Zen Monthly Newsletter

Zen Internet is doubling in size year-on-year, so there are fantastic career opportunities throughout the company to work in a friendly, informal and exciting environment where the belief in communication and ongoing improvement creates a real buzz. The recruitment team is looking for quality people to provide the very best service and customer care as the company continues to grow. Zen's Web site provides up to date details of the many and varied current vacancies in the Rochdale area. Check the expanding Jobs Pages throughout this month for details of upcoming Recruitment Events and more about joining a company that could be the key to the future you're looking for.

Happy New Year! The products you use will be smarter, faster, smaller and cheaper in the year ahead, says PC World, in the magazine's annual 'what's new and what's next' roundup of the latest PCs, software, mobile gadgets and home electronics.

Using a standard laptop PC, fitted with a wireless card and an antennae, anyone can go 'wardriving' - looking for other people's wireless networks to break into. Wireless safaris can be as simple or as elaborate as you want them to be. You can build complicated antennae (there are numerous designs on the Internet) and detect networks from miles away, or you can park next door to a vulnerable business and get access without going to any trouble at all. Most practitioners do it for fun, 'because it's there', but it can be a serious security threat and there are criminal hackers who are out to turn a profit by gaining access to sensitive information. Last month saw the first conviction for wardriving activity when Brian Salcedo, 21, pleaded guilty to tapping into the wireless network of a North Carolina retailer in an attempt to capture credit card information. The plot failed, but the hapless hacker was sentenced to nine years in federal prison for his efforts anyway. Salcedo's conviction breaks the record for the longest sentence for a hacking crime, previously held by Kevin Mitnick, who was sentenced to five and a half years behind bars.

Six years ago, German inventors, Guido Ciburskipartner and Petra Sauerbachs developed a device called the "telly fairy" which enabled viewers to skip irritating TV commercials and they won a court case when TV companies mounted a legal challenge to ban the product. Now the duo are back with a plan to launch free TV viewing on the Internet with a revolutionary Web service that aims to give viewers access to any programme from almost anywhere in the world.

If you're more interested in searching for media than text, try the new search engine GoFish, which claims to search 12 million media files. Media in this case includes audio, video, games and ring tones.

How many times have you downloaded a movie or audio file only to find you need a new player or different codec to view it on your machine? There are so many different media formats now that you need an arsenal of software just to keep up. Or you could try the one size fits all solution offered by VideoLAN, a non-profit organisation based in Paris. The group's VLC media player is a totally free, Open Source utility that works with any format, on any platform, including Mac and Linux. There are no additional codecs to install, even for DivX and Xvid.

If you have Flash, you have all you need to check out the free entertainment at Matt Spendlove's Polymorphic Web site, created to share his friends' music with the world. Click the play button to open the Polymorphic Jukebox, and then surf while the music plays. There are plenty of tracks and artists to choose from.

One of 2004's most popular Christmas gifts was the portable digital music player. The biggest sellers, like the Apple iPod or Creative Zen Micro, fit in your pocket as easily as a mobile phone and can store thousands of songs copied from CDs or downloaded from the Internet. But technology security experts are warning new owners about dangers that can lurk behind the music. Peer-to-peer file-swapping networks - Kazaa, BearShare and LimeWire - may deliver more than free software and music. Some sneak in adware or even viruses and spyware, according to Kraig Lane at the Norton security company, Symantec. "The risk has skyrocketed" he says, warning that even reputable online music stores sometimes include adware that hides in the background on computers to track user behaviour and report it to advertising companies. More sinister than adware is spyware, which sifts through hard drive information for personal and financial data and reports it to crooks. Music fans have no problem trusting Apple and have paid to download more than 200 million songs from the iTunes Music Store since its launch in 2003, but there are more than a dozen other online sites selling or sharing millions of music files.

Anyone who likes to surf the Web will have heard about spyware. Pop-ups, hijackers, trackers and spiders are everywhere. But what are they and how harmful can they be? You can find any number of anti-spyware Web sites that will tell you why you need protection, but they usually have a vested interest in something they're selling. How can you tell which product is best for the job, and what you should worry about, as opposed to what poses no real threat? Spy vs Spyware is a Web site created by a PC consultant who needed to discover what worked best for dealing with spyware in his own office. The result is clear, concise, no-hype information about the nasty things you might pick up on the Web, and how to get rid of them, including links to download pages for the tools that he found most useful.

One of the most difficult spyware nuisances to get rid of is the browser hijacker, CoolWebSearch, which alters browser settings, adds Web sites to your favorites list and often crashes systems by launching multiple pop-up ads at the same time. It is extremely persistent, replicating and reinstalling itself when removal is attempted. "It wants to stay alive," says Ed English, CEO of InterMute, a company that offers CWShredder, the best known of the dozen or so software helpers designed to detect and remove CoolWebSearch and other browser parasites.

Writing in the Microsoft sponsored Slate magazine, Steven E. Landsburg argues that the best place for virus writers is Death Row. "It's estimated that virus writing and related activities cost about $50 billion a year. If executing one of them would deter just one-fifth of one percent of other virus writers for just one year, we'd be $100-million better off", says Landsburg. "On a pure cost-benefit basis, we should be quicker to execute a virus writer than a murderer".

Skepdic is the online home of American author Robert Carroll's book "The Skeptic's Dictionary", and it's a must-read for anyone who is having trouble knowing what to believe in. From alien visitations and faces on Mars, to chiropractics, chain letters and pyramid sales, the articles in these pages deconstruct more than 400 everyday beliefs and urban myths.

Seeing is believing, most of the time. Cool Optical Illusions is a collection of 150 optical illusions, gathered and displayed online, with some available as wallpapers. There is also a colour blindness test and an entry explaining how the eye and brain conspire to make the impossible appear possible.

Remember Etch-A-Sketch? 1960s originals are still selling on eBay and there's an online version that offers all the excitement of the original knob twiddler. After experiencing that, you may be surprised to learn that new designs have kept the toy in production for 40 years and there have been recent models for Shrek and Simpsons fans.

Hot new animators are the talk of Hollywood, and it's not hard to understand why thousands of hopeful young computer enthusiasts are aiming at a glamorous career with the likes of Pixar. Thanks to Stan Hayward, and his award winning Make Movies Web site, there is a place that budding young talents can flex their creative muscle. This site is completely dedicated to making animations - from the basic principles of flip-book or roller animations, right up to storyboarding and capturing and editing whole sequences and movies.

Here's a picture of everything, according to driven American amateur artist Howard Hallis, who has drawn the world and everything and everybody he's seen in it on one piece of paper - and then turned it into a Web site. His eccentric creation can be deconstructed by clicking on an area of the picture and zooming to the next level, where you can zoom into the next, and the next, until you reach one of the individual cartoon close-ups that Howard has been dashing off and adding to the mosaic since 1997.

Acrobat 7 and Reader 7 are now available for download from Adobe's site and, as previously, the latest version of the PDF reader is supplied free of charge. Acrobat 7 itself is faster and has new features including support for Microsoft Access and Visio, which means that reports, maps, charts and databases can be made into PDFs, with formatting preserved. New Microsoft Outlook integration allows Acrobat to 'bind' messages sorted in Outlook or put together in a folder as a PDF, so that a project’s e-mails can be kept together as a single document for circulation or archiving.

We had an avalanche of literally some letters in response to articles in last month's newsletter, including one from James Brough, concerned about his Web site's Google 'PageRank' after reading that Microsoft's new search engine was unlikely to overtake Google as the world's favourite Web seeker in the near future. Appearing in the first ten or twenty Google results for particular keyword searches can be crucially important for commercial Web sites, but high positions are not determined by PageRank, which is strictly about links. PageRank is Google's measure of the quantity and quality of the links that point to a particular Web page, but it's not usually up to date or very accurate and it has few followers outside the enthusiasts who have installed the Google toolbar to keep an eye on it. There is much more to Google's algorithm than PageRank. Higher PageRanked pages don't necessarily out-perform lower PageRanked pages in search results. Our advice? Optimise every important page of your Web site for all the major search engines and put your potential customers first. The more relevant it is for them, the more the search engines will want to make sure they can find it.

People are going to need specialised media search engines to look for programmes and content on the Internet as the Web matures into an entertainment platform that not only rivals television but merges with it through 'convergence technology' and devices that combine PC and TV features. Google is said to be recording and indexing TV content to make programmes searchable online, in much the same way that it is bringing library books to the Web. Last month, Yahoo! unveiled a beta video search engine to serve the growing appetite for multimedia entertainment online and a new engine at Blinkx TV began indexing video and audio streams directly from broadcasters like Fox News, HBO, ESPN, National Public Radio and the BBC. Microsoft is developing a platform for searchable video that allows people using the Internet or a TV to find Web based or on-demand media. America Online has updated its multimedia engine Singingfish to include video search. "They're all circling around it," says Mika Salmi, founder of AtomFilms, a film site that is working with Yahoo! to make its videos searchable. He sells TV-style ads for Web sites at ten to fifteen pounds per thousand showings, about five times the average cost of banner ads, and believes that searchable video will soon be attracting a major share of the billions spent annually on TV commercials.

Blinkx is leading the field in media clip indexing (see TV TIMES story above) with a metasearch engine that scans content from a long list of broadcasters. It includes BBC News, ITN, Bloomberg TV, ESPN, CNN, Sky News and Sky Sports, Fox News, ABC, CBS, NBC, HBO, National Geographic, the History Channel and the BBC's Parliament channel.