Hi Y'all,

If you haven't been to Windows Update recently and gotten the Windows Script Engine (Specifically JScript) Update for Windows 98 to XP, do it now. This is a "must have" update. Read about it here. Win NT 4 and 2000 users: click the plus sign in front of the Additonal Information section to see minimum Service Pack requirements.

Since Microsoft has declared Windows 95 has gone to the big bit bucket in the sky, there is no update for you folks; you just have to cross your fingers you don't visit the wrong Web page or open the wrong e-mail. I see it as another attempt to force you to spred thousands of dollars around the computer industry to buy an XP grade computer and all new monitors, printers, scanners, software, etc.

The architectural design for the new World Trade Center was picked Feb 26, 2003. Here are two pictures of the architect's model of the WTC complex: Pic 1, Pic 2. More info.

Some groups described only as "rights societies" want a "copyright levy" placed on every personal computer made in Germany. A copyright levy, or pre-paid royalty, is in actuality the amount of the fine for a crime you may or may not commit in the future. Having in your possession a computer and software capable of copying copyrighted material is prima fascia evidence that you will copy copyrighted material without the permission of, or recompense to, the copyright owner, and since your chance of getting caught is essentially nil, you must pay the fine up front.

As ridiculous and probably illegal as this sounds to Americans, it has German computer manufactures running scared. Germany and several other European countries imposed "copyright levies" years ago on blank audio and video cassettes just because they could be used to make illegal copies of songs and movies.

This silliness isn't just happening "over there."  The legislated concept of paying now for a crime you might commit in the future is camped on our doorstep: Canada has bought into it.  I'm afraid it's only a matter of time, perhaps very little time, before some shady lawyer turned Congressperson finds the right fancy words to circumvent our Constitution and "due process" laws and force us to plead guilty to the crime of using or owning a computer or blank VCR tape and make restitution to people we haven't harmed.

The fines, I mean levies, collected somehow are supposed to filter back to copyright owners of material which might be copied in any manner whatsoever onto any medium now known or invented in the future.

How could any person, group, company, or even national government determine who those copyright owners are? Do you believe for a second if you wrote a poem (which is copyrighted by default because it's an "original work") and posted it on your Web site or sent it in an e-mail or handed it in person to your S.O. (you've now lost exclusive control of your poem), you'll suddenly begin receiving monthly or annual "copyright violation restitution" checks from various governments and organizations around the world? Ha!

I suspect the membership of those "rights groups" are major movie and recording companies and perhaps a scattering of publishing companies and independent musicians and movie makers, and it is those organizations which receive the money and parcel it out to their members in proportion to the amount of "dues" they paid.

The IDG News Service story upon which the preceding editorial is based also yielded the quotation at the head of this Newsletter.

Windows, Macintosh, other operating systems: On 3 March 2003, Macromedia released a Flash Player update which contains a few performance tweaks plus plugs another potential security breach. Macromedia considers this a "Critical" Security Update. Flash content isn't supposed to be able to escape the bounds of the player. It's called "the sandbox" – the people who program Flash content can play with their little pails and shovels to their heart's content in the sandbox, but they aren't supposed to be able to leave it to shovel in the flowerbed. This update plugs another hole someone discovered in the sandbox through which a bad guy could wiggle and get into your flowerbed (your computer system.) The Security Bulletin explaining the sandbox hole is here.

You can get the updated Flash Player for your operating system at the Macromedia Flash Player Download Center. Before clicking the Download button, read the description below the button and make sure Macromedia discerned your operating system and browser correctly. If it didn't, click the Need a different player? link and click on the proper version.

Note: You may not be aware of it, but you do have the Flash player on your computer as it's included with most operating systems (some employer owned computers might not have it.)

The following are some quotations from a booklet prepared by Republican strategist Frank Luntz in 2002. It contains instructions on how Republican apologists, office holders and candidates can appease the American public with deceptive phrases and descriptions while repaying the deep pockets which put the G.W.Bush administration and its Congressional allies in power. After reading the set of pages excerpted from the booklet one can almost agree with much of it... until one remembers these are "how to bamboozle the American public" instructions.

"The environment is probably the single issue on which Republicans in general - and President Bush in particular - are most vulnerable."

"... any discussion of the environment has to be grounded in an effort to reassure a skeptical public that you care about the environment for its own sake – that your intentions are strictly honorable. ...once you are able to establish your environmental bona fides, ... then the conservative, free market approach to the environment actually has the potential to be quite popular."

"When we talk about 'rolling back regulations' involving the environment, we are sending a signal Americans don't support." More palatable terms are "'update' Superfund" and "'modernize' the Clean Water Act."

"The scientific debate is closing [against us]" on the subject of global warming. Brackets are the author's, not mine.

"It's time for us to start talking about 'climate change' instead of global warming and 'conservation' instead of preservation."

Oh, right. "Climate change" - that's something that happens every hour of every day; nothing to be concerned about.

Instead of "preserving" something we should "conserve" it. What's the difference? According to the American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition Conserve is defined "To preserve." Wait - it has another definition: "To use carefully." That dovetails nicely with the "conservative, free market approach to the environment." Discard that extraneous word (the "carefully") and we reach the foundation of G.W.Bush & Co's public lands policy. To wit: "Modernize" Wilderness Area and Preserve designations (and anything else controlled by the Federal government with preservation as it's stated goal) from Preserved to Conserved. Then there would be no legal basis for trying to prevent the Federal government from using our tax dollars to build roads in the previously untouchable Preserved areas for the sole benefit of extractive industries (logging, mining, oil and gas), and the companies don't even have to be careful about the ways they use up the trees and land.

To read a little bit about what our government has done to (not for) you in the last four months, start here and click the link to the next month at the bottom of each page (the pages are very short and there's only four of them.) For many more examples, read The Bush Record. Click on each of the 6 little pictures, then on the sub-section names directly beneath the picture.

A particularly sickening example of Bush's stupidity is well illustrated in the Wildlands & Wildernes section, National Parks sub-section, at Bush administration opens national park to drilling. An oil company has been issued a permit to drill two gas wells on the Padre Island National Seashore which receives about 800,000 visitors/year. During the tourist season there will be heavy semis, flatbeds, well servicing trucks making 40 round trips/day up and down a 14 mile stretch of beach (there are no roads) and over the gravely endangered Ridley Sea Turtle's primary U.S. nesting area.

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I've been doing a lot of G.W.Bush & Co bashing lately. Just so you'll know where I'm coming from, I'm neither anti-Republican nor pro-Democrat, I detest Greenpeace, and think many Sierra Club actions and policies are wrong headed.

I do care about our country and our environment. Why Bush & Co feel it imperative to return as quickly as possible to the "good old days" when a handful of powerful companies and industries controlled the government and did what they pleased, where they pleased, and to whom they pleased, with impunity, I don't know, but I can hazard a guess – lots of $$$ in their pockets. Either that, or someone dropped ol' G.W. on his head when he was a baby.

If you know your Congresspersons on a first name basis, one of them might just give you a stretch of shore line property on a nice lake. See Developer Gets Rent-Free Deal on Federal Land.

Microsoft has started co-branding MSN for broadband (DSL and cable) carriers. That means companies like Quest and Verizon are using MSN as their ISP service for their DSL subscribers; the Web pages will bear those companies' logos, but it's MSN's ISP (Internet Service Provider) product underneath. So why's that a big deal? Because Microsoft (and AOL and Mindspring) has done nothing but lose money as a primarily dial-up ISP service and the pool of dial-up users is shrinking as America, as a whole, is moving to broadband. The money is in broadband (Microsoft and AOL hope) and Microsoft will be shutting down MSN's dial-up service, but, a Microsoft spokesperson says, dial-up subscribers won't be hung up on "for as long as it's a viable market." Translation: Microsoft is willing to absorb the loss for another year or two, or until it brings in enough broadband subscribers, whichever comes first.

Most regular ISP services make a profit charging 1/2 of what MSN and AOL charge, because they just tell you how to configure your operating system's built-in Dial-up Networking application to dial their phone number, and how to configure your own e-mail application (probably Outlook Express for most of you), and let you figure out how to use your own browser to get around the cold, cruel Web. AOL, MSN (and Mindspring?) thought that if they could wrap their subscribers in a warm fuzzy cocoon and feed them "safe" bits of the Web (and get a commission for doing so), the subscribers would stay home, which meant a captive audience and they could sell lots of advertising space. It may have worked for a while, but no more.

AOL, for example, has around 26 Million subscribers, yet lost about $98 Billion dollars in 2002, and for the first time ever, had a net loss of subscribers. AOL is also trying to bring in broadband ISP subscribers, but it may be too late to help. AOL Time Warner says the AOL division better make a dramatic turn around this year, or they'll cut AOL loose to sink or swim on its own, or just sell it. Would you buy stock in, or buy, a company which loses $98 billion a year on its primary business of Internet Service Provider to dial-up customers? I wouldn't be a bit surprised to find out in a year or so that AOL is going to pull the plug on its dial-up subscribers, or is going out of business. Mindspring customers - do you see a pattern here?

The Reuters news service is providing free Flash-based viewing of raw, unedited, unnarrated war-related video footage and live news conferences, government briefings and other events. You can watch them at reuters.feedroom.com.

Internet Week, Business Week and others have been warning about responding to Spam offering Symantec products at very low prices ($30 for items that retail for $100+.) Most of the spam is coming from Canada, Europe, and China. According to Symantec, the CD's are unauthorized copies and often altered to introduce viruses, Trojan horses, and spyware to capture credit card information, and 30% of the "offers" are pure scams; they just want your credit card number - you'll never receive anything except charges to the card.

If you receive any spam offering Symantec products, Symantec requests you forward the e-mail as an attachment to spamwatch@symantec.com to aid them in working with law enforcement agencies to locate the perpetrators. Three examples of the spam are here.

If you have an attbi.com e-mail address, Comcast isn't telling you this, but you'll have until December 2004 to get your friends and contacts, newsletter subscriptions, online billing, etc., changed over to using your new comcast.net address, according to Scot Finnie's newsletter. If you subscribe to this newsletter, don't forget to send a change of address to me. Just click the Feedback link at the bottom

I'm still getting e-mail from people who appear to be using Hotbar. I hope none of you have made the mistake of installing Hotbar, a vicious little ad-ware/spy-ware program which can also cause Internet Explorer, Outlook, and Outlook Express to malfunction, and/or cause your computer to slow down. One description of Hotbar's nastiness is described by the East Carolina University in Greenville, NC. Another is at Thundercloud.net where they note some of the things Hatbar said about itself on its website (the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy have since been rewritten and now only mention they are not responsible for viruses their "partners" may introduce into your machine.)

Be sure to uninstall Hotbar properly. You know the drill - reboot onto Safe Mode, or... "disable" your anti-virus program; close all other programs (always-connected users don't close your firewall), don't forget TClockEx if you have it; use Ctrl-Alt-Delete to End Task everything showing except Explorer and SysTray. Go to Start | Settings | Control Panel, double-click Add/Remove Programs, close Control Panel, in Add/Remove Programs click Hotbar then Remove. You may be asked which parts you want removed - check them all off. Reboot after Removal finishes.

Hotbar's uninstall routine is buggy and may not completely undo the damage it did. Open Outlook Express, click Tools | Options | Send tab | HTML Settings and make sure "Send pictures with mail" is checked, OK your way out (Sorry , I don't know what the procedure is for Outlook.) You may also find you can no longer view .JPG and/or .GIF format pictures. If that happens to you, open IrfanView (get it at http://www.irfanview.com/, it's a freebie), click Options | Set File Associations, click the boxes in front of GIF (CompuserveGIF) and JPG/JPEG/JPE (JPEG Format); not the JPG2000! . Click OK. Now do it again, only this time UNcheck those two boxes, click OK, close IrfanView, and reboot. All that rigamarole will reset the default viewer for those graphic formats back to the default of Internet Explorer.

One last chore is to make sure a Registry which has been messed up by Hotbar doesn't get replaced by the "good" Registry you now have if your computer should crash hard and damage the Registry. Click Start | Run, type in SCANREGW (that's the Windows version of the DOS ScanReg program) and click OK (or press the <Enter> key.) Tell ScanRegW you want to Back-up the Registry again.

The first annual Team America Rocketry Challenge takes place in Great Meadow, The Plains, Virginia on May 10-11, 2003, where student teams from 100 high schools will compete to be in the top 10. All they have to do is design, build from scratch using off-the-shelf or self-fabricated parts (except for the motors), and launch a two-stage rocket carrying two Grade A Large eggs. At liftoff it must weigh less than 3.3 pounds, then travel up to exactly 1,500 feet, and both rocket stages must return "safely" to the ground, with the eggs unbroken! No adult help is allowed, except to suggest reading materials and make sure safety precautions are taken during construction and launch. Sounds like a very challenging challenge to me.

You can get all the rules, regulations, and information on forming teams at the National Association of Rocketry and the Aerospace Industries Association Web sites. For various reasons, a team (minimum of 3 members) must be associated with a high school, but anyone in grade 7 or above may be a team member, including "home schooled" students.

Which dot are you? or should that be "is you"?

'Til next time,
Pete