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In this issue (click to go): |
It may not have escaped your attention that the past few weeks have been on the warm side. Temperatures have been soaring in the upper 90s (upper 30s-40s C), taxing electrical resources and systems, home cooling systems (if you are lucky enough to have them), and you. For days, one topic has been heading the evening news throughout the US and Canada...the heatwave. With humidity, a simple walk around the backyard becomes a romp in a steam room. Make no mistake; the heat can be a killer, particularly in closed, unventilated spaces. We've heard about children and pets cooking to death in automobiles inside of a few minutes, elderly persons simply dying because the air is too hot, too thick to breathe, workers passing out on the job. Reports from Europe suggest they are suffering along with the rest of us. It's just plain "too darn hot."
Growing up in the Midwest, I'm used to a certain amount of relief in the sort of weather patterns that sets up between humidity and heat. Eventually, evaporation of moisture off the Great Lakes causes the air to reach a sort of critical mass resulting in thunder and electrical storms, which cools things off considerably albeit temporarily. Of course, where there is little humidity, all you get is the electrical variety, the air charged with the static of lightning, what we called "heat lightning" (it is, by the way, this variety that has much of the states of the Pacific Northwest--Washington, Oregon and Northern California--currently in flames). Neither heat storms nor outright rainstorms are very good for electrical systems on the ground including your telephone service, your TV reception, and your computer--especially your computer.
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When it is too darn hot to do much else, the temptation is to turn on the computer and sit quietly surfing or doing file maintenance or open up that game you got last Christmas and have never gotten around to playing. Unfortunately, when it is too hot for you, it is also way too hot for your computer, where internal temperatures can be ten to thirty degrees higher or more even with cooling systems built-in. In point of fact, it can get hot enough to melt motherboards, to fry CPUs, to burnout power supplies, to corrupt software and storage media, and generally cause havoc internally.
Additionally, the warmer temperatures cause more people to turn on cooling appliances such as room and ceiling fans, air conditioning and swamp coolers, which all employ electrical power. The higher usage of these appliances can lead to less electrical power resources, overloads of power stations, brownouts and other fluctuations in power. Your surge protection is some help, but not a guarantee against system wear. Power fluctuation does cut into the system life, generally, if not causing outage completely.
While your computer may deliver the mail (the e-mail), it is not a postman. Storm and heat will keep this courier from its appointed rounds albeit gloom of night is usually its friend. What I am trying to say in this long-winded fashion is simply this: when the weather turns nasty, don't turn on your computer.
What to do instead...The past couple of weeks, I've availed myself of the opportunity of too much heat to do some things I've been putting off in the offline/powerdown computer maintenance department. All those manuals shoved in boxes, all those wires tucked in drawers, all those peripheral devices that were top of the line when I got them but are no longer functional on higher speed computers, and all that software has to be gone through sometime. Some are treasures I forgot I had (every time you upgrade your system something gets left behind). Most have enough dust and cobwebs on the outside of the boxes they are stored in to be embarrassing. I don't even want to think what may be lurking in the desk drawers at this moment. I'll bet it is the same for many of you who are long time computer users.
Of course, the more important task I set myself was the cleaning of the computer components themselves--the hardware. Did you know that dust could collect in the pin collar of your printer cable eventually causing it to fail? I know that now. Did you know that dust could collect in the heat vents of your power supply and on the blades of your power supply fan slowing it, causing it to overheat and eventually burn out? No? Well, of course, you did know that there is some fairy goblin running about putting their smudgy fingerprints all over you monitor screen, your nice white case, etc.
Screwdrivers up! In this issue of the newsletter, NOWAYWINS and I are going to discuss some of the simple hardware maintenance things you can do to keep your computer running cool, clean, and efficient.
Also, in this issue, our member Arizona_Kate begins a series on the "FAQs about Copyright Online." What she said in this opening article offered me some food for thought concerning my own online practices. And, we'll be continuing the series, which will also include some points from me on documenting sound files and graphics generally as well as other forms of attribution.
And finally in this issue, we have yet another article from the archives of NOWAYWINS on the cost of e-mail hoaxes.
We hope you enjoy this issue of the Yahoo! Club Founders' Club Newsletter.
AngelPie_Mouse
CFC Founder
No chat sessions are currently scheduled for the end of August through the beginning of September. If you would like to recommend a chat session time and date, please contact cfc_founders@yahoo.com.
 
Is no news good news? On July 18th, Warren raised his head to give us an excuse for not having been online in a while. He recited some of the elements of the new interface previously discussed and gave us the usual peptalk. We reprinted his message here. Unfortunately, that was the last time we heard from him, the last time he approved a message in his group Yahoo! Clubs, and the last bit of news we had on the merger.
Really? Well, no, not really. While we may not have heard from Warren, we have begun to notice some club-like features creeping into groups. Some may not be all that new to members who use groups; some bear a little discussion concerning what they actually mean and do.
Item #1: Access Option Special Announcement. The option is so new that it does not appear in a download of the member information for a club. That is: someone goofed in updating the material and left this one out. It's there and it works, it just shows as a blank where the personal access information ought to be in a download of the memberlist.
What is Special Announcement? Very simply, this is a variation on the club feature of founder's mail. The notion is that subscribers will only receive those e-mail which owners and moderators designate as Special Announcements. Otherwise, they would receive No Email just as they do in clubs now. Unfortunately, there remains the option No Email; so, if the owner or moderator has a special announcement, then either the e-mail access for those opting for No Email must be temporarily reset to Special Announcement or the subscribers must be written individually.
Item #2: Most Recent Messages. Scrolling well down the group Home (start-up) page, you will find the posting of the most recent messages posted to the group. As in clubs, it contains five with the date of the post, the subject line, the screen name of the person posting, and a short view of the opening text. The problem, of course, something we continue to complain about, is the placement. We've said so in the past and we still maintain that the opening messages are the real enticement to people viewing a club or group for the first time. They show the activity in the club/group to be sure, but they also give a hint as to the character of the members, what people actually talk about. Going by my own surfing habits, I will rarely scroll for club stats, but I will check out those messages.
Placement of the most recent five messages at the front of the interface at all is some improvement for which we are grateful. Now, if we could only get them to realize that the other club/group information and the wider than necessary founder message area ought to make room for this feature, we might have something. <sigh!>
Item #3: Photos. Sans some of the textural detail available in a club photo album, this new feature allows you to created albums and upload very much like the former. You are allowed to upload up to 5mg of picture with 30 mg of storage for the entire feature. You can set access to the albums across a far better range of restrictions than available in clubs: Group (Any Group member can add photos & subalbums to this album) and Personal (Only the Moderator and I can add photos & subalbums to this album), which are the same as currently exist in clubs. Add to these two new ones, however, Age Restriction (Only allow people over 18 to view this folder) and Order Restriction (Don't allow others to order prints from this album). This last permits your friends and others to order prints of the pictures you post. And, you can create subalbums within albums, so that all the pictures uploaded by a single member may be grouped together, for example.
Last but not least the Photos section may be viewed as file folders, as a list or menu, or in a slideshow format (replacing the old thumbnail viewing option). However, since viewing is restricted to members only, storage of graphics in a photo album is not an option that can be used for pictures you want visible to visitors.
And that's all that is new since last month's report. Stay-tuned.
by NOWAYWINS and AngelPie_Mouse
Here they come again...the Spoofers! In June of last year, we ran a thread about a series of hoaxes being perpetrated on Geocities users. This time around, it is anyone using a Yahoo! ID. If you were one of the people targeted, you received the following in the e-mail:
Dear Yahoo Member,
We here at Yahoo are upating out servers, We are currently running dangerously low on webspace and in order to reactivate your account you need to reply to this e-mail with your login name and password. Any accounts that do not reply to this e-mail within 48 hours will be terminated. During the next few days you might experience some problems logging in to your account but this is just because of the technical problem we are experiencing. We are sorry for any incovinience this causes. PLease reply to the email adress below. And jus to insure you, all information, such as your user name and password will remain strictly confidential.
JOHN WAYNES
The return address read "staff@yahoo.com" and there was a link to "yhoo_server_bot@yahoo.com" after the signature.
Okay, aside from the fact that the spelling, punctuation, grammatical, and typographical errors were so numerous as to be laughable, what should be a big tip-off to any Yahoo! club or group user are a few small items that render the whole rather feeble and transparent. Number one: Yahoo! states "we will never ask for your password." They know your ID and password. If they required you to activate your account, they would ask you to go to a standard login page, not email it in to them. And two: part of the reason Yahoo! sought to acquire eGroups was to expand its physical server resources. This end has been accomplished. They aren't going to be terminating IDs for space; IDs are just not big enough to be of much help in freeing up space--probably take less room than I've just used to get to this point in this report nevermind the whole newsletter.
Let me put that in better perspective. We'll say the average ID contains 2KB of actual data spread around in a standard form. It would take five hundred IDs to make a megabyte, five hundred thousand to make a gig. If they eliminated a million IDs, it would only free up about two million KB or two gigabytes, which is far less than the capacity of the average hard drive on a personal computer. Hardly enough to impact Yahoo!'s resources. Even if a single ID required a good deal more data space than I am suggesting here, a million names would hardly make a dent.
Alright, let's say you received a similar message that someone took the trouble to run through a spellchecker and punctuate correctly. Let's say further that they asked you to click the link below and log in as usual. That sounds like a reasonable request. Should you do it? NO! Stop! Don't go there!
You should be able to get to any place requiring a log-in in the Yahoo! system without using an e-mail link. If it were an official request from Yahoo!, they would tell you to go to your profile or some other area in their system alternative to the link. However, in addition, any address provided in link in an e-mail may very well be a continuation on the hoax. It doesn't take much to register for a page with an address that may be similar to a standard Yahoo! one or to create a look alike page to a standard login, to spoof the real thing.
How could you tell the difference? The keys mentioned above would be some indication, but another would be the time duration required to fulfill the request. No real public service such as Yahoo! would be so unreasonable as to allow only forty-eight hours, imparticular as e-mail can take longer than that to deliver.
What should you do if you receive a message similar to this one? If you receive a message similar to the one above, or one less obviously a hoax, about Yahoo! or any other public access service you may be registered for, forward the message and headers to their abuse department (for Yahoo! use "abuse@yahoo.com," the complaint department for Yahoo! Mail). If it is genuinely a request from Yahoo!, or any other legitamate service, they will get back to you to confirm the request. Otherwise, you have reported the hoax to the appropriate authority so that they may take steps to protect their users.
[See Messages 1750, 2666]
Continued on Page Two
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