Zen Monthly Newsletter

Zen Internet is delighted to be celebrating its tenth anniversary this month, a key milestone in the company's history. Launched on 13th October 1995 with a network capable of supporting up to six simultaneous dial-up users sharing a whopping 64kbits/sec bandwidth, the company now has a core network capacity over 20,000 times larger and its first year sales record of £59,000 is broken every working day. Since Zen's modest beginnings, the online services market has grown enormously. In 1995 the Internet was nowhere. It was a novelty for techies. It wasn't in the press, or on TV or radio, and companies didn't take it seriously as a business tool. Now there are approaching 20 million Internet connections in the UK; e-mail has become a universal means of communication and the market for Internet services in this country is worth billions. The top headline story on our Home Page has the full story.

Google has hired Vinton Cerf, the chairman of the Internet overseeing organisation ICANN. Called the Father of the Internet and "the most important person alive", he starts work at Google this week. "Vint", now 62, co-invented TCP/IP, the Internet's primary data-transfer protocol in the 1970s. He says he won't be working directly on writing code or managing programmers at Google, but looking at fundamental re-design of its systems. He also keeps a part-time job at NASA, working on interplanetary communications, and predicts the development of an interplanetary backbone by the end of the decade, although he admits "TCP doesn't work all that well when round-trip times are 40 minutes."

Thousands of pounds in prizes are on offer this month at two of the UK's most popular computer magazines as they seek your votes for their annual awards given to the best companies, products and services for the IT and online community.

Before you're asked to vote on UK progress towards membership of an alleged European super state, you'll have the chance to register an appropriate new domain name - yourcompany.eu - run from Brussels by EURid. The not-for-profit organisation, selected by the European Commission, is a partnership between operators of the country-code top level domain registries for Belgium, Italy and Sweden and will use software that's already in place for registering domains in Belgium, meaning the new domain will benefit from years of development and should be almost entirely automated from start to finish. A predicted one million .eu names will be sold in its first year. Zen Internet is an accredited EU Registrar for the UK and is taking orders now, in the 'Sunrise' run-up period before the domain goes live in a few months time.

The European Commission has accepted UK proposals to log details of all telephone, e-mail and Internet traffic across the 25 countries of the EU in an attempt to combat terrorism. Only three months ago, the European Parliament voted against similar measures, which it said would place an unreasonable burden on industry and infringe citizens' privacy rights. The new proposals have been condemned by European Digital Rights, an umbrella organisation of 21 civil rights and privacy campaign groups across the EU.

The head of threat intelligence at Symantec argues that Mac OS X and Mozilla Firefox users are fooling themselves if they think they’re impervious to attack. Out of 38 vulnerabilities discovered in the first half of 2005, 25 were for Mozilla browsers and only 13 for Internet Explorer. Recent trojan discoveries demonstrate that as OS X increases in popularity, it will get more attention from potential attackers. The Register has the full story.

One of the oldest Web browsers in existence, the full version of Opera was only available by paid subscription until recently. Now you can download the full version of Opera and enjoy a "superior browsing experience" for free. Next to Internet Explorer, Opera is one of the most seasoned veterans of the Web browser crowd and has been refined over the years to include some of the richest and most useful features around.

In Windows XP, holding the WinKey (the key with a Windows symbol) and tapping the L key will promptly lock the system. If it's password protected, you’ll need to enter it to get back in. This is great if you have nosey workmates, children that like to bash the keyboard whenever your back is turned, or someone who might clean the keyboard without turning the computer off. You can create your own shortcuts too, perhaps to access the programs you use most often, like the Windows Calculator in this example: Go to the Start menu - All Programs - Accessories - right-click on Calculator and choose Properties. Go to the Shortcut tab and left-click inside the Shortcut key box. Then just type the key combination you want to fix, such as Ctrl+Alt+C, save, and you're done.

In recent years, Microsoft has made learning their wares a lot easier. If you are interested in database administration or development, for example, you can access free 'e-lessons' that will eventually sell for £50 or more.

If you want to sell overseas and have several Web sites based on one catalogue or content set, tweaked to suit visitors in different countries, you run the risk of being penalised by search engines. They often view near-duplicate pages as deliberate attempts to dilute their results. Foreign language translations cause few problems, but if you want to gain customers in North America, Australia, and other 'English Spoken' countries, you need a solution that doesn't involve replacing perfectly good content with something radically different just to keep the search engines happy. One answer is to use IP recognition. Using an IP-to-country database, your site can perform an IP lookup to find out where a visitor is coming from and serve up pages based on their location. Search engines won’t see near-duplicate content, because they receive only one copy of any given page - the primary UK version - but when visitors are referred from Google, Yahoo! or MSN in other countries, they will see localised content, with appropriate pricing, regardless of where the search was performed.

CSS Zen Garden is a Web site demonstrating the benefits of using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Half manifesto and half gallery, according to its own words, the project appeared as a reaction to the mostly uninspired use of Cascading Style Sheets that was typical in 2003. Since then, over 700 Web site designers have contributed different CSS files to the site that produce dramatically different Web pages from the same fixed HTML code.

He is Japan's most successful film-maker, with a box-office hit that beat Titanic into second place. Pixar's John Lasseter calls him "the world's greatest living animator". Others know him simply as "the God of Anime". But away from the limelight Hayao Miyazaki leads a monastic existence (no TV or Internet) and in his first interview for 10 years he reveals a "curiously Zen" attitude to his fate as the last of a dying breed of hand-drawn cell animators.

In what blogger Robin Good calls a preview of the Web to come, a free online application mixes two Web services - Craigslist, the outrageously simple classified ads service that has been taking business from newspapers - and Google Maps, which provides zoomable maps and satellite views covering most of the planet. A Wired Magazine report proclaimed Google Maps with Craigslist as the first Web 2.0 application.

When Fats Domino's niece posted a worried message in the special "Missing Persons" section created on the New Orleans Craigslist after Hurricane Katrina, hers was just one of over 3,000 such messages posted that day. Despite the volume of appeals, her famous uncle's name was quickly noticed and reported in the press, and within hours his rescue was confirmed. Other missing people didn't benefit from the same media attention, but Craigslist was seen as a natural gathering place to exchange information among survivors and their friends and family. More than 13,000 messages were posted to the "Missing Persons" board in the days that followed.

Tech companies including the big three, Microsoft, Google and IBM, made crucial contributions in the wake of the hurricane disaster that devastated New Orleans. IBM took the wraps off sophisticated new search tools from its labs to pool data on storm victims; Google provided new satellite photographs and other data on a special page that was often the only way evacuees could find out if their home was under water; Microsoft programmers worked for days to get a Red Cross missing persons site up and running.

Congratulations to Picard Solutions, Northampton, a Zen Partner and the only IT services provider in the country able to showcase a complete set of Zen Internet promotional items - coffee mug, ID pass lanyard and logo-printed pens - generously purchased at a recent eBay charity auction in aid of the MS Society. In a winning formula set to be repeated in future competitions to benefit good causes, Zen matched Picard's winning £100 bid to double the donation to the charity.

Weblogging has just launched a new service called Creative Reporter allowing readers to contribute tips, news, pointers and full articles to its thematic network of blogs - and it will pay for your authorship.

Instant messaging is all the rage these days, and Google has shown up fashionably late with its no-frills, no pack drill messenger: Google Talk. As the name suggests, you can actually talk, not just keyboard chat, using the built-in VOIP client. Read more, or download here.

Surfing the Net isn't always done from behind a desk. People are accessing the Web in new and different ways, using mobile phones, PDAs and even portable gaming systems. More gadgets with wireless Internet features are introduced every day and your Web site is being seen by visitors in some very unlikely places.

One of the biggest stories in recent weeks was eBay's move to purchase Skype, a peer-to-peer-based Voice over IP (VoIP) provider, for $2.6bn in cash and stock up front, with $1.5bn to follow in 2008. VoIP has been in the news a lot this year, with Microsoft buying Teleo, Google rolling out Google Talk, Yahoo! acquiring Dialpad, and even AOL introducing a new service designed to let users make phone calls over the Net. Most commentators think eBay is paying too much for Skype, favouring alternatives with better security and more flexibility like Gizmo Project. Where Skype uses its own proprietary protocol, Gizmo Project uses the open SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) standard and supports the open Jabber IM (Instant Messaging) protocol. And where Skype only allows free VoIP calls to other Skype users, Gizmo Project is committed to interoperability, making it possible to interconnect with any SIP-compatible VoIP system.

Last month, in conjunction with the Independent Film Channel, Tivo started offering downloads of TV programmes and films before they aired on television. NerdTV claims to go one better with a television programme that's available only over the Internet. Is that still television? Probably not, but the new weekly chat show, "essentially Charlie Rose for geeks - a one-hour interview show with a single guest from the world of technology", is worth a look in any case.

Google wants to make the full text of all the world's books searchable online, and has started work, but the Association of American Publishers, the trade association of the US publishing industry, objects to the content being used in a commercial context. After it criticised Google for "digitally reproducing copyrighted works to support its sale of advertising", the project ground to a halt. In the UK, others are going ahead. A co-operative initiative by the BBC, the British Film Institute, Channel 4 and the Open University, will make print and broadcast content from their vast archives freely available online. A British Library project will make over a million pages from 19th century newspapers available, and there are plans for the European Union to create its own digital library, containing 4.5 billion pages of key works from libraries across Europe.

Search engine staff at Lycos have recorded the 50 most common searches during half the lifetime of the Web and you might be surprised at who and what made the list. Check out the Lycos 50 hall of fame and be underwhelmed by what Web surfers have been wasting their time on since 1999 - largely Pamela Anderson and large men in tights it seems - with Star Trek still squeaking in at number 50.

Don't let the name put you off. This new engine has an interesting new take on the search process that allows you to to juggle the results you see with a secondary keyword entry box that targets the kind of Web sites and information pages you're looking for much more precisely than the default scattergun approach taken elsewhere.