Blog for "the-enabler" of the letsnet.org network

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"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."-- Aldous Huxley

As the prostitute said, "It's not the work, it's the stairs." As told to me by Elaine Stritch, star of stage, screen, & TV, right after she won her 1st Emmy. Ago 79.

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messenger virus:

W32/Kelvir and W32/Sumom-A:

right now it's just hitting Microsoft's IM but if it can work there it can work on Yahoo and anyone else IM. How it work, well for what I know right now don't click on any "clickable" links in a Messenger window, unless you really feel safe on it or the person.

More info from the web:


Worms threat to instant messaging


Two instant messaging worms that affect MSN Messenger and Windows Messenger are in the wild.

They have been detected by various anti-virus software companies and are classed as "medium risk" by the industry-backed instant messaging body IMLogic.

W32/Kelvir and W32/Sumom-A have both been spreading since the beginning of the week, said IMLogic, which is backed by the likes of Microsoft, AOL, Symantec, Sophos and Yahoo.

Users infect themselves and others by opening a .pif file via a link in a malicious message that contains the worm.

The increasing number of hackers targeting instant messaging programmes from the likes of Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo, is adding to pressure on organisations to block instant messaging programs on their networks altogether.

Microsoft issued a patch last month against a different vulnerability in its MSN Messenger and Windows Messenger systems.

Just one third of British companies give staff access to instant messaging, according to a recently published study for Telewest Business by the Manchester Business School.

So, for now I'm not going to stop useing my Yahoo messenger but I'm thinking twice before clicking on a link



MY ADVICE endeavors at keen.com. The number is 1-800-275-5336 (800-ask-keen) + ext. 0329063 for tech stuff, 0329117 for running a small business, and 0329144 on investing. Want to CHAT, I use Yahoo's IM as the_web_ster. View me in the Friends & Family part of webcamnow.com, just click on "view cams", then in the Java window click on WebcamNow Communities drop down arrow & select Friends & Family. Under the live webcams look for & click on me "the_webster".

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"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."-- Aldous Huxley

As the prostitute said, "It's not the work, it's the stairs." As told to me by Elaine Stritch, star of stage, screen, & TV, right after she won her 1st Emmy. Ago 79.

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Six Month Rating: 94%
Pre Sales information:92%
Install Co-ordination:92%
Connection reliability:97%
Tech Support:95%
Services:97%
Value for money:94%
More rating stats..

SONIC.NET (san francisco(CA) oakland(CA) santa rosa(CA) )

Pluses: "Great service", "Quick, easy, self-install. no hang-ups during the process.", "Information provided, installation instructions, speed of installation", "Everything", "easy install, no problems", "Excellent instructions, tech support,, and ease of getting DSL installed.", "Ordering, installing and using have been so easy, I wish I had done it earlier.", "Service is good", "Nice feature set for network geeks", "None",
Minuses: "None", "Nothing", "promotional price will end after 1 year", "Price will go up after 1 year.", "Billing", "Installation can be painful", "No high speed, Rude Customer Service, Delayed Refund",
Bottom Lines: "Great service and knowledgeable techs.", "Dynamite speed & service for the price.", "They made it easy even for a relative computer ignoramus like me.", "A very satisfied customer", "highly recommended", "An excellent customer oriented company to do business with.", "Billing Frauds", "Not perfect, but a decent value.", "Waste of My Time"



MY ADVICE endeavors at keen.com. The number is 1-800-275-5336 (800-ask-keen) + ext. 0329063 for tech stuff, 0329117 for running a small business, and 0329144 on investing. Want to CHAT, I use Yahoo's IM as the_web_ster. View me in the Friends & Family part of webcamnow.com, just click on "view cams", then in the Java window click on WebcamNow Communities drop down arrow & select Friends & Family. Under the live webcams look for & click on me "the_webster".

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"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."-- Aldous Huxley

As the prostitute said, "It's not the work, it's the stairs." As told to me by Elaine Stritch, star of stage, screen, & TV, right after she won her 1st Emmy. Ago 79.

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What you need is a power back up sys. And they are call UPS(something Power Supply, I think). But more inportant than what UPS stand for is that you know that it's a power back up sys. Take a look even if you're not interested in VoIP. You may very well want to think about having a back up for power outages so that whatever you're working on on your computer you won't lose it if there is a power outage.

Take a look

Then go forth and learn of what you should or should not have. And of course you can always call me.



MY ADVICE endeavors at keen.com. The number is 1-800-275-5336 (800-ask-keen) + ext. 0329063 for tech stuff, 0329117 for running a small business, and 0329144 on investing. Want to CHAT, I use Yahoo's IM as the_web_ster. View me in the Friends & Family part of webcamnow.com, just click on "view cams", then in the Java window click on WebcamNow Communities drop down arrow & select Friends & Family. Under the live webcams look for & click on me "the_webster".

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"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."-- Aldous Huxley

As the prostitute said, "It's not the work, it's the stairs." As told to me by Elaine Stritch, star of stage, screen, & TV, right after she won her 1st Emmy. Ago 79.

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Internet Calling Rocks!

Michael Desmond, PC World

My name is Michael Desmond, and I am an Internet phone-aholic.

About a year ago, I started looking into Net-based telephony services that let you place and receive phone calls over a cable or DSL modem connection. I didn't mean to turn my life upside down. I certainly didn't intend to drag half a dozen friends and family members into my alternative, digital lifestyle. But that's the way it turned out. Today, I am a man without a traditional landline.

And you know something? It's not that bad.


Consumer voice over IP services started springing up a few years ago, tapping into the growing number of homes connected to the Internet by fast broadband connections. Sign up with a VoIP(Voice over the Internet provider) service provider, and you get a little box that plugs into your cable modem or broadband router. That box talks over the Internet to the VoIP provider's servers, which in turn link to the public switched telephone network to connect calls to traditional landline and cellular phones. Plug a regular phone into your VoIP box and you get a dial tone, just like traditional phone service.

I first ran across VoIP thanks to my brother-in-law, who signed on with the Vonage service for his small business. His tale ended badly--more on that later--but I was hooked. Lured by the promise of sharply lower phone bills and powerful, Web-based controls, I decided to ditch my Verizon local and long-distance phone service in favor of Vonage, starting with my home-office phone.

One look at the math sealed the deal: My monthly phone bills were running about $75, but Vonage at the time was offering a 500-minute local and long distance dialing plan for $29.95 a month. It was a deal I couldn't refuse.

Risk Versus Reward

But moving from traditional phone service to VoIP can be like a North Korean refugee stepping into an American supermarket. There are so many choices that the mind simply boggles. Dozens of companies--many of them tiny startups--offer similar VoIP packages and equipment. Among the providers are Broadvox Direct, BroadVoice, Verizon VoiceWing, VoicePulse, and Vonage. At first glance, it can be tough to tell them apart. More important, it can be difficult to tell which services are reliable and which may be trouble.

And there's the rub: VoIP may be inexpensive, innovative, and just plain cool, but it can be a risk. Over the first six months, my Vonage calls at times produced annoying echoes, experienced momentary dropouts, and even suffered outages lasting up to 15 minutes. My uptime was still somewhere north of 95 percent, but compared to the always-on nature of traditional landlines, those wrinkles can be a shock.

My advice? If you're considering VoIP but are nervous, go with the larger providers. Vonage has the most subscribers by far, while AT&T CallVantage and Verizon VoiceWing are backed by established telecom giants.

Now, there is no guarantee that bigger is better, and glitches may be due to your cable or DSL service rather than the VoIP provider (and remember, if you go with VoIP, those multi-day cable outages could translate to multi-day phone outages). But at least bigger companies should stick around for the long haul. Smaller players, by contrast, could fold their tents or be bought out, possibly landing you in phone limbo.

If you just want to save a buck--and VoIP is all about savings at this stage--the best deals are with the so-called pure plays. Smaller VoIP specialists like Lingo and Packet8 sling all-you-can-eat local and long distance dialing for $20 a month or less. Some, like Lingo and BroadVoice, offer unlimited dialing to select countries for the same amount. Shop around, compare plans, and look for deals that can score you a free month of service or reduced rates for an introductory period.

A Tricky Business

If there's one thing I learned in my VoIP travels, it's that the technology makes the most reliable and simple appliance in your home--the phone--more complex. Over the months, I've updated firmware, moved around my telephony adapter, and noodled with configuration options. I've learned not to trust the Vonage simultaneous ring feature (which is supposed to route a single call to multiple phone numbers if I am on the move), and to occasionally reboot the adapter to avoid connection problems.

The good news is that VoIP adapters are getting better. Early models often struggled when connected directly to a modem, becoming confused by frequent port scans and other traffic from the Internet. Placing the modem behind a broadband router fixed the instability for me, but wiped out the useful Quality of Service features in the box that give voice traffic highest priority. Today, VoIP providers ship devices that combine a broadband router and analog telephony adapter in a single box.

Still, problems can persist. I know two people who have received Linksys adapters that suffer from an annoying background noise problem. One has already swapped out his device twice, yet cannot shake the line noise that makes calls hard to bear. He's likely to switch back to a landline after the embittering experience.

Other issues may also arise. Many users can transfer their current phone number to their VoIP account, a process called Line Number Portability. But the process is imperfect. A neighbor who switched both his home and office lines had one number switch through in two weeks, while the second took four times as long. My brother-in-law finally dropped his Vonage service after waiting on the transfer for months. The reality is that your mileage can, and probably will, vary.

Me? I was one of the lucky ones. My line numbers ported quickly, and I was able to solve my performance woes by upgrading a four-year-old cable modem. Since then, I haven't noticed a single issue.

In fact, the sailing was so smooth, I convinced my wife to switch our home line over to Vonage back in August. It's been a savings bonanza ever since. Thanks to an ongoing price war, Vonage today charges $24.95 for unlimited local and long distance dialing. We are saving about $100 every month on our combined phone bill, and I am totally hooked.

Michael Desmond is a freelance technology writer based in Vermont.
END

Just remember a couple of things. First,your putting more of your eggs in one basket, your ISP, and two if your power goes out and you don't own a cell phone your Line-phone is not going to work. You'll have no light and not way to call anyone to find out why.



MY ADVICE endeavors at keen.com. The number is 1-800-275-5336 (800-ask-keen) + ext. 0329063 for tech stuff, 0329117 for running a small business, and 0329144 on investing. Want to CHAT, I use Yahoo's IM as the_web_ster. View me in the Friends & Family part of webcamnow.com, just click on "view cams", then in the Java window click on WebcamNow Communities drop down arrow & select Friends & Family. Under the live webcams look for & click on me "the_webster".

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"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."-- Aldous Huxley

As the prostitute said, "It's not the work, it's the stairs." As told to me by Elaine Stritch, star of stage, screen, & TV, right after she won her 1st Emmy. Ago 79.

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Well, if you've listen to me and not use your ISP for email, and just used your ISP to "Get to the Net", you can look around without being afraid to move. And that's what I do and my contract with Yahoo/SBC was up last month and I'd been looking around mostly at Sonic.net. But I let my contract run out to see what would happen. And then I got my first off contact bill, $26.95 went to $49.95. I called and went NUTS on them, and found that if I'd sign up for another 1 yr. contract I could have the $26.95 back and a credit for the differance for last months bill. I went NUTS again.
I called my cable co. and talked to a manager I know there. Their deal was not as good on price, or on time. Three month at $19.95 and after that 49.95. My dreams were starting to darken. I called Sonic.net and found that thier $24.95 was only good with a one year contract and after that $49.95.
I thought I was going to tell ya'll that Sonic.net was the place to move to but NOT SO. After somemore homework I've taken SBC deal for anyother year and glad I had it to go to.
The homework goes on and I'll talk more as things change, but as of this writing is that all we may have in a year is $49.95 a month for the slowest of DSL. Keep your fingers crossed.




MY ADVICE endeavors at keen.com. The number is 1-800-275-5336 (800-ask-keen) + ext. 0329063 for tech stuff, 0329117 for running a small business, and 0329144 on investing. Want to CHAT, I use Yahoo's IM as the_web_ster. View me in the Friends & Family part of webcamnow.com, just click on "view cams", then in the Java window click on WebcamNow Communities drop down arrow & select Friends & Family. Under the live webcams look for & click on me "the_webster".

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"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."-- Aldous Huxley

As the prostitute said, "It's not the work, it's the stairs." As told to me by Elaine Stritch, star of stage, screen, & TV, right after she won her 1st Emmy. Ago 79.

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The All-New Netscape Is Potentially Useful, But Has Design Flaws(and what doesn't these day)

Netscape, the browser that dominated the Web in the 1990s until Microsoft's Internet Explorer took over, has faded into obscurity since it was acquired by America Online in 1998.( and it my belief that it is spyware)

But AOL is hoping for a Netscape comeback, starting today. The company is releasing a beta, or prerelease, version of an all-new edition of the storied browser, called Netscape 8.0. This new Netscape, which works only on Windows ( which I'm looking into leaving as my OS[apple Mac Mine]), sports some unusual features designed to help bolster security and compatibility on the Web.

I've been testing the new Netscape for a week or so, and consider it an interesting and potentially useful product. But it has some design drawbacks, and only time will tell how well it works.

Netscape 8.0 is based on Firefox, the open-source browser that lately has become a hot challenger to Internet Explorer. Like Firefox, and earlier versions of Netscape, the 8.0 version uses tabbed browsing, which allows multiple Web pages to be open in a single window, each identified by a tab.

But the new Netscape looks and works quite differently from Firefox. It adds two major new features. First, Netscape rates every Web site for trustworthiness. This includes whether the site is genuine, and not a fake created by crooks for so-called "phishing" schemes; and whether it can be trusted not to secretly load spyware or other malicious programs onto your PC.

Secondly, Netscape has the capability to render a Web page in two ways: as Firefox would present it or as Internet Explorer would. This is useful because some Web sites don't work properly in Firefox and rely upon special features available only through Internet Explorer. With the new Netscape, you can see the Internet Explorer version of a page without launching Internet Explorer.

If a site is considered trustworthy, Netscape automatically renders it using the Internet Explorer method, for maximum compatibility. Internet Explorer's method for rendering Web pages opens security vulnerabilities that Firefox's doesn't. Netscape figures that, at trusted sites, it's OK to take that risk.

On the other hand, if Netscape isn't sure about the trustworthiness of a site, it uses the Firefox method for rendering the pages, which is safer but might have compatibility issues.

If a site is believed to be dangerous, Netscape 8.0 puts up a special page with a huge warning that it's a security risk. Users still can load the dangerous site, but at their own peril.

Netscape bases its trustworthiness ratings on "white lists" of good sites and "black lists" of bad sites compiled by others. At the moment, it is using only AOL's own lists, which are extensive. But it is negotiating with other list vendors. It expects the ratings to cover what it calls the "top" 1,000 sites on the Web.

In my tests, this system worked pretty well. Major Web sites I tried displayed a green shield symbol in their tabs, indicating they were trusted. Sites Netscape didn't know about had a yellow shield. Several known spyware sites I tried generated the scary warning pages.

Users can turn off the trustworthiness rating system or they can override it, deciding on their own which sites to trust, and which they want to view via Firefox and which via Internet Explorer.

So what are the drawbacks? Well, the security system adds a layer of complexity to the browser. Users now have to pay attention to the colored shields, and they may get scared away from some good sites that just don't happen to have been rated by Netscape. For instance, in my tests, two popular sites devoted to new gadgets, Gizmodo and Engadget, came up with yellow shields.

And, of course, the ratings are only as good as their authors. Digital criminals may be able to fool or outrun the compilers of the lists Netscape relies on, and thus attack users lulled into a false sense of security by the color shields. It might be safer to simply use Firefox regularly in order to avoid Internet Explorer's vulnerabilities, launching Internet Explorer only in the few instances where sites absolutely require it.

Netscape 8.0 also has problems unrelated to its security features. I found its user interface dense and cluttered. The toolbars are packed with annoying boxes containing scrolling text, objects Netscape calls "widgets." These display automatically updated news headlines and weather forecasts.

Adding to the clutter are built-in search boxes for shopping and yellow pages. Some of these things are built into the browser because AOL makes money when you click on them.

You can delete these irritating toolbar objects, but that takes effort. It would have been better if Netscape had followed the lead of Firefox, and of Apple Computer's Safari browser, in presenting a clean, spare look.

Finally, I found the browser to be slow, and somewhat prone to crashes. This is probably due to its beta status, and it's something AOL pledges to fix, along with some other problems, such as the fact that only eight tabs for Web pages can be visible at once, compared with dozens in Firefox.

Netscape 8.0 is a good idea, and it will be a boon for some users. But it needs work, and its real effectiveness won't be known until it's clear just how good its trust rankings are.( Eazier to just go to a safer puter like the apple mini, I think. And for $500.00 plus your old keyboard and mouse and monitor[of which I have tons of] you've got a footprint of Just 6.5 inches square and 2 inches tall. And no you can't get in it, and for me a puter that I can't get into would make me do some more inportant things I should be doing. Right B?


MY ADVICE endeavors at keen.com. The number is 1-800-275-5336 (800-ask-keen) + ext. 0329063 for tech stuff, 0329117 for running a small business, and 0329144 on investing. Want to CHAT, I use Yahoo's IM as the_web_ster. View me in the Friends & Family part of webcamnow.com, just click on "view cams", then in the Java window click on WebcamNow Communities drop down arrow & select Friends & Family. Under the live webcams look for & click on me "the_webster".

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"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."-- Aldous Huxley

As the prostitute said, "It's not the work, it's the stairs." As told to me by Elaine Stritch, star of stage, screen, & TV, right after she won her 1st Emmy. Ago 79.

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So, this entry is on both investing and tech. Link, to companies that support spyware by investing in them. And having you do the same. You can fight back if you make a decision to NEVER buy from companies that use these deceptive practices to sell their produsts. Go take a look at just a partial list of the advertisers who do so, by going to that "link" above.



MY ADVICE endeavors at keen.com. The number is 1-800-275-5336 (800-ask-keen) + ext. 0329063 for tech stuff, 0329117 for running a small business, and 0329144 on investing. Want to CHAT, I use Yahoo's IM as the_web_ster. View me in the Friends & Family part of webcamnow.com, just click on "view cams", then in the Java window click on WebcamNow Communities drop down arrow & select Friends & Family. Under the live webcams look for & click on me "the_webster".

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"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."-- Aldous Huxley

As the prostitute said, "It's not the work, it's the stairs." As told to me by Elaine Stritch, star of stage, screen, & TV, right after she won her 1st Emmy. Ago 79.

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Happy Easter!!! And yes I checked out by using my free Opera browser to open it, no bad cookies.

MY ADVICE endeavors at keen.com. The number is 1-800-275-5336 (800-ask-keen) + ext. 0329063 for tech stuff, 0329117 for running a small business, and 0329144 on investing. Want to CHAT, I use Yahoo's IM as the_web_ster. View me in the Friends & Family part of webcamnow.com, just click on "view cams", then in the Java window click on WebcamNow Communities drop down arrow & select Friends & Family. Under the live webcams look for & click on me "the_webster".