Chebucto Community Net

Help \| Search \| News \| Contact Us \| Web Cam
											Chebucto Community Net Old Chebucto News Home >> *Beacon* >> Chebucto News >> Old Chebucto News Serving Your Community's Online Needs Since 1994.

Updated: 9 October 2002

Message Of The Day

Chebucto News Archive

Chebucto in Montréal
for Global Community Net Conference

Two representatives from Halifax's Chebucto Community Net are in Montréal, Québec this week attending the Global Community Net conference. Chebucto Board members Chris Watt and Andrew D. Wright join dozens of other attendees representing community nets and other similar groups from around the world to discuss mutual concerns about access to internet communication technologies and related issues. The conference is the third in a series of such conferences leading up to a United Nations-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society to be held in Geneva, Switzerland in 2003.

Conference delegates have been comparing notes on a staggering variety of obstacles facing groups trying to bridge the so-called "Digital Divide", the gap between those who have internet communications access and those who do not. Pictured here is South African delegate Peter Benjamin holding a handicraft bowl made from the ripped out telephone wires laid down to bring communications to remote areas of his country. Other delegates spoke about special needs of various language groups, women's problems with communications access, economic issues and a host of other challenges.

Good Crowd at Word On The Street!

Chebucto volunteers and Board members were at this year's Word On The Street festival at Pier 20 on the Halifax waterfront. An estimated 45,000 people attended the fair, many of them stopping off at the Chebucto Community Net booth. Pictured here from left to right are Chris Wood, Johnathan Thibodeau, Mark Rushton, Chebucto Chair Marilyn MacDonald, John McKay and Bernie Hart. Not pictured but also helping out were Bill Matheson, Norman De Forest, Mark Alberstat and Andrew D. Wright.

New spam filters catching lots of rubbish!

Chebucto Community Net's spam and virus filtering mail server has been catching and deleting 15 viruses an hour from incoming mail to Chebucto. User reaction to the email announcement explaining how they can set their mail filtering preferences has been overwhelming positive.

All Chebucto mail users can go to the spam filtering preferences page at http://nospam.chebucto.ca and set spam filters to delete spam, store spam in a separate folder for inspection and deletion later, or not to filter mail. Chebucto text users can access this page using the new go spam shortcut as well. Full instructions can be found on the spam filtering preferences page.

56 K Update

Installation and testing of the new 56 K equipment which was delayed due to construction work planned for the Chase Building machine room is still going ahead. The long wait for the digital telephone lines to be installed continues. Afterwards, a few weeks of testing is planned before the service is opened up to Chebucto Plus users.

The new 56 K digital phone equipment purchased in July will allow up to 96 users at a time to connect to the Chebucto Plus dialup service at 56 K speed, the maximum speed possible over a dialup connection. The 16 kg (36 lb) rack-mountable Ascend 6096 has 96 digital 56 K modems, kept cool by eight high-velocity fans.

Chebucto now accepts four credit cards

Chebucto can now accept payment by holders of Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover credit cards. Previous to this, only Visa cards could be accepted and processed. A recent switch in credit card processing services has proven far more versatile and Chebucto is paying a substantially lower processing fee than before.

Windows XP Service Pack 1 released

Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 for the Windows XP Operating System. The update contains all security and bug fixes to date in one package as well as an assortment of upgrades to the Operating System including support for USB 2.0. The 130 Mb download is available from the Windows Update site, http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com or by CD from Microsoft. Due to the serious risk involved in running an unpatched version of Windows XP (one 'bug' fixed in Service Pack 1 lets special code that can be put on a hostile webpage delete files on unpatched Windows XP hard drives), we recommend users get this Service Pack.

Low-Cost Custom Web Addresses Now Available

Chebucto users, groups and businesses can now have low cost custom website and email addresses. For $20 a year or less, full details here, users can have a custom Chebucto Sub-Domain name.

Non-Profit groups on Chebucto can have the website address name.chebucto.org, where name would be replaced by the organization or group name. Small businesses on Chebucto can customize the website address name.chebucto.biz; individuals and families can customize name.chebucto.net with their family name; and Chebucto-based information resources can customize the web address name.chebucto.info.

Email aliases to registered Chebucto sub-domain names are also available for $10 per year per alias. These email aliases can redirect mail to any email account.

Membership Reward Plan continues

Chebucto is pleased to announce a new Membership Reward Plan open to all current Chebucto members. Full Details here.

For each new Sustaining or Family Sustaining member who tells us they were referred to us by you, we'll give you a $20 credit good towards your next Sustaining or Family Sustaining membership. "Word of mouth" advertising can now get you free internet: five referrals are good for a free Sustaining membership, including a year of our famous Chebucto Plus full graphical access.

**Chebucto Users still tops in *.NS.CA SETI processing**

SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, has been processing their radio telescope data with home users' computers for years now. Using an innovative screensaver which runs whenever the user computer is not in use, SETI has had more than 1,162,000 years of high quality computer processor time donated to it.

Of all the computer domains ending in the letters NS.CA, denoting Nova Scotia, chebucto.ns.ca now ranks number one, beating out both the government of Nova Scotia and the vast resources of EdNet, the schools network. Current stats here. Chebucto users have sent in more than 15,000 results, representing more than 33 years of CPU time that would otherwise have been wasted.

Outlook user email advisory

After the recent wave of viruses specifically targetting users of Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express email programs, and the constant stream of user complaints about randomly altered program settings and difficulty using the program, the Chebucto Community Net Office and the Chebucto Technical Committee recommend our users do not use either Outlook or Outlook Express as their email program.

Windows Users can find a selection of email programs available for download here and Macintosh users can find a selection of email programs here.

Go to the Beacon

Go to the Services page