_www.FantasyLibrary.com [Visit Who Is Joseph Teller?] Synthesis & Synchronicity 028

Synthesis & Synchronicity #28

Swen Is Not Your Friend: For the past couple of weeks my email has been suffering from an avalanche of incoming messages that are infected by the nasty Swen virius in its various incarnations. Now, as a user of a number of Virius defense programs, I'm protected from infection (and as a user of a non-Microsoft email program there is no accidentally launching of an attachment) but the shear volume of infected messages has been getting out of hand.

What do I mean? Well I have a 10 meg storage limit on my mailbox with my main ISP, Earthlink (a company that ate my previous provider, Mindspring, a few years ago in one of the many consolidations in the online world), and it is currently filling up with email 3-4 times a day, with about 20 of these infected emails for every 1 normal email I receive. That's hundreds of these nasty thing coming in daily.

Swen evidently grabs email addresses from Newsgroups, MS Outlook Address Books and HTML files on computers that it infects. It then mails itself covertly to them.

So, I decided enough was enough and I needed to use other measures, or else legitimate mail wouldn't get to me. So I poped on to Earthlink and used their built in Spamblocker software to improve my defenses, setting it to the 'middle' setting. Ok, that should have stopped the barrage... but no, it didn't. It stopped about 10% of the emails. Why? Because the rest would disguise themselves as coming from various host's administration accounts, claiming to be bounced messages. Earthlink's software specifically NEVER blocks messages with such a header.

So I wrote Earthlink about my problem... and wrote them... and wrote them... and no matter how I explained the problem, their technical staff remain baffled. They suggested raising to maximum Spamblocking settings. A nice idea except 1) It would only allow me to get email from individuals who are in my online addressbook (which has only 1 entry since I generally read my email offline not online) except for 2) It specifically lets thru administrative messages of the sort that the virius is disguised as! Explaining this to them failed to produce any logical or reasonable response. They don't seem to understand that no matter what I do, it won't stop Swen unless they adjust their own blocking lists to reflect the problem. It seems they, like most tech folks these days, aren't really tech folks, but folks who just keep repeating or quoting from "official company documentation" on how to deal with any problems that occur.

To say the least, I'm annoyed. I also would like to apologize to anyone who's tried to email me and either had their message bounce off of a full mailbox or gotten no response at all because spamblocker mistook their email for spam. If either of these occur, please use my backup email address naughtyfaerie which is @operamail.com (be sure to put these together.... to be cautious I've seperated the information, in case this column ends up on someone's infected computer.

Note, if you aren't using virius checking software on your incoming email and you're on a Windows machine PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE get some! If you are using Microsoft Outlook PLEASE consider changing to Eudora, Pegasus or some other reader to protect yourself! Or at least make sure to get your software up to date! The fixes for the problems that Swen uses to get into your system were put out over a year ago! And if your system is infected, get a clean copy of Norton's Anti-Virius NOW and use it.

Bureau-13 work continues and the character generation gathering for Team Smorgasbord went well this past Sunday. I'm working on the plots, NPCs and other necessary bits and it looks like we should have a fun time. I'll be putting some more material on the Team page soon, for the benefit of both players and outside interested viewers.

As a sidenote, I did a Google Search for Bureau 13 the other day, about 3 weeks since my last one, to get a few research bits together. Theres a good 150 hits that come up for that name, including hits for the old computer game that was based on B-13 and book reviews for Nick's books of fiction based on the game. Anyway, somehow our page for our game is now not only recognized by Google as existing but came up as the #11 page it pulled up! That's awfully impressive that we've shot that high up on the listings, since the listings are usually based on the number of other pages that link to your site. We were even higher up on the list than Wildside Press, the folks that are reprinting Nick's fiction books! Now I feel a bit obligated to keep adding material to my page for the game, since so many folks are evidently tuning in to look at it.

And Now For Something Completely Different.... Cue The Music....: What follows is a little cooperative composition between myself and David Neilson's Alanis Morissette Song Lyric Generator on The Brunching Shuttlecock's Website. The Shuttlecocks, alas, are no more and the website will be eventually vanishing, but here is a momento from my encounter with it:

"Why"

Secret Service Agents, Weapons Of Mass Destruction, Pretzels
Why God, Why?
Weapons Of Mass Destruction, Sheep, George Bush
Why God, Why?
What have I done to deserve this Blue horror?
Surrounded on all sides with the Hell of George Bush
Like a Byron character, I'm wordy and alone
Why God, Why?
Countries, Secret Service Agents, Votes
Why God, Why?
George Bush, Votes, Pretzels
Why God, Why?
What have I done to deserve this Blue disaster that is my life?
Surrounded on all sides with the Hell of George Bush
Like a Byron character, I'm wordy and alone
Why God, Why?
What have I done to deserve this Blue misery?
Surrounded on all sides with the Hell of George Bush
Like a Byron character, I'm wordy and alone
Why God, Why?
Why God, Why?
Why God, Why?
Why God, Why?
Why God, Why?

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