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Old Chebucto News Home >> Beacon >> Chebucto News >> Old Chebucto News Serving Your Community's Online Needs Since 1994. |
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Updated: 8 January 2003
The majority of the volunteer beta testers since November are reporting
good connections and increased speeds: the average worst reported speed
from the second survey sent out to beta testers was 39.7 K and the
average reported best speed was 45.6 K. Less than a quarter of the
beta testers have reported getting randomly disconnected or making low
speed connections and about ten percent have reported problems getting a
connection.
Spam, or unsolicited commercial
email, has become a huge problem all over the Internet. Spam is now
estimated to make up 40% of all email and the amount of spam has more than
tripled in the last year. As if this was not enough, spammers have more
and more been using innocent people's addresses as the From: and
Reply-to: addresses in spam, so these innocent people are then
deluged with thousands of bounced messages, abuse and remove requests a
day. Recent studies have put the economic cost of spam at more than 13
billion dollars a year.
Advice to users is unchanged: delete the spam and never, ever respond to
it even to "remove yourself from their mailing list" (which is always a
lie), and never, ever buy a spam-advertised product. Supposedly only one
person in a thousand buys the spam-advertised product but that is enough
to keep all the spammers in business.
Unpatched versions of these Microsoft products are vulnerable to many
viruses, worms, trojan programs and exploits where hostile users can get
access to your computer and files. Users are advised to keep current with
Service Packs and Critical Updates for Microsoft products.
Chebucto Users still tops in *.NS.CA SETI processingSETI, 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 1,282,000 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 17,300 results, representing more
than 37 years of CPU time that would otherwise have been wasted.
Outlook user email advisoryAfter the continuing 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.
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The new Chebucto Plus 56 K dialup
service is set to start Monday January 13th. An announcement to Chebucto Plus users will be sent out
shortly. Most Chebucto Plus users will
not need to change any settings to use the new service. Windows 3.1 and
3.11 Chebucto Plus users will need to
make some minor dialer setting changes. This
information will be available online shortly. User support will be
available through the Chebucto office.
Chebucto Community Net's spam and virus filtering mail server has
been laboring under heavy loads due to massive
surges in the amount of incoming spam, causing temporary delays in
arriving email of up to several hours. A middle of the night
upgrade to the mail scanning software seems to have sped things up again.