Oh yes. how could I possibly avoid posting a link to this.

Configuring Mail Clients to Send Plain ASCII Text
including 6 answers to the question "What is wrong with sending HTML or MIME messages?" and detailed instructions on how to turn off HTML email in all known email readers.

Coming soon: A related set of articles entitled:-
- How to avoid running attachments and getting infected by a virus. Doh!
- How to turn off warning messages from your anti-virus program. I really didn't send you a virus email. It was someone else we both know. Honest.
- How to turn off Auto-responders. Really. Nobody cares that you're out of the office. Especially the other thousand people on the mailing list.
- How to add a signature to the bottom of your emails with your contact details. You said phone me. But how? I don't have your phone number.
- How to keep your email signature down to 4 lines. I know and you know that you're not speaking for your lawyer "Sue, Grabbit & Runne" and they're never going to sue Yahoogroups for putting the email you sent to the mailing list on the web. So why do you have to include a 30 line disclaimer from them in every single email you send?
- How to properly quote replies, use the delete key and add your comments at the bottom. Oh, never mind. I really do know this is hopeless and the vast majority of Outlook users are just never going to do it. But I can live in hope can't I?
- How to cut and paste plain text out of MS Word or Powerpoint into a 10 line email instead of attaching a 25-100Kb document. [from: JB Ecademy]

Wireless Network Security for the Home has a list of 6 steps to take to secure your home wireless.
1. Change the System ID:
2. Disable Identifier Broadcasting:
3. Enable Encryption:
4. Restrict Unnecessary Traffic:
5. Change the Default Administrator Password:
6. Patch and Protect Your PC’s:

At first glance these look sensible. But lets look a little deeper. What's the threat model?
- Drive by hackers. Well yes, but how likely is this really?
- Attacks over the internet. If the Wireless router is the boundary then fair enough but no more than if you had a single PC on your broadband line
- Your next door neighbour. This is probably the most important as they have time to play.

So here's my set
1. Change the Default Administrator Password: Well duh! Do this first as soon as you take the router out of the box and plug it in.

2. Change the System ID: Use something meaningful like your house address. Then someone connecting by accident will at least know where to go and feel some guilt and worry that they might get found out. Leaving it as the default (eg Belkin54G) is an invitation to hack as you clearly don't know what you're doing. Turning off broadcast of this doesn't actually add any security so leave it on.

3. Restrict Unnecessary Traffic: This is what we should be doing but the firewall controls are too simplistic on consumer grade routers currently. We should be able to allow unlimited internet port 80 access but close off email and usenet send and throttle bandwidth use. We ought to be able to use a captive web page to get people to authenticate in the style of NoCatAuth. Similarly we should be able to selectively allow incoming requests from the Internet. Non-Geeks probably should be able to ban all incoming but in reality things like VoIP are going to work better with selective access. This is an area that manufacturers really should work on as the hardware controls are a long way behind even free apps like ZoneAlarm.

4. Patch and Protect Your PC’s: This again is fairly obvious but one thing not mentioned is network sharing. Be selective about what directories you share on any connected machine and put a password on all network shares. The one thing you really don't want your neighbour or drive by hacker to be able to do is to copy files off and onto your home machines.

Now notice I haven't suggested using encryption. Several reasons.
- In my experience, configuring WEP and getting it to work adds another level of hassle and things to go wrong. It can be hard enough to install WiFi and make it work without this. If you're going to rely on WEP then you really should change the code once a week. Otherwise your next door neighbour's geek kid will see it as a challenge and eventually break it. Are you really going to change the code and then go round all the machines changing their settings and then make them work again? Once a week?

- I want to see a world where Wifi internet access is everywhere. So we should concentrate on making this possible and controlled.

- Putting big visible locks on the doors but ones made out of balsa wood is false security. You may discourage the drive by hacker. But that's not the big threat. [from: JB Wifi]

Download details: Mydoom (A, B) and Doomjuice (A, B) Worm Removal Tool (KB836528)

If you run a Windows PC, please run this regardless of whether you think you might have the virus or not. Please pass on the link and encourage anyone you know who has a Windows PC to do the same.

There's a really strong argument now that MS should include free Anti-Virus tools in the operating system, just as they're beginning to include a free firewall. [from: JB Ecademy]

The Register : Wi-Fi in the real world - pt. 1 Wi-Fi Internet access may sound like the best thing since sliced bread, but does it yet make mobile working a reality? The Reg went wireless to find out. Here, Nico Macdonald checks out the UK capital's hotspot scene. Next week, we take a trip out of town.

Essential reading if you live or work in London and especially if you work for a WISP. [from: JB Wifi]

Here's a lazyweb request. Anyone up for a small Python project?

Merge Mark Pilgrim's Ultra Liberal RSS Feedparser with Bittorrent. Somebody with a flow of Torrents could then publish an RSS feed of new torrents using the enclosure tag. I'd subscribe to that feed and the system would download (and of course serve) the torrents to my machine in the background.

This was inspired by Disney who are doing something like this to serve large quantities (Gigs per day) of multimedia content to their corporate customers.

Does anyone use the bCentral Microsoft site for SMEs.

I only ask because of this article in El Reg. "British Chambers of Commerce urges gov to cut red tape. The British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) today promised to kick off a campaign of lobbying which it hopes will force Whitehall to cut the Government red tape tangle that is increasingly ensnaring Britain's small businesses. The BCC initiative forms the main plank of a three-year collaboration with Microsoft and also aims to boost IT skills and raise awareness of e-security issues. "

This is an admirable goal. I just question whether it should be tied into a single supplier like this. And this problem is rather larger than simply a question of IT.

BTW. Is anyone here involved with their local Chamber of Commerce? [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

There's a good weblog run by Steve Stroh on Wifi. We used to read the headlines into the WiFi TN as part of the Dailenews.

I discovered today that he's moved to Blogger as a weblogging platform. And the blog now only exports headlines in the new Atom format and not RSS.

This makes me really angry. We're just at the point where RSS is getting some real traction with sites like the BBC producing it when the standard fragments and we have competitors. This means that I now have to go and write more code to read and parse another standard. Or simply ignore it which is what I will probably do until I absolutely have to have some feed or other that's only available in Atom.

IMHO. Google as owners of Blogger and Blogger themselves are doing the internet community a major disservice by not supporting the de facto standard as well as the new one. "We're not evil" Yeah, right. [from: JB Ecademy]

Firebird is dead, long live Firefox.

Firefox 0.8 has just been released along with Thunderbird 0.5.

The download servers are being hammered right now so you'll probably want to wait a day or two before downloading it. [from: JB Ecademy]

Today I got a cheque from Google for Ads placed on my personal site. $45 for 7 months. Wow! I think I'll go and buy myself a CD.

AdSense is generating rather more money for Ecademy but it's not going to make anyone rich. I probably shouldn't encourage you to click through the Google ads, but if you see something interesting, don't hold back. [from: JB Ecademy]

Brits pay more for Wifi

Wi-Fi users in Europe are paying much higher rates than those in the US, according to a price-comparison web site, W-Fi Rates. And we pay more for our hardware too, with IBM Centrino laptops costing at least fifty percent more than in the US. Surprisingly, UK users can find themselves worse off than people in the rest of Europe.

The average hourly rate to use Wi-Fi at a hotspot in the US is $3.75, while in the UK it is £4.41, or nearly $8 (let's compare in US dollars, shall we?). US users can surf for a whole day for $7.70, while the average daily rate in the UK is £10.78 (or $19.37).

I guess £1 == $1 Bah! [from: JB Wifi]

I've just gone back and updated a couple of bookmarklets for blogging on Ecademy.
http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=4663

Surf round the web and when you see something you want to comment on and show other Ecademy members, click on the bookmark and it will cut and paste highlighted text, the title of the page and a link into the Ecademy blog entry form ready for you to add your pithy commentary.
[from: JB Ecademy]

broadband » News » Get More From Your Router - Tinkering with modified WRT54G firmware The main reason the author was playing with this was to get QoS bandwidth shaping for VoIP sessions. It worked! [from: JB Wifi]

Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Weblog says "Upon Cleaning Out My In-box This Morning -- A passing thought...Who needs social nets when we've got friends of friends automatically delivered to our inboxes via email worms?"

Ah bless. Who can avoid being touched by the tragically absurd paradoxes of modern life?
[from: JB Ecademy]

Swisscom to connect UK Premier Lodge hotels They're aiming for 140 sites with 3 live this month.

Has anyone got the Travelodge franchise? This seems like a no-brainer to me as they get so much commercial traveller business. A quick search to find matches between Travelodge locations and nearest hotspot didn't turn up anything. [from: JB Wifi]

Rupert Goodwins talks about using the GNER Wifi train from London to Scotland and back. On the way up he has almost uninterrupted internet access, rigs up a webcam piinting out the window and at fellow passengers. On the way back signal failure means the wrong train, no Wifi and a 1 hour wait outside York "while the train in front of us is abducted by aliens from Doncaster."

Sounds about right. [from: JB Wifi]

We had some fairly strange explanations last night on TV as to what might happen today, but the gist of it seems to be true. Maybe there's actually no connection between the MyDoom virus, Denial of service attacks on sco.com and Microsoft, and poor network performance. But this morning I am seeing major packet loss on a whole range of networks. NTL-LINX-Globix-Ecademy looks particularly bad, but I'm also seeing drop outs on Level3 and a few other routes. Curiously the NTL web proxy servers seem to be holding up as the Ecademy website looks ok to me, but picking up my email is almost impossible as there are so many timeouts. MSN Messenger keeps dropping out or failing to connect.

Hey-ho. The Internet seems to be broken. If this is being caused by MyDoom, it's worse than people thought. [from: JB Ecademy]

As seen on Orkut.

Bad, bad server. No donut for you

We're sorry, but the orkut.com server has acted out in an unexpected way.

Hopefully it will return to its usual helpful self if you give it another chance. If it still refuses to play nice, please send an email to help+errror@orkut.com and help us modify this poor behavior.

We apologize for the inconvenience and our server's lack of consideration for others.

I guess it is in Beta ;-)

As well as gnews2rss.php there's also

Perl

here --> http://googlenews.74d.com/files/getgoogle.pl

and in python

here --> http://www.muselog.net/download/googlenews.py

My current favourite radio station is Monkey Radio. What is Monkey Radio? Well, some call it "Trip-Hop." And some call it "Acid Jazz." Some call it "Downtempo" or "Abstrakt Beats." Now take the intersection of all these. Stir in groove. Dust with sexiness. Simmer. Voila.Serve chilled.

You can listen to it with the highly recommended Winamp 5 [from: JB Ecademy]

Number of WLAN APs in London trebles in a year But 1 in 4 are still unprotected by WEP or other security mechanisms. [from: JB Wifi]