Zen Monthly Newsletter

Zen Internet and Manchester-based Introspect IT Solutions, a Gold ZenPartner, were 'instrumental' at the 10th annual incarnation of the V Music Festival over the weekend of August 20th-21st this year, which ended on a high note with more than 130,000 fans filling two sites in Staffordshire and Essex. Behind the scenes, four ZenADSL lines provided 2Mbps connections for the festival organisers and three more for the bands. More than 80 acts took part - including Franz Ferdinand, The Streets, Kaiser Chiefs, Maroon 5 and Joss Stone. Veteran Tony Christie delighted festival-goers at both sites, following the successful revival of his single (Is This The Way To) Amarillo. Oasis closed the festival at Weston Park and the Scissor Sisters were the last on stage at Hylands Park.

This tale from Alice Miles, writing in The Times last month, will remind some newly arrived broadband customers (if this is the first time you have seen our newsletter - welcome aboard) of past trials and tribulations suffered at the hands of certain other ADSL providers before a change of fortune and the discovery of a brighter pathway led them to Zen.

The National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU), the UK's specialists in law enforcement online, surveyed businesses recently to discover their experiences of computer crime. They estimate that £2.4bn in damage is caused every year to companies with more than 1,000 employees and that nine out of ten have experienced some kind of computer-related security incident. The Financial Services Authority (FSA), recommending penetration testing which mimics hacker intrusion, says that 'pen tests' at UK financial institutions regularly lead to the discovery of old, unpatched software or dangerous services running on Web servers that would permit a hacker to enter a system.

Following a six-month deferment on the implementation of new rules on electrical and electronic waste announced by the DTI, manufacturing companies are being urged to take advantage of the free help available to rethink the products they design, and users will need to think twice about what they buy - and how they dispose of old equipment. The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive, which is now expected to become effective in June 2006, will make producers responsible for financing the collection and treatment of their products at their "end of life" to reduce the amount of waste going to landfill. New products launched on the UK market after 13th August this year must be marked to show compliance - and identify the manufacturer. The Reduction of Use of Certain Hazardous Substances (RoHS) Directive goes one step further, banning the sale of new electrical and electronic equipment that contains more than agreed levels of particular hazardous substances after July 2006.

More people are spending more time reading online newspapers at work. During May, Guardian Unlimited saw a 61 percent increase in page views from company premises and Slate, the Microsoft-backed Internet news magazine, registered a 112 percent gain. Online advertisers paid more to reach the bigger audience, contributing most to recent newspaper ad revenue growth, which one American report described as a "life raft" for the industry.

Even though Hurricane Katrina literally stopped the newspaper's presses, the New Orleans Times-Picayune still delivered the news. Staff rose to the challenge last Tuesday by publishing a special, 20-page PDF "Hurricane Edition", which was available for download from its affiliated Web site "Everything New Orleans" at www.nola.com.

And speaking of rising oil prices... The average UK motorist uses a thousand litres of fuel a year, based on an annual mileage of 12,000 miles. Paying a few pence less per litre at the cheapest petrol stations can add up to some worthwhile savings. You can check the Find Cheap Petrol Web site to see if any of your local petrol purveyors are listed. Better yet, to save some serious money, you could halve your fuel bill by switching to liquid petroleum gas (LPG) - it's about 50p a litre cheaper than petrol. There's a substantial up-front conversion cost, but the half-price fuel soon pays it back - and some cars qualify for grants to help cover the initial outlay. LPG is also more environmentally friendly, and LPG-fuelled cars enjoy a reduced or zero rate London Congestion Charge.

Pick a JPEG image stored on your computer and you can create your own postage stamps - approved by the postal service and legal to use - for letters or packages posted in the USA. Advertising, sales messages and company logos are forbidden, and there are rules prohibiting sexually suggestive images and the like, but typical photos from the family album are acceptable and the company producing the stamps, in sheets of 20, has wildlife, history, space exploration and other image galleries to choose from.

Short of disk space? At Streamload, you can upload gigabytes of music and video files (as well as Word docs, Web pages, presentations, almost anything) and share them with any other Streamload user you choose. You or your friends can stream or download media files to any computer, so you can watch your favourites even when you are far from home. A free Streamload account comes with 10GB of storage and allows 100MB of downloads per month.

Invite anybody and everybody to share their amateur videos and favourite clips with a worldwide audience via the Web and you get everything you'd expect, plus some real gems.

A 19 year old appearing in a Missouri court last month was the first to be prosecuted under a new law prohibiting the use of camcorders in cinemas. The teenager, who faces 17 years in prison, made copies of recent releases "The Perfect Man" and "Bewitched" to distribute on the Internet. The Motion Picture Association of America estimates that camcorder piracy accounts for over 90 percent of new movie copies that eventually turn up on peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa, or burned onto discs sold on the black market.

Microsoft has revealed more about its HoneyMonkey research project, designed to trawl the Internet looking for Web sites hosting malicious code. A large network of Windows XP machines, some unpatched and some fully updated, have been set as 'honey traps' designed to attract invasive browser-based exploits. Yi-Min Wang, group manager of the Cybersecurity and Systems Management group at Microsoft Research, said the network had snared hundreds of dangerous URLs in its first few weeks of operation. The system found 750 with active exploits infecting Windows XP machines, and one that breached fully patched systems running the company's newly hardened XP Service Pack 2. Wang said information would be provided to Microsoft's Enforcement Team for possible legal action.

Crooks are using Internet job search Web sites to recruit home users looking for part time employment and offering lucrative jobs that quickly turn into scams designed to clean out their bank accounts. Victims are sent foreign cheques and asked to clear them through their personal accounts for a 10% fee. But after transferring the lion's share of the money to their new employers, the foreign currency cheque fails to convert into real cash - it turns out to be a clever forgery - and the home workers are left with a hole in their savings and no way to refill it. A police investigator said this is the easiest way he's ever seen to make money. "You're not holding a gun to anyone, but you're cleaning out their bank account". Language warning: The full story, reported by a newspaper in Ohio, might leave UK readers wondering again at the annoying American habit of taking two words with clearly different meanings, usually homophones like tyre and tire - or cheque and check in this case - and simply scrapping one, leaving a confusing homonym to do the work of both.

That Web site may look like the genuine article, but is it really? You could find out by downloading Corestreet's free Spoofstick applet. A handy tool for fighting phishers and others with something to hide, it displays the real domain of the site in your browser, regardless of what the address window says. The toolbar is available for IE 6.x and Firefox 1.x.

Co-operation between Microsoft and the FBI led to the arrest of a teenage Russian living in Morocco and a 21-year old Turkish man only days after they launched computer worms, known as Zotob and Mytob, against Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003 and other systems last month. At the height of the attacks, CNN reported on air that its PCs had been taken over by a worm that caused them to restart repeatedly and networks at ABC, The New York Times and Visa were shut down. Microsoft claimed the arrests as a success for its 50-person Internet Crime Investigations Team and its $5 million anti-virus reward scheme that pays informants for tips leading to the arrest and conviction of virus and worm writers. The initiatives led to another quick arrest in May of a 19-year old German responsible for creating the Sasser worm.

Over a year ago, in our July 2004 issue, we reported the case of AOL employee Jason Smathers, who stole 92 million screen names and sold them to a Las Vegas 'male pill' spammer for thousands of pounds. Before his court appearance last month, Smathers struck a plea bargain with prosecutors and agreed to help track down the recipient of the list in exchange for a much reduced sentence. The judge acquiessed, and handed down a 15-month prison term. The CAN-Spam legislation (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) under which Smathers was charged, was introduced only months before his arrest. AOL claimed the theft had cost the company over £150,000.

File this one away with a reminder that it might be useful next Valentine's Day. Whenever you need to let someone know your true feelings without revealing your identity, you can slip them a word or two in secret using Sharpmail's anonymous e-mailer. Messages can be in plain text, you can add hearts and flowers with HTML, or you can send an SMS message to someone's mobile. But don't even think about sending inappropriate mail or spam; Sharpmail will not respond kindly.

Has anybody mentioned your Web site in the chattering class circles of the Internet recently? TalkDigger is a free service that queries all the major Web and blogs-based search engines, searching for mentions and references to any Web site URL that you care to submit. The results show up in an unusual, empty-looking page format, but if you click on one of the tiny square symbols displayed, all will be revealed.

Google offers more than a dozen services, but most are hidden. The GoogleX interface makes all of Google's goodies, such as Gmail, Froogle, Maps, and more, easily accessible via a nifty Mac OS X-like toolbar. Originally designed by a Google researcher, the toolbar disappeared shortly after being posted on the Google Labs site, but not before some enterprising users saved a copy.

This is a fast metasearcher that finds flights, hotels, and hire cars from more than 100 different travel sites. Prices are in dollars, but coverage from UK airports is excellent. Fast, easy, comprehensive.

Spotster, a new search engine "targeted at the specific needs of business professionals looking for information within their industry", launched in Beta during August. Privately-funded, the California-based Spotster claims to offer an ad-free, B2B-tuned search engine for targeted industry research that is "dynamically creating and growing a vertical network of pages most relevant to a particular industry" according to company officials, who describe the technology as capable of ensuring that only the most relevant Web pages are included in its industry index.