Almost as an aside at a committee meeting a suggestion was
made to produce a 10 Year Booklet to celebrate the first decade
of the Hertford and District U3A, to consolidate our history and
to have something to give to new members so they can really
see what they are coming into.
This was definitely an ‘acorn’ that met with superb response
from the membership and the Group Leaders in particular. In
two months we had enough items that represented the major
interest groups. The trouble has been in condensing the material
offered.
Enjoy Decade, this is some of your U3A.
An article by John Lever of Systems Services Tel : 01763 288 165
(email).
These days a lot of people use the internet regularly - mainly using Internet Explorer for surfing the web and Outlook or Outlook Express for e-mail.
A lot of people also have more and more problems with unsolicited e-mail (called spam). In addition when browsing the web unsolicited windows can pop up or unwanted advertising occur. In some situations unwanted advertising can also pop up on your machine even when you are not using the internet.
All these things can make using e-mail and surfing the internet trying . In addition unscrupulous websites can even install so called "spyware" which in the most extreme cases can monitor and even report back via the internet on your usage of the internet and/or your personal computer.
There are various simple ways that you can protect your personal computer from these intrusions.
The simplest way for web surfing is to apply "family filters" in search engines such as Google and Altavista (in my opinion Google is the best search engine for standard searches, Altavista is the best for multimedia searches). You can also change the 'Privacy' and 'Security' settings on the control panel to be more strict in controlling what is available from websites ; you do however need to be careful not to make things too strict or you will block all or parts of perfectly legitimate websites.
For unsolicited e-mail filtering other reliable measures can be put in place which will identify what appears to be spam and dump it into a safe area for you to either delete it or keep it as you wish (you can even 'bounce' it ie tell the sender that the message could not be delivered to you).
The measures so far discussed for web surfing are not foolproof as they can be circumvented from websites or changed on your machine. My kids and their friends know how to change settings on my machine so yours may too. There are however ways of both cleaning your system if you already have such problems and also protecting your system from further abuse.
I am looking into reliable and inexpensive ways of handling both spam and stopping or recovering from problems in surfing at present.
I am also looking into ways of identifying images and videos (including ones you cannot see in the filesystem but are still there). This can be useful in helping parents determine how a PC is being used by youngsters.
You can investigate these protection methods yourself - but do be careful as I found that in downloading one piece of protection software other intrusive advertising software was downloaded with it.
