ICANN, the Internet’s chief regulating body, has just decided to completely open up the Domain Naming System. Hundreds if not thousands of new top-level domains are on their way.

Now “.com”, “.gov”, and so on can be joined by just about anything, including non-English names and characters. Trademarked names, like “.microsoft”, or “.disney” will be restricted, objectionable terms won’t be allowed, and there is expected to be heavy competition for names like “.bank” when the new system starts in a year. It won’t be cheap, either. ICANN expects to raise over $100,000 for each new category. But “.com” is expected to remain the most common for a very long time.

Call Us for Qwest High-Speed Internet Changes

Recently there have been occasions when Qwest has disconnected DSL service in response to a customer calling Qwest directly to upgrade their DSL speed. Call us instead. We will monitor their response and make sure you get the right speed with all appropriate discounts and no added charges.

Plus, you can get Qwest’s Price for Life through us, too! Call our Help Desk for more information at (505) 232-7992.

Like bookstores, the world’s libraries are going online. Since 1971, Project Gutenberg, promo.net/pg, for instance, has been transcribing classics into plain text. Now, other projects are underway around the planet to transfer the sum of human knowledge from crumbling paper to the Internet by producing high-quality scans of books, other printed material, and manuscripts.

ICANN, the Internet governing body, announced that it has launched an investigation into insiders pre-emptively registering desirable domain names, calling the practice “domain name front running.” As we warned readers last issue, this sort of practice is becoming more widespread all the time. Standards will have to be set, but at the present time, it does not appear as if the practice is actually illegal.

Continue to take care when checking for domain  name availability.

The World Wide Web has not stopped evolving while we’ve been busy with our Open House and fighting phishing scams in recent months. So in this, our first anniversary issue, we’ll take a look at a few intriguing news items you might have missed in the meantime.

First up, life online before search engines like Google is hard to remember. But have you ever imagined what it might be like after Google?

Web Inventor Looks Beyond Search Engines & Social Networking

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while a fellow at the European nuclear research facility, CERN, has said that Google may eventually be displaced as the top brand on the Net by whatever company harnesses the power of next-generation Web technology. And not just Google. The same technology, he said, would eventually supercede even currently-popular sites like Facebook and MySpace.

This technology is called the “Semantic Web”. It will allow any piece of information to connect with any other. Today, the World Wide Web is a collection of pages with built-in links. These links not only help surfers navigate; Google and other search engines also use them to build search lists and rankings. This allows a person to efficiently find the pages with the most information and links to other pages.

This next phase will build Web-based connectivity into any piece of data so that it can link to any other piece. It’s already happening with “mash-ups”, where applications are combined together, like finding real estate prices or locations noted upon Google Maps.

Berners-Lee claims that this would enable much more powerful applications to be built. “Imagine if two completely separate things – your bank statements and your calendar – spoke the same language and could share information,” he gave as an example.

“You could drag one on top of the other and a whole bunch of dots would appears showing you when you spent your money.” He said you could then drag your photo album over this to be reminded where and under what circumstances you spent it on. “It’s about creating a seamless web of all the data in your life.”

Berners-Lee said that the “Google of the future” would likely be a type of “mega-mash-up” where every bit of data is like a location on a map and anyone can join them together for different purposes.

Google Wants TV for Wi-Fi

Meanwhile, Google is creating the basis of many mash-ups itself, but it’s also pursuing many other options as well. Recently, it began pitching an idea to the FCC to use “white space” on broadcast televi- sion to provide wireless Internet service.

The “white space” is the unused sections of the electromagnetic spectrum between TV channels 2 and 51. Broadcasters oppose this, fearing interference with their programming and the federally ordered transition to digital TV that will be completed by next year.

The FCC will likely make no decision on the plan until the switch to digital television is complete.

Photoshop Express Online

Adobe Systems, creators of the universally-used Photoshop image manipulation software, have just launched a new website that it claims blends its popular tools with the ease of social networking.

Photoshop Express, still in a test version, is now available for use online. This is a free Web-based image editor with tools for one-click cropping, color adjustment, some special effects, and sharing, and comes with 2 Gb of free storage for your pictures.

Of course, the online version has far fewer options than the $649 Photoshop CS3 suite used professionally. This is intended for amateur photobugs who would want to post their pictures online at places like Flickr, Facebook, or Picasa. It includes features for building albums and slideshows as well.

Find it at www.adobe.com/products/photoshopexpress.

Email Inventor Did Not Foresee Spam

Another great Internet inventor, Ray Tomlinson, who sent the first email on an autumn evening in 1971, doesn’t remember what it said. He thinks it was probably “QWERTY” or another nonsense phrase, and it traveled a mere yard between two computers in his Cambridge, Massachusetts, lab.

Since then, email has become one of the most important means of communication ever devised. Hundreds of billions of messages now span the globe each day. Even astronauts aboard the International Space Station use it. But like many technologies, it too has been abused in ways its inventors could not have possibly foreseen.

Spam, says Tomlinson, could not even exist until email “came to be so widely used that the possibility of sending a message anonymously emerged.” He says that he did not have any idea of the havoc it could cause because in the earliest days, the number of people using email was so small, “you’d know who was sending it. You’d be able to say to them: that’s not a good thing to do.”

The ubiquitous @ sign, by the way, was adopted to separate the recipient’s name from their computer. Since most special characters were already being used, of those remaining, “@ was the best. Plus it conveyed a sense of place, which seemed to suit,” he said.

Though he suspects that email and other messaging methods will evolve in the future, Tomlinson says there will always be a need to “send messages that won’t be read or replied to instantly, and that’s what email allows you to do.”

The Future of Online TV Arrives

That recent Hollywood writers’ strike was largely about the future of commercial television and the Internet. Tinseltown really first began to get worried back when people started to post the best sketches from their favorite shows on YouTube. Lawsuits from Viacom and other major media companies soon put a chill to that. Copyrighted content began to be limited to corporate producers’ websites, like The Daily Show at Comedy Central. This resulted in a confusion of formats, players, and sites that often required registration to use.

What Hollywood really wanted was their very own professional version of YouTube, as it were, that they totally controlled, from which their products could be streamed in high-quality video. And, of course, from which those advertising dollars could be gathered.

The answer seems to have arrived with Hulu. Launched by Fox, NBC, and their partners, it has no registration or special players. Clips or full episodes of popular shows like The Simpsons and a number of full-length feature films can be viewed for free, full-screen, and with just a few commerical interruptions. Check it out at www.hulu.com.

Internet Addiction?

With all these dizzying possibilities, a person could easily wind up spending too much time online. Dr. Jerald Block, in an editorial for the American Journal of Psychiatry, warns that Internet addiction is so widespread that it should be formally defined as an illness.

He says Internet addiction has four main parts:

• Excessive use, often associated with a loss of the sense of time or a neglect of basic human drives,
• Withdawal, including feelings of anger and depression when the computer is inaccessible,
• Need for better computers, more software, more time,
• Negative effects, such as lying about use, arguments, poor achievement, loneliness, and fatigue.

A case study supporting this comes from South Korea, which has the greatest use of broadband on the planet. There, over 10 people have died from blood clots from sitting too long in front of the screen and another was murdered over an online game.

Ironically, many people around the world are attempting to deal with these compulsions through online forums. Though resistant to treatment, one psychiatrist suggests face-to-face “real” self-help groups rather than online ones.

An occasional walk might also help. 

by Jay Nelson, Editor 

from SWCP Portal, April 2008 

It finally happened. Many companies, large and small, have been hit already with this kind of scam, but last month it was our turn.
On February 28, many of our customers received this frightening message:

Dear swcp.com Subscriber,
To complete your swcp.com account, you must reply to this email immediately and enter your password here (*********) if you are the rightfull owner of this account, and help us to fight sparm mails.
Failure to do this will immediately render your email address in-active from our database.
You can also confirm your email address by logging into your swcp.com account at: web-mail.swcp.com
NOTE: You are advice to change your password in the next 7 working days after undergoing this process for sercurity reasons.
Thank you for using SWCP.COM!
THE SWCP.COM TEAM

As the real message we sent our customers soon afterwards noted, this was certainly not from SWCP. It’s what is known as a “phishing” scam. The criminal creators of this email were falsely pretending to be us in order to lure our customers into sending them their account information. Most likely they wanted access to an account from which they could further spread their scam or other spam. Or possibly as an opening to steal more data such as credit card numbers and banking information. In any case, they stole our identity so they could steal yours.

Phishing is among the top ten online scams these days, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Phishers usually play on people’s fear and trust, not just posing as ISPs, but banks, credit card companies, mortgage holders, retailers, even the IRS. One notable scam terrified innocent citizens by claiming that an online account to access pornography had been created in their name and a free disk of child pornorgraphy would be sent unless they opted out by instantly replying.

With a little thought, such attempts may seem laughable, so the intent is to startle the recipients into reacting automatically in a self-defensive reflex. With our online lives so important these days, an official-looking notice from an institution threatening a disruption of services is a great way to do just that.

However, these pitfalls can usually be avoided with a little caution and common sense. Here are ten easy ways to avoid being snagged:

Above all, DON’T PANIC! Take a deep breath and re-read the email carefully.

1. Look for mistakes. Phishers are careful. Notice how the helpful advice in the fake SWCP notice about changing your password within a week makes it seem more real. But many scams come from non-native English speakers overseas and have telltale grammatical or spelling mistakes. It’s very unlikely that a real ISP would ever misspell “spam” as it is above, for instance. A keen-eyed observer can often detect the small differences between fake and real in both email and web addresses, too.

2. Unusual requests for information are another clue. Your bank, for instance, should already have your account number on file. In situations where identity confirmation is needed, typically they ask for information agreed on in advance that isn’t sensitive in itself but a faker probably wouldn’t know, like your mother’s maiden name or your home phone number. Likewise, the request in the phishing ploy above really makes no sense, since no one can send emails through our system without having accounts in our database to begin with.

3. Urgency should set your alarm bells off that the notice may be a scam. Phishers want to scare people into reacting instantly, so any demands with a burning deadline require calm and cool consideration, not a frightened response. Think before you act.

4. Impersonally addressed. If all your mail from your bank has had your name on it, and this supposedly important message is addressed simply “customer” or “subscriber” – as is the one above – the message was mailed out in bulk, which should raise suspicions that it’s spam.

5. The phrase “verify your account” is often a dead giveaway. Even if the email looks otherwise correct and proper, remember that legitimate institutions generally understand the dangers of emailing important information. It’s not good business to expose their valued customers to such risks. Therefore, they will not ask for login names, passwords, account numbers, Social Security numbers and so forth.

Their reason for caution is simple: unless encrypted, email is no more secure than a postcard. It can potentially be read while enroute to or from you. Therefore Southwest Cyberport will never email critical information of any kind anywhere outside our own system.

6. Avoid convenient links to “your” account. Not all phishing operations rely on fake email accounts. Links to phony websites are also often included in the message. These bogus sites can sometimes be quite exacting copies of the real ones.

Though a fake address cannot be exactly the same as your bank’s actual one, don’t depend on luck to spot them. When on some interactive webpages, a lock or key icon the bottom of your browser window should appear. Clicking on it will bring up information about the website, including verifying its Site Certificate. Any legitimate organization will have one.

Furthermore, if the lock icon is closed or the key not broken, the site is “secure”. That is, any data exchanged between your computer and the website is encrypted in transit. (The URLs of secure websites also begin with “https” not “http”.) An open lock or broken key icon means data is transmitted just as it is, without encryption. A page with either of those and a form you are asked to enter personal information into is at best unsafe and at worst an outright trap.

Unfortunately, some phishing sites nowadays look secure too, even with fraudulent certificates, so not even that is an ironclad guarantee of identity. Some browsers, like Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox, can now be equipped with new tools to track trusted sites and block phishers. Hopefully, this will greatly ease this problem.

7. Don’t click on popup windows or open or even preview attachments in these messages. These might contain trojans which will install malware or spyware programs. Many browsers now have controls to prevent annoying popups. If they keep occurring, it could be a sign that your computer is already infected.

8. Don’t trust, verify. You can use old-fashioned methods of checking it out, such as calling the institution itself. There should also be a means of verifying their identity or an alternative means of contact included in the webpage or email if they are legit. If you’re still concerned, call us, or better yet, forward the message (with full headers – call if you need help) to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it so we can analyze it for you.

9. Stay alert. As always, Southwest Cyberport strongly encourages users to keep their anti-virus protection up to date, use firewalls, and regularly scan their systems for spyware. Keeping current on your system updates and online accounts is also good practice.

SWCP remains vigilant. We cannot stop these schemes from taking place, but we can limit their effects and safegaurd our users. But to do so we need you to pay attention. So please read your email from us carefully. Several people who received our warning replied by sending us their passwords! Against that, there’s little we can do.

   by Jay Nelson, Editor

from SWCP Portal, March 2008