointing out that Firefox uses a pop-up blocker with will prevent most rogue diallers from loading. So Firefox is getting noticed.

Hazel