At Your Fingertips...

A tip worth employing: Use Google to find a topic-specific search engine, then use that engine to locate the sites that are most applicable to your needs.

Tips for a Virus Attack

Call a PC guru and don't shut off your PC which could trigger the infection.
Disconnect your online connection.
Back up any new data, it might be your only chance. Try to clean it later.
Use another PC to learn about the virus.
Use anti-virus software to scan and clean. If not treatable, delete the file.
Brief your anti-virus software vendor, in case it's an new virus.

Same Rainbow, no Gold

Six or seven times a day, for at least the last six years, I have received various ridiculous "help me move my fortune from my third-world country" email letters. How can the same transparent tactics be employed more than 12,000 times unless there are legions of moron recipients who actually respond to such letters? How difficult can it be for full-faculty recipients to figure out that these bogus claims are perpetrated by career criminals in the world's cyber cafes where their thievery is largely untraceable? Did I miss an important announcement -- is the general level of intelligence dropping to new lows?

Your Online Activity is Monitored

Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters by Bill Tancer is a scary book! It "guides the reader through the search patterns among 10 million Internet users, challenging myths and making new discoveries about the psychology of consumers, illustrating that clicks speak louder than words and can reveal unspoken truths about individual drives that are not expressed via other forms of media."

In short, the book explains how your online activity can be captured by experts who can then determine you identity as well as nearly everything else about you! No Breathing Space for extensive web surfers.

BookMooch is

Here’s a Breathing Space idea worth pursuing! BookMooch is a community for exchanging used books. “BookMooch lets you give away books you no longer need in exchange for books you really want. Every time you give someone a book, you earn a point and can get any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch. Once you've read a book, you can keep it forever or put it back into BookMooch for someone else, as you wish.”

Now you have no excuse to hang on to stacks and stacks of books you’ll never touch!

Documenting Transgressions

Jennifer Saranow, writing in the Wall Street Journal, discusses how “bad parking, loud talking -- no transgression is too trivial to document online.” In some respects this can be socially beneficial, but too quickly, I fear, such postings represent the kind of over-information in which too many people are immersed. Moreover, where is the Breathing Space if everyone is a snoop?

Mega-Spam: No Breathing Space

The website ThisIsLondon.co.uk reports that “image spam” could bring the internet to a standstill. “At first, they seem like your average junk email, containing share tips or an advertisement for Viagra, along with a small, slightly garbled picture.But this, experts say, is the spam that could bring the internet to a virtual standstill this year.”

“To bypass anti-spam software, the emails use an image instead of text. In the past six months, this image spam has seen a massive increase and now represents 35 per cent of all junk email, according to security software firm F-Secure and image spam is taking up 70 per cent of the bandwidth bulge. The emails, generally containing stock tips, come from gangs and even bored teenagers in the United States and Russia trying to inflate prices in a swindle called ‘pump-and-dump’. They promise that a cheap, usually American, stock will take off. The perpetrator then dumps his stock as buyers leap in before it collapses.”

“Dmitri Allperovitch of computer security company CipherTrust said: ‘They're niche companies with no profit and no products, so when you see a spike from almost no trades to two or three million when the spam is sent out, you know there were a lot of people who fell for it.’” Is your PC a slave unit to such schemes?

Are you unwittingly passing bogus information to millions of other people?

The All-in-One Device Emerges

Apple announced the iPhone at its annual Macworld expo. Steve Jobs called the iPhone a "revolutionary mobile phone" that will feature an iPod, phone and "Internet communicator."

Old Email Never Dies

AP business writer Christopher Rugaber, in a recent article, observes that “U.S. companies will need to know more about where they store e-mails, instant messages and other electronic documents generated by their employees in the event they are sued, thanks to changes in federal rules that took effect Friday,” according to legal experts.

In other words: anything you ever email at work will be stored for evermore and may one day be used against you. “The changes, approved by the Supreme Court's administrative arm in April after a five-year review, require companies and other parties involved in federal litigation to produce ‘electronically stored information’ as part of discovery, the process by which both sides share evidence before a trial.”

A word to Breathing Space enthusiasts: if you write it and send it, your message will live on. So think twice before you hit “send.”

Surf Faster, Breathe Easier?

According to J.D. Power and Associates in their “2006 Internet Service Provider Residential Customer Satisfaction Study,” broadband has finally passed dial-up for Internet home access.

Some 56% of residential ISP customers subscribe to broadband, and 44% subscribe to dial-up. Will you use the time you save surfing to have more Breathing Space in other areas of your life?

The Fastest Route to Purchases

Do you go online to find out about products or services these days? Of course, what could be faster or easier. So, where do most web surfers obtain information on potential purchases? According to Hitwise.com, an online competitive intelligence service, Google is by far the top U.S. search engine in terms of driving visitors to shopping sites, accounting for 14.9% of visits.

Yahoo! Search was found to be the second most popular search engine, accounting for 4.7% of shopper visits, followed by MSN Search and a rapidly-gaining MySpace.

Stuffing Our in Bins

All that spam you’re getting? You are not alone. A Reuters report out of London says that “criminal gangs using hijacked computers are behind a surge in unwanted e-mails peddling sex, drugs and stock tips.”

According to Postini, a U.S. email security company spam messages have tripled since June and now account for nearly 90% of the e-mails sent worldwide. "E-mail systems are overloaded or melting down trying to keep up with all the spam," said Dan Druker, a vice president at Postini.

The Reuters report observes that “as Christmas approaches, the daily trawl through in-boxes clogged with offers of fake Viagra, loans and sex aids is tipped to take even longer.” Postini has detected a staggering 7 billion spam e-mails worldwide in November compared to 2.5 billion in June.

According to Spamhaus, an agency that tracks the problem, “About 200 illegal gangs are behind 80 percent of unwanted e-mails.

Reuters: Experts blame the rise in spam on computer programs that hijack millions of home computers to send e-mails. These "zombie networks", also called "botnets", can link 100,000 home computers without their owners' knowledge. They are leased to gangs who use their huge "free" computing power to send millions of e-mails with relative anonymity.

Overexposure

Katharine Herrup, writing in the New York Sun says, “Exhibitionism in America has always existed. But it has been particularly evident in the newer media. The degradations of Reality TV were pretty bad — before then, no one could imagine so many minutes of tears on television. But newer media are allowing people to further degrade themselves. MySpace and Friendster are the examples of sites that can be fun and useful, but can also be sorely abused and depressing. When 13- year-old girls promote their body measurements, as they do on such sites, something is wrong….”

Snooping Bosses

If you think your employer is checking your e-mail, Web searches and voice mail, You're probably right.

An Assault on Breathing Space

A study conducted by Commtouch indicates that most spam originates from websites hosted in countries outside the U.S. Pharmaceutical drugs are most advertised, with Viagra the leading the way.

The recipients of these largely unwanted messages are nearly all in the U.S. Meanwhile, despite filters and spaminators, the pace of spam is accelerating . The aggregate number of unique spam outbreaks per day has been rising for for more than five years.

100 Million Websites

CNN.com: There were just 18,000 Web sites when Netcraft, based in Bath, England, began keeping track in August of 1995. It took until May of 2004 to reach the 50 million milestone; then only 30 more months to hit 100 million, late in the month of October 2006.

Over-surfing as Medication

The U.S. could be rife with Internet addicts as clinically ill as alcoholics, an unprecedented study suggested. Based on a telephone survey, researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine concluded that more than one of every eight U.S. residents showed at least one sign of "problematic Internet use." The findings of this survey was consistent with those of previous, less rigorous studies.

The typical Internet addict appears to be a single, college-educated, white male in his 30s, who spends about 30 hours per week on non-essential computer use. Some people hide their Internet surfing, or go online to cure foul moods in ways that mirrored alcoholics using booze, using the Internet to “self-medicate."

The Right Tools, for the Right Job

Jerry Gitchel, president of Make Technology Work, explains the right tools for the right jobs for staying in touch with customers and associates.

* Instant Messaging from a computer or cell phone is best for a quick answer to a specific question.

* Telephone - best when used to brainstorm with others and for providing feedback on emotion and tone. It lacks the ability to archive or easily share info with a third party.

* Email - best for frequent non-urgent communications if you remember that they are not private. Easy to forward, lasts forever.

* The web - best when used to publish timeless information as desired, for current or future customers or associates.

* Audioconference - best for realtime communication and collaboration, enhanced when used with web-based documents.

* Online conferences - best when you need to add video capability to a group event. Lacks continuity between separate events.

* Online collaboration - best when used to create a comprehensive project management solution requiring document management, web publishing and/or support data, including images and video.

Exhibitionists Reign Supreme

In a world of too much competing for everyone’s attention, individually it’s harder to get noticed. This could explain why vast segments of the population have turned to online exhibitionism. Writing in the Washington Post, economist Robert J. Samuelson says, “ It turns out that the Internet has unleashed the greatest outburst of mass exhibitionism in human history.”

“Everyone may not be entitled, as Andy Warhol once suggested, to 15 minutes of fame. But everyone is entitled to strive for 15 minutes -- or 30, 90 or much more… This is no longer fringe behavior. MySpace has 56 million American "members." Facebook, which started as a site for college students and has expanded to high school students and others, has 9 million members. …YouTube, a site where anyone can post home videos, says 100 million videos are watched daily.”

Samuelson notes, and it’s hard to counter, that “People seem to crave popularity or celebrity more than they fear the loss of privacy.” However, “what goes on the Internet often stays on the Internet. Something that seems harmless, silly or merely impetuous today may seem offensive, stupid or reckless in two weeks, two years or two decades. Still, we are clearly at a special moment.”

Samuelson concludes by noting that “Henry David Thoreau famously remarked that ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ Thanks to technology, that's no longer necessary. People can now lead lives of noisy and ostentatious desperation. Or at least
they can try.”

The Catalog Blizzard

In any given year, catalog companies in the U.S. mail more than 19 billion catalogs, consuming almost four million tons of paper, despite wide-spread adoption and use of the Internet. Although the quality as well as availability of recycled paper has improved, the majority of catalogers, among them J. Crew, J.C. Penney, and L.L. Bean, continue to use solely virgin paper. What a waste, for everyone and everything.

More Web, Less TV

Technology 'optimists' turn off TV
By Paul Bond

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Broadband Internet surfers in North America watch two fewer hours of television per week that do those without Internet access, while those using a dial-up connection watch 1.5 fewer hours of TV.

The data come from a Forrester Research study released Tuesday that uses what it calls the longest-running survey of its kind, counting nearly 69,000 people in the U.S. and Canada as participants.

Broadband Internet users watch just 12 hours of TV per week, compared with 14 hours for those who are offline, according to the study, "The State of Consumers and Technology: Benchmark 2005." Forrester also predicts that the number of broadband households in the U.S., which already soared to 31 million at the end of last year from 2.6 million in 1999, will swell to 71.4 million by 2010.

While its conclusion that Internet usage detract from other media is not new, the study delves deeper than others, separating consumers into various categories, including technology "optimists" and "pessimists" and "tenured nomadic networkers."

While newspapers and magazines also suffer a bit from Internet competition, radio and video games do not, the study concludes. "Online media attracts technology optimists in droves," says the report, noting that they are three times more likely to use streaming media and peer-to-peer file sharing and read blogs as are their pessimistic counterparts. Optimists play video games, read magazines and listen to the radio more than do pessimists, while pessimists watch more television.

Too Much Email of the Wrong Kind

50 billion e-mail messages worldwide are sent each day, equal to seven messages for everyone on the planet, although the vast majority of people are not online. In 2001, e-mail traffic was less than 12 billion.

Of the 50 billion messages sent daily, more than 88% cent of e-mails are spam including about 1 per cent which are virus-infected. So that means at least 44 billion spam messages are sent each day, 365 days a year, and each day 4.4 billion e-mail messages contain viruses. Has junk email become an issue for you? It’s time to arm yourself to the teeth with with spam protection, virus protection, and a private email account.

Time Wasted on the Job

According to an online survey conducted by AOL and Salary.com, workers waste more than two hours a day on average by surfing the Web, conducting personal business, chatting with co-workers,and just zoning out.

A Trip to the WELL

What is The WELL? The WELL describes itself as a gathering place like no other: uninhibited, intelligent, and iconoclastic. For more than twenty years, The WELL has been a trail stop for thinkers from all walks of life.

The people who frequent this place include artists, programmers, journalists, educators, and others who engage in discussion, swap information, and express their convictions, and who greet their friends in the famous online forums known as WELL Conferences. Is the WELL for you?