October 5th, 2007

Posted by David Berlind @ 9:33 am

Yesterday was the last straw for me when it comes to the way spam is impacting my work. First, before purging the junk mail folder in my Outlook, I did a quick scan only to notice that almost every other e-mail that was classified as spam was actually a legitimate e-mail that should have flowed into my inbox. Why was it in my junk mail folder? I have no idea. That’s part of the problem. In many cases (not all), you can’t look at the e-mail, see what the offending issue was, and notify the sender of why their e-mails are getting classified as spam.

But that wasn’t all that happened yesterday. For the events company (Mass Events Labs) that Doug Gold and I co-own to produce Mashup Camp, Startup Camp, and other events, we use a masseventslabs.com-specific context of Google Apps for e-mail, documents, spreadsheets, etc. In other words, when Doug and I send e-mail to each other through the masseventslabs.com domain, both he and I are sending and receiving from and to a Google Apps-based version of Google’s GMail. Yet somehow (as you can see in the attached video), yesterday, when he replied from his Google Apps account to an important e-mail that I sent to him via my Google Apps account, GMail redirected his reply to my spam folder. How can this be? That’s the equivalent of users of the same, behind-the-firewall copy of Microsoft’s Exchange Server not being able to send e-mail to each other because it’s getting classified as spam. Surely, an e-mail server has some idea of when the source of e-mail is itself.

So, what’s the problem and whose to blame for “friendly fire” and other SNAFUs in the battle against spam? The problem is that the major e-mail technology providers won’t work together to come up with some standard approaches to stopping spam. And when I say major, I mean AOL, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. If those four companies simply got together and said it’s time to fix the problem and here’s how we’re going to fix it, the rest of the world would have no choice but to follow. Don’t agree with me? Watch the video. From my interview the other day with Matt Glotzbach, director of product management for Google Enterprise, I extracted the part where he unequivocally agreed that that’s all it would take.

Yet, here we are, more than five years after the major e-mail tech providers said that they’d find a way to curb the problem, and the situation buying cialis is markedly worse. Markedly. Compounding the problem is that there is some cooperation going on between pockets of vendors and Web sites here and there. But the end game there will be separate Internets. If Yahoo! and eBay get together as they’ve just done to address phishers going after users of eBay and PayPal and Google does something different with GMail to address phishers going after users of Google Checkout, pretty soon, you end up in a situation where you have to enter completely different multi-site contexts (walled Internet silos) to get anything done. That was not the idea behind the Internet.

So, are you outraged enough to join me in taking action? How can we (you and I) solve the problem. We have to put the pressure on AOL, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. I’ve recorded a video Technology Shakedown (see above) and I’ve licensed it under a Creative Commons license that allows you to re-use it anywhere you want. It’s not easy to grab our videos from ZDNet (I’ll work on that). So, if you want a copy of the video to paste into your blog or Web site, feel free to grab the YouTube version. Maybe together, we can all send a clear message to these four technology providers that its time to stop dilly-dallying and to lead the Internet to a standard “stack” of anti-spam solutions that will have most spammers and phishers looking for a new line of work.

David Berlind has been Executive Editor at ZDNet since 1998 and has been a technology journalist since 1991. Although he can't respond to all e-mails, he reads them all. You can reach David at david.berlind AT cnet.com. If you don't want the content of your e-mail to turn up in a blog entry, make sure you say so. To the extent that most e-mail he receives looks to sway his opinion about something, he usually looks to pass those points of view onto ZDNet's audience members for their consideration . For disclosures on David's industry affiliations, click here.

Pasted from <http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=817&tag=nl.e539>

by Greg Shultz | Jan 4, 2006

Takeaway: Did you know that unless you uninstall a device driver on a Windows XP machine that it still may be sucking up valuable system resources? Here are step-by-step instructions on how you can view and remove these unnecessary devices.

When you install a device driver on a Windows XP machine, the operating system loads that driver each time the computer boots regardless of whether the device is present—unless you specifically uninstall the driver. This means that drivers from devices that you have long since removed from your system may be wasting valuable system resources.

Follow these steps to view and remove these unnecessary device drivers:

1. Press [Windows]+[Break] to bring up the System Properties dialog box.

2. Select the Advanced tab and click the Environment Variables button.

3. Click the New button below the System Variables panel.

4. In the New System Variable dialog box, type devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices in the Variable Name text box and 1 buying cialis without prescription in the Variable Value text box.

5. Click OK to return to the System Properties dialog box and then click OK again.

6. Select the Hardware tab and click the Device Manager button.

7. In Device Manager, go to View | Show Hidden Devices.

8. Expand the various branches in the device tree and look for the washed out icons, which indicate unused device drivers.

9. To remove an unused device driver, right-click the icon and select Uninstall.

Pasted from <http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10877_11-6017628.html?tag=nl.e064>

Date: September 19th, 2007

Blogger: Greg Shultz

If you need to copy output from a command and paste it into a Windows program, such as Notepad, while working at the command buying cialis without a prescription prompt, chances are you’ll try to use the Mark and Copy commands on the command prompt’s Edit menu. A better way to get information from a command prompt and onto the Clipboard is the Clip.exe command line tool.

Clip.exe comes with Windows Server 2003, but it also works in Windows XP Professional. Simply copy Clip.exe from the Windows\System32 directory on a Windows Server 2003 system, and then paste it into the Windows\System32 directory on a Windows XP system. (If you don’t have access to Windows Server 2003, you can download a copy of Clip.exe from Daniel Petri’s IT Knowledgebase site.)

Once you have a copy of Clip.exe on your Windows XP system, using it is as easy as appending the pipe and the clip command (| clip) to the end of your command line. For example, you can use this command to copy the directory listing to the clipboard (Dir | clip), or you can use it to collect, copy, and paste the results of the Ipconfig command (Ipconfig /all | clip).

Note: This tip applies only to Windows XP Professional.

Pasted from <http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/window-on-windows/?p=521&tag=nl.e064>