Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam!

If you are like most everyone else in the world with an email address, you cringe every time you look at your inbox and see that 90% of your emails are from someone trying to sell you something. It gets to be a hassle, trying to sort the real emails from the junk, and I have more than once deleted an actual email thinking that it was junk. Of course, all this junk email we get has a name. And its name is Spam.

The term Spam as it relates to junk email can trace its origins back to 1994 or 1978, depending on who you ask. The 1994 incident, where a husband and wife lawyer team from Arizona spammed around 6,000 newsgroups is generally accepted as the beginning, however. The fact that a lawyer started this whole mess makes me think that there might be a lawyer joke somewhere to be found here, but for fear of litigation I will not attempt to find it

What is Spam, really? Well, aside from the mystery meat concoction sold in a can, it is really any unwanted email. Almost always these emails will try to sell you something. Sometimes they are intended to get you to visit a particular website or to make you think you have won something. The famous Nigerian scam is one of the most popular forms of spam. This is where you get an email from the brother/son/sister/daughter/uncle/etc of some high-ranking official in the Nigerian government. They inform you that the official has in his possession some large amount of American money, almost always in the millions of dollars. They then ask for your discreet help in getting this money into an American bank. And of course, they will reward you with tons of cash for helping them. It is really just a ploy to get you to send them moneydont fall for it.

Very often folks wonder why people go through all the trouble to send these spam emails when almost no one ever buys anything from them. Well, the key to that is that almost no one buys anything. When you send out 6,000,000 emails trying to sell some junk, if only one-half of one percent of the recipients buy it youve sold 30,000 products. That is why spam is so popular, and so frustrating.

There have been anti-spamming laws passed in recent years, but they are quite difficult to enforce. Unfortunately, spam may be with us for some time to come.

Now for the Cool Site of the Week If you are interested in reading more about spam, visit the Federal Trade Commissions site at http://www.ftc.gov/spam. There you will find more interesting facts and you can also report spammers.

As always, if you have any comment or suggestions please email me at mike@mikebryant.com (no spam, please).

Mike Bryant has worked as a professional software developer for over ten years. A born entrepreneur, he currently owns Centrant, LLC, a software consulting firm specializing in custom software for small businesses. He currently resides in Jackson, Kentucky with his wife, two kids, and five computers. For more information, please visit http://www.mikebryant.com.

Nice Content Boxes

1. Create a new canvas

Size: 160x160,
Background: white
Resolution: 72 pixels/inch

2. Set your foreground color to #F2F2F2. Radius: 15 px

Paths (see second image below)

Exclude to overlapping areas (see image below)

3. Now drag out a rounded rectangle that takes up most of the canvas, and it should look like mine to the left (if not, make sure you have the same settings as I used above).

4. Then, go to the paths tab (windows--paths if its not already viewable) and double click on the path, giving it a name as shown to the left.

5. You will now have something like the image shown to the left.

6. Now, select the new layer on the layers tab, and double click on it to bring up the layer styles box (or select the layer and go layer--layer styles).

Next, enter the settings I have above for outer glow.

7. Now you will have something like that shown to the left, and if you like you can keep it like this, and finish the tutorial here, however, I will now show how to add a nice highlight to it.

8. Create a new layer now, and then press ctrl and click on the layer with the box on it, as shown to the left.

Next, with the selection tool selected, nudge the selection up 5 pixels by pressing the up key on your keyboard 5 times.

9. Now hold alt, then ctrl + click on the color fill layer, and you should (hopefully) get the selection shown to the left.

Now, again with the selection tool selected, nudge the selection down 8 times, and fill it in white.

10. Next, feather the selection by 3 pixels (select--feather) and then inverse the selection (ctrl + i) and press delete, you should have something similar to that shown to the left.

11. This looks alright, but I don't think that highlight looks right, so lets make it a bit narrower.

Press ctrl + t and then, whilst holding alt move the left or right anchors a little toward the center, as shown.

Conclusion
Now it is finished! You should now have something along the lines of the image shown below. ( I blurred the highlight slightly as well - filter--blur--gaussian blue)Media 2004 (C)

From Tourbus?

"Not sure how to say this -- but just for fun I clicked on a credit card application, and then cancelled IMMEDIATELY! Well, two months later my count as of this day: 2948 spams for credit cards, loans, easy credit, etc. About 370 spams a week, or about 53 A DAY! While I know money support is nice, and I don't subscribe to the paid edition of TourBus BUT if I did, would I get more moral staunchness on your part re: allowing spammers to use your site? SHAME ON YOU, BROTHER! -- PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH!!!!!"

I've Been Spammed! (And I'm Blaming You)
I get emails like this occasionally, from people who have visited the TOURBUS website, clicked on an advertisement and then were unhappy with the results. Some blame me for spam, others for customer service problems with the advertiser.

I can't understand why some people have the misconception that every advertiser on a reputable website is somehow vetted or vouched for by the website operator. To think so would be applying a much different standard to the online world than to print or broadcast media.

If you pick up a copy of the NY Times and browse through the classifieds, certainly you don't assume that everyone advertising there is completely honest, and that the Times is endorsing their product or service. And if you buy something from a TV infomercial, you don't blame the television station if the product doesn't meet your expectations.

Caveat Pre-Emptor?
So why are the concepts of "buyer beware" and "due diligence" conspicuously absent on the Internet?

Even for advertisers that appear in the TOURBUS newsletter, with whom I deal directly, there's no way I can check them all out to ensure that everyone will always have a perfect purchasing experience. I do, however, have a policy of "If you can't get satisfaction from the advertiser, I will personally make it right." And of course I'll no longer allow bad faith actors to advertise in the newsletter. But for the website ads, we don't even have the means to check out individual advertisers. Because web ads are served by third-party advertising networks, we don't even have control over which speficic ads appear on the site, except for the fact that they should be contextually relevant.

Protecting Your Privacy
Spam is the bane of the Internet, and we hate it as much as you do. In fact, the publishers of Tourbus have been quite active over the years in educating their readers about spam, where it comes from, and how to avoid it. Because we respect your privacy, we have always pledged that we will not rent, sell or otherwise reveal your e-mail address to any third party. And since we started in 1995, we never have!

Your email address is safe with us, but if you click away from the TOURBUS newsletter or website to a third party offering a product or service, you have to realize you're on your own, and use the same caution that you would when making any purchasing decision -- online of offline. That's not because we're mean or greedy, it's just common sense.

Online consumers should ALWAYS read the advertiser's privacy policy to see how their email and other personal information will be used. No privacy policy? Vague (or endless) privacy policy? No sale!

(Oh, and for the record, there is no paid version of TOURBUS.)
BOB RANKIN... is a tech writer and computer programmer who enjoys exploring the Internet and sharing the fruit of his experience with others. His work has appeared in ComputerWorld, NetGuide, and NY Newsday. Bob is publisher of the Internet TOURBUS newsletter, author of several computer books, and creator of the http://www.LowfatLinux.com website. Visit Bob Rankin's website for more helpful articles and free tech support.

How Grid Computing Can Improve Database Performance

Nathan Segal interviews Benny Souder, Vice President of Distributed Database Development for Oracle, and Jeff Jones of IBM.

According to said Benny Souder, Vice President of Distributed Database Development for Oracle, Grid Computing is where you have a network of computers which tap into a main server. The concept comes from the electrical grid and would be arranged in a system that functions in a similar fashion. If you take an appliance and plug it into a wall outlet, then you become a client of the electrical grid. As a client, you don't know how the grid is implemented, whether the power station is in the next state or next door. All you want is power; you plug in and you get it. That's the highest logical level of Grid Computing."

N: How do you maximize the potential of Grid Computing?
S: "Through centralization. This includes consolidation, centralization, and cost savings. As the nodes or points in the grid get bigger and you have a small number of large nodes, you can do a more effective job of Grid Computing, just as a power company has a small number of large power generators, rather than a power generator per house. The power company works this way because they're trying to get real efficient utilization of their resources, because that keeps the rates down."

"If you have little islands of computation, you have to size them for peak, but most of the time they're pretty idle. A good way to get high utilization is to pool these islands into larger nodes. If you then have the right technology and software, you can dynamically allocate these computers to the priorities of your business."

N: Can you offer an example of Grid Computing in actual practice?
S: "Yes. Let's pretend that you're an Internet retailer selling books on the web and you've got two databases, one that powers your website and keeps track of all the books, and the database is a data warehouse of all the click stream data, etc. Right now, you need every computer you've got powering your web site, because if the website is slow, people are going to leave."

"In December, a mountain of data is collected about transactions on your website, but in January, you'll want to analyze that data and begin planning for next Christmas. If you use separate SMP (symmetric multiprocessor) machines for those two databases, it's very hard to put all your CPU's behind the website and then switch them 30 days later and have almost all your CPU's on the data warehouse."

"To get around the problem, you would use Oracle technology and some new hardware called Server Blades. You could do it with SMP, but you'd have to take the cabinet and machines apart. That's a big job and while you're doing it, the website's down for sure."

N: What is the advantage of using Server Blades?
S: "Server Blades are like a computer on a board, with a CPU, some memory, a local disk for caching stuff and a backplane plug. These blades, (about the size of a skinny pizza box) plug into a rack, which has a power supply, a cooling fan and a network connection. Typically, there are 10-30 blades in a rack. Since there are commodity CPU's on these boards and they share a common power supply, they're very economical to make, about 80-90 cheaper than SMP."

"With the blade technology, we can run our database as well as real applications. Other database vendors will tell you that these blades are great, but don't put the database on them. The reason is that their database on blades doesn't run real applications. Their cluster database runs benchmarks. There's no application vendor that's certified on their cluster database. Whereas on our database, what we call real application clusters, SAP is certified as well as Oracle applications and we have a hundred + production reference customers who are running their business on this cluster database."

N: What happens if you attempt to run applications that are not certified?
S: "They don't work. If you call up SAP, they will tell you that it's not supported. We can take a blade off or add a blade to our database while it's running. So if you're running your website and data warehouse on our blades, you can move the blades back and forth without any down time. That means it's really easy to allocate computing to what your business priority is. That's the first thing we've got for grid computing."

"The second thing is information sharing technology. For example, we have this stuff called Transportable Tablespaces. This lets you snap data off one database and snap it onto another. The file is on a disk, meaning that you don't have to load or unload the data. We also have Oracle Stream, which is a complete solution for information sharing asynchronous. It does messaging, replication, events, publishing, subscribing, and has a rules engine all in one integrated database.

"The third thing is that we're completely portable. So the application you've already written on your SMP machine ports right into this grid technology, you don't have to rewrite the application."

"The fourth thing we've got is Globus, a small organization that's trying to develop open source software for grid computing. They built this thing called the Globus Toolkit that we've integrated with the Oracle database. We have a free for download customized, integrated version of the Globus Toolkit with the Oracle database, so you don't have to figure out how to make these two things work together. We do that for you."

A different perspective was shared by Jeff Jones of IBM. He said: "Grid Computing is an effort to make computing resources appear to be utilities that you tap into as necessary. In DB2 (Version 8), several aspects have been enhanced, making it a good candidate for that type of processing. The first is scalability. A grid requires and expects an enormous amount of data to be supported and an enormous number of users to be coming after that data. So very large scale processing is the norm in a grid."

"Some of our experiences with Grid Computing are the Life Sciences based grid done by Oxford University in England with us to support Breast Cancer research. Another one exists at the University of Pennsylvania that's a Mammography sharing grid, all of which have been built on DB2."

N: How does DB2 work with Grid Computing?
J: "With DB2, we have a Share Nothing architecture. Here, any physical number of servers can be clustered together and you can run one instance of DB2 across all of it. One server takes the requests and breaks them up into pieces and farms the pieces out to all the other servers to work in parallel, then reassembles everything at the end and provides a complete answer back when questions are asked."

"Each server in the cluster receives an independent subset of the complete set of data and operates separately and independently on its subset of the problem to be solved. This form of independent cluster processing is extremely scalable with little loss of efficiency as you add more servers to the cluster."

N: How does this compare to Oracle?
J: "Their approach is to have a very large common memory. Each instance of the database shares a common memory and is being gone after by the same user population, so traffic management becomes the hard problem to be solved."

N: Oracle spoke about server blades. Would you have to shut your system down to add more servers?
J: "No. Server blades are new form factors for servers that can be rack mounted in very large numbers and can be pulled in and pulled out and plugged back in again. It's not a new paradigm; it's just a more efficient way of clustering hardware. Their approach and our approach both enable clusters to be grown or shrunk with not nearly as much agony as in the past."

"With DB2, our approach is to offer utilities. When we add a new server to a cluster, we apply a rebalancing utility that allows you to redistribute the data and populate the new server. This type of housecleaning has to be done on anybody's system. You shouldn't let any vendor convince you that it's painless, but today both vendors have made it much more bearable and much of the process can be done with nothing coming down."

"In a fault tolerance sense, this is good, because servers can be paired together and one can serve the idle standby for the other. This is something that both Oracle and IBM do in a similar fashion. You can have an eight server cluster where four of the servers are actually doing work, while the other four are twins of the first four; waiting to be failed over to if something goes wrong. This is very common high tolerance, high availability configuration for servers. And racks and blade servers simply make that more efficient."

Souder said that the goal of Grid Computing is where "you want information, answers, computation, and get it. That's the fundamental idea, the dream and the goal. We're a long way from being there, but that's the direction that we're moving in."

Delete Index.dat Files

What are Index.dat files?
Index.dat files are used by Internet Explorer and Windows to store history, Internet cache, cookies, UserData records and other information about what you have done in Internet or in your PC. Although some of their functions are useful, they are dangerous privacy threat - any person with even little knowledge about index.dat files locations and structure can see history of almost all of your computer activities. Index.dat files are not the only privacy threat but they are the most obscure and dangerous one because they are hard to find and even harder to delete. In fact, in most cases it is impossible to delete Index.dat files manually because Internet Explorer and Windows use them all the time.

Where are located Index.dat files?
Location of index.dat files depends on the version of Windows and whether or not you are using user profiles. Regardless of Windows version in many cases you can't see or find index.dat file using Windows Explorer. There is a little file called desktop.ini in each directory where index.dat file is located. This desktop.ini file forces Windows Explorer to hide index.dat files and to show the contents of Internet cache or history instead. However you can use some other file utility and binary (hex) editor to find the files and read their content. If you have Windows Me, Windows 98, Windows NT or Windows 95 then index.dat files are in these locations:

C:WindowsCookiesindex.dat C:WindowsHistoryindex.dat C:WindowsHistoryMSHistXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXindex.dat (XXXX are some digits) C:WindowsHistoryHistory.IE5index.dat C:WindowsHistoryHistory.IE5MSHistXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXindex.dat C:WindowsTemporary Internet Filesindex.dat (only in Internet Explorer 4.x) C:WindowsTemporary Internet FilesContent.IE5index.dat C:WindowsUserDataindex.dat C:WindowsProfilesCookiesindex.dat C:WindowsProfilesHistoryindex.dat C:WindowsProfilesHistoryMSHistXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXindex.dat C:WindowsProfilesHistoryHistory.IE5index.dat C:WindowsProfilesHistoryHistory.IE5MSHistXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXindex.dat C:WindowsProfilesTemporary Internet Filesindex.dat (only in IE 4.x) C:WindowsProfilesTemporary Internet FilesContent.IE5index.dat C:WindowsProfilesUserDataindex.dat

How to erase or clean Index.dat files?
Erasing or cleaning of the index.dat files is not an easy task because they are opened by Internet Explorer and Windows all the time. If you are using Windows Me, Windows 98 or Windows 95 you can restart in DOS mode and then you can delete index.dat files one by one (look in the folders that are mentioned above). However if you are using Windows XP, Windows 2000 or Windows NT this won't work.

About Mil Incorporated
Mil Incorporated was founded with an ambitious objective to be a trusted software partner for individuals and enterprises around the world. Mil Incorporated provides software security and privacy solutions that incorporate state of the art technology, security expertise, and substantial resources.

With threats to computer systems coming from all directions and growing in number and sophistication, our customers know that ordinary security measures are not enough. Mil Incorporated supplies privacy and security solutions that are solid, affordable, easy to use and provide outstanding level of protection.