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The LangaList
16-Mar-00
A Free Email Newsletter from Fred
Langa
That Helps You Get More From Your Hardware,
Software, and Time Online
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Ever have the feeling that some
project you're on is cursed? <g> Well that's how this site move has been.
I *thought* it was over last week--- but I was mistaken. The whole move is
actually getting funny, so I'll tell you some of the weirder twists and turns in
the "Just for Grins" Section at the end of this issue. (See? I'm
trying to laugh about it!<g>) On a positive note, since last
week, I've refined the site and reduced the load times of many pages; once the
DNS weirdness finally clears, over two thirds of the pages on the site should
load in less than 10 seconds with a 56K modem (and much less on fast
connections), and almost all the rest should load in under 15 seconds. A few
pages--- such as the "Contents" page that is recalculated live when
you load it--- take a little longer, But on the whole, when the site-move logjam
clears, the whole site should be faster. And by the way, later in this
issue, I'll tell you about free tools I used to speed page-load times: They're
cool, and very useful if you have a web site of your own. The most obvious changes to the
site are the overall design and the addition of banner ads. Until now, the site
has run without ads and I've simply paid the hosting fees out of my own pocket.
But with the huge increase in visitors to the site, the web hosting fees grew to
thousands and thousands of dollars a year--- yikes! So, as with the text ads in this
newsletter, I'm hoping the banner ads on the site will defray my out-of-pocket
costs and allow me to continue to offer these services to you for free. And you
can help--- just click on a banner once a visit, for example, or visit the sites
of the advertisers here. Thanks! Elsewhere on the site, I changed
the date format to the international dd-mm-yy standard, eliminated some popups
and target (secondary window) pages some readers found annoying, and generally
tried to make things clean and clear. I've added a privacy statement (describing
what I do--- and don't do!) with any information you provide, such as your email
address. There's lots more there, and lots
more to come--- including a bulletin-board area and live chats where you can
talk to other LangaList readers and to me in real time to explore problems,
share your knowledge, and get answers to your questions. I hope you find all the changes
positive. I welcome your feedback in any case! Now if I can just get past the
end-of-the-move hassles, we'll be all set! 8-) Click to
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The article is now posted at http://content.techweb.com/winmag//columns/explorer/2000/06.htm
. It builds on two earlier columns.
In Part One ( http://content.techweb.com/winmag//columns/explorer/2000/04.htm
), we discussed the four myths of online security and the essential steps you
need to take to ensure that your PC doesn't suffer from the worst and
most-common online/networking security holes. By itself, Part One gets you a
long way towards solid, basic online security. In Part Two ( http://content.techweb.com/winmag//columns/explorer/2000/05.htm
), we looked at "Personal Firewalls" that sit on your PC (and on each
PC on a shared Internet connection). These applications work on a local level to
block unwanted access to your PC from hackers or other undesirable agents. Even
better, some also can block unwarranted accesses that originate from within your
own PC--- such as from Trojan Horse and other apps that may secretly "phone
home" to send information about you or your PC back to some outside
destination. This column---Part Three--- shows
you how to make your PC nearly impregnable via a "layered defense."
Come check out the column and decide how much or how little "layering"
of defenses you need, then join in the discussion: What do you use to provide
online security? What hardware and software solutions can you tell us about? How
much protection is enough---and how much is too much or too little? Join in at http://content.techweb.com/winmag//columns/explorer/2000/06.htm
! Click to
email this item to a friend Remember the "Aureate
Mess" about a "spyware" app that can be installed silently on
your system to perform various tasks ranging from managing ad banners to sending
information about you to a third party? We've covered it a lot, so I won't
replow old ground: If you need more info, please see http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2000/mar-2-00.htm
, http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2000/mar-6-00.htm
, and http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2000/mar-9-00.htm
. In those past issues, I told you
of some early anti-Aureate tools that can delete various Aureate DLLs and
settings that may be on your system. The trouble with some of these tools is
that is that they simply whack everything on the original list of supposed
Aureate DLLs that circulated when this story first came to light--- and that
original list erroneously included some very NON-Aureate stuff, including parts
of Microsoft Media Player. As a result, some people using these crude tools
ended up crippling completely "innocent" apps along with the Aureate
stuff I told you I was waiting for
Steve Gibson's promised app. (Steve's site is http://www.grc.com
). I got a letter from Steve this week: Fred, I heard about your
mention of [my] Aureate "Antispy", and also read your
comment about preferring to wait for my forthcoming solution:"OptOut". I intended to take a
look at AntiSpy so that I could intelligently respond to people who wanted a
comparison, but I've been in SUCH a burn
to get OptOut written that I never found the time. So, I thought of
that, and you, when I read the following comment from someone who I
let play with a very early non-even-yet-complete copy. I explained that it was
SO raw that the paint was still wet: Gads Steve if that's
ALPHA (Wet paint, no beta? ::snicker::) I will probably
fall over dead when the final comes out.. This was a DREAM to
run! FAST!!! Clean presentation and EASY!! No doubts on my end as to
what was going to happen, what happened, and the end results…. 13
Aureate Process Parasite references found! 14
Adbot/Spyware entries were found in the registry! I also did the deep
drive scan, from C: thru H: only the 2 fake advert.dll
files were found.. (I created them). Fred, I'll be finishing
it this week, and preparing a supporting web site, etc.
I'll send you a copy, a URL, and the news as soon as it's ready for
your audience ... and the world! Thanks Steve. I'll post the URL
as soon as it's ready. Meanwhile, the guys at PC Pitstop
have generated a simpler Aureate sniffer: Fred: [We've] put up a
page at http://www.pcpitstop.com/pcpitstop/AureateCheck.asp
that checks for Advert.DLL automatically, since so many users have trouble even
viewing the DLLs in Windows\System. If the damned thing is there, it offers a
link to an AutoFix that will rename Advert.DLL to Advert.old. If you rerun the
AutoFix later, you'll be offered the option to name it back (if you discover
that you like your freeware more than you fear the Aureate "spyware"). Thanks, guys! And finally, A number of readers wrote to me
("Darren" was the first) to tell me that Aureate has changed its
name, if not its stripes. It's calling itself "Radiate" now. See http://www.radiate.com/press/news.html Thanks to all who wrote in! Click to
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Most web images are GIFs, JPGs,
or PNGs; there are formats that already include a fair degree of
data-compression to make an image file far smaller than it would be in, say, the
Windows BitMap (BMP) format. But even though an image is
compressed, it may be able to be compressed further without compromising the
visual quality of the final image! This can be done through a variety of
techniques, including removing unused colors from the stored palette, slightly
shifting colors to more easily-stored values, and so on. There are a number of
image-editing tools that can deliver impressively compact images; Gif Wizard is
perhaps one of the better-known commercial apps. There also are quasi-free sites
such as http://websitegarage.netscape.com/O=wsg/turbocharge/gif_lube/index.html
; but this site requires a cumbersome double-login process (once for Netscape
Netcenter, then again for the GIF site), and I actually had trouble with the
results--- the site said it "did not recognize" the format of my
standard images. Duh. There's http://www.peda.com/smaller/,
which offers a shareware tool: You can download and use a copy for free to
compress images; but if you do this with no real intention of keeping and paying
for the app, it's ethically questionable. The site I ended up using is http://www.giftools.com,
which offers a variety of image and text tools that run live, online, and for
free. Check it out! Click to
email this item to a friend One of the slower pages on the
old Langa.Com site was the Search, which was handled entirely locally. I had
thought that keeping things local would make the search faster than one that
used an external search engine. I was wrong. On the all-new Langa.Com, I'm
using "Pico Search," which is a FREE special-purpose search engine.
You sign up on the PicoSearch site ( http://www.picosearch.com/
) and the free tool will index your site in a matter of minutes. PicoSearch
generates some cut-and-paste code you drop into your site; this creates the
fill-in search form. (If you know HTML, you can modify the form to suit your
site's design.) Once you've set it up, the search
is lightning fast: When you click on the search button, you get your results
almost instantly. And they're rank-ordered for relevancy, and include snippets
of the text surrounding the "hit" so you can judge whether or not the
search had actually found what you're looking for. It's so good it's amazing that
it's free. PicoSearch handles sites up to 1500 pages, and doesn't even clutter
the results page with ads the way some "free" searches do: Instead,
you get to brand the ad-free results page with your own site logo. If you'd like to see it in
operation, try the Search function at Langa.Com. And if you like what you see,
you can add the same kind of search to your site in minutes via the link above. I should mention that PicoSearch
offers two for-a-fee search options, too; these are geared more to very large
sites, and sites that need a lot of customization. In my case, I found the free
tool perfectly suited to my needs. Check it out! Click to
email this item to a friend If you think the
LangaList is a worthwhile read, just use the following link to recommend the
LangaList to a friend. Your friend just may find a new source of useful
information; I just may gain a new subscriber; and you just may win $10,000 for
your trouble (full details also available via this link): http://www.langa.com/recommend.htm#1 Or, win a copy of
"Poor Richard's E-Mail Publishing: Creating Newsletters, Bulletins,
Discussion Groups and Other Powerful Communications Tools." This book has
been described as "An excellent, straightforward manual on email
publishing, banner ads, driving traffic and especially ethics." (Full
details also available via this link): http://www.langa.com/recommend.htm#2 Either way, thank
you, and good luck! Click to
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Dozen Great Books Check
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I have to laugh. The only
alternative is to toss my monitor off a tall place. 8-) Many of you suffered through the
initial site move last week when Langa.Com moved to a new web host; the site was
slow and flaky for a couple of days and my email (which passes through my web
host) was totally hosed for a while. Sigh. I spent almost two days talking to
tech support, babysitting the DNS changes at Network Solutions, and doing
everything I could to try to keep the process moving along. When the move finally went
through, the site looked great, but it was gawdawful slow. What was going on? Turns out SprintLink---a major
Internet "backbone" carrier--- chose that moment to blow up: It
suffered a period of horrendous performance where any data packets traversing a
SprintLink hop would suffer huge slowdown. But, to end users, it would just look
like whatever site they were trying to reach was very, very slow. For many users, Langa.Com was one
of the sites made to look slow. Sigh^2. There's nothing I can do about
Internet backbone issues, so I spent the next two days finishing work on the new
site: things like finding the best way to compress the graphics; finding,
testing, and changing to PicoSearch; and setting up for the new Chat and BBS
features (coming soon!); and so on. Part of the reason I'd moved the
site was to get better performance and higher bandwidth allowances. But even
with the SprintLink slowdown, so many of you visited the new site that my
estimates were way off. In fact, my new web host measured the initial traffic on
the site and recommended a hosting plan with even higher bandwidth. So, I dug
out my MasterCard and bit the figurative bullet. Sigh^3. And---they were trying to be
helpful---although the new plan did not call for it, my new web host decided
that Langa.Com would do better on one of their special servers designed for very
busy sites. It was a nice gesture--- I hadn't paid for a special server, but
they moved Langa.Com to one anyway, to ensure good service. The only problem was that the new
high-capacity server has a different IP address than the old, and so
"Langa.Com" also got another new numeric address (actually, the
*fourth* numeric address change in just eight days!) That,
in turn, meant that the whole DNS mess had to be repeated. Sigh^4. Then the site went offline for a
short while as the initial DNS switch took place. Then my email went away again.
And it turned out they had rebuilt the new site from the last daily backup tape
of the former site, so many of my painstaking final tweaks of the site weren't
live on the new high-speed server. That's not a big deal--- except that the new
site wasn't editable for 18 hours… on and on. Sigh^5. As I type this, the newest IP
address is just starting to propagate across the web. (If you want to go to the
new site directly, it's at http://www.langa.com/
.) . Eventually, all the dust will settle, and the new site should be great. But I'll be bald by then, for all
the hair I've torn out in the last week! Arghhh! There. I feel better now.
<g> Click to
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See you next issue! Best, (Please recommend
the LangaList to a friend! (And maybe win $10,000!) An easier-to read formatted HTML version is
available in the "what's new" section of http://www.langa.com.
(The HTML version of each issue normally is available by 9AM EST [GMT-5] of the
issue date.) All past LangaList issues are also available via the same link. Why are you getting this newsletter? There are
only two ways to get on the list (direct email request or via the WinMag mail
list signup page) so if you're getting this newsletter; your name came to me
through one of those channels. SUBSCRIBE (it's free!): Create and send a new
email address it to subscribe-langalist@lyris.dundee.net About
the advertisers: Langa Consulting LLC will never knowingly accept
advertising for a fraudulent product, company or service. However, Langa Consulting LLC makes no implied or explicit warranty, recommendation or endorsement
of or for the products, companies or services mentioned in the ads. Disclaimer:
The tips and other information given in the newsletter are researched and are
believed to be accurate, but we cannot and do not guarantee that all the
information here will work on all systems, for all users, all the time. All
information herein is offered as-is and without warranty of any kind. Neither
Langa Consulting LLC, nor its employees nor contributors are responsible for any
loss, injury, or damage, direct or consequential, resulting from application of
any information presented here. This newsletter is a free service of Langa Consulting LLC and is Copyright © 2000 Langa Consulting LLC. All rights reserved.1)
Just When I Thought It Was Safe…
http://www.langa.com/sendit2.htm
return to top of page2)
Secure Your PC Online, Part Three
http://www.langa.com/sendit2.htm
return to top of page3)
Two FREE Automatic "Aureate Mess" Fixes
(and an Aureate change)
http://www.langa.com/sendit2.htm
return to top of page4)
Cool Tool #1 (FREE!)
http://www.langa.com/sendit2.htm
return to top of page5)
Cool Tool #2 (FREE!)
http://www.langa.com/sendit2.htm
return to top of page6)
Don’t Make Me Beg! 8-)
http://www.langa.com/sendit2.htm
return to top of page
(At a 20% Discount!)
by Fred Langa and available at Amazon.Com's deepest discounts!7)
Just for Grins
http://www.langa.com/sendit2.htm
return to top of page
Fred
(fred@langa.com)
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