[Zsd-news] Payment and Privacy

[Ian Forbes]

Hi All


LATEST WAR BULLETIN

No, this has nothing to do with the Middle East. Rather, the processors
in our mail servers are getting warm doing battle against an onslaught
of incoming spam!

Last month I gave details of our new "spam reporting service". The
reports received are used to automatically update our anti-spam filters.
They also get forwarded to anti-spam organisations on the Internet who
use the information to maintain the anti-spam block lists used by many
ISP's world wide, including ZSD.

This service is up and running well, but we have had feedback about
problems from some of our users:


Spam reports getting blocked as Spam:

After one user reports a particular spam message to our service, our
anti-spam rules get updated and reports containing the same spam message
from other users get blocked. This users found rather annoying. Worse,
still where multiple spam messages were sent in a single report, a
single "known" message prevented the others from getting processed. I am
happy to report that we have now "white listed" our spam reporting
address and the issue has now been resolved.


Problems reporting spam with different E-mail clients:

In order for us to make use of reported spam, it is essential that we
receive the "Internet headers" that come with every e-mail. Normally
these are not displayed when you read a message and if you just
"forward" it most e-mail clients will strip off most of the headers.
Thus I gave a simple set of instructions for reporting a spam message,
with headers. Unfortunately there are a multitude of E-mail clients and
those simple instructions do not work with all of them. We have
addressed this as described below.


We have now published a web site with full details on using our spam
reporting service. It also contains instructions for reporting spam
using a number of popular e-mail client programs as well as the
reporting address. If you receive a spam message and you wish to report
it so as to help block similar messages, please read
http://www.zsd.co.za/support/spam/reporting.


PAYMENT AND PRIVACY:

Those of you who use Microsoft Windows XP, and keep it up to date with
the help of Microsoft's "Update" service, may have noticed that with
recent updates, a "Validation" tool was installed. During the
installation you would have had to click on a box to accept the licence
terms. But I am sure that very few of you stopped to read those terms,
and that not many people appreciate the "devil in the detail".

The validation tool checks your computer to ensure that your Microsoft
software is properly licensed and registerd, which implies that is was
paid for. If the validation check fails, the windows update program will
refuse to install any updates. Rather it will install a "nag" program
which will periodically remind the user to get the software licensed.

Nobody can expect Microsoft to provide upgrades for their software to
individuals who never paid for the software in the first place. The tool
itself runs very unobtrusively. So paid up Windows users should have
little reason to be concerned? Perhaps not...

There are many "Windows" computers connected to the Internet which, for
one reason or another, do not have properly licensed software. Perhaps
they belong to "low budget" individuals, like scholars and students.
Some belong to companies who find themselves in the situation where they
own more computers than they own licences - it happens. But what ever
the situation, these computers will no longer be upgraded with security
patches which will leave them totally vulnerable to the next generation
of viruses and worms.

As we know, viruses can cause havoc on the net. But worse than this, is
the fact that spammers have programs which actively scan the Internet
for vulnerable computers, compromise them and use them as "spam bots" to
spew out spam. Of course the majority of this spam is addressed to paid
up Microsoft customers...

Those of you who have strong principals regarding privacy may be
interested to know, that in order to do it's job, the validation tool
collects information about your computer. This information is reported
back to Microsoft, over the Internet, and is kept on a database. It
includes information about the software running on your computer,
information about the computer make, model, and "bios" program, as well
as information unique to your computer, including the unique
identification generated when Windows XP was installed and the serial
number of your hard drive. This information is communicated to
Microsoft, not only when you install software, but also every time you
reboot and once a day if you do not reboot - which means it behaves like
spyware.

Microsoft claim that they will only use the information for the purpose
of validating software and to keep statistics on the number of licensed
and unlicensed copies of their software. They state that they will never
use this information to attempt to contact the computer's user.

For more information go to
http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/downloads/PrivacyInfo.aspx. Or for an
independent review of the subject which includes additional information
provided by Microsoft
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20060608002958907.

In the "post September 11" era, many of us have come to accept this kind
of practice. I am not sure if Apple computers do anything similar but
Linux I know is both free and unencumbered. Perhaps this is something to
keep in mind when weighing up the pros and cons of committing oneself to
"single vendor" products and protocols.


ZSD TECHNICAL LETTER:

As a technical person I am often guilty of putting in too much technical
detail into these newsletters. On the other hand I regularly get
enquiries from people who want more technical details. The solution - we
are going to launch a Technical news letter. This will be aimed at
people who provide support for computers, including dealers, IT
consultants and IT support staff. I have taken the liberty of adding
names of people that I talk to on a regular basis. If you are interested
in receiving this newsletter please subscribe at
http://lists.zsd.co.za/mailman/listinfo/zsd-tech.



Regards


Ian