Senior Women Web > Money & Computing

The *Scout Report has unearthed another new service using maps and connecting news:

The explosion of geospatial computer applications and their ilk has been exciting in recent years. The MetaCarta company recently created the GeoSearchNews site, and it's one that visitors may find themselves spending a bit of time with while online. The site pulls news stories from a wide range of sources, geocodes them appropriately, and then allows users to view the locations on an interactive map. Users can type in a location and zoom in on a range of recent news articles and stories. Using the search engine, visitors can also specify their date range and their general region of interest. Currently, visitors can look all over the globe, and the site also includes a FAQ section for general consultation.

Computer Science Department, University of Wisconsin; Sponsored by University of Wisconsin - Madison Libraries.

On Facebook Forever? Why the Networking Site was Right to Change its Deletion Policies, And Why Its Current Policies Still Pose Privacy Risks

Has Facebook become like the Hotel California, where "you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave"? Until recently, that was how it felt to Facebook users who wanted to remove themselves, but found the process was neither quick nor straightforward.

Facebook used the term "deactivate" in its privacy policy, and "deactivation," it turned out, was not the same as deletion. Instead, Facebook would keep material stored in case users later wanted to reactivate their accounts. Thus, the site reportedly warned users that "[r]emoved information may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time," and "[e]ven after removal, copies of user content may remain viewable."

In light of recent criticisms in the blogosphere, however, Facebook has wisely changed its policy. It now allows users to remove themselves and their data from Facebook with a single email request.

In this column, I will examine Facebook's prior policy, and analyze whether it was legal. I will also consider other facets of Facebook's data retention and privacy policies. Finally, I will argue that users need to be more cautious about signing up for social networking sites because, on such sites, their privacy cannot be fully guaranteed.

Online Game Playing

Sleuth

"Sleuth is an open-ended, detective role playing game (RPG) where you solve mysteries by searching for clues, questioning suspects and interviewing witnesses. Every mystery is unique with different victims, suspects and clues. All mysteries are solvable, in fact there are always two ways to solve any single mystery, but player skill and a small amount of luck are necessary to nab the guilty suspect."

Sleuth contains literary violence and mildly suggestive themes. It is intended for players 13 years of age and older.

Editor's Note: Our oldest daughter, who has been game playing for years online, recommended this game. Here's one site's description and critique of the game:

Hypothetical Software’s current product, Sleuth, is a detective noir themed on-line game. Sleuth is an open-ended, detective role-playing game (RPG) where the player solves mysteries by searching for clues, questioning suspects and interviewing witnesses.

Future products include Sleuth II. The design and features of this product will be heavily based on feedback from Hypothetical Software’s existing clients. The sequel will share the same core theme and premise as the existing Sleuth product, but the user interface will be much more visually inter¬active and feel more like a video game and less like a text based website. Compared to the existing product, this sequel will be more widely marketed, appeal to a broader segment of game players and support a higher subscription fee structure.

Another blog's entry about the game:

The interesting feature on this game is that besides questioning game characters and inspecting crime scenes you can, join secret societies, acquire town contacts or even travel two other countries.

The down catch on having a free account are:

A player can only solve 4 cases per day
A player cannot enrol[e] in an agency

Just What is a Captcha and a re-Captcha?

You've been asked to identify the letters/numbers displayed to connect with email, enter a contest or just pass a barrier in order to complete as task on the Internet.

For example, humans can read distorted text as the one shown below but current computer programs can't:

CAPTCHAs have several applications for practical security, including (but not limited to):

Online Polls. Can the result of any online poll be trusted? Not unless the poll requires that only humans can vote.

Free Email Services. Several companies (Yahoo!, Microsoft, etc.) offer free email services. Most of these suffer from a specific type of attack: "bots" that sign up for thousands of email accounts every minute.

Search Engine Bots. Search engine bots, since they usually belong to large companies, respect Web pages that don't want to allow them in. However, in order to truly guarantee that bots won't enter a Web site, CAPTCHAs are needed.

Worms and Spam. CAPTCHAs also offer a plausible solution against email worms and spam: "I will only accept an email if I know there is a human behind the other computer."

Apparently, according to a New York Times article, captchas are now become more challenging to solve.

But now, you know what they're called, at least, and what those letters are an acronym for: Completely Automated Public [Alan] Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. A recent Carnegie Mellon release tells us that:

A Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist is enlisting the unwitting help of thousands, if not millions, of Web users each day to eliminate a technical bottleneck that has slowed efforts to transform books, newspapers and other printed materials into digitized text that is computer searchable.

Luis von Ahn, an assistant professor of computer science and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant," says the project will also improve Web security systems used to reduce spam and make it possible for individuals to safeguard their own email addresses from spammers.

Key to the new project is assigning a new, dual use to existing technology: CAPTCHAs, the distorted-letter tests found at the bottom of registration forms on Yahoo, Hotmail, PayPal, Wikipedia and hundreds of other sites worldwide. CAPTCHAs, an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart, distinguish between legitimate human users and malevolent computer programs designed by spammers to harvest thousands of free email accounts. The tests require users to type the distorted letters they see inside a box — a task that is difficult for computers, but easy for humans.

Working with a team that includes computer science professor Manuel Blum, undergraduate student Ben Maurer and research programmer Mike Crawford, von Ahn invented a new version of the tests, called reCAPTCHAs, that will help convert printed text into computer-readable letters on behalf of the Internet Archive. The San Francisco-based non-profit group administers the Open Content Alliance and is one of several large initiatives working to digitize books and other printed materials under open principles, making the text searchable by computer and capable of being reformatted for new uses.

Badware Monitored

In spite of their slightly off-putting name, the organization's defines itself as a " 'Neighborhood Watch' " campaign aimed at fighting badware:

" We will seek to provide reliable, objective information about downloadable applications in order to help consumers make better choices about what they download onto their computers. We aim to become a central clearinghouse for research on badware and the bad actors who spread it, and become a focal point for developing collaborative, community-minded approaches to stopping badware."

" ... software that fundamentally disregards a user's choice over how his or her computer will be used. There are several commonly recognized terms for types of badware — spyware, malware, and deceptive adware. Common examples might be a free screensaver that surreptitiously generates ads, or a malicious web browser toolbar that makes your browser go to different pages than the ones you expected."

StopBadware.org's goal is to "create a community of concerned users that are ready to regain control of their computers and are not willing to allow badware makers to intimidate us."

We have had instances of spyware and deceptive adware on our computer and found it impossible to eliminate ourselves without resorting to paid help from our computer brand. We recommend that you consult their reports page for badware they've identified with tips to remove them from your computer. Examples already identified can be found at the right of their reports page.

The Internet’s Growing Role in Life’s Major Moments

From the Pew Internet Project:

The internet has become increasingly important to users in their everyday lives. The proportion of Americans online on a typical day grew from 36% of the entire adult population in January 2002 to 44% in December 2005. The number of adults who said they logged on at least once a day from home rose from 27% of American adults in January 2002 to 35% in late 2005. And for many of those users, the internet has become a crucial source of information — Pew Internet & American Life Project show that fully 45% of internet users, or about 60 million Americans, say that the internet helped them make big decisions or negotiate their way through major episodes in their lives in the previous two years.

To explore this phenomenon, we fielded the Major Moments Survey in March 2005, that repeated elements of an earlier January 2002 survey. Comparison of the two surveys revealed striking increases in the number of Americans who report that the internet played a crucial or important role in various aspects of their lives. Specifically, we found that over the three-year period, internet use grew by:

54% in the number of adults who said the internet played a major role as they helped another person cope with a major illness. And the number of those who said the internet played a major role as they coped themselves with a major illness increased 40%.
50% in the number who said the internet played a major role as they pursued more training for their careers.
45% in the number who said the internet played a major role as they made major investment or financial decisions.
43% in the number who said the internet played a major role when they looked for a new place to live.
42% in the number who said the internet played a major role as they decided about a school or a college for themselves or their children.
23% in the number who said the internet played a major role when they bought a car.
14% in the number who said the internet played a major role as they switched jobs.

Men & Women & The Internet

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has released its latest report contrasting how men and women use the Internet. Here is a summary of their findings:

A wide-ranging look at the way American women and men use the internet shows that men continue to pursue many internet activities more intensively than women, and that men are still first out of the blocks in trying the latest technologies.

At the same time, there are trends showing that women are catching up in overall use and are framing their online experience with a greater emphasis on deepening connections with people.

Some highlights from a new report show how men’s and women’s use of the internet has changed over time.

The percentage of women using the internet still lags slightly behind the percentage of men. Women under 30 and black women outpace their male peers. However, older women trail dramatically behind older men.

Men are slightly more intense internet users than women. Men log on more often, spend more time online, and are more likely to be broadband users.

In most categories of internet activity, more men than women are participants, but women are catching up.

More than men, women are enthusiastic online communicators, and they use email in a more robust way. Women are more likely than men to use email to write to friends and family about a variety of topics: sharing news and worries, planning events, forwarding jokes and funny stories. Women are more likely to feel satisfied with the role email plays in their lives, especially when it comes to nurturing their relationships. And women include a wider range of topics and activities in their personal emails. Men use email more than women to communicate with various kinds of organizations.

More online men than women perform online transactions. Men and women are equally likely to use the internet to buy products and take part in online banking, but men are more likely to use the internet to pay bills, participate in auctions, trade stocks and bonds, and pay for digital content.

Men are more avid consumers than women of online information. Men look for information on a wider variety of topics and issues than women do.

Men are more likely than women to use the internet as a destination for recreation. Men are more likely to: gather material for their hobbies, read online for pleasure, take informal classes, participate in sports fantasy leagues, download music and videos, remix files, and listen to radio.

Men are more interested than women in technology, and they are also more tech savvy.

Still, our data show that men and women are more similar than different in their online lives, starting with their common appreciation of the internet’s strongest suit: efficiency. Both men and women approach with gusto online transactions that simplify their lives by saving time on such mundane tasks as buying tickets or paying bills.

Men and women also value the internet for a second strength, as a gateway to limitless vaults of information. Men reach farther and wider for topics, from getting financial information to political news. Along the way, they work search engines more aggressively, using engines more often and with more confidence than women.

Women are more likely to see the vast array of online information as a “glut” and to penetrate deeper into areas where they have the greatest interest, including health and religion. Women tend to treat information gathering online as a more textured and interactive process – one that includes gathering and exchanging information through support groups and personal email exchanges.

Google Maps Rampant

A site called Google Maps Mania styles itself as "An unofficial Google Maps blog tracking the websites, ideas and tools being influenced by Google Maps." The site combines and keeps abreast of the plethora of new maps devised by Google's software code. That code creates maps with virtual pushpins that can be combined with other specific facts to provide an amazing crazy quilt of information.

If you're interested in joining the phenomenon yourself, Marc Andreesen has created Ning.com. Here's that site's pitch:

Ning is a free online service (or, as we like to call it, a Playground) for building and using social applications. Social apps are web applications that enable anyone to match, transact, and communicate with other people.

Anti-Phishing Sites Educate

When I mentioned phishing to friends and supporters of seniorwomen.com a couple of years ago, I was met with blank expressions both on and off the Web. Not so today. Most Internet users now know about this most ubiquitous of all scams and attempts to encourage people to part with their private financial information through phony requests from recognized institutions.

One rule of thumb, clearly, is not to part with any financial information on the Internet, regardless of the appearance of the site, until telephoning the source requesting the information, whether it be eBay, PayPal, a bank or a credit card company.

As noted on various security-related sites, the potential for scams surrounding the Hurricane Katrina disaster is quite large. Expect to be receiving emails for ''charity'' organizations soliciting money for the victims of Katrina. Some emails will promote truly fake organizations, and some will pretend to be from real organizations (and even have links that look real in the email), but when clicked, these links will take an unwitting user to a fraudulent site.

Here's two additional sites that inform about this fraud:

Case Study: Operation Cyber Chase

In April 2005, an investigation code named Operation Cyber Chase led US authorities from the Drug Enforcement Agency, the FBI, and other agencies to an Internet pharmacy that sold $20 million worth of controlled drugs to thousands of people around the world. The online pharmacy did not require prescriptions, only a credit card number and address. Based in India, the Internet ring supplied drugs for 200 Web sites. The foreign distributor shipped the drugs in bulk to Philadelphia and other sites in the United States, where the drugs would be repackaged and shipped to customers. Authorities have seized $7 million from banks and 7 million doses of drugs, and arrested twenty-three people in eleven cities in the United States, India, and Canada. The online buyers paid higher-than-market prices, leading police to suspect that many were abusing the drugs. Federal authorities obtained most of the buyers’ names and credit card numbers and may refer the information to authorities in the states where they live.

Fraud — The anonymity and opportunities for misrepresentation found on the Internet make fraud easy. Fraud comes in several forms. Advance-fee frauds exploit greed and cupidity by offering, often through an e-mail that purports to be from a relative of a prince or dictator, a chance to gain a share of millions. The e-mail asks for the recipient’s bank account or a payment as part of a money laundering scheme that will release the millions in loot. In another variant, the cybercriminal touts a certain stock on an online chatroom. When the stock price rises because of the false information, the cybercriminal cashes in. Or the cybercriminal can create a false Web site that mimics an online retailer. Sometimes, a simple typing error in entering the legitimate name will take the consumer to the criminal site. When the consumer places an order, the criminal gains not only the money from the transaction but the consumer’s account information. In some cases, cybercriminals illicitly access databases and tamper with records to gain some advantage. Auction fraud is another common variant — the winning bidder pays a spurious seller for a high-value good and receives nothing or junk in return.

Phishing — Currently the best known form of fraud, phishing begins with an e-mail purporting to be from a bank, credit card company, or retailer asking the user to go to a Web site and supply account information. Phishing has become increasingly sophisticated, with false Web sites that are indistinguishable from the legitimate company. Often the phisher will use psychological techniques, such as announcing that your account as been suspended, to coerce the unsuspecting into providing information. Some cybercrime sites offer do-it-yourself phishing kits for less than $300.

Who and How Many Watch?

One out of six American adult internet users (16%) have gone online to view another person or a place via a web cam. That translates into roughly 21 million people who have viewed material on web cams. And on any given day, about two million internet users are checking out remote places or people by using webcams.

These findings about web cam watching come from a nationwide phone survey of 1,450 internet users by the Pew Internet & American Life Project conducted between February 21 and March 21 this year. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus three points.

This is the first time the Project asked about use of web cams in its surveys, so it is not possible to analyze the level of growth these figures represent. However, it is likely that use of web cams has grown in recent years for several reasons: Web cams are relatively cheap – a decent cam unit can be purchased for under $30 – and easy to set up. The spread of broadband makes it ever easier to display and access images from web cams on computers. Indeed, 19% of those with broadband at home have checked out web cam images, compared to 13% of those who have dial-up at home.

Moreover, there are growing numbers of ways that people and organizations use web cams. Web cams allow users to capture digital video and immediately transmit it over the internet. They can be used for video chats and conferencing. They have been used in reality TV shows, to view remote and environmentally important locales, to increase surveillance of city streets and factories, to allow home buyers to view construction progress, to permit commuters to check out traffic hotspots, and in communications between U.S. military personnel in Iraq and their families. Webcams have also been used in collaborative contexts — connecting doctors, students, musicians and archaeologists across the globe — and in monitoring political candidates’ events.

The use of web cams appeals to all kinds of internet users. Online men are more likely than online women to have viewed images from web cams: 19% of men with internet access have done so, compared to 13% of wired women. Another way to describe the gender gap is to say that 60% of those who have viewed web cam material are men.

However, there are no noteworthy differences in the use of web cams in other demographic categories: minorities who use the internet are just as likely as whites to have viewed web cam images; internet users in their 50s and those in their 20s watch web cams in equal proportion; those online with graduate degrees and those with high school educations are equally interested in web cam viewing; those who live in relatively well-off households are as likely as those who live in homes with less income to have looked at web cam images; and non-parents are as likely as parents to have viewed web cam material. The Pew Internet & American Life Project is a non-profit initiative of the Pew Research

Mapping On the Internet

"Some of the niftiest stuff on the Internet these days involves GIS data and mapping. For example, see this list of Cool uses of Google Maps, pulled together by Jonathan Dube, CyberJournalist.net." TerraFly, an application that debuted in 2001 and is linked below, is a public service of Florida International University.

"If you've never explored TerraFly, from Florida International University, don't wait one minute longer. Simply enter an address, and our system will put you at the controls of a bird's view aerial imagery to explore your digital earth."

"Once you have an image displayed, you'll see a scattering of lime green dots superimposed on it. Click on any one of these and another window pops up with local information — population data, schools, local businesses, links to additional satellite images and more."

Another mapping service will be Microsoft's MSN Virtual Earth, scheduled to debut this summer.

PEW/Buzzmetrics Blog Report

Speculations

Will the blogosphere become a Fifth Estate? That is one possible development. It would be a good thing if it meant institutionalizing the ethos of the current blogosphere. The national discourse could benefit from a sector favoring transparency over opacity, conversation over presentation, small pieces over big works, flexibility over anchorage, incompleteness over conclusiveness, documentation over description and, paradoxically, individuality over institutionalization. Not all bloggers and especially not all commenters on blogs adhere to these values, to be sure. But enough do at the present time to assure their dominance.

Alternately, the blogosphere might divide into blog components of each of the four traditional estates. The emergence of successful business models and the dynamics of small versus large businesses will figure heavily in the capacity of the current crop of political bloggers to maintain their niche as the elite’s guide to the internet. And the possibility of a new technology and net-related form emerging to eclipse the blog must always be borne in mind; as blogs eclipsed the e-newsletter/web diary, so they may give way or make room for the next new thing. There is no reason to think we have reached a slowdown phase in the technological evolution of the medium.

The bigger phenomenon, meanwhile, remains that of buzz, which is nothing new, but now more visible and comprehendible than ever thanks to digital communication. It’s instructive to track buzz for duration, intensity, breadth, and focus across the public discourse, not just across the blogosphere. We can generate case histories and use them as a basis to learn more about what happened in battles and competitions for influence, and to inform communication strategy, not just in presidential politics but other campaigns and image-management efforts.

Read the entire report, Buzz, Blogs and Beyond, by Michael Cornfield Senior Research Consultant Pew Internet & American Life Project, Jonathan Carson President and CEO BuzzMetrics and two analysts

Web Spam

From a paper, Combating Web Spam with TrustRank, by Zoltán Gyöongyi and Hector Garcia-Molina of Stanford's Computer Department; Jan Pedersen of Yahoo!

The term web spam refers to hyperlinked pages on the WorldWideWeb that are created with the intention of misleading search engines. For example, a pornography site may spam the web by adding thousands of keywords to its home page, often making the text invisible to humans through ingenious use of color schemes. A search engine will then index the extra keywords, and return the pornography page as an answer to queries that contain some of the keywords. As the added keywords are typically not of strictly adult nature, people searching for other topics will be led to the page. Another web spamming technique is the creation of a large number of bogus web pages, all pointing to a single target page. Since many search engines take into account the number of incoming links in ranking pages, the rank of the target page is likely to increase, and appear earlier in query result sets.

Just as with email spam, determining if a page or group of pages is spam is subjective. For instance, consider a cluster of web sites that link to each other’s pages repeatedly.

These links may represent useful relationships between the sites, or they may have been created with the express intention of boosting the rank of each other’s pages. In general, it is hard to distinguish between these two scenarios. However, just as with email spam, most people can easily identify the blatant and brazen instances of web spam.

For example, most would agree that if much of the text on a page is made invisible to humans (as noted above), and is irrelevant to the main topic of the page, then it was added with the intention to mislead. Similarly, if one finds a page with thousands of URLs referring to hosts like buy- canon-rebel-300d-lens-case.camerasx.com, buy- nikon-d100-d70-lens-case.camerasx.com, ..., and notices that all host names map to the same IP address, then one would conclude that the page was created to mislead search engines. (The motivation behind URL spamming is that many search engines pay special attention to words in host names and give these words a higher weight than if they had occurred in plain text.)

While most humans would agree on the blatant web spam cases, this does not mean that it is easy for a computer to detect such instances. Search engine companies typically employ staff members who specialize in the detection of web spam, are constantly scanning the web looking for offenders. When a spam page is identified, a search engine stops crawling it, and its content is no longer indexed.

Web spam pages use various techniques to achieve higher-than-deserved rankings in a search engine’s results. While human experts can identify spam, it is too expensive to manually evaluate a large number of pages. Instead, we propose techniques to semi-automatically separate reputable, good pages from spam. We first select a small set of seed pages to be evaluated by an expert. Once we manually identify the reputable seed pages, we use the link structure of the web to discover other pages that are likely to be good. In this paper we discuss possible ways to implement the seed selection and the discovery of good pages. We present results of experiments run on the World Wide Web indexed by AltaVista and evaluate the performance of our techniques. Our results show that we can effectively filter out spam from a significant fraction of the web, based on a good seed set of less than 200 sites.

Languages & Translations

Google has produced a language tool for translation. They offer a free service that automatically translates pages published in languages other than English. Not all languages are translated and not all pages in those languages we do support are translated completely. Nor does the translation software recognize text within images, so these remain untranslated.

When you click on the "translate this page" link, you will be taken to a version of the page that has been automatically translated into English. You can choose to view the original page instead by clicking on the "view original web page" link in the top frame of the translated page or by going back to the Google results page and clicking on the large blue text link at the head of your selected result.

Currently, Google offers English translation from Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Spanish, and Portuguese.

We actually became intrigued by the language classification of Elmer Fudd and clicked on the label, finding the Google Diwectowy, De web owganized by topic into categowies, sorted by Pwefewences. Okay, we're showing our age but how many in today's animation world are even clued into Mr. Fudd?

Read Google's FAQs for a further description of its translation service features. And, If you don't see your native language, you can help Google create it by becoming a volunteer translator. Check out our Google in Your Language program.

Over Fifty-Five Age Group

At long last, agencies and research firms are recognizing, through polling that the over fifty-five 'cohort' is one of the largest and fastest growing users of the Internet.

From Media Audit: The younger age groups were the first to embrace the Internet but most of today’s growth is being driven by the older age groups, starting at age 55.

According to The Media Audit data, the 55 to 64 age classification has increased as a percent of the total Internet audience from 9.5 to 11.3 percent in the past four years. The percentage of those in that same age group who access the Internet regularly increased from 45.8 percent in 2000 to 56.7 percent in 2003.

During the same time period, the 65 to 74 year olds have increased as a percent of the total Internet audience from 4.6 to 5.4 percent. The percentage of those in that same age group who access the Internet regularly increased from 26.2 percent to 35.9 percent.

Those age 75 plus have increased as a percent of the Internet market from 1.3 to 1.6 percent The
percent of the 75 plus group that is accessing the Internet has increased from 12.1 to 15.9.
In the 80 plus markets surveyed there are 130.4 million adults. Of that number, 79.9 million log on
regularly. And 22.3 million of the 79.9 million are over age 50.

Significantly More Affluent
The percentage of the 50 plus age group with annual incomes of $50,000 or more increased from
32.7 in 2000 to 35.9 in 2004. The percent with incomes of $75,000 or more increased during the
same years from 17.8 percent to 20.6 percent. Those with annual incomes of $100,000 or more
increased from 9.6 percent to 11.8 percent.

Educationally, the group looks much like the rest of the adult population. In the 50 plus group, 35.3 percent have at least one college degree. The percent is the same for the general adult population.

“The most impressive demographic changes in this group,” says Jordan, “are reflected in our Internet use data. Those who logged on regularly increased from 29.8 percent in 2000 to 47.0 percent in 2004. Those who made at least one purchase via the Internet during the past year increased from 17.1 percent to 31.1 percent. Those making five or more purchases during the past year increased from 8.4 percent to 17.3 percent.” In the general adult population, 61.3 percent log on regularly while last year and 25.5 percent made five or more purchases.

“Initially, the 50 plus age group was slow in coming to the Internet,” says Bob Jordan, president of International Demographics, Inc., “but they now look like they will soon catch up with the 60 percent use rate of the general adult population. Forty-five percent of this group is retired and subsequently they have more time to invest in using the Internet. The 50 plus age group may become a prime market in coming years — if marketers ever wake up to the potential market value this group offers.”

Mossberg's Advice

Walter Mossberg's WSJ Personal Technology columns have been noted before in this section of Seniorwomen.com. This time he's clearly warning personal computer users of Microsoft Windows about security lapses. Not only that, he feels that Microsoft and the computer makers should be taking care of these problems in a coherent, unified manner but noooooo ...... they're not.

Seniorwomen.com has just removed a firewall that not only slowed our computers down, it prevented us from seeing images located on other sites. We're going to follow Mr. Mossberg's advice and test some of these products in addition to the steps that we've already followed on our own.

Mossberg's Bottom Line: "If you use Windows, you're asking for trouble. But you can mitigate the risk by taking precautions."

Google's Doodles

Google, the search engine of recent IPO fame, creates doodles using their familiar logo as a base. For those who use the search engine daily, as we do, it can be a welcome diversion, especially when it celebrates the once-every-122-years Transit of Venus.

A collection of past doodles is available for viewing, including their most recent event subject, the Olympics. Dennis Hwang is the artist responsible for the artwork. And yes, Google fans of the genre have even been inspired to produce their own versions of the Google logo, including these logos by Andre Giroux.

There's even a fairly short-lived blog (months of May and June only seem to be represented) that can be viewed, including an entry titled, Chicken a la The King, which contains a recipe for Buttermilk Fried Chicken Elvis Loved from a man who once cooked for the late, continuously lamented singer.

For an idea of what others search for on Google, the Zeitgeist page is illuminating, albeit, at times very disappointing. In Spain, we find that a 'popular woman' category is actually inhabited by Barbie.

Report

Two analyses papers are offered including one entitled On a Filtered Internet, Things Are Not As They Seem. The paper points out that "Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates openly admit to Internet filtering, even appearing proud to filter. But the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights makes access to information an undeniable entitlement - something China, Thailand, Uzbekistan, and others seem required to recognize."

"Indeed, by hiding their current efforts at filtering, these countries implicitly admit that they ought not block their citizens' access to information. At least the Middle Eastern countries proceed openly and seemingly under claim of legal right - whereas secret filtering gives an implicit admission of impropriety, for if filtering were permitted, there would be no need for secrecy." (This paper has been written by a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Economics at Harvard University and a student at the Harvard Law School.)

"The world's dominant Internet player, the United States sees itself as the champion of online free expression. But US legislation has increasingly trampled on the civil liberties of Internet users since the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States. And US senators, while launching a programme to combat Internet censorship worldwide, refuse to rein in US companies that help equip dictatorships with online surveillance and filtering equipment."

Recognition

Tim Berners-Lee, the 'inventor' of the World Wide Web, has received some compensation for his conception. Some years ago, he and his colleague, Robert Cailliau demanded that the Web remain license-free and the rest, as they say, is history.

The Millennium Technology Prize has been awarded Berners-Lee by the Finnish Technology Award Foundation in the amount of $1.2 million. He reminds us that ”We must remember that the Web is a long way from revealing it’s full potential. The extension from human-readable to include also machine-readable information is just one direction of development.”

WC3, a World Wide consortium, has on its site, beyond Mr. Berners-Lee's biography, a section he devised of Answers for Young People (6 - 96). Some of the FAQs he includes Where were you when you invented the WWW?, What happens when I click on a link?, and the inevitable question, Did you Invent the Internet?

"Vint Cerf and people he worked with had figured out the Internet Protocol, and also the Transmission Control Protocol.

"People had already used TCP/IP and DNS to make email, and other cool things. So I could email other people who maybe would like to help work on making the WWW.

"I didn't invent the hypertext link either. The idea of jumping from one document to another had been thought about lots of people, including Vanevar Bush in 1945, and by Ted Nelson (who actually invented the word hypertext). Bush did it before computers really existed. Ted thought of a system but didn't use the internet. Doug Engelbart in the 1960's made a great system just like WWW except that it just ran on one [big] computer, as the internet hadn't been invented yet. Lots of hypertext systems had been made which just worked on one computer, and didn't link all the way across the world.

"I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and — ta-da! — the World Wide Web."

Berners-Lee also gives us some background on his childhood, something most of us are always interested in:

"I grew up in south-west London. I wasn't very good at sports. When I was 11 I went to a school which was between two railway tracks, so I saw lots of trains and started train-spotting. I also had a model railway in my bedroom. It was a long thin layout with a 4-track station in the middle, and on each side pairs of tracks going off into tunnels to actually loop back to each other.

"I made some electronic gadgets to control the trains. The I ended up getting more interested in electronics than trains. Later on, when I was in college I made computer out of an old television set. I bought the television from a repair shop down the road for £5 (about $7).

"My mother and father were both working with the very early computers when they met. Later on, my mother taught maths in school. They taught me that maths is a lot of fun.

"When I went to Oxford University, I studied physics. I thought that science might be more practical."

Reader Friendly Software

We've linked to Walter Mossberg's WSJ columns (which are available to the non-subscribing Internet public) for years but a recent one on Making the Internet a Little Easier on Aging Eyes is particularly noteworthy:

This week, my assistant Katie Boehret and I tested a cheaper, simpler solution that's just aimed at making the Web easier to read. It's a $19.95 downloadable software program for Windows users called Web Eyes, from a Missouri firm called Ion Systems. The program can be downloaded from the webeyes.us site, or for $29.95 the company will mail it to you. Web Eyes embeds itself into Internet Explorer (versions 5.5 and up) and adds a special toolbar to the top of the browser. This toolbar includes options for changing a Web site's text size and navigating through a page that go far beyond what Microsoft offers. But its most interesting feature is one that reformats a whole page for easier reading.

Katie and I each downloaded a free 15-day trial of Web Eyes and used it while reading online throughout the past week. Overall, we found the product useful and easy to apply to every Web site that we tested.

To adjust the font of any article, we clicked on the red plus and minus buttons in the toolbar to enlarge or shrink text size accordingly. Using the plus and minus signs, font size can be adjusted up to 144-point type; you can also manually enter any font size that you want. While reading an especially long article from Slate.com, Katie increased the type size by clicking the "plus" sign twice and could sit back in her office chair while reading.

I tested Web Eyes on a long article at the Web site of the magazine U.S. News & World Report. The text size feature of Internet Explorer had no effect on the small type of this particular page. But Web Eyes blew it up to any size I liked, and the enlarged text remained smooth and sharp, with none of the jagged effects produced by the built-in Windows Magnifier.

I also liked another feature of Web Eyes, called Page Control, which allows you to easily and rapidly pan and scroll through pages with a few mouse clicks.

Link

Information Visualization

From the site's concept:
Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.

Email Spoofing or,
The Case of the Forged Header

This past week I received yet another email accusing me of promulgating the current virus by sending a message with the virus attached. When I tried to explain that my email had been 'spoofed' and I was not the person using my email address in this case, I realized that my correspondent hadn't the slightest clue what I was talking about. (Fortunately, I have two techie daughters and sound authoritative)

So, here from two sources are explanations of this type of annoying and disturbing occurrence:

Carnegie Mellon's Spoofed/Forged email and Technomom's instructions on Reading Internet Message Headers. Some of the information may be much more technical than you need or want but, if your virus scanning services have done their job, you may not be the guilty one.

Carnegie Mellon's site informs that spoofing may be used to elicit information that could be damaging:

"Email spoofing may occur in different forms, but all have a similar result: a user receives email that appears to have originated from one source when it actually was sent from another source. Email spoofing is often an attempt to trick the user into making a damaging statement or releasing sensitive information (such as passwords)."

The Carnegie Mellon CERT site also contains a Current Activity web page that is a regularly updated summary of the most frequent, high-impact types of security incidents currently being reported to the CERT/CC.

Cyberstalking

"Over the last few years governments, law enforcement agencies, and the media have noted increases of online harassment. Although there has been a great deal of research into 'offline stalking', at this moment in time there has been no formal research that attempts to classify cyberstalkers. This study aimed to identify a classification of cyberstalkers by interviewing victims. Twenty-four participants were interviewed and their responses logged on a 76-item Cyberstalking Incident Checklist. A typology of cyberstalkers was developed."

"A group of behaviours in which an individual, group of individuals or organisation uses information technology to harass one or more individuals. Such behaviour may include, but are not limited to, the transmission of threats and false accusations, identity theft, data theft, damage to data or equipment, computer monitoring and the solicitation of minors for sexual purposes. Harassment is defined as a course of action that a reasonable person, in possession of the same information, would think causes another reasonable person to suffer emotional distress."

The Cyberstalker’s Motivation: Four major themes surrounding the cyberstalking relationship emerged from the data. They were the 'vindictive', 'composed', 'collective', and 'intimate' cyberstalkers.

"As stated earlier, the intimate cyberstalker sub-group was very similar to the offline stalker classifications by Mullen et al. (1999). The victim’s responses indicated that the 'ex-intimates' were similar to Mullen and his colleagues’ classification of the rejected stalker (who wish to rekindle a terminated relationship). The 'infatuates' were also similar to their intimacy seeker/incompetent suitor (attempting to bring to fruition a relationship with a person who has engaged their desires, and who they may also mistakenly perceive reciprocates that affection or seek to develop relationships but they fail to abide by social rules governing courtship)."

Parenting & Web Guide

We've previously spotlighted Tufts University for its health and nutrition website but now they've constructed a site, Child and Family Web Guide, that is a directory evaluating, describing and providing links to hundreds of sites containing child development research and practical advice. Here's a part of their stated goals:

For a complete list of topics go to the five colored boxes on the homepage or to the index search.

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