Coffs Ex-Services Computer Club

Five minutes into the last computer club meeting, I was in the process of showing somebody a website distributing some software for running a library, and found myself instead showing them a web page telling us that we weren't permitted to access this site because it was in the blocked category of "freeware/software downloads".

Max said that he'd earlier had a similar problem while trying to show somebody an auction site. I tested this out and sure enough eBay, et. al. were similarly inaccesible because they fall in the blocked category of "auction sites".

The club has installed web content filtering "censorware" on the gateway between it's local network and the outside world. As a club member, I'm appalled by this for a number of reasons:

• censorware doesn't work to significantly reduce IT security risks
• censorware is an attack on freedom of thought and expression, and is morally wrong, regardless of how well it does or doesn't work

Of course this makes running a computer club from within the club's network practically impossible. Or rather it would if circumventing the censorware hadn't been ten minutes work.

In principle however, it is outrageous that an organisation with a commmunity service mission should opt to control the behaviour of it's members and staff using techniques favoured by brutal dictatorships.

In the first part of this article, which I stress reflects my own personal opinions and not those of the Coffs Ex-Services Computer Club as a whole, I will go into detail about how and why censorware doesn't work as a solution to percieved IT security problems that arise from unrestricted access to the Web.

In future posts, I shall examine the ineffectiveness of censorship as a solution to low employee productivity, why it shouldn't be used even if it was effective, and outline a few of the multitude of trivially easy censorware circumvention techniques.

I'm possibly the worst email writer in the world. That's not to say that I can't spell or string a sentence together; the problem is that I do these things with altogether too much enthusiasm. An email to a client telling them that I've completed some simple little task can run to pages, covering the process in exacting detail, with numerous digressions, humorous asides, and one or two mini-dissertations on the fascinating history of the technologies employed. After enough fastidious revision and style-checking to make Jane Austen look like Jack Kerouac, I finally hit the "Send" button in time to clock in at least twice as much time spent on the email as on the work that was it's subject.

For people sufferring this debilitating fascination with the sound of their own voice in print, Wired Magazine's How-to Wiki has a useful guide on writing a prefect email. Keep it brief, give your reader some context, something to act on, and a deadline, and you'll be saving your acquaintances a lot of time and bewilderment.

Ever wondered what became of those protocols you once used? Gopher, finger... It got me thinking so I did a search...didn't find to much, you could say they are extinct.

For those who want a trip down memory lane go to floodgap. It boasts the only working Veronica-2 server left on the planet for seaching gopher sites.

For anybody who, like me, is running a computer five years or more old, every software upgrade is accompanied by a fear that increased system requirements will render your computer so sluggish as to be practically useless. This list of Firefox 2 configuration tweaks includes a few tips to help you wring another year or two out of your old hardware.

Unless I'm very much mistaken, I have received my first ever piece of spam masquerading as a mailing list reminder.

I've never been to this website associated with the email, much less subscribed to a list. A little bit of investigating shows that although this company has a mailing list server, it has (at the time of writing) no actual lists configured. A quick whois query revealed that the owner of the sell-my-stuff.com domain is a company called NH Web Host (who I won't reward by linking to their site), and the domain administrative contact address is baconda@nhwebhost.net.

You should never put an undisguised email address on a public website, as that email address will be harvested by spam bots, and will shortly receive a greatly increased amount of spam. Whoops.

This is a quick guide to uploading files, for example to a static web site, using Secure Copy Protocol (SCP) and WinSCP.

For more comprehensive information, see the official WinSCP documentation.

The New York TImes isn't the first to notice that businesses are vetting prospective employees via Google. Personally, I think if you're shocked that a) what you've said on the Web (as opposed to email, instant messaging, etc.) isn't private, or b) an employer would use what you've said against you, you're probably not bright enough to qualify for the position you've applied for anyway. If you're not comfortable loudly declaring something in front of your friends, relatives, and prospective employers, think twice about publishing it for all to see on the Web.

Anyway,  I'm just off to update my personal site to enhance my employment prospects: "Hello, I'm a mindless drone. This is my home page. I have to go back to work now."

This month's IEEE Spectrum has an article entitled "Death by DMCA", which is a good overview of all the useful things you can't do because of laws drafted at the behest of the old media middlemen.

So if you're tired of not being able to play that major label album in your car stereo, or view that Hollywood DVD on your computer, why not legally download an album from Jamendo, or the visually stunning and bewilderingly surreal short film "Elephant's Dream". If you like them, share them with your friends.

"Net Neutrality" is the principle that all data sent across the Internet should be given the same priority.  That is, the Internet doesn't care whether a particular chunk of data is part of an email, a web page, or a TV show. Telecommunications companies don't like this idea; they want to be able to charge premium rates for priority delivery of certain types of data, and are opposing proposed US legislation to guarantee net neutrality.

The major problem with this plan is that you never know what the Internet may be used for in the future. For example, the technologies that underly the Internet were developed long before the World Wide Web, never mind streaming multimedia.  If you optimise the Internet for the purposes it is currently being used for, you will almost certainly be de-optimising it for useful applications not yet developed.

Inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee summarises the consequenses of this thus:

"Anyone that tries to chop [the Web] into two will find that their piece looks very boring."

Want to know more about net neutrality? Why not ask a ninja? 

BBC News warns of three newly-discovered bugs in Internet Explorer, two of which can enable others to take control of your computers.  Microsoft won't be issuing a fix for these vulnerabilities until April 11, as they claim they are "limited in scope".  Well, they're certainly limited in comparison to the effect of the bug in Mozilla Firefox which can cause your fiancee to break up with you.  Now that's a showstopper.