If you’re connected to the Internet---and who among us is not?---it’s getting increasingly important to start thinking about security and protection from these things (don’t ask me what the differences are among them; look it all up on the Internet, where all knowledge in the universe now resides). The reason I mention this area is because I’ve been hit lately, repeatedly, with several viruses, one of which is named the "Bymer Worm" and another known by its name of "ttfload.vbs" or "ttfloads.vbs" (the latter is what’s called a "visual basic script," which is why it has the .vbs ending on the file that gets snuck into your computer).

Those two viruses aren’t as destructive as some other payloads; over time they’ll slow your computer down, interfere with the operation of your network, cause various anomalies to occur that make you think you’ve got a hardware or software problem, etc. But there are others out there that will try to destroy your computer system, erasing all or part of your hard drive in the process. Those little babies are another story. Right now, your story is this:

A. You need to have a real-time anti-virus program installed on your machine, running at all times, particularly when you’re logging onto the Internet. And you need to have a regular schedule when you run your anti-virus program and scan every file on every hard drive in your system (I do mine monthly; others prefer a more frequent schedule). The most popular anti-virus programs appear to be Norton Anti-Virus, Trend Micro’s PC-cillin, and McAfee’s anti-virus program. Do some investigating on the Internet, where all knowledge in the universe now resides, to find out more for yourself. (I use the McAfee ActiveShield and Virus Scan Online products, and they work well.)

B. You also need to have a relatively new type of program that’s been invented just in the last year or two. The general moniker of such programs is "personal firewall." There are plenty of them out there, including some pretty good ones which are free. Because of the repeated attacks on my system, I’ve found, downloaded, and now use a free one called "Tiny Personal Firewall." Its technology is said to be based upon U.S. Navy encryption and firewall technology, and many people speak very well of it. It certainly has been working for me. Do a search on the Internet (where all the knowledge in the universe now resides), and you’ll find tons of info about Tiny Personal Firewall, as well as other popular programs that do the same thing. Particularly at risk in this area are cable and DSL connections (which are "always on" in the background, and thus subject to being attacked at any time by hackers).

To find out just how exposed you and your computer may be when you’re logged onto the Internet, go to the following location, where Gibson Research has set up a free service that checks your computer’s vulnerability as you watch: Go to http://grc.com, and then click on the Shields Up! icon. You’ll be able to download a small free program called "Shields Up Test," and then be stunned to find out just how "open" your computer is to adolescent hackers.

We all know that backing up our computer systems and data is absolutely essential. Especially in the case of businesses. Our entire businesses now "live" on computers, and (a) theft of our computers or (b) hardware breakdown or (c) a fire in your building or (d) other natural disaster could very well shut your business down. Up until recently the solution was one of a variety of back-up technologies, including zip drives, tape drives, CDR (rewritable CD-ROM’s) drives, and even good old fashioned disks. Now there’s another technology surging as an answer to this ancient (say, 10-year-old) problem: Online backup services.

With an online backup service, basically what you have is a company with huge backup capabilities. You connect with them over the Internet and upload your data files, business files, or the contents of your entire computer network, to their storage drives. Then, no matter what happens to your office (earthquake, fire, hurricane, attacks by giant beetles, etc.), your essential files are stored safely way far away, from whence they can be quickly and easily downloaded.

Couple of caveats. First, you really want to be on some kind of a broadband connection such as DSL or cable modem if you’re going to use an online service. It takes a lot of time to upload your files to such a service. But who cares, if the uploading is happening overnight? Second, although most of these backup services offer free accounts, those types of accounts are limited in size. If you want to safely back up your entire business with an online service, you’ll be paying a not-too-big monthly fee. If you want to try out such a service, the obvious thing to do (as I am) is sign up for a free service with only 25 to 50 megabytes available, and try it out. I’m currently compressing all my data files, and a few others for safety’s sake, and uploading them to an online service called Connect.

For more information, do a search for "online storage" providers on the Internet, where all knowledge in the universe now resides. Some of the companies that you’ll read about include those located at http://www.myspace.com, http://www.xdrive.com, http://www.freedrive.com, http://www.idrive.com, and http://www.driveway.com. Check’em out.

If you travel much and could use remote access to your home or office computer files, you need to take a close look at http://www.mangosoft.com. This company has created an astoundingly easy implementation of a virtual private network ("VPN") which you can try out for free for 30 days (see if it works, after all). The implementation is called "mangomind" and will create an "extra hard drive or drives" on any computers you want when you download the software from mangosoft. The "extra hard drive(s)" will simply appear on your home or office computer, just like extra drives on a local network. And the service sets up so that it or they will be easily accessible to your laptop or other computer from anywhere else through an ubiquitous Internet connection.

Up until now, VPN’s have been somewhat expensive and unwieldy, reserved for the big corporations with the money and techies to make it all work. I tried out the "Mangomind drive" (as they call it) VPN and found it to work incredibly easily. It’s just like having an unlimited network connection that you can access from anywhere when you’re whiling away the time at a deposition in New York, Singapore, Costa Rica, or wherever. Consider what that means (about the Mangomind drive, not the foreign deposition): You can get onto your home or office computer system and pull up any file, any document, any information you need, about any case, from anywhere, just about as easily as you do when you’re in the office itself.

I didn’t keep the Mangomind drive implementation, which costs something like $25 per remote user per month, because I don’t travel that much, and I don’t have a bunch of lawyers in the office who need to share. Perhaps some of the rest of you do. It would pay you to check out the Mangosoft offerings, just in case.

Oh yeah, one other thing. "What’s a virtual private network," you want to know? Beats the hell out of me. Look them up on the Internet, where all knowledge in the universe now resides, and learn all about them.

By now everyone knows the sad, unfolding tale of Napster. The Internet music-sharing service where copyrighted music is downloaded "for free" is in the process of being squashed by the evil Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), along with some rock bands who have piled on, including Metallica and Dr. Dre. While Napster attempts to fight off the barbarian hordes with help from high-powered legal talent (notably David Boies, last seen representing Al Gore in Florida and before the U.S. Supreme Court), other free services are taking over, multiplying like cockroaches in the walls. Jockeying to take the place of Napster are music sharing/stealing (depending on your outlook) services, including Gnutella, Freeinet, Aimster, Napigator, and lots and lots of others.

But wait! The RIAA and their rock star supporters have birthed a new phenomenon, "Cyber-narc"! This is a private company that cybernetically "sniffs" throughout the Internet, finding computers that are sharing or offering to share copyrighted music. When they find such a computer, they accost not the computer-users but the ISP (Internet service provider), telling them that someone they’re providing service to is illegally sharing copyrighted music, and they (the ISP) will be sued if they don’t put a stop to it. So the ISP then goes after the music-sharers, cutting them off if necessary. I ask you, is this a great idea or what?

Perhaps more importantly, however, is the looming battle over electronic books and texts. The Internet is, above all, a supreme tool for information-sharing. And the "digital information" can be in the form of music, or books, or pictures, or speech, or non-music sounds, or anything else that can be rendered into other bitstreams. Who gets hurt when everyone is able to share everything with everyone? You would think the artists and writers and poets and the such. But it’s not that, not really. The real victims of such an information-sharing revolution will be those who make their money off of being the "middleman" between the creators and the consumers. That is, the distributors. In the case of music, it’s the big record labels. In the case of moving pictures (coming to a computer screen near you, soon, just wait), it’s the film distributors. In the case of books, it’s the publishing/distribution industry. In each case huge amounts of money are skimmed off by those who "reproduce and distribute" the product, whether it be music, moving pictures, or writing. The middlemen.

So, perhaps predictably, about two months ago megapublisher Random House filed a lawsuit against a tiny new "ebook publisher," RosettaBooks LLC, accusing the new company of illegally selling electronic copies of books written by Random House authors. Which in turn started a giant imbroglio over who exactly owns the rights to distribute electronic renderings of books. The head of RosettaBooks fired back at Random House, saying that his company had contracts with the Random House authors to distribute their writings electronically. Random House fired back that they owned the exclusive rights to distribute the works electronically ("ebooks," as they’re increasingly being called).

If you go to www.rosettabooks.com, you’ll see a quite interesting selection of ebooks for sale, including some authors who are otherwise published by Random House. Of course the prices are still ridiculously high, "25% off retail price," but that will change. And the industry still awaits a truly handy ebook reading device, which hasn’t been invented and marketed yet. But the future is still visible: Less paper, more bitstreams; less ink, more digital rendering; less warehousing and trucks, and more instant downloading.

In the meantime, the lawsuit between Random House and RosettaBooks apparently continues.

With all the ferment going on throughout the civilized world (not to mention the uncivilized parts, like China) regarding the Internet, it would seem to be a "given" that public records such as you find in courthouses (mortgages, property deeds, judgments, satisfactions, etc.) are going "online," and soon, right?

Well...not really.

But wait! Don’t "public records" mean "public records"? Can’t anyone go down to the courthouse and pull out any court file or other public records and peruse its contents? That’s true. But some people, and apparently some courts, think that public records shouldn’t be public if it’s "too easy" to access them. For instance, there’s a battle going on in Virginia right now over whether to allow the posting of public court case documents on the Internet. Some say that criminals and businesses and other nefarious types can send "crawlers" or Internet robots around to collect personal information from court records if they’re posted on the Internet, and then use that information for all sorts of nefarious purposes. Similar battles are going on in Texas, Kansas, New York, Ohio, and all over the place otherwise.

The problem is that traditional public records exist in what experts call "practical obscurity." After all, who takes the trouble to go down to the courthouse to pull those court files and sniff out information about individuals. But when it’s right there on the Internet, for everyone to see, including your Aunt Matilda, well, that’s seen as far different.

Hold on, says the media-driven Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Those reporters sure do go down to the courthouse and sift through those court records to get what they need, but they don’t want it kept off the Internet either. The executive director of the reporters committee, Lucy Dalglish, says, "This is all kind of nutty, part of what I call technology hysteria....If something is so sensitive that it needs to be sealed, you can do what people do now: Ask a judge to seal it."

One prominent battle in this area was lit off when one of the parties in a libel suit set up a web page and moved to post entire discovery depositions of parties involved. Invasion of privacy? Public records? A First Amendment issue? The judge in that case initially granted an injunction against posting the depositions, finding that irreparable harm could come to one or more parties if the stuff was posted (you can imagine what areas the defendant’s lawyer got into when the plaintiff was deposed; it soon degenerated into juicy tidbits about extra-marital affairs, drug usage, and other great stuff).

Which way will this issue break? Who knows? Stay tuned for more on this emerging battle.

For us big-town people in places like Tampa and Orlando, Miami and Ft. Lauderdale, getting broadband internet connections is no big thing. Many of us even have choices between ADSL ("asynchronous digital subscriber line," or "DSL" for short) and cable. However, for you country people, there’s often no broadband offering at all. This is because cable Internet access systems piggyback on cable TV lines, and lots of places still don’t have cable television offerings. As for DSL, there are range limitations; it only works within a few thousand feet of a telephone company switching station. As a result, only about 65% of the average telephone company’s market is reachable with present technology.

But that’s all about to change. At least one company, Symmetricom, as of January 2001 successfully demonstrated a "repeater" for DSL applications. The new technology is said to have demonstrated a 30-fold improvement over conventional DSL installations. Meaning that broadband Internet access through DSL service will soon be available to 95% of the average telephone company’s market. Stand by. Broadband access will soon be here for everyone.

Finally, there’s a new software tool out there which can be obtained for free, for previewing and printing out various types of files. It comes, oddly enough, from Kinko’s, the copying, printing, photographing, collating, coloring, and everything else store. The program is called, quite originally, the "Kinko’s File Prep Tool" and can be downloaded for free from http://www.kinkos.com (or obtained in CD-ROM format at any Kinko’s store). What’s the big deal about it? Consider this:

Everyone has heard of the Adobe Acrobat Reader, the program that reads "PDF" ("portable document format") formatted files. The PDF format is a de facto standard for rendering and reading of pamphlets, books, magazines, pictures, web pages, etc. It can be obtained for free, and virtually everyone who’s spent any time on the Internet has downloaded a copy.

Of course, there is another Adobe Acrobat program, the one that is utilized to create the standardized Acrobat programs. It’s not free. Not by about $250. What’s the value of such a program? Standardization. When you create an Adobe PDF file and put it on the Internet for downloading by whomever---as many, many downloadable files are---you want to know that when the file is opened it will look exactly as you have set it up to look and that anyone can read it with the same, standardized reading program. That’s hard to do with word processing programs, for instance, since the program on one machine might be (and usually is) set up with different settings from the program on another machine. Not to mention that someone who wants to read your document may not even have a copy of the program to read it.

Also, the Adobe program handles all kinds of formats in converting to the PDF format. It doesn’t matter if the file you’re converting is a word processing file, a web page, or a graphics format file. They all come out so that they’re readable on the standard Adobe Acrobat reader program. But...while you can obtain a free Acrobat reader program in numerous places on the Internet, you must pay about $250 to obtain a copy of the Adobe Acrobat program that creates files in the standard PDF format.

So...enter the Kinko’s File Prep Tool program. You can get it for free, and it does essentially the same thing as the Adobe Acrobat program that creates PDF files. Except when you install the Kinko’s program, you obtain the capability of creating "KPF" files from any other program (it works like you’re "printing to a KPF printer"); once you do that, anyone with a copy of the Kinko’s program can open and read your document, whatever it may be, or have, or contain, or look like. Very handy. And of course the price is right. And one other thing. It’s also...ahem...rumored that Kinko’s KPF files can also always be read by the free Adobe Acrobat reader program. Interesting, hah?

Well shucks. I trust I haven’t meandered too far afield for everybody. Much of what I’ve written above may be common knowledge to many of us computer-geek-types. But it’s all new, at some time or another, to everyone else...all part of the incredible technological advances rushing upon us. This is just a small effort to outline some of those changes.

So read up, tune in, turn on, freak out, enjoy it all, and be ready. Here comes the Singularity! (Read all about that...you guessed it...on the Internet, where all knowledge in the Universe now resides.) u