Laptops Lack Necessary Security
A Stockholm-based company purchased 100 unclaimed laptops over a two month period and found that 70 of them contained unsecured files that were easily accessible. The company bought the laptops through eBay or from other auctions of unclaimed merchandise, and even if the hard drives were wiped clean, the company was able to retrieve sensitive information from them. The company says that to make these machines more secure, something as simple as a hard-drive password can be used to deter a hacker.

Do-Not-Spam Registry Not Feasible Says FTC
The Federal Trade Commission said that a government-run do-not-spam registry would not help in the fight against spam, and could in fact help spammers by giving them a list of valid email addresses. Do-not-call registries work because authorities can determine the location from which the calls originate; determining the location of a spammer is much more difficult. The FTC is calling on private enterprises to come up with a spam solution.

Major Web Sites Face Temporary Blackout
On Tuesday morning Microsoft, Apple, Google, and other popular web sites were unavailable for two hours, most likely due to a domain name server (DNS) problem. Akamai, the company who is responsible for DNS (translating word-based URLs into numeric web addresses) was affected by the outage, and some speculate that the popular web sites were up and running but users could not reach them because of the DNS problem at Akamai.

Yahoo Competes with GMail
To better compete with Google, Yahoo has decided to give users 25 times more storage space for their email and to release email address names that had previously been claimed but haven't been used for years. Yahoo will give 100 megabytes of storage, while GMail will give 1000 megabytes. Yahoo currently provides the most popular free email accounts on the web, beating Microsoft's Hotmail.

AT&T to Bring VoIP to Corporations
Next year AT&T expects to launch a VoIP service to multinational corporations, helping to connect workers by using broadband connectivity and IP phones. Users will receive voicemail on their PCs and will be able to forward these voicemails by using email. Trials of the technology will begin in Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Kingdom.

Voter Data Can be Sold in Most States
In 28 of the 50 states, the information that voters enter on their voter registration cards can be sold to political parties and non-profit agencies. In some states, this information can even be sold to commercial marketers. A task force in California recently published a report with this information, and is asking the state to note this privacy issue on voter registration forms.

New Technology to Guide the Blind
In Finland, the government is working on a new device that uses a combination of cell-phone, GPS and voice technology to help guide the blind. The device will tell users where they are and help guide them to where they want to go. Users can speak to the device, which then connects to a central database to retrieve the information they need, including everything from the weather to the arrival time of their bus.

How to Delete Your Files Completely
When you save a file on your PC, data about the file is saved in the File Allocation Table, along with a pointer to the location of the file on the hard drive. When you delete a file, the file still appears in the Recycle Bin, and when you empty the Recycle Bin, you assume the file is gone. Unfortunately, emptying the Recycle Bin doesn't ensure that the file is no longer available to anyone using an "undelete" utility. Deleting a file from the Recycle Bin only erases the pointer to the file's location on the hard drive. And while the file itself will likely be overwritten by another file at some point, there is no guarantee when this will happen. To ensure you've truly deleted the file from your hard drive, you can run a utility specifically for this purpose. Three available utilities are: CyberScrub, Sure Delete, and

Use Magnifier to Zoom
You can use the Magnifier in Windows to zoom in on an area of your desktop, helping you give presentations, take screen shots, or just simply enlarge text as you go along. To open Magnifier, choose Start, All Programs, Accessories, Accessibility, and Magnifier. The Magnifier window will appear at the top of the screen, but you can resize it or un-dock it by dragging and dropping wherever you'd like. You can set the Magnifier to follow your mouse cursor or the text you're typing. If you need to take a screen shot that includes the mouse pointer, you can take a screen shot from the Magnifier window. Simply resize the Magnifier window and choose Alt+Print Screen. Then paste the screen shot into your Word doc or other program.

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