The Chebucto Office in the Chase Building is closed today, Friday June 13 to allow us to open it at the 50+ Seniors Expo, being held at Exhibition Park, Halifax.

The Chebucto Community Net is sharing a booth with the Halifax Regional Community Access Program (CAP). There will be all-day service there both Friday and Saturday running from 9 am to 5:30 pm.

System and security upgrades continue

The Chebucto Technical Commnittee has been working on upgrades to several different Chebucto services ranging from updates to our Spam filtering software and the machine running it to security patches for active web servers. There have been some minor disruptions in service including delays in receiving new email and some webmail sending problems but all have been fixed soon after their discovery.

In today's internet, with the amounts of spam and virus laden mail starting to become the majority of all mail received by our system, such work is of critical importance.

AGM News

Treasurer Bernard Hart reported that Chebucto is in good financial shape, Internal Committee Chair Mark Alberstat reported on the revitalization of his committee and Policy Committee Chair Andrew Wright reported that spam email using forged headers pointing to innocent third partys' email addresses was the biggest abuse issue Chebucto faced in 2002. Board member Christopher Watt's excellent home-made cookies and squares were well received by the membership.

Technical Committee Chair Edward Dyer reported on the many technical advances made in 2002 and how Chebucto is looking to make even more, demonstrating wireless internet technology at the meeting. Chebucto is actively investigating possible uses for this new high speed technology. In recognition for all the work done by the Technical Committee this year, Chair Marilyn MacDonald presented them with Certificates of Appreciation. She was surprised by receiving a Certificate of Appreciation herself from Board member John McKay.

Six Board members offered for re-election this year: Edward Dyer, Bill Matheson, John McKay, Jeff Warnica, Christopher Watt and Andrew Wright. They were elected by acclamation. The Chebucto Board of Directors has been joined by local community activist and newspaper columnist Joan Jones, who is completing the second year of recently resigned Board member Mark Rushton's two year term.

Chebucto Newspaper Column Give-aways!

Chebucto mousepads may be purchased from the Chebucto Office for $10 each or mailed out for $15 each. Contact office@chebucto.ns.ca to order.

Alert: Fake Windows updates

Chebucto advises all users of the Windows Operating System to keep updated with the latest security updates from Microsoft. There are major security holes in the Microsoft Windows Operating System, Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser and Microsoft's Outlook Express email program which can be fixed with software patches from Microsoft's authentic Windows Update site.

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 processing

Of all the computer domains ending in the letters NS.CA, denoting Nova Scotia, chebucto.ns.ca now ranks number one, producing more than double the results of both the government of Nova Scotia and the vast resources of EdNet, the schools network combined. Current stats here. Chebucto users have sent in more than 21,000 results, representing more than 43 years of CPU time that would otherwise have been wasted.

SETI is about to enter a new phase, targetting the top 200 candidate signals for direct observation using the full resources of the world's largest radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico.

Outlook user email advisory

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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