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**** NewsBytes **** NewsBytes **** NewsBytes ****
Windows 98 reprieve
Microsoft has extended support for Windows 98, Second Edition (98SE) and Millennium Edition (Me) to 30 June 2006, reversing its decision to end support for the product on 16 January. The popular Windows 98 platform is still relied upon by millions of users globally, especially in developing countries. Incident and hotfix support will be chargeable but free patches will still be issued to fix serious security holes.
Broadband plus
PlusNet has joined the ranks of Tiscali and others in offering variations on the standard broadband theme. Their lower-speed packages for a lower-price per month are 150Kbps for £15.99, 200Kbps for £16.99 and 250Kbps for £17.99, all VAT inclusive. Standard broadband speed is 512Kbps, costing between £20-30 per month form most ISPs. PlusNet are also throwing in a free USB modem with their half price setup fee of £30.
Google gurgle
Is Google Broken? asks Daniel Brandt on the Googlewatch site. His theory is also that many site rankings were recently pushed downwards by the addition of an excluding filter, dating back to a cessation of the once-per-month web crawl by the PageRank system. Judge for yourself. Rating: needs severe interest in search engine workings.
Unequal exchange
Despite the same year notation, Exchange 2003 does not run on 64-bit editions of Windows Server 2003 - early adopters please note! Check the full system requirements for Exchange 2003 Enterprise and Standard editions.
Spam ceases to be a devil
ISP THUS/Demon has employed leading spam-buster Brightmail to block junk email from their servers. What's more. their service is free to its customers. More details in their press release.
Windows 2000 bows out
Windows 98 may have escaped the chop, but next in line are Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Windows 2000 Client Access Licenses (CALs) which will all be retired phased out. Customers who need or prefer the well-tried Windows 2000 series can still purchase a higher licence version (namely Windows Server 2003) and install their chosen system instead, known as downgrade rights. Mainstream support won't cease until 31st March 2005. More details.
Gates to close on spam
Among a raft of solutions to eliminate spam announced by Bill Gates at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, were ideas such as a computational load induced on computers sending out many emails, a sender's tax and mechanisms to identify the original sender. Moves toward the latter occurred in 2000 with ISPs requiring SMTP authentication but, in response, fly-by-night spammers just picked up free accounts, dumped their mail and immediately abandoned the mail account, choosing a different one next time around. However Microsoft's knight to be is confident in the long term and sees their anti-spam technology, built into into Exchange Server from mid-2004, as a key technology. Exchange Intelligent Message Filter is similar Hotmail-based routines that identify content and behavioural patterns. However, some industry commentators say it better to filter spam at the ISP.
Tips for junk email filters for Outlook.
Doom-laden virus is world's fastest yet
The MyDoom virus caused a storm of bogus emails apparently from friends and colleagues. With a wider and more sudden impact than even the SoBig virus, this mass-mailer crippled mailservers and brought with it a zipped attachment that turned millions of infected computers into slingshots aimed at felling corporate servers, such as sco.com and microsoft.com, in denial of service attacks (DoS) between the 1st and 12th February. After this end date however, the infecting Trojan remains on a machine possibly awaiting further destructive orders. See removal instructions from NAI/McAfee, Sophos, Symantec/Norton, Datafellows/F-Secure.
**** end of NewsBytes ****
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1. Interpreting DVD technology
A guide through the wealth of DVD drive formats. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Why DVD?
Quite simply, DVDs hold more data. And the drives are cheaper than ever. With their 4.7GB (GigaByte) capacity comprising the equivalent of around 7 CDs (only 650MB each) and the drive costs in the region of £140 being about half of those a year ago and a quarter of those 2 years ago, it's a no-brainer. However, with three incompatible formats to choose from DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) drives have thus far been more perverse than versatile. -RAM, -RW, +RW: what it all meansLooking not unlike CD discs and drives, it's hard to tell DVDs apart except for the small logo on drives and the suitably encsribed discs.
To make things worse though, they are then subdivided into DVD-RAM, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW and DVD+MRW.At least some of the conventions of CDs are continued, so that "R" means a disc that can only be written once and "RW", a disc that can be re-written as many as 1000 times, albeit at slower speeds.
Designed around the commercial (as opposed to home) movie industry, DVD-RAMs were sold in protective cartridges to prevent damage, though now they may be also be purchased without sleeves - nude, as it were. Aside from the difficulty of putting a housed cartridge into a DVD tray, all DVD rewriters can thus play this format. It's now becoming a question of which formats they can (re)write. The first group of manufacturers to form a 'camp' for writing data from PC_based drives were those that came up with DVD-RW. This acronym was eventually pronounced "dvd minus r w" when a later alliance was created around the DVD+RW format.
The +RW format is more efficient than -RW not least because it's less susceptible to writing errors and also faster. Another standard from innovator Philips, +MRW (Mount Rainier), takes error and defect handling even further and is intended as a successor to the floppy disc but has little support yet. Multi-format arrives
Earlier in 2003, Sony released the first multiformat DVD drive to write both +RW and -RW formats, allowing consumers to side-step the decision of "should I go with plus or minus?"
Since then, other manufacturers have jumped on the bandwagon and DVD RW specifications now often quote "multi-format", "dual-format" or "DVD±RW" to indicate 'don't worry, we've got it covered'. Some media are more equal than othersThe issue of reliable recording of DVDs is complicated by 'lesser brands' of DVD discs causing compatibility problems across the + and - formats. Sticking to well-known brands like Verbatim can minimise this.The earlier protective casings of DVD-RAM were not supplied without good erason. While we all bash our CDs around and still expect them to reproduce data and music faithfully even after using them as breakfast plates, bare DVDs are a different kettle of fish (or perhaps kippers, to continue the metaphor). The tiniest of scratches or knocks will damage the surface and impair the data quality. The CD legacyThough the specifications for the latest PCs make little mention of CD reading or writing, where a DVD rewriter is provided, you can take it as read that it CDs (CD-R, CD-RW) can be rewritten too.Speed equals time
Fortunately DVD baseline transfer rates attempt to average out this degradation to give you a fairer idea of speeds and recording times. The figure is also set higher than a CD, at 1380KB per second, or 1.38MB per second.
Very approximately, a 40x CD is equivalent to a 4x DVD speed, thus you will see these sort of figures quoted side-by-side on DVD burners for the respective formats. Thus far in the history of optical disc recording, a full CD or DVD has typically taken about 20 minutes to copy, but a proposed new 8-speed DVD+RW standard could bring that to under 10 minutes and indeed 8-speed drives are already appearing on the market. Contacts
-IB-
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2. Mobile phone trackers
Big Mother is watching you! | ||
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Can you really be tracked simply by owning a mobile? Short answer - not very well. However the technology and the law are slowly creeping up on us to generate the desire and thus a market. Just how accurate is tracking?If your phone is switched on, your mobile telecoms service provider can tell (very roughly) where you are, since each transmitting mast covers a certain area and your phone must talk to its 'mother ship' (base station) about every few minutes or so.We tested a simple Global Positioning System (GPS) from Psiloc on our Symbian7-based P800 smartphone. A couple trips though London streets (3 miles and 5 miles respectively) showed that cell areas were on average 200m apart. This level of precision is hardly a basis for accurate location, even given that masts are more densely sprinkled in some urban locations. In rural ones, base stations may be 2Km or more apart.
Personally identifiable?In theory, your provider has access to all the information associated with your mobile number, at least for those on contracts, rather than Pay-as-you-go top-ups. But don't forget that mobile conversations legally have to remain private.All the information-gathering that the provider could achieve can only be tied to that phone number, not actual Personally Identifiable Information like your name and date of birth (PII), so any potential marketing (increasingly via SMS) can only be targeted at a profile attached to a phone number, unless your PII is volunteered in some other way. If providers started making PII available to third parties without your consent, that would be contrary to the data protection laws. Nevertheless, two companies, Mapminder and Verilocation, have tentatively entered the new market of geo-locating mobile phones. Who wants to be watched?Well, nobody really.However two sectors of the population are coming, quite literally, under scrutiny.
Who wants to do the watching?The partners to the two potential market sectors and - crucially, for suppliers of mobile geo-locators - the ones who are going to do the paying, will be mums and fleet vehicle owners respectively.While the former will naturally be interested in the security of their offspring, it's a double-whammy in that succumbs to kids' desires to get their paws on a mobile asap ... and guess who's paying?
For the latter, it's about efficiency of deliveries and it's already common for, say supermarket home deliverers, to have mobiles on board to track a vehicle's progress and optimise routes avoiding traffic build-ups. Is it really legal?Clearly the consent of the phone owner is required, so where the mobiles are company-owned, it may become a part of a delivery driver's job to be tracked by that phone.In the case of children under 16, you must be the legal parent or guardian. Mapminder's mapaphone service requires a signed declaration in return for a unique PIN number which you enter into the child's mobile to activate it. How much does tracking cost?As with any new services, companies are finding the market niches by devising unique, rather than comparable, tariffs.Thus Mapaphone works on a £2.95 per user monthly subscription to Mapminder and a setup of £10 per tracked phone per year. On top of that, it's then 20p a 'hit' to locate a mobile, though they do throw in SMS texts to any of your mobiles for 7p.
By contrast, Verilocation charges £5 + VAT monthly (6 months payable up front) for which you get up to 5 numbers to track (extra ones £5 + VAT each) and 10 free 'credits' per month, each credit allowing you one 'hit' to locate 1 mobile phone. Additional bulk credits can be purchased online and get cheaper in bulk (a bit like GPRS bundles) so that 10 credits cost £5 (50p each), reducing to £200 for 1000 (20p each), VAT-excluded. Note that the current policy of the big four networks (O2, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Orange) means that a charge is incurred for a location fix even if there's no result, for instance if a tracked phone were turned off. However when more networks provide the service (T-Mobile, Virgin Mobile and 3 are due to come online by mid-2004) and if tracking sees a take-up, this sort of 'no-show' charging will have be subsumed to retain customers. If my phone's off, I'm invisible, right?The ultimate cloak is of course simply to kill your transmitter, though it kind of defeats the object of having agreed to be tracked. At the tracker's end, they will see the last known position of the tracked phone as it disappears into the underground or metro, in the case of a Vodafone mobile - more useful than the other networks which just report "unable to locate".Hailing a new technology
While checking on colleagues, partners and friends is likely to have dubious benefits and negative social consequences, geo-locator tracking is certainly an arriving technology and taxi companies like Zingo are already using it to join potential fares to the nearest available cab. Indeed, their terms and conditions (at the time of writing), assume your consent to be positioned, if not actually tracked, just by ringing the phone number - although their registration with the "Data Protection Act of 1988" (sic) seems to have occurred 10 years before the Act came into existence.
Summary
Tracking partners and colleagues by 'watching them' on their phones, even with consent, will hardly engender trusting relationships, be they work- or home-based ones. But the real damper is that geolocation like this doesn't really give the surveiller a true picture unless they have a context. How many tracking credits will they use up before deciding that the subject still standing at the station is just expecting a delayed train or completely stuck likely to cancel an appointment?A short verbal discussion of even text can enlighten everyone easily and cheaply, so at least in the short term, tracking subscribers are likely to be spending more on voice calls. However the two applications illustrated above are likely to be easily accepted since the security and economical benefits are plain Although a technology still in it's infancy for most users, this sort of tracking at least has security inherently built into it's infrastructure (telephone-based) and its contractual usage (Data Protection Act and communications laws), compared to the Internet that was borrowed from the trusting environment of universities and thrust into the commercial world with few legal and security restraints.
Contacts-IB-
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3. Alternatively wired networks - power over Ethernet
Imagine throwing away most of your power cables and using your wired network instead. | ||||
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The fourth utilityWith "data" rapidly becoming the 4th service required in any building - after gas, water and electricity - suppliers are looking for ways to minimise the costs of building in yet another level of infrastructure.However the customers (building occupiers - that's all of us) could benefit from the simplicity of having fewer wires around the place. You only have to look behind the average server or patch cabinet to appreciate the problem! Consider this: wherever there's a data/phone outlet (an RJ45 socket) positioned on a wall, a power point or two lurks not very far away. At a stroke, the cabling count could be halved by installing Power-over-Ethernet (PoE). By running just a single CAT5 Ethernet cable (like the ones that already exist in most networked offices) carrying both power and data, a whole tangle of mains wiring is eliminated. Networked devices can benefit from being sited more flexibly since there is already power for them wherever you want to set them up. How it worksIt's basically more electronics in anonymous, rectangular grey and beige boxes, but begins with a CAT5 "Injector", a box that inserts a DC voltage into unused wires of the CAT5 cabling that typically links up networked desktop computers. This Injector would usually be installed in or near the data cabinet or server room where the Ethernet switch or hub is located.
Some Wireless Access Points and other network accept the injected DC power directly from the CAT5 cable through their RJ45 jack. These devices are considered to be "PoE-Compatible" or "Active Ethernet Compatible".
Enthusiastic pundits or PoE are hoping that the the RJ45 plug (aka RJ45 jack in the US) - the one we're all familiar with connecting into a standard network socket - will become the universal power plug for computer-based equipment. Indeed, some are confidently predicting that three quarters of corporate networked devices will be RJ45-pwered in the next five years. Benefits
DrawbacksYou can't power any old box, only those devices that nibble, rather than scoff, power. With an actual power limit of 12.95 Watts, 802.3af unfortunately rules out desktop computers - the most prolific networked devices in any given office each needing several hundred watts.
But that may change, or at least the nature of networked computers is changing, especially when it comes to power consumption.
How to make it happenIronically, some of the first applications to benefit from Power-over Ethernet have been wireless networks. To establish a reliable coverage for wireless transmission, a wireless Access Point is typically mounted high up on a wall, so reducing the number of cables running up to from the data cabinet will make for a more elegant installation. Hence a PoE-connected AP has just one network cable plugged into it - the one that carries its power as well as data - eliminating the need for separate power cables or DC adapters.Networked webcams are also good candidates for PoE, especially where a 'fit-and-forget' installation is required for, say, surveillance of a reception area. Power hubs are a good starter. They fit between the 'wired side' of your network - eg the Ethernet switch - and the 'PoE side', the bit that connects to wireless access points or other hubs serving a small department. Such PoE-enabled hubs can be rack mounted in your data cabinet and combine the power and network data on to the same unshielded twisted pair (UTP) cabling that runs from the switch to the remainder of the network. The more you employ Power-over-Ethernet, the more efficient it becomes, so the key is to use it wherever possible. Contacts
-IB- Acknowledgements: Jim Geier |
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Approved by the IEEE Standards Board on 12 June 2003, document 802.3af defines the Power-over-Ethernet Standard and specifies 48 volts DC as Injected PoE voltage. Although various types of equipment can use this 48V supply directly, others may choose to 'tap' a portion of this down to a standard regulated voltage, say 12V, 6V or 5V, as is appropriate to the chips running inside and also allows non-PoE equipment to be powered through the CAT5 cable.
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4. Alternatively wired networks - home phone networks
A way to network homes and small offices that's even simpler than Wi-Fi. | ||
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The futuristic lifestyle of the networked the home has been touted for over a decade, but the prospect of drilling walls and lifting floorboards for yet another round of disruptive wiring is daunting even for hardened DIY-ers. While a Power-over-Ethernet approach might sound attractive, it is unlikely to be economical for locations where the number of power outlets is already high and the anticipated number of network devices is low. And if you can't power your PC or media centre from it yet, probably even less so. Now a new router from BT brings that utopian vision a little nearer and without the misery of fused lights and a universal coating of plaster dust. Well connected
The BT Home Network 1200 is a router bunding together in a single box the by now usual ADSL modem and router, as well as connections for USB (from any PC), Ethernet (from any network card) and 802.11b (Wi-Fi) wireless networking.Despite having covered all of the common networking bases already, this rather unassuming-looking (apparently rebranded) box brings to the table the possibility of turning your own home or office phone extension wiring into network cabling with Home Phone Networking (HomePNA).
Wow - all that connectivity! Is it secure?Professional strength firewall with wireless encryption – protects all your home data and ensures that only your PCs access your network 64-bit WEPPlenty of telephone type leads are supplied as well as USB and Ethernet networking cables. BenefitsDrawbacksExampleA typical SoHo office application would be 3 PCs (extra adaptors needed), a networked multiple function printer (MFP) via a direct Ethernet cable and capacity for several 802.11b wireless laptop connections for visitors.Contactshttp://www.bt.com/homenetworkingFull review at ADSLguide. -IB- Acknowledgements: Andrew Ferguson |
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By the simple expedient of plugging into your existing phone socket a BT Home network adapter, any networkable device will be able to connect to the 1200 router 'at the other end', wherever you have placed it, obviating the need for any ugly rewiring.| ^ Back to contents ^ | ||
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5. Online calendars get smarter
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Of late, just about any web email client worth its salt now includes a calendar and a host of Personal Information Manager tools bolted on around the basic email send and receive capabilities. So we have all become accustomed to all of our essential information being accessible from anywhere on the Net, at almost anytime, depending on the dependability of the web email provider we've chosen. Equally, and more physically, a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or handheld machine, could also be hooked up via our desktop computers and we could then carry all this information with us. It felt like we were going places. That was until mobile phones came along. They offered, in the beginning, a way to keep list of people's phone numbers to hand, and, eventually, full calendaring and task/to-do lists as well as email and a host of other communications-based applications (see smartphones), like texts and global positioning systems. Street credNow a new dimension has entered the fray - mobile-to-online synchronisation.This allows us to synchronise our handhelds to our online calendar. No PC cradles needed, no fiddling around with plugs at the back of your computer, not even Wi-Fi or Bluetooth radio connections are necessary. Now we are literally going places! How it worksA typical example:You're delayed - aboard a bus on 5-mile diversion due some unspecified alert and the driver's doing their level best to stay on schedule, listen to instructions and fend off passenger queries all at once! But there is no way you are going to stay on your schedule. Of course this scenario only holds water if all the folks in your organisation are hooked into the same online calendaring software package, but there are several companies out there vying for the market, some with business orientated offerings. Who uses this stuff?Inevitably the 'high-flyers' are the ones who benefit - people who must manage their time because it's precious. Or perhaps more signicantly, people who pay assistants to do the managing for them.Be wary of just diving in though; having a whole host of time-planning and task tools at your disposal convert you into slick efficiency overnight if you are hopelessly disorganised at running your life in the first place. Which companies are doing what?There are plenty of high-end (and high-priced) solutions out there, but here are some entry-level ones more suited to the not-for-profit sector.
What security should you expect of an online calendar?At the very least:
Look for the padlock symbol in the bottom right-hand corner of your browser or a address begining with https:// at the beginning. Simple calendaring for simple needsEstablished stalwarts uk2.net and myrealbox.com have both added calendaring to their increasingly sophisticated web-based email clients
and still remain a free service, though the latter emphasises its status as a testbed for refining Novell's Netmail groupware.
For a good example of simple no-frills shared calendaring working well, you can't beat www.mycalendar.net, an intuitive web-based system with 3 levels of access, reviewed by us here. Contacts
-IB-
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Access is also possible from any mobile or device that supports the Phone.com WAP standards. | ^ Back to contents ^ | ||
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6. Web design tips for accessibility
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The latest of the excellent Joe Saxton-organised nfpSynergy seminars featured a talk by Seb Bacon, Technical Director of Jamkit. Tackling the difficult issue of of website accessibility, the aim was to guide us along the path to meeting our legal obligations or even exceeding them, a subject which seems to have clear guidelines but nevertheless requires a degree of interpretation and common sense. The session examined coding and design techniques as well as making the most out of your site's accessible features. Top tipsAmong the top tips were some well-known tricks such as ....
Recommended as 'the bee's knees' - but inevitably very detailed - was the Dive Into Accessibility site, which provides PDF or zipped html versions for download. Contacts
-IB- Acknowledgements: Seb Bacon, Joe Saxton |
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Clicks of the Trade - view Word documents instantly
--- Quick tips for happier clicks! --- | |||
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-IB-
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For viewing a document instantly, from say Explorer or any browsing or search window, this little add-on saves you waiting for Word to open and avoids the risk of inadvertently editing a valuable file - especially if it's authored by someone else!
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