Retrospective/Internet Security and Safety

This month's column is a two parter, due to some very moving personal experiences at Macworld Expo.

Nearly two years ago, my wife and I were looking for a way to keep in close contact with our daughters who live on the east coast of the USA. We investigated applications that let us actually talk over the Internet, but we could find nothing but sex-related rooms to connect through, and weren't very comfortable talking to our family in that setting. We also tried AOL chat rooms, but had a similar problem.

Then we found World Without Borders (WWB), a "G"-rated Internet conference and chat site, at http://worldwithoutborders.com. We had no idea how that event would change our lives. We found some wonderful people and a great family-oriented site which has online interactive conferences, games, and general chat.

We liked the WWB site so well, we decided to shift from some of our community volunteer efforts such as Court Appointed Special Advocates for abused children (also called Guardians ad Litum http://www.casanet.org and nearly full-time involvement with foreign exchange student programs to becoming volunteer staff members at WWB. You can see the WWB events that my wife and I host listed on our website at http://www.palmettobayinc.com.You can see the entire WWB event schedule at http://worldwithoutborders.com/calendar/wwbcalendara.shtml

One of my first assignments at WWB was to host a weekly guest interview conference called My Mac Magazine Presents (Wednesdays at 8 P.M. Eastern, 5 P.M. Pacific). This is sort of like a talk show, where I introduce the guest, ask a question or two to set the tone, then start prompting the audience to ask questions. This gave me a chance to "meet" lots of movers and shakers in the Mac Internet and software worlds.

Then I talked Brighid Brady-de Lambert, Apple's User Group Manager, into starting a monthly Macintosh User Group Leader conference, also on WWB (the first Tuesday of each month at 9 P.M. Eastern, 6 P.M. Pacific). This gave me the opportunity to meet even more new friends from the Macintosh community. When Brighid moved to Japan, Diane Cohn took her place at Apple. Visit http://www.apple.com/usergroup for more info on user groups, and to find a user group near you. Come to the User Group Chat at http://worldwithoutborders.com to find out what the top user groups are up to and to find out how to further develop your own user group.

Then I started submitting software reviews, and then a column proposal, to My Mac Magazine. That gave me the opportunity to meet even more of you. My wife also started reviewing children's educational software for My Mac, and has made some wonderful friends as a result.

My wife and I got to meet several of the World Without Borders staff members at the 1999 Macworld Expo in San Francisco, than met others at the wedding of the WWB founder and Community Director, Cys Bronner. We met more of the WWB staff later at the annual WWB gathering in Las Vegas. It was very interesting to be able to meet the people who had been our friends and co-workers on the Internet for some time.

My wife and I attended this year's Macworld Expo in San Francisco. While there we got to meet lots of other people I have interviewed and met on the Internet over the past year and a half. And we got to meet the publisher, webmaster, and some other columnists of My Mac Magazine at the first Internet Authors Party. This was a great event, organized by John Martellaro (a columnist at Applelinks http://www.applelinks.com and macopinion http://www.macopinion.com and sponsored by Metroworks http://www.metroworks.com. We also got to talk in person with several staff members of World Without Borders, most of whom we had met in person previously.

While working as a volunteer at the Apple Booth User Group Area at Macworld Expo, I met several user group leaders and members with whom I had talked during the User Group Leader chats. Then, at the Macworld Expo Apple User Group volunteer's dinner I got to meet even more.

But one of the events with the most impact on me was meeting a User Group President and newsletter editor with whom I had never talked, Len Kaufman, from Jacksonville, Florida. He sat across from me at dinner, recognized my name on my Macworld Expo badge, and told me that he had been using my software reviews in his User Group Newsletter! Talk about a small world! I was amazed to meet someone who had no idea I would be at Macworld Expo, and to find out that our paths had crossed in this way.

Meeting all these wonderful people in person after "meeting" them on the Internet was a very memorable experience!

Now, on to Internet Security and Safety.

Note that I talked quite a bit above about meeting people in person that I had talked with on the Internet.

This can be dangerous if not done correctly!!!!!

I knew the affiliation of each of the people I was meeting, I met them in public places and I met them in groups. I am not so casual meeting someone I know nothing about other than what they told me, and you should not be either (anyone can fib on the Internet). Never give out your address or information that would let someone you don't know locate you (such as school names or local school sports team mascots). I discourage people from meeting one-on-one with strangers they have "met" on the Internet, but if you do so, please have at least one friend or family member with you, and meet in a public place. If the person you are meeting is truly a friend, they will want the same precautions. If the person objects to these precautions, that should raise a big red danger flag in your mind!

I often help User Group members with their computers. I am often asked if anyone can come in through the Internet to their computer. If you use file sharing, setting it up so that each user has a name and password will give you adequate security against outside connections from almost all users (there is no such thing as foolproof security). Please be sure you use a unique password (something that is not a dictionary word), such as id4Ah%o. Base your password on a word that has meaning to you (Idaho, in this example), but throw in a capital somewhere other than the beginning, and add a punctuation mark or a special character, and/or a number. This makes the password harder to remember, but makes it much more secure.

For those of you with young children (or curious preteens) who are concerned about inappropriate content in websites, Apple http://www.apple.com has just introduced several new free services on their website, including an Internet site filtering service that gives access to only sites that have been reviewed and approved as safe. In my opinion this is a great service. It functions at the operating system level, and so is much harder to bypass than software that works with just your web browser. Apple says you need Mac OS 9 to use the new services (although I have seen reports that many of them work with older versions of the Mac OS also), and I feel they alone are a good reason to upgrade to Mac OS 9. There are also several commercial software packages that perform filtering. I have never used any of these commercial packages, and so cannot make recommendations.

Everyone using the Internet eventually gets unsolicited email advertisements (called spam). You can just trash them, but it just doesn't seem right to let the people who engage in this practice get by with no adverse consequences. I use a service http://spamcop.net that ferrets out the sender's information from the spam and automatically prepares a complaint email for sending to the administrator of the appropriate Internet Service Provider(s) to complain. Often, the spammer's accounts are terminated within minutes or hours! SpamCop has a free service, or you can pay a small fee of one or two pennies per email (as I do) to get some extra services, such as an email address from SpamCop. If you post messages in UseNet News Groups, I strongly encourage you to get a SpamCop account and email to use in your postings. It eliminates tons of spam that you would otherwise receive.

While there are many fewer viruses that infect the Mac OS than there are that infect Windows, there are some. I work at the largest Macintosh site in the USA http://www.llnl.gov, and have seen two infected files in five years at work. If you download files or exchange files with other users (and who doesn't?), you should invest in a commercial anti-virus software package. Symantec's Norton Antivirus http://www.symantec.com/mac and McAffee's Dr. Solomon's Virex for Macintosh www.mcaffee.com/products are two with which I am familiar.

Finally, I would like some email feedback on my columns. Feedback has been trickling in, but I want to hear from more of you. Send me your favorite Internet knowledge and/or information sites. Send me suggestions for the type of information you would like me to find and discuss here. Just don't send spam. ;-)

Next month we will see more of the best knowledge and information sites on the Internet.

And now, KnowledgeSpider's Knowledge/Information Resource recommendation of the month:

Internet Security: Use common sense to protect yourself, and use appropriate tools to protect your computer and files. Virus protection software is a good investment in peace of mind.

In each column I will grab knowledge or information resources from the web and share them with you. If you have a learning or knowledge resource or a teaching technique that has proven particularly useful to you, share it with all of us by tossing it into my web!

David E. Price
david@mymac.com