Number 225 - February 2002

UPDATE
Hacker Activity Dropped With AT&T Switch But Is Now Slowly Rising     We have been an AT&T @home Cable Internet customer since its inception in Tacoma. We have also run a software firewall (BlackIce) on our computer from the start. It was common to have twenty or more "hits" a day, indicating attempts by someone trying to break into our system. Since our ISP change-over in early December 2001 from Excite's @home.com to AT&T's @attbi.com the number of "hits" dropped to none or, at most, one or two a day. We noticed in late December and early January that the number of hits was rising slowly, presumably because most of them come from automated "bots" which sophisticated	hackers use to cruise existing ISP addresses looking for holes in the system. We suspect that attbi.com is now being added to the bots' list of targets. Good Stuff This Month But One is Our Favorite     This month's newsletter looks to us like a bonanza of good articles but the one titled Typing in a Foreign Language is, to us editors, the most useful. Our editing/composing software allows us to use arcane keystrokes to create foreign letter/symbols but the procedure is awkward and incomplete. The foreign character sets built into Windows makes their application easy. Why didn't we think of that?
Number 225 - February 2002