One of the biggest scams on the internet is to send you an email that looks like it came from your online bankers or paypal etc, asking you to confirm your login or banking information. They offer a link to what looks like the official website. But it’s not; it’s what’s known as a Phishing website.  Once you click on the link and fill in the details, your information is recorded by the scammers and they can then access your accounts and steal your money. If you receive an email, even if you know it to be genuine, don’t click on the link. Open up your browser and type in the web address or use the link in your favourite’s folder. Try and get into the habit of always going to your browser and typing the address in. If the last three letters of the address are .exe, then don’t even put it into your address bar.

1. Don’t click on the ‘Remove Me’ link

You may receive a spam email which says: “To be removed from our mailing list, click on the link below”. Don’t do it! Spammers buy lists of email addresses from other spammers and these lists get passed around the spamming community. They don’t know if your email address is live (still in use) or not. That is until you contact them and let them know that it is. Then it is added to a live list and your spam increases.

1. Don’t just forward other’s emails

Most people when they receive jokes or interesting information from friends, forward these jokes on to their friends, leaving all those email addresses available for all to see. Eventually yours and your friends email addresses end up on a spammers list. See our article with full instructions on how to, still be able to share your jokes, but not feed the spammers with email addresses. Here’s the address:

http://www.magiwebs.com/articles/computer/spam/how-to-hide-your-mass-email-addresses.html  

Copy the address and paste it into your browser.

1. Don’t pass on virus warnings

This may sound a bit strange at first, but there are two very good reasons. Firstly 9 out of 10 virus warnings sent by email are hoaxes. Norton and Microsoft NEVER send out email virus warnings. All this does is waste your time and make you look a little silly when some bright spark tells your list that it is a hoax. There is a website that you can go to check whether the email you just received is a hoax: http://www.hoax-slayer.com. They have a pretty good list of all the hoaxes, so check them out first. If you then feel you want to pass the info on, then use the method in 3 above.

The other reason for not passing on virus warnings is that they may have come from the very person setting up the virus. You then click on a link or open up the attachment and bang there you go!

1. Don’t open up attachments

This is a pretty obvious one, but we all do it. When a friend sends us a crazy movie clip or power point promo we always click on that little paper clip to have a look. If you’re going to do this, scan it with your anti virus software first. Most anti-virus programs should scan it as it is downloaded, but it doesn’t hurt to be sure.

1. Use an anti-virus program

There is a theory that most viruses are made by anti-virus companies to keep themselves in business! If this is so then it’s another good reason to have an anti-virus program. There are many good ones on the market. We recommend Kaspersky, from Kaspersky labs (Google it). The price is very good and it monitors emails and everything else coming into your PC.  

1. Use the Phishing Filter

Windows Explorer 7 has what is called a Phishing Filter. If you use that browser make sure the filter is enabled. If you go to a website that is not what it is supposed to be i.e. the legitimate website then the Phishing Filter will inform you of that fact and tell you to get the hell out of there! For example if you get an email from Ebay, Paypal or your bank with a link to go to their website, place your cursor over the link. In the address bar at the bottom of the page you will see the address the link is going to. You would expect to see www.paypal.com or www.ebay.com but instead you’ll probably see: http://62.365.125.39/user/FJFGEAFD4545XC44SX/login.php This is a link to a Phishing website.

1. Make sure your firewall is enabled.

Windows XP and upwards come with an automated firewall, make sure that it is enabled. To do this right click on your connection icon in the bottom right hand corner next to the date. This is the icon that let’s you know you are connected your ISP. Click on “Change Windows Firewall Settings” In the ‘General’ tab make sure the tick is next to the ‘ON (Recommended) tab. You can add websites and programs you want to access your PC in the “Exceptions” window.

1. Use a Spyware removal program.

When you visit some websites they embed bits of programming into your browser called cookies. Cookies are used for a whole host of reasons all of which are not malicious. Some cookies remember your passwords, so that you don’t have to type it every time you visit the site. Some cookies contain spyware. These are bits of programs that monitor which websites you visit in order to send you targeted advertisements and emails. Google were talking about doing just this every time you search for something on their website. Use a Spyware program regularly to get rid of this added intrusion. There are lots of free programs around to do this, Spybot SD, spyware killer etc.

1. Use an IP blocking software tool

Every computer connected to the internet has an IP Address. This is a unique identification number. Government bodies, Universities, Copyright companies and other interested parties can monitor your IP address and see which websites you visit and trace your whole browsing history. To many minds this is an invasion of privacy. You can block others seeing your IP address with blocking software. Peer Guardian is the most popular IP blocking software and is free to download.

There are lots of other ways in which you can make your internet experience a safe and secure one, but if you use any of the above it will be a good start to help keep you safe on the net.

If there are any words or phrases you do not understand, Google them for a full explanation. You will find many of the programs mentioned above available in our free downloads section.

Please pass this information on to as many people as possible. If we all did even 25% of the things above, we could make the spammers and spies lives a lot harder and who knows, we might even eradicate them altogether!

1. Point your browser to dir.yahoo.com.

This takes you directly to the Yahoo! Directory search page.

2. Type your site’s domain name into the Search text box.

All you need is yourdomain.com, not http://www. or anything else.

3. Make sure that the Directory option button is selected and then click

Search.

If your site is in the Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! displays that site’s information

on the results page.

The others

To find out if your site is listed with the other search systems, simply go to

the search site, type the domain name, and click the Search button. In the case of all the major systems, the results page will contain an entry for the specified domain if it’s in the index. Other results may be placed on the page, too, but the first entry is the specified website if the information is available.

What if you’re not listed?

First, if your site is not in Yahoo! or the Open Directory Project, you have to

go to those systems and register your site.

What if you search for your site in the search engines and can’t find it?

If the site is not in Google, you have a huge problem. If it’s not in the smaller search engines, that’s less of a problem, of course, and quite

common.

Here are two possible reasons why your site is not being indexed in the

search engines:

The search engines haven’t found your site yet. The solution is relatively

easy, though you won’t get it done in an hour.

The search engines, whether or not they have found your site, can’t

index it. This is a much bigger problem! We will go into this in more detail a little later.

How to tell if your site is invisible.

Some websites are virtually invisible. A search engine might be able to find

the site, by following a link, for instance. But when it gets to the site, it can’t read it or, perhaps, can read only parts of it. We know of a client who built a website that had only three visible pages; all the other pages, including all the pages with product information, were invisible.

How does a Web site become invisible?

We talk about this subject in more detail later in this article, but here’s a brief explanation. In most cases, the problem is that the site is dynamic, that is, a page is created on the fly when a browser requests it. The data is pulled out of a database, pasted into a web page template, and

sent to the user’s browser. Search engines often won’t read such pages, for a variety of reasons explained in detail later.

How can you tell if this is a problem?

Take a look at the URL in the browser’s location bar. Suppose that you see something like this: http://www.yourdomain.edu/rodent-racing-scores/march/index.php. This address is okay. It’s a simple URL path made up of a domain name, two directory names, and a filename. Now look at this one: http://www.yourdomain.edu/rodent-racing/scores.php?prg=1

The filename ends with ?prg=1. This parameter is being sent to the server to

let it know what information is needed for the web page. If you have URLs

like this, with just a single parameter, they’re probably okay, especially for

Google; however, a few search engines may not like them.

Here’s another example:

http://yourdomain.com/products/index.html?&DID=18&CATID=

13&ObjectGroup_ID=79

This one’s a real problem, even for Google, which does a good job of indexing dynamic pages. This URL has too much weird stuff after the filename: ?&DID=18&CATID=13&ObjectGroup_ID=79. That’s three parameters — DID=18, CATID=13, and ObjectGroup_ID=79 — which is too many. Google cannot or will not index this page.

Another problem is caused by session IDs — URLs that are different every

time the page is displayed.

Look at this example:

http://yourdomain.com/buyAHome.do;jsessionid=

07D3CCD4D9A6A9F3CF9CAD4F9A728F44

Each time someone visits this site, the server assigns a special ID number to

the visitor. That means the URL is never the same, so Google won’t index it.

Google probably can get to databased pages, but chooses not to. If Google sees links to a page that appears to be dynamic, it doesn’t know whether the URL will change between sessions or whether many different URLs point to the same page. Google doesn’t want to overload the site’s server and also doesn’t want garbage in its index.

If you have a clean URL with no parameters, the search engines should be

able to get to it. If you have a single parameter in the URL, it may or may not be okay. Two parameters also may or may not be a problem, although they’re more likely to be a problem than a single parameter. Three parameters are almost certainly a problem. If you think you have a problem, then we will show you how to resolve this in Part Three.

With CSS the same result can be achieved like this:

As you will note, the codes are more or less identical for HTML and CSS. The above example also shows you the fundamental CSS model: But where do you put the CSS code? This is exactly what we will go over now.
Applying CSS to an HTML document
There are three ways you can apply CSS to an HTML document. These methods are all outlined below. We recommend that you focus on the third method i.e. external.
Method 1: In-line (the attribute style)
One way to apply CSS to HTML is by using the HTML attribute style. Building on the above example with the red background color, it can be applied like this:

Method 2: Internal (the tag style)
Another way is to include the CSS codes using the HTML tag <style>. For example like this:

Method 3: External (link to a style sheet)
The recommended method is to link to a so-called external style sheet. Throughout this article we will use this method in all our examples. An external style sheet is simply a text file with the extension .css. Like any other file, you can place the style sheet on your web server or hard disk. For example, let's say that your style sheet is named style.css and is located in a folder named style. The trick is to create a link from the HTML document (default.htm) to the style sheet (style.css). Such link can be created with one line of HTML code:

Notice how the path to our style sheet is indicated using the attribute href. The line of code must be inserted in the header section of the HTML code i.e. between the <head> and </head> tags. Like this:

This link tells the browser that it should use the layout from the CSS file when displaying the HTML file.

The really smart thing is that several HTML documents can be linked to the same style sheet. In other words, one CSS file can be used to control the layout of many HTML documents. This technique can save you a lot of work. If, for example, you would like to change the background color of a website with 100 pages, a style sheet can save you from having to manually change all 100 HTML documents. Using CSS, the change can be made in a few seconds just by changing one code in the central style sheet. Let's put what we just learned into practice.
Try it yourself
Open Notepad (or whatever text editor you use) and create two files - an HTML file and a CSS file - with the following contents:
default.htm

style.css

Now place the two files in the same folder. Remember to save the files with the right extensions (respectively ".css" and ".htm") Open default.htm with your browser and see how the page has a red background. Congratulations! You have made your first style sheet!
In the next article we will take a look at some of the properties in CSS. . Our thanks to www.html.net for information contained in this article

This tutorial is based on using Microsoft Outlook Express, but the process should be similar for most other email clients (programs) too.

So, in Outlook Express, the first thing you should do is open up your address book and create a new contact. Call it ‘Friends List’ or whatever you want but make sure you put your email address in the address box and click on ‘Add’.

This may be slightly different in Microsoft Outlook.

In the main Outlook window click on the ‘Create Mail’ tab. You should then see a window like this:

You can either write your message first and then add the recipients or add the recipients first.

Click on the address icon in the ‘To’ box    to add the email addresses of the people you are sending the email too. You should then see a window like this:

Scroll down the list of your email addresses in the left hand panel until you find the one you just created called ‘Friends List’ or whatever. When you find it, click on it to highlight it, then click on the ‘To’ button. This will add your address as the main recipient and will be the only one seen.

Then scroll down the list again and highlight the names you want to send your joke or video to and click on the ‘Bcc’ button. This will add those names to the Blind Copy box and they will not be seen by anyone else when the email is sent. You can add them one at a time or hold down the Ctrl key and highlight them all and then click on the ‘Bcc’ button.

When you have added all the names you want, click on the ‘OK’ button and ‘et voila’, you’re done.

Please pass this information on to as many people as possible and who knows, maybe one day there won’t be any spam!!!

Is Your Site Indexed?

It’s important to find out if your site is actually in a search engine or directory. Does your site  come up when someone searches at Google for your keywords? Can you find it in the Yahoo! Directory? Perhaps it simply isn’t there. In the next several sections, we explain how to find out if your

website is indexed in a few different systems.

Search Engine Basics

Some of the systems into which you want to place your website are not

household names. However, these are extremely important as only a handful of search systems provide all of the worlds search engine data.

Google

Google is the largest of the search engines around today and therefore one of the most important. Open up your browser (We are assuming that you’re using Internet Explorer and have downloaded the Google Toolbar — available at toolbar.google.com — to your computer.) and type in site:yourdomain.com. This will bring up all the pages that Goggle have cached from your website.

1. Click the information icon on the Google Toolbar. If you don’t have the toolbar, don’t worry; we explain a non-toolbar method in a moment.

2. Select Cached Snapshot of Page from the drop-down list that appears.

Hopefully, Google loads a page showing you what it has in its cache, so you know Google has indexed the page. If you’re unlucky, Google tells you that it has nothing in the cache for that page. That doesn’t necessarily mean Google hasn’t indexed the page, though. A cache is a temporary storage area in which a copy of something is placed. In the context of the Web, a cache stores a Web page. If you don’t have the Google Toolbar, you can instead go to Google (www.google.com) and type the following into the Google search box: cache:http://yourdomain.com/ Replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain name. When you click

Search, Google checks to see if it has the page in its cache.

What if Google doesn’t have the page? Does that mean your page is not in

Google? No, not necessarily. Google may not have gotten around to caching it. Sometimes Google grabs a little information from a page but not the entire page.

Now try this little trick. Search Google for the following:

site:yourdomain.com-pppppp

This tells Google to find all the pages on the yourdomain.com site that do not have the text pppppp. The dash (-) before the text tells Google to omit pages with this text. Of course, you can replace pppppp with any text that you’re sure doesn’t appear on your site.

Google should show you all the pages on your site that it knows about. (For

some reason, though, if you change the garbage text, Google will provide a

different result; site:yourdomain.com -pppppp is not the same as site:

yourdomain.com -oiuiyiy.) Look at the blue bar at the top of the search

results. It says something like Results 1 - 10 of about 254,000. If your site has 30 pages, and it says of about 30, you’re in good shape; Google has found them all. If it says of about 3, you have a problem — most of your pages are not indexed by Google.

What if Google doesn’t return any search results? Try removing or adding the www. bit; that is, if you searched for site:yourdomain.com -pppppp, try

site:www.yourdomain.com -pppppp, or vice versa. Sometimes Google

returns results one way but not the other. Also, make sure that you didn’t

mistype the search string; try again to be sure. If nothing works, then Google doesn’t know about your website.

You can search for a website at Google another way, too. Simply type the

domain name into the Google search box and click Search. Google returns

just the home page of that site. If you want to use the search box on the Google Toolbar to do this, type the domain name and then click the binoculars button. (If you type the domain name and press Enter, Google simply redirects your browser to the specified domain name.)

Yahoo!

At the time of writing, Yahoo! search results are provided by Google, so you

don’t need to check Yahoo! However, by the time you read this, Yahoo! may

be providing its own search results. Here’s how to check. Go to Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) and type any keyword into the search box and click Search. When the results page appears, go to the bottom of the page and look for the text Search Technology provided by Google, or something similar. If you don’t see this message, Yahoo! may be using its own index. If this is the case, use a technique similar to some of the others we describe in this article to see if you can find your site in the Yahoo! index.

Because the underlying IP network is inherently unreliable, in contrast to the circuit-switched public telephone network, and does not inherently provide a mechanism to ensure that data packets are delivered in sequential order, or provide Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees, VoIP implementations face problems mitigating latency and jitter. This is especially true when satellite circuits are involved, due to long round-trip propagation delay (400–600 milliseconds for links through geostationary satellites). The receiving node must restructure IP packets that may be out of order, delayed or missing, while ensuring that the audio stream maintains a proper time consistency. This function is usually accomplished by means of a jitter buffer in the voice engine.

Another challenge is routing VoIP traffic through firewalls and address translators. Private Session Border Controllers are used along with firewalls to enable VoIP calls to and from protected networks. Skype uses a proprietary protocol to route calls through other Skype peers on the network, allowing it to traverse symmetric NATs and firewalls. Other methods to traverse firewalls involve using protocols such as STUN or ICE.

Some broadband connections may have less than desirable quality. Where IP packets are lost or delayed at any point in the network between VoIP users, there will be a momentary drop-out of voice. This is more noticeable in highly congested networks and/or where there are long distances between end points. Technology has improved the reliability and voice quality over time and will continue to improve VoIP performance.

It has been suggested to rely on the packetized nature of media in VoIP communications and transmit the stream of packets from the source phone to the destination phone simultaneously across different routes (multi-path routing). In such a way, temporary failures have less impact on the communication quality. In capillary routing it has been suggested to use at the packet level Fountain codes or particularly raptor codes for transmitting extra redundant packets making the communication more reliable.

The VOIP phones offer various payment plans to fit your phone use needs. The VOIP pre-paid phone card is very popular. While this is not an actual phone, it allows the user to make the same affordable calls, from anywhere in the world - right from their computer. The pre-paid phone card is a great product for those working or traveling in another country.

It is believed the VOIP will soon replace many home phones and cell phones. An individual will use their VOIP for both. This is because the cost will be less and the service will be better.