[Sca-cooks] Useful cyber-info

[Siegfried Heydrich]

    The following is clipped and forwarded from the NYT - enjoy!


Deflecting the Marketing Offensive
It's springtime, and you know what that means: E-Mail Abuse Season. (Of
course, summer, fall and winter are also E-Mail Abuse Seasons, but humor
me.)

So it's time once again to lay out the ways in which you can defend
yourself. Clip this column, save, and forward it to those you love (except
to the computer geniuses, of course, who already know this stuff).

Issue 1: Hoaxes

If it sounds alarming, urgent, or too good to be true, delete it at once.

One e-mail hoax asks your help in transferring $65 million from Nigeria to
the United States. Another claims that Congress is about to abolish the
National Endowment for the Arts. Then there's the Neiman-Marcus
cookie-recipe hoax, the Craig Shergold hoax (boy with leukemia wants
postcards) and about 50,000 different virus hoaxes. None are true.

Before you react to any of these, first look it up at www.snopes.com, a
massive, intelligent, fascinating compendium of urban legends, including
email hoaxes.

Issue 2: Spam

It's surprising how many people are unaware of the anti-junk-e-mail tools at
their disposal.

Spammers have automated software robots that scour every public Internet
message and Web page, automatically recording e-mail addresses they find.
That's why you should get yourself a second e-mail account (free at
hotmail.com or mac.com, for example). Use it exclusively for online
shopping, Web site and software registration, and newsgroup posting.
(Reserve a separate e-mail account for person-to-person e-mail.)

Never, ever respond to spam, even if the senders claim that they'll remove
you from the list if you do so! All you'll accomplish is getting yourself
flagged as a living, breathing sucker who actually reads the stuff. Your
e-mail address becomes that much more valuable to mailing-list sellers, and
you'll double the amount of spam you get.

Instead, use your e-mail program's anti-spam tools. In Outlook XP, for
example, you can add a junk sender to a list of blocked senders by
right-clicking a spam message and, from the shortcut menu, choose Junk
E-mail. In Outlook Express for Windows, highlight the message and, from the
Message menu, choose Block Sender.

Apple Mail for Mac OS X offers the most ingenious solution of all-a Bounce
to Sender command. It flings the e-mail right back at the low-life who sent
it to you, looking exactly as though your e-mail account has been
deactivated. Your name gets dropped from that list and any lists generated
from it.

Learn to use the E-Mail Rules or Message Rules feature in your e-mail
program, too. It's a great way to flag certain subject lines ("XXXXX,"
"FREE!," "Make money salting crackers at home!") as junk mail and have them
trashed before you even see them.

The Web is filled with other solutions -- spam-reporting services,
auto-blocking services, software programs -- but these simple tips can make
a huge dent in your spam quota.

A Related Pet Peeve: Pop-Under Ads

It's not enough for advertisers to put their banner ads at the top of every
Web page. Now we have to tolerate pop-up ads (in a separate window in front
of our browser) and pop-under ads (which lurk behind the browser window).
And yes, I'm aware that these ads pop up at NYTimes.com. I still find them
annoying.


The solution is easy enough: use anti-ad software like Guidescope
(www.guidescope.com, free) or AdSubtract Pro (www.adsubtract.com, $30). Not
only do they block almost all Web ads, but they make surfing the Web
noticeably faster (because you're not downloading ad graphics and
animations).

Now turn off the computer and go outside to play!


The Truth Will Set You Free.
        But First It Will Piss You Off.