IB: InfoBulletin

1. Attracting search engines to your Web site with meta tags
2. Language translators
3. Email policies and the law
4. Currency convertors
5. SurfTime wastes time big time
6. Is your NT disc fast enough ?
7. Retrieving stuck CDs
8. Disabling a stolen mobile phone
9. OneHopMail - simple messaging with multiple identities

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1. Attracting search engines to your Web site with meta tags

What is it ?
Search engines get their information about what type of documents you have on your Web site by examining the Meta tags in those Web pages - or not if you haven't put any tags in. The search engines can then index your site more effectively and provide information about its content to people doing search queries. Most engines employ automatic 'crawlers' or 'bots' to scour Web sites on the Internet non-stop to find new or changed tags.

Benefits
The result is you make your Web site easier to find by the common search engines. It only takes a few minutes to put the tags in and you can do this with any editor if your usual Web page editor doesn't provide an appropriate form.

How to make it happen
You put Meta information within the paired tags and . The important Meta tags include the NAME Attribute, which is used with the CONTENT attribute to provide information about the page. Here are some examples of the most useful combinations :

• Author, eg
  <META NAME="author" CONTENT="your name">
• Description, eg
  <META NAME="description" CONTENT="organisation's mission statement">
• Publisher, the organisation responsible for producing the site, eg
  <META NAME="publisher" CONTENT="your web designer">
• Keywords, the important bit! A set of comma separated keywords, used by some search engines to index your page, eg
  <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="campaign, policy, action, government, pressure group, advocacy">

Tips on the Keyword and Description values
When writing keywords and descriptions you need to use as many words as you can that are relevant to the Web page you are describing, so as to have maximum exposure to the search engine crawlers, so :

1. Spell out acronyms and punctuate them (eg "WWW, W.W.W., World Wide Web").
2. Use a thesaurus to find related words.
3. Use synonyms (eg "Internet, information super highway").
4. Only capitalise names and proper nouns (eg "London" but not "Town").
5. Internationalise with different spellings (eg "color, colour").
6. Group related keywords together (eg "congestion, vehicle, Internet, network" not "congestion, Internet, vehicle, network").
7. Only use words relevant to the page.
8. Keep the total length of keywords to less than 250 characters.
9. Keep the total length of the description to less than 100 characters. You need to be concise but descriptive.

2. Language translators

What is it ?
If you have overseas contacts or branches in your organisation and need to write emails in another language, an online translator may be the answer. Simply type in your sentences in your language, choose which language to convert them into and press "Go".

Benefits
Quicker than a dictionary.
Ideal for users with no foreign languages who want to make simple enquiries.
Good if you want to enhance your school-level language ability or cross-check something you have already written, eg arranging appointments, travel, hotel bookings, etc.
Useful to lookup words which don't exist in your old 1965 paper dictionary, eg slang, jargon, newly-adopted words.

Drawbacks
Translations are by no means perfect, eg we found the Spanish verb states "estar" and "ser" were commonly confused.
Most conversions are limited to Western European languages and a maximum of 150 words.

Contacts
One of the first - AltaVista's The Babelfish (of Hitch Hikers derivation) http://uk.altavista.com/content/translate.jsp. Also translates entire Web pages if you type/paste in the URL - presents the Web page in original layout, but translated.
Their translator is actually powered by Systran who also supply a personal translator that you can download to translate larger passages into more languages.

Both Microsoft Office Services and have BTConnect have borrowed the translator engine from Belgium's Lernout & Hauspie. You can select different contexts like business, computers legal and medical to make conversions more accurate. We gave it good marks for Italian and French.
L&H also offer a 'free' translation service to wireless-connected Palm VII organisers and say that their Online iTranslator - a commercial, "pay as you go" website providing Internet access to both machine and human translation services - is "coming soon".

To run a translator on your own machine, you could do worse than buy L&H's Power Translator Pro 7.0 for about £90. This series has had good reviews, translating 9 language pairs and integrating well with the office applications, although this latest version needs nearly 1GB of disc space free for an installation and 64M of RAM to run it.

And finally ...
... the last word in translators is the infamous Jive Translator which converts English into politically-incorrect Jive talk.

[Thanks to Nyree Hughes and Phil Anthony for research]

3. Email policies, the law and human rights

What is it all about ?
Half the companies questioned in a 1999 survey did not have a corporate email policy. If your organisation doesn't have some sort of policy on what constitutes acceptable use of email (or more generally an IT Acceptable Use Policy), now is a good time to consider drawing one up.
This is one of those documents that simply gives clear guidance to employees on what email should and should not be used for. All staff, departments, unions, etc, should know about or have agreed the guidelines in advance. The consequences of not following these guidelines are usually only met with appropriate disciplinary measures as a last resort. Details about the policy should ideally be included in your staff induction and combined with regular reminders and training.

The whole controversial issue of implementing such guidelines has been the subject of much parliamentary discussion especially because the recent Human Rights Act (Europe) can be seen as having conflicts with the requirements of Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (UK). However, the Home Secretary has stated that the two are, in his view, compatible.
The implication is that firms must reassess email, phone and Web monitoring policies, but before you panic, be aware that legal and IT analysts are saying that not much should need changing, assuming that your organisation's policies are reasonable in the first place.

Why have an email policy ?
The benefits of having a policy are many and often unsung and should cover :

• communicating more effectively, both inside and outside your organisation
• giving guidance to new or mobile staff,
• indicating when email is not an appropriate method, for instance, resolving disputes, brainstorming (especially if you can all meet up).
• accepted methods of using email and labelling confidential messages, employing encryption if necessary
• helping users acquire good email skills (just like a letter-writing skills)
• using the right approach, eg friendly if internal, perhaps more formal if external

The risks of not having considered a policy include :

• messages sent outside your site may contain confidential information, whether sent by staff, volunteers or contractors
• circulating material (text, graphics, photos, logos) in breach of copyright
• liability in sexual or racial harassment cases: case law has established that relevant activities here include circulating racially offensive jokes and employees sending sexually explicit emails to each other
• libel: commercial employers have had to pay high costs in cases of email libel as a result of internal emails making libellous claims about their competitors
• carelessly worded emails which could unintentionally lead to a binding contract if there is enough evidence of agreement and they are not at least labelled 'subject to contract'.

Should you be monitoring company emails or are they 'personal' ?
There are compelling reasons for creating a corporate email policy, but once it's in place how do you supervise and enforce it? Many commercial companies monitor employee's emails. Tools like MimeSweeper from Content Technologies can analyse email text to look for 'problem' messages which you have specified. Even re-routing those common emails which have misspelled addresses may need some form of intervention by an administrator, whether technical or clerical.
Appropriate circumstances under which you might monitor internal communications might be :

• detecting crime
• investigating unauthorised use of your computer equipment and also personal/business uses
• training purposes
• detecting virus activity
• checking compliance with procedures required by other authorities
• checking that your communications system works properly.

What is RIP ?
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) updates the law on the interception of communications to accommodate 'new advances' like the Internet. It also aims to help combat the threat posed by rising criminal use of encrypted messages.
This controversial Act governs the field of 'intrusive investigative techniques' including phone calls, fax and email on both public and private networks. However, companies are only allowed to monitor communications with the consent of both the sender and recipient, unless monitoring is to provide evidence of business transactions or regulatory compliance, for the detection of crime, or for protection against hacking or computer viruses. Even when the exceptions apply, companies need to make reasonable efforts to inform callers that interceptions may take place.
In certain cases, government security agencies are allowed to demand access to your internal information networks and data, eg, when national security interests are the issue. Critics say this could result in imprisonment for those who use encryption, but say they have lost their "key" for decoding messages. ISPs are also required to build "reasonable interception capabilities" into their networks to allow enforcement access to email.

This is the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) in full.

An excellent summary of the main issues is provided by Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties (UK).

A critique page by the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR) can be found at http://www.fipr.org/rip/.

What is HRA ?
The legal framework regarding monitoring of company email in the UK is changing. The Human Rights Act 1998 came into force on 2nd October 2000 and incorporates into UK law certain rights and freedoms set out in the European Convention on Human Rights such as: Freedom of expression (Article 10). Employees will have a new right to privacy in their correspondence, though legal experts are split on how this will be implemented, bearing in mind the emphasis on 'reasonable grounds' for surveillance in upcoming legislation.

For example: Article 8 of the HRA grants rights of privacy in correspondence, so a firm would appear to be in clear breach of the act if it monitors its employees at all.

A good summary of employment proceedings of the Act can be found online at LawRights.co.uk.

How to make it happen
On our Web site, you can find a basic IT Acceptable Use Policy (ITAUP) in the downloads section. The idea is to copy and adapt it to the needs of your organisation. A simple "find-and-replace" routine in a word processor to add the name of your own organisation will get you a good part of the way there.
If you are going to set up monitoring systems, it's a good idea to seek legal advice, especially if you are going to act regularly on the information gathered.

Contacts
Liberty on the Human Rights Act 1998

Electronic Communications Act 2000

The Home Office on the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill

Foundation for Information Policy Research views on the RIP Bill

Data protection registrar

British Standards Institute

MimeSweeper

[Acknowledgements: Graham Lane, Lem Bingley]

4. Currency convertors

What is it ?
You want to know how much cash to take for that trip abroad? What sort of exchange rate should you expect? You can find this out online much faster than running to your bank or the local exchange kiosk.
Just select the "From" and "To" currencies and click the appropriate button, usually "Go" or "Convert".

Contacts
Altavista's offering is a simple and quick 2-way convertor powered by Oanda. Only a small viewing area.

To see a bigger version of the same thing, Good-Stuff uses the same engine but it's easier to read.

Moneyweb's convertor has a very friendly front page and is very quick, but rounds off (up or down?) and assumes you know which currencies each country uses. Useful if want to compare lots of currencies on the same page, ie what is the pound worth in 46 different countries?

Oanda is the 'bees knees' of currency sites has a quick convertor (top left) and a an instant table (no typing needed) showing Dollars, Pounds, Euros and Yen. The mass of content makes this page a bit slow. Their conversion engine powers other sites too.

5. SurfTime wastes time big time

Our experience with BT's SurfTime is proving to be a disappointing one. For a flat rate monthly charge, you get "unmetered calls to the Internet anytime" and your accountant gets peace of mind since the phone bills are more predictable (no call charges).
The dial-up service is great when it's going, but frustratingly patchy, just dropping the line at random and excluding access. (Telnetting into the Pipeline router, you can see that the connection is randomly dropped on the WAN side while the LAN side is still sending Tx packets asking for download).

Perhaps this is to be expected and it's just a case of "you pays your money and take your choice". You can imagine many companies have set up their modems or routers to stay on as long as they like, since they don't have to pay call charges - resulting in an overloaded and/or intermittent service.
BT have a clause which says they can basically 'chuck you off' (Freeserve-style) if you treat the service as though it were 'always-on' but enforcing that wouldn't exactly pay dividends for them.

Moral: The more expensive services and accounts are still the most reliable. If you depend on your Internet connections, then modem and ISDN2e (dialup rates) or leased line (flat fee, unmetered) still have mileage in them.

Contacts
http://www.btconnect.com/public/home/surftime_tracker.html

6. Is your NT disc fast enough ?

What is it ?
Windows NT has a Performance Monitor Counter which lets you know if your hard drive is too slow.

Benefits
Tells you if applications are running efficiently on your disc or whether you should consider replacing it with a faster drive.

Drawbacks
You need to restart the NT server or workstation.

How to make it happen
Before you can run the disc counter, log on as a member of the Administrators group. before you activate the physical and logical disc counters.
Run a command prompt. (Type diskperf to view a Help document about how to turn diskperf on and off)
Type "diskperf -y" to set the system to start disc performance counters.
(This will also show you whether the disc performance counters have already been activated)
Restart the computer to activate the disc performance counters.

1. Open Performance Monitor (Start | Programs | Administrative Tools | Performance Monitor).
2. Choose Physical Disk from the Object drop-down menu.
3. Choose Avg Disk Bytes/Transfer from the Counter.

Contacts
[Tip courtesy of TechRepublic]

7. Retrieving stuck CDs

The drive has eaten my CD !
Your favourite CD or the master version of your software is stuck inside the CD-ROM drive and no amount prodding the eject button or verbal abuse will make it re-appear.

How to release the CD
Most CD drives have a small hole above or below the drive tray. This hole hides a release catch about the diameter of a straightened-out paper clip. Once you have poked this valuable tool into the hole, you should be able to grab the drive tray and pull out the tray by hand, whether the power is on or not.

8. Disabling a stolen mobile phone

Where is it ?
You don't know. Your phone is lost or stolen.

What can I do now ?
Your chances of getting it back by having reported it stolen, etc are slim, but fortunately you took the precaution beforehand of writing down its unique ID number and keeping it in a safe place. Simply give this ID number to your phone service provider when you report it missing so they can disable any services to that phone. Even if the thief changes the SIM card, the stolen phone will be totally useless.

How do I get this unique ID number ?
To check your mobile phone's serial number, key in the following 5 characters on your phone:

* # 0 6 #

Benefits
You won't get charged for unauthorised calls.
Whoever stole it won't be able to use it either.
You've done your bit to help crack down on crime.

Drawbacks
You're still unlikely to get your phone back.

But I didn't find out the code first!
You could always ring the thief and get them to type in *#06# so they can tell you the 15-digit code.
;-)

9. OneHopMail - simple messaging with multiple identities

What is it ?
OneHopMail^TM is a free message-sending tool, except that you can choose your identity - ie, who the message appears to come from - as well as who it goes to.
The only screen you have to deal with is basically a "compose message" screen - there is no 'inbox' or folder system. In addition to the usual "To:", "Cc:" and "Subject:" fields, this screen simply asks for you to fill in who you are and choose a password. Clicking "Send" sends the message as well as registering your 'account'. This gets around the interminable process of choosing a unique name, which is common when registering with other accounts - your email address is inherently unique.

Benefits

• Speed: It's one click mail. The login, send and compose actions are all compressed into one screen, and are executed with one click.
• Even more portable than normal conventional Webmail accounts. Make your email message look like it is coming from any of one your usual email addresses, whether office, home or Webmail. This is ideal for professionals on the move who want to send an email, but are not able to log into their account at work to accomplish the task.
• Encourages your correspondent to reply to the address you specify, eg reply to my office rather than the Webmail account I'm using while on the move.
• The service also sends a copy of the mail to your regular e-mail account.
• No incoming mail to read, so nothing to distract from your main objective of sending a message.
• Very few ads so far.
• Registration happens transparently the first time you send a message, ie it logs your chosen password.

Drawbacks

• No message store. You have to go to your regular mail account to read incoming messages, but then that's not the point of using this facility.
• You must type your name, email address and password correctly first time round - the "forgotten my password" only sends to the account you specified.

How to make it happen
Simply visit http://www.onehopmail.com