MyDoom Fills Up Inboxes and Paralyzes a Company
The recent virus seems to be an invention of somebody aimed at attacking a company called SCO by using the computers of anybody unlucky enough to be infected. It turns out that it has succeeded in accomplishing its mission as the servers at SCO were brought down last Saturday. A second variant of the virus attempted to bring down Microsoft servers to no avail.

View from the Other Side of Junk Mail Marketing
The New York Attorney General and Microsoft are both out to sue him for sending tons of unsolicited mail. We should all get to know what makes him tick before he winds up bankrupt.

Microsoft's List of Tricks to Avoid Fake Sites
Although no fix has been released for Internet Explorer that will stop people from falsifying the URL of a website, Microsoft has given us a list of ways to avoid any sites that take advantage of this hole. The worst idea is that people should type in their URLs instead of clicking on them. This is pretty ridiculous considering the length of addresses some sites use. The best trick they list is to run a Javascript command that will tell you the real address of the site you are on. You can do this by making this link a bookmark, and click on it anytime you have doubts about the validity of the site.

Digital Picture Verification Kits
Now that technology allows most everyone to digitally manipulate a photograph any way they, how will anybody prove a picture is real? Well certain digital camera companies are selling picture verification kits that will allow someone to tell if anything in an image has been altered in any way by means of digital fingerprinting. It's unknown how secure the fingerprinting method is, and whether that can be altered as well, but it still puts a roadblock in the way of somebody interested in tampering photographic evidence.

Online Font Detection
There are a gazillion different fonts that, to the naked eye seem similar enough, but are actually quite different. Even with widely differing fonts, it's hard to put a name to one since the conventions for naming fonts can have nothing to do with what it looks like and more to do with who made it. That's why this online site is great since it allows you to figure out a font by just uploading an image.

The Newest Addition to Social Networks
Friendster and LinkedIn are all examples of a somewhat new type of technology to connect people to other people in a daisy chain. With LinkedIn, it's about making business contacts. With Friendster, it's really just about seeing how many people, and which people, you can connect to. Access to the site is invitation only, and there's not much you can do once there. All in all, the service is more novelty than purpose, but it's still interesting. Now a new one, made by somebody who works for Google, called Orkut has entered the fray. It has people wondering, that if Google gets behind it, there might be more possibilities to what the technology can be used for.

Apple Logic Board Recall
Anybody with an iBook that has display problems would be best to send their computer back to Apple to have the logic board replaced. Even if the board isn't malfunctioning, you may want to preemptively send it in since this seems like a major problem. Although this is a large manufacturing mistake, it's good to see Apple coming out and admitting the failure and giving free repairs for it.

Why Bouncing Spam is a Bad Idea
Email filters that return an "unable to send" error for every piece of junk mail they catch, can be a very bad idea. Not only do they waste some bandwidth sending out messages that probably aren't read, most junk mail marketers are wise to this trick and consider it a sign that an email address does exist. Also, if the junk mail is coming from a computer infected with a virus, bounced messages that include attachments only serve to spread the virus attachment. And it will just mean more email for the infected computer to root through and delete.

Introduction to Mail Merges
They can be incredibly helpful for sending out mass mailings, printing lots of mailing labels, and a number of other things. Previous versions of office made it somewhat annoying, but Office XP is relatively easy to use in this respect.

The easiest way is to just open up one of the Mail Merge templates in Office (File > New. Choose "New from Template" in the right column. Select the Mail Merge tab, and choose one.) To add in a new field (such as Last Name or Zip Code) into your template, go to the Insert menu and choose Field. You'll want to make sure there is a corresponding section in your list of recipients.

When you're done with the template, just add a list of recipients by using the Mail Merge window in the right column. It will open up a window similar to an address book to enter each one individually. When done, it will ask you to save the list, if you want, and then show all of the entries in a table. Just choose Continue and it will bring you back to the template. You can now continue through the Mail Merge window on the right to merge the documents for printing, or merge them and allow you to go through and edit each one individually.

Need stock photos/images for a website? Upset by the high prices most stock photo agencies charge? ShutterStock is the answer! Click here for more info.... Get UNLIMITED photos for just $89.99 per month! Thousands of Stock Photos All 100% Royalty Free One low fee gives you access to the entire collection No watermarks on purchased images Get Unlimited Access Now! Let all your webmaster friends know about this great deal!

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions regarding this newsletter, email suzanne@surfsecret.com.