Call Sign October 2000

COMPUTER CHINCHAT

Unauthorised Entry
Can anyone crawl into your PC whilst you're connected? I got a real shock last month when I visited a web site and the owners managed to grab my email ID without my permission. If you are now concerned, then please read on....
   I was concerned that maybe someone, somewhere, without my knowledge may be gaining access to my PC at home whilst I'm surfing or downloading emails, so I visited a few security related sites to establish how these intruders could accomplish this feat.
   An excellent resource can be found at http://grc.com/default.htm. The guys at Gibson Research Corp certainly take security seriously and after visiting their site, so would you.
   From their home page you can navigate to the Shields Up page where they'll test the security of your PC against attack whilst you're connected to the Net. Be prepared for a shock because after my first visit I became quite paranoid about security...
GRC have provided extensive documentation and resources on their site that will enable you to defend your PC from unscrupulous intruders, although I must stress that the chance of intrusion is very minimal, especially if you're a dial-up user. If you are worried about intrusion, then I suggest you download the ZoneAlarm Firewall located at: http://www.zonelabs.com.
   Zone Labs have a free version available, which is excellent and has received numerous creditable mentions in PC magazines.
   And now hopefully, a layman's explanation of a firewall: A firewall intercepts incoming and outgoing data and depending upon your settings/configuration will accept or reject the data. I've found the default settings of ZoneAlarm to be adequate and it will politely ask you whether you wish to allow the application to access the Internet or will tell you that it has successfully stopped another application obtaining access to your PC. The latter is quite

startling when it happens. Visit both http://grc.com and http://www.zonelabs.com and please implement their recommendations; you have been warned....!

From the Demise of DISCUSS...
August saw the demise of the UK's first taxicab related discussion list, discuss@taxicab.co.uk as mentioned by the Editor last month and I have promised to mention any replacement lists. Dial-a-Cab's Jamie Owens at http://www.london-taxi.co.uk has created a replacement and can be found at http://www.egroups.com. This is an excellent site devoted to email discussion groups and Jamie's taxi@egroups.com has already got over sixty members, so if you wish to join Jamie's discussion list please send an email to Jamie at Jamie@london-taxi.co.uk.

'Ere, Oose This Vince Geezer?
Some of you may wonder how come I waffle on about the Internet every month and do I really know what I'm talking about? Well recently I've been working on a web site that is quite attractive and functional and can be found at http://www.fatface.co.uk. If there are any younger readers of my column, then I suppose you don't need me telling you who Fat Face are, but for those older farts, such a myself, I'll continue...
Fat Face are retailers of fashionable clothes and equipment, such as snow-boards etc and their site at the time of writing this article should go live on Friday 15th September. I've enjoyed working on this e-commerce site but I must admit I did not create the graphics. Graphics are something I really have to work hard at and I like to leave it to the artists. I concentrate on the back-end development. Check out the site and let me know what you think, even if it is a negative comment.

C Ya next month... Vince Chin