No privacy on the Net
Sorting files with a click in Explorer
How to boost your fax modem's signal
General decompression batch file for DOS and Windows
Windows conventional memory manager
I would like to bring to your attention an experience I had while surfing the Internet the other night.
I had been following random links (just casually looking around) and ended up at www.ts.umu.se/~balp/porno/ The opening paragraph on the page proceeded to tell me which browser (down to the version number) I was using, under which operating system, what link I had followed to that page, and my IP address.
Now, I think that basically the creator of this page was just showing how clever he/she is, but I don't appreciate personal information being accessed without my permission. It is a breach of my privacy and I did not like it. The whole point of the Internet is to be anonymous unless I choose not to be.
I thought I would bring this matter to your attention and inform your readers of how easy it is for their privacy on the Internet to be compromised.
- Lesley Smith
Editor's note: Thanks for raising this issue, Lesley. There isn't a great deal of privacy on the Net. In fact one thing to be very wary of is that, if anyone wants to go to the trouble, it's possible to trace all your activities on the Internet, and discover everything you've looked at, how long you looked at it on-line, and what you've downloaded to look at off-line. If you're at all curious about this, read the book TakeDown, by Tsutomu Shimomura (with John Markoff) on the capture of legendary hacker Kevin Mitnick.
Your boss can easily monitor all your activities if you're connected via your local network, and if not your ISP can monitor all your activities in great detail, if they can be bothered. Administrators and anyone with any technical skill can easily read your e-mail.
As you explained in a further e-mail, you found this site by following a link to the Geek Site of the Day. However, it's worth noting that cruising around looking for artistic photography on the Internet is considerably more exposed than looking at mature magazines in a newsagency. Just because you're sitting alone at a PC doesn't make you anonymous.
The wicked young man who created the Web site of which you speak,
a certain Anders "Balp" Arnholm, appears to be making
some kind of point about all this. He makes elaborate claims,
in strangely broken English, about the content of his site:
Howdy, reader of the Balp's ComputerPorno Archive!
Here i have tried to collect all nice pictures of my nude babes. I have found a look of naked ones, and I'm very glad to share them whith you. The first intressting fact is that aloot! pers has visit this page since 1 March
1996...
I see that you are using :Mozilla/1.22 (Windows; I; 32bit)
on the machine: dialup12.geko.net.au
and you found your way here from: ....
And then it turns out that the "nude babes" are just PCs with the cases removed! To add injury to insult, Balp logs all the information he has collected about the site from which you came, your browser and other details, and publishes them in his visitor's book, which makes very interesting browsing. An awful lot of people find their way to his site, apparently having searched for keywords such as "nude", "babes" and "porno" in a huge variety of Web search tools.
For this, Balp's page has received the Geek Site of the Day award for 15th May 1996, and I'd have to say, as geek behaviour goes, the award is very well deserved.
In many ways it's fortunate that Anders has gone to the trouble to demonstrate the lack of anonymity on the Net with such obvious goodwill and humour.
You're right to be concerned. Far from preserving our anonymity,
the Web makes us far more exposed. There's no getting around it.
The more we use machines like telephones and computers for communicating,
the more we're susceptible to surveillance. If you want to remain
anonymous, you have to go lo-tech. Thanks for alerting us to this
site.
Lincoln Spector in "All the right moves" in the May issue [page 138] suggests sorting files in Explorer by using the View-Arrange icons-By type, by size, etc. There is a far easier way.
The right pane of the Explorer window displays the contents of a particular folder. To sort the files simply click the label bar at the top of the right pane corresponding with what you want to sort by. For example to sort files in ascending order by size, click the Size label bar. Click it again to sort the files in descending order. The same goes for Name, Type and Modified. You can also resize any of these fields as you would in an Excel worksheet.
- George Maniatis
In regard to "Just the fax" June 1996 [page 180], most modems have an S register to set up the PSTN Transmit attenuation level <S91>, and some have an S register to set up the fax attenuation level <S92>. I believe that the default level for Australian PSTN is -13dBm; I have no idea what it is for fax.
To check the current profile of your modem, enter AT&V or, ATS91=?, and ATS92=?
You can change the output level using ATS91=10, for example.
If your fax modem has an S92 register you can experiment by changing the level and sending a fax to the Telstra service you quoted.
- Peter Clarke (Leut, RAN)
Editor's note: Thanks very much for your reply on this issue, Peter. I tried this on my Hayes modem but it doesn't appear to have S register 92, and it doesn't seem possible to alter the setting of 10 in S register 91. Readers can try it out on their own modems. The command AT&V lists all the S registers you have and their current values.
I really appreciate when readers take the trouble to help out with information like this. You're obviously well qualified in computing and electrical engineering.
Please keep in touch, especially if you have any other information that may help other readers. It's nice to know the country's defences are safe in technically competent hands.
Editor's note: The batch file described here decompresses files that have been compressed in zip, arj or lz format. It places the decompressed files in a directory called c:\enlarge.
I get a deal of pleasure from your magazine and thought it time I made a small contribution. The following batch file has been used by me for years, although DELTREE is a newish addition.
To make use of the batch file below:
For DOS just type: enlarge filename.ext.
For Windows 3.x in File Manager choose the File-Associate command to associate each Extension (file type) in the batch file, with the batch file.
For Windows 95 in Explore choose View-Options, click the File Types tab and create a New Type for each file type (Extension). If the file type already exists then double click on it in the Registered File Types window and then click on Edit below the Actions: window.
The paths in the batch file must point to your decompression utilities. To use your favourite decompression utility, add another two lines to the batch file. The C:\enlarged directory gets deleted with every running of the batch file so remember to first copy/move any files that you don't want to delete.
@echo off
If exist c:\enlarged\nul deltree /y c:\enlarged
md c:\enlarged
echo %1|find /i "zip">nul
if errorlevel 0 if not errorlevel 1 d:\lib\pkunzip -d %1 c:\enlarged\
echo %1|find /i "arj">nul
if errorlevel 0 if not errorlevel 1 d:\lib\arj x %1 c:\enlarged\
echo %1|find /i "lzh">nul
if errorlevel 0 if not errorlevel 1 d:\lib\lha x %1 c:\enlarged\
echo %1|find /i "arc">nul
if errorlevel 0 if not errorlevel 1 d:\lib\arce x %1 c:\enlarged\
pause
Your magazine is the best on the shelf at my newsagent. En Avant.
- Michael Druett
Editor's note: Reader Michael Moran found a Windows conventional
memory manager that solves "out of memory" errors in
Windows.
I'm not quite sure how Fix1MB works but it seems to make Windows dll's and drivers use less of the conventional memory than usual. I suspect the problem is more noticeable on my system because I have a lot of network drivers loaded. If I start my system without the Windows network drivers (ie, win /n) I get an extra 100K of conventional memory available.
I have Windows configured for a Windows network, NetWare and TCP/IP. Before installing Fix1MB, I had only about 32K of conventional memory, but after installing it I had about 270K conventional available (even with the network drivers running).
The conventional memory available to Windows seems to have little bearing on what TSRs and drivers are loaded high in config or autoexec. I have nearly all my drivers and TSRs loaded in upper memory, and this gives me over 600K reported free by mem, but I still end up with very low conventional memory in Windows. The conventional memory reported available in a DOS window under Windows also does not seem to have anything to do with the "Windows conventional memory".
There also do not seem to be many programs which tell you how much conventional memory is available. Norton Utilities' System Watch and the shareware program Winwatch are two.
Fix1MB is a tool to help with the dreaded "out of memory" errors in Windows that cause new programs to not start. This particular problem is caused by DLLs that inadvertently suck up all the memory below 1Mb in the Windows address space. Windows needs a certain amount of memory below 1Mb to start a new task.
Fix1MB not only shows you which DLLs and programs are using this precious memory, it also acts to prevent them from grabbing the memory below 1Mb.
Fix1MB can either be run from within Windows, or loaded at startup time. The latter allows Fix1MB to preserve even more memory below 1Mb. Fix1MB was written by Matt Pietrek, and is from his May 1995 Questions and Answers column in the Microsoft Systems Journal. Please refer to that column for additional information.
- Michael Moran
Editor's note: Thanks Michael. It's a great tip and I'm sure it will help many other readers.