Zen Monthly Newsletter

This newsletter has been going out at the beginning of the month, every month, since March 2001. If you don't get every issue, it might be because there is some over-protective censoring software at work on your behalf that is blocking perfectly innocent messages. E-mail filtering is a good idea in principle, but too many systems use simplistic searches for matching strings of characters that end up trashing completely innocuous messages. One victim of the nanny state of censoring software, David Bowsher, writes: "The internal e-mail network of the university hospital in which I work has its own list of forbidden words. Among these is 'spastic', as I found when I tried to send a message to the Medical Director of the Stroke Unit about a patient with spastic paraplegia following a stroke". Roland Sussex, Professor of Applied Language Studies at the University of Queensland, suffers a particularly personal problem: "I can't send e-mails to a number of countries and institutions because my surname contains a prohibited word. I have to strip all signatures before sending, and sometimes in addition have to contact the e-mail administrator at the other end to allow passage of the most innocent and anodyne of messages". Another teacher discovered that several people were prevented from receiving a message with the subject "Adult Religious Education" and there is a list of English towns and villages that can't be mentioned in e-mail, as well as common ornithological names and instructions about cooking sausages. Back issues of the newsletter are available on the Web.

Tesco is blitzing the nation with marketing e-mails, dispatching 16m-20m every month. The carpet mail bombing exceeds all its supermarket rivals' campaigning combined and is going out to four million consumers, offering shoppers everything from flower bouquets to the Chronicles of Narnia. Last month Tesco sent out 44 separate e-mails, each promoting a different offer, while Sainsbury's sent out just two. German supermarket chain Lidl sent out eight e-mails, Asda seven, Marks & Spencer four and Waitrose three. "Tesco sees e-mail as key to its marketing strategy. About 60% of the company's online revenue comes from e-mails," said Mike Parry, managing director of digital marketing company Interactive Prospect Targeting Services.

Pay-per-click advertising on major search engines has been blamed for hastening the shift of spending away from print and newspaper ads to online promotions, and certainly most of Google's annual advertising gain - part of $10 billion per year in the US alone - is somebody else's loss. But now, in a surprising twist, Google is planning to help reverse the trend, and get paid for driving dollars back to newspapers, by establishing an advertising agency. The new service will allow users to select a publication or list of publications by demographics, circulation details, or keywords, design an ad that can include images, and submit it online.

Newspapers like the Boston Globe are winning back advertisers attracted by Craigslist and other free classifieds sites with free online listing offers of their own. Advice from New Times Media, owners of Village Voice, which runs the backpage.com network of free classified bulletin boards, says they can still make money by offering advertisers the option to pay for some extra prominence. Running free ads ensures that online classifieds pages have plenty of variety and fresh content, which drives popularity, and gathers enough competing advertisements to make paying for premium listings worthwhile. It's a winning formula that's demonstrated by hundreds of successful business directory Web sites - and confirmed by the sorry state of others that stay almost empty and fail to attract visitors or advertisers in sufficient numbers because they insist on payment for even the most basic listing.

Growth and change never stop at Zen Internet and although growing and maintaining the infrastructure to provide the levels of service that our customers expect goes mostly unseen and unnoticed, there are times when improvements require some changes at their end of the line too. New equipment and some fine adjustment this month to the way our DNS servers work will mean changes to the DNS (caching/resolver) server IP addresses for some business clients. Most users will not be affected at all and the new DNS servers will be assigned to customers automatically if they do not set them manually. But those who do manually assign the DNS servers will simply need to change their server entries to: 212.23.3.100 and 212.23.6.100. Customers who have firewall rules in place to block all traffic on port 53, unless it is from Zen's DNS servers, will need to make changes to their firewall rules to allow traffic from the new addresses. Full details, and help if you need it, can be found on our support site and you can e-mail our Technical Support staff at support@zen.co.uk or call them on 0845 058 9009.

If you used to rely on finding Zen Internet's handy domain name checker at the foot of the home page and are wondering where it's gone, drop in at the all new Zen Web Hosting site. You'll find what you're looking for at the top of the page. When you've tracked down the perfect domain name, you can save and 'park' it right away for only £14.99 per year. Check the revised set of hosting packages for home and business users from as little as £1.99 per month to make your visit extra worthwhile. A new Reseller offering means you can even become a Virtual ISP and earn money selling Web space, mailboxes and database. Whatever your hosting choice, you get complete control of your own Web space in the new Linux hosting packages that now come with an easy to use cPanel Interface. Key features of cPanel include: domain name management, e-mail solutions, Web statistics, password protection, database management - and Wizards that mean you can build a Web site in minutes. Customers using Zen's previous hosting products will be given the option to transfer to one of the new cPanel packages when their contract is due for renewal. There's a demo that all newsletter readers can try. (Username: cpdemo, Password: cppass).

One domain name that your company should be looking for - before someone else does - is the new .EU domain. If you have any trademarks or brand identifiers that are important to you or your business, the time to register is now. Zen will help with your application by proof reading and checking your documentation against relevant guidelines before forwarding for validation. This is a vital service - getting things wrong means losing the chance to secure your domain before the free-for-all open registration period next year when there will be no need to show 'prior rights' to the names that companies value. The creation of a new top level domain for Europe is an important development for all businesses inside the European Community and for UK and Irish companies it presents a unique opportunity to be identified as an active player in an expanding market that already includes 25 countries and over 450 million people.

This story isn't a wind-up, but it is about a wind-up computer - the new 'Green Machine' from MIT, launched by Kofi Annan at the UN World Information Society Summit last month. Intended as a giveaway for poor children in developing countries, the rubber-cased Green Machine uses four C-cell batteries and a hand crank for power, features a 500 MHz CPU, flash memory instead of a hard drive, 'wireless mesh' technology to share scarce Internet connections and a 7" LED display that cuts typical LCD power consumption by a factor of 10. MIT's Professor Negroponte, who set up the non-profit One Laptop Per Child group to sell the laptops to developing nation governments, plans nothing less than global domination for the children's portable. "We are launching with six countries initially and as many countries as possible six months later", said Negroponte, who hoped to see more than 100 million machines built by the end of 2006. The project has some big name supporters on board, including the unlikely pairing of Google and media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Microsoft Research has announced a 1.2 million dollar Digital Inclusion funding opportunity for academic researchers "to enable expansion of computing technology to better serve the social and economic challenges of underserved communities".

If they can do it in less than 48 hours - the deadline is this week - the UK’s most innovative businesses, local authorities and voluntary sector organisations are invited to enter the 2005 eWell-Being Awards. An initiative of the UK Centre for Economic and Environmental Development (UK CEED), the awards "identify and promote the environmental, economic and social benefits of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)". There are five categories: 'Improving Public Services' - sponsored by the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) - is open to national, regional and local government and seeks projects that utilise ICT to deliver improvements in customer services and public services delivery. 'Digital Inclusion' is for voluntary sector projects that use ICT to enhance access to services. 'Age and Disability' seeks entries focusing on enhancing ICT access and services for elderly or disabled people. 'Climate Change and Environmental Efficiency' is for projects that make use of ICT to reduce the environmental impacts of energy, water and resource use. 'Better Ways of Working' covers ICT projects or applications that encourage more efficient and flexible ways of working. Projects must have been running for at least six months. Entry forms are available at the Web site.

ARTstor is a non-profit organisation created by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that offers a wealth of well-presented artwork online that is free for use in classrooms and colleges. Students can use the resource for portfolios, term papers, theses and dissertations - and for online presentations.

The widespread use of lie-detection technology is approaching and the chances are the first time you’ll encounter it will be at an airport. New Israeli-developed technology is already being used for insurance and workers compensation claim assessment and is available as a downloadable PC program that can analyse live and recorded telephone conversations. Now airports are introducing the 'GK-1system Multilevel Voice Analysis Technology' to ask questions, analyse psychological and emotional voice characteristics, and make a decision to channel travellers through green or red corridors at the rate of one per minute. The system will be used at customs and border controls to spot terrorists and smugglers. There’s also a version for analysing telephone conversations and tools that work out whether your partner really loves you and whether your spouse is telling the truth when they explain why they were so late getting home last night.

This searchable Web site and hints collection from Phil Bradley tells you how to do most things with your computer - especially online - from how to share research with colleagues and "do things with multimedia" to accomplishing "clever things with RSS and wikis".

Ingenious is a new Web site that makes available 30,000 images and articles from the Science Museum, the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television and the National Railway Museum. "You are invited on a voyage of discovery, exploring new perspectives on human ingenuity", it says, and the busy front-page interface duly opens onto an eclectic mix of glossy reference works, long, drill-down information corridors and extra links that add up to a colossal resource library, maintained by over 100 staff, which appears to have used every penny of the whopping lottery grant that funded its development.

Festoon is a new free plug-in for Skype and Google Talk that allows you to conference in real-time via your Web cam with up to 200 people - and screen-share any application or document you have on your computer at the same time. Festoon includes some unique personalisation and image manipulation effects that allow for fun and games too. You can talk to people from the front row of a football crowd, or the middle of a sunflower - pretty much anything that's done on TV with blue-screen technology - and the corporate user can have the company logo or office environment as a backdrop, no matter where they're calling from. Festoon is developing the facility to reach people from both Google and Skype at the same time, which isn't available for audo and video elsewhere, and plans to enable inter-network conferences as well.

Your Web site visitors will thank you if you can cut down the size of those whopper PDFs that you offer for download. Brand owner Adobe's top tip is to select Save As whenever possible, rather than simply clicking Save. PDF Zone, the Ziff Davies site, has more minimising ideas.

Zen Internet is providing Scotland's leading event organisers with multiple high-speed broadband connections to help run Edinburgh's Christmas and Hogmanay celebrations. Iain Johnstone, Zen Internet, said: "Our virtual events team has experience working for Glastonbury, Live8 and the V festival. We understand the fine timelines involved in event organising and our fast turnaround is vital". A spokesperson from Unique Events said the fast-install broadband connections enable staff on the ground to co-ordinate and organise the events as if they were back in the office. They have full access to e-mails, contact with suppliers and, crucially, instant access to the latest weather reports". Unique Events create, produce and manage Scotland's annual celebrations, starting with the Christmas Light Night and Ice Show on 24th December, and including the world famous Royal Bank Street Party where an expected 100,000 revellers will greet the New Year in Edinburgh, entertained by performances on four stages of free live music and giant show-screens.

The first holographic 'not DVDs', storing up to 300GB on a single disc, will go on sale before the end of 2006. InPhase Technologies and Hitachi are developing the technology, which uses laser light interference to store data - a technique known as holographic memory. It will offer read and write speeds of up to 120Mbits/sec and eventually allow up to 1.6 Terabytes to be stored on each disc - more than 300 times the capacity of a conventional DVD. InPhase Technologies says holography allows a million bits of data to be written and read in a single flash of light, unlike other technologies, that handle one data bit at a time. The high transfer speed enables playback of broadcast-quality HDTV content, with 26 hours stored on a single disc.

As many readers will have seen in recent news, a dangerous 'rootkit' was discovered in the copy protection used on Sony music CDs. Microsoft has reacted with an update of its security tools to detect and remove part of the copy protection, which is installed on PCs when Sony discs are played, after determining that it poses a security risk for Windows users. The Sony rootkit hides itself on the hard drive when a CD is played on a PC. Experts blasted the cloaking mechanism, saying it could be abused by virus writers, and the first remote-control Trojan horses that take advantage of the opening provided by the Sony software have already surfaced. To protect Windows users, Microsoft plans to update Windows AntiSpyware and the Malicious Software Removal Tool as well as the online scanner on Windows Live Safety Center to detect and remove the threat. Sony said it had halted production of CDs with the controversial technology, which is designed to limit the number of copies that can be made of a CD and prevent computer users from making unprotected MP3s of the music, but would continue with other copy protection schemes.

Get Safe Online will help you protect you and your business against Internet threats. The site is sponsored by government and leading UK businesses to provide a free, public service.

If Google and the fifty or so other search engines covered in this regular footnote since the first issue of the newsletter are not exactly what you want, you might like to design your own. Swicki lets you do that - and share it with others. You can see some examples before you get started at http://swickihome.eurekster.com/dir.htm. "A personalised Swicki is new kind of search engine that allows anyone to create deep, focused searches on topics they care about. Unlike other search engines, you have total control over the results - and Swicki uses the wisdom of crowds to improve results".