
  
  





                       W  I  N  D  O  W  A  T  C  H



             The Electronic Windows Magazine of the Internet





  
   Vol 3  No.1                                              January 1997
  

  page 2
                              WHAT'S INSIDE
   Vol.3  No. 1                                           January  1997
  

                      The Editor's Soapbox   Lois Laulicht
     Herman Hollerith's Tabulators: Part I   Herb Chong
                   Windows95 OSR2 Mini-FAQ   Sean Erwin
           Optimizing Word7 for Windows 95   Jack Passarella
         The Computer Brawl in the Schools   Frank McGowan
            Cryptography Software Reviewed   John M. Campbell
              An NT Homepage of Excellence   Linda Rosenbaum
          Eudora v.3 Pro: A Product Review   Dan Christle
              Reflections of A ModemJunkie   Leonard Grossman
         The Care and Feeding of Web Pages   Lynn Alford
                  A Quick Look at Spoofing   Lois Laulicht
                 Tonic Water or Snake Oil?   Daniel Christle
                Internet Humor from UseNet   Anonymous Sources
                              The LastWord   Ben M. Schorr
    WindoWatch Annual Index 1994 thru 1996


  page 3
  WindoWatch              The Electronic Windows Magazine of the Internet
   Volume 3  No. 1                                          January 1997
  


                          The Editor's Soapbox


New Years Predictions: The Short Memory Syndrome!

Anyone who pays serious attention to Internet polling results might also
look to the gloom and doomers of year end predictions. Most of us know
there is no fairy godmother, that Santa Claus is a state of mind we have
created for our children, and there is no free lunch. I won't make too
much of the poorly constructed surveys or the predictably unreliable
results. Some market research types have had sufficient integrity to
distance themselves from the Taro card approach that passes for
objective information gathering while a handful of others have denounced
many of the findings... as they should!

It has become the equivalent of being politically correct, or should we
call it wide eyed Internet ingenuousness, for industry writers to
predict the collapse of the backbone, the demise of large numbers of
ISPs, the shortfall of newbies coming onto the Internet while
simultaneously claiming a choking of the bandwidth, and the massive
failure of the NetPC. This is in the category of creating news or
constructing media scenarios. The Internet is not going to the dogs
without a minor yip! Major players like IBM, Microsoft, Netscape,
Oracle, and Sun have not merely staked out turf but have made huge
investments into the future of this enterprise.

To believe that continued growth of the Internet will radically
diminish, equates to abandonment of respect for human ingenuity. That
some strategies may be modified, others abandoned entirely, while still
brand new approaches will be invented is to be expected and should be
welcomed. Not change for the sake of change but rather an appreciation
of technological evolution tempered with practical hands on Internet
experience.

Some of us very early in the game, likened the potential for profit of
the Internet to hitting a mother lode. To know that the lode is there is
quite different than extraction of the gold from a specified place!
Unfortunately, I reluctantly abandoned my trusty Jack Armstrong decoding
ring long before the sixth grade for more rational tools and confess to
not having a clue to its location !

What is absolutely apparent, is that the business model which works
fairly well in the mainstream society is having very rough going in the
virtual world. We must remind ourselves that the corporate model has
changed many times too, as the downsizing of workers and industries that
were America's life's blood, have become ghosts of their former
dominance. Further, the over blown expectation of quick profit was
simply unrealistic within the context of Internet freebies and self
directed computer professionals. Traditional marketing to this bunch is
like hauling coals to Newcastle.

One must wonder aloud at the loose lips blathering relating to the
numbers of people who have regular access to the Internet. We don't
know! It's like counting fleas on the backs of a moving herd of
elephants. A favorite target of this Chicken Little philosophy are the
ISPs. These people have been around the block a few times! The fact of
the matter is that lots of ISPs are administered by very savvy folk!
They saw the demand coming, equipped their shops, and have now shaved
their prices to the bone. That they have the moxy to make the quick
modifications and forge new relationships and partnerships is a foregone
conclusion. The one prediction I will make is that we could well see an
association of independent ISPs based on the premise that each has a
single valuable commodity to offer - access to local telephone exchanges
and everything that means in terms of keeping overhead down and low
costs for users. An unusual spin to the 800 telephone number offering or
simply just gateway services swapped! CIS, AOL, Prodigy, and MSN keep
reinventing their narrowly defined services while the independents rush
ahead with generous offerings of drive space and unlimited access for a
relatively small cost.

All of this is happening while the local telcos continue to drag their
feet in the name of squeezing out the last dime. They have a unique
expertise which is being buried by a bureaucracy hell bent on
maintaining the status quo in the midst of an ever changing Internet.

lbl


   ww page 4
   Putting it Into an Historical Perspective:
  


                 Herman Hollerith's Tabulators: Part 1
                      Copyright 1997 by Herb Chong


Herman's Hollerith's position in computing history is rare. He
contributed many fundamental technologies to make modern computers
possible, but almost nothing he did is in use today. Most of his worked
had to do with punched paper cards and machines that processed them. In
fact, many people still refer to the punched card that was in most
current use as the Hollerith card. Hollerith was the right man in the
right place at the right time. In today's buzzwords, there was a
convergence of technology and demand.

Almost all of Hollerith's work was done for the US Government's Census
Office. This came about because in the US Constitution is the
requirement for representation in the houses of Congress by relative
population. The only way to determine that correctly is by means of a
census. The first census in 1790 was done completely by hand. It did
more than count people and what state they lived in. It asked six items
of demographic information. Partly this was to have several different
ways of coming up with the totals, so accuracy could be checked, and
partly to find out a little more about the people. It concluded that
there were 3,893,637 Americans. The process took just over a year.

Bureaucrats are pretty much the same the world over and today's
bureaucrats are really not that much different than yesterday's. In
1850, Congress enacted a statutory limit of 100 questions on the census
form. The combination of population growth (over 31 million in 1860) and
the number of questions was exceeding the capabilities of the Census
Office to manage. The effort needed form management of the Census, by
then, was very large and growing rapidly. But, even at that time, it was
becoming obvious that it wasn't going to be too long before the Office
to compute the statistics from the last census was going to be finished
before it was time to begin a new one. Clearly, something had to be
done.

Col. Charles W. Seaton was chief clerk of the census for 1870. His was
the first census where entry operators has some aid in transcribing raw
census data onto the forms used by the clerks. It was nothing more than
a simple box that helped the operators line up their columns for each
section of the form, but it made a big difference to the clerks who had
to read the entered numbers. However, even to the government
bureaucrats of the day, it was obvious that this was only a temporary
solution. Something more had to be done. Fortunately, Seaton had working
for him a young man by the name of Herman Hollerith. From the beginnings
of processing census data sprang the forerunners of most of the
computing industry!

From all reports, Hollerith wasn't a very exciting man to be with. He
did little else but eat, sleep and work. So far as anyone could tell,
Hollerith had no hobbies or outside interests that were not part of his
job as an engineer. If Charles Babbage was computing's first hacker,
Hollerith could be called the world's second. Unlike Babbage, Hollerith
not only knew when to stop and consider a job finished, he knew how to
patent and market his work so that Hollerith ended up being well-to-do
in the end.

By various accidents of fate, Hollerith graduated from Columbia School
of Mines in 1879 with a mining engineering degree and promptly went to
work in Washington for the Census on some obscure papers related to
steam and water power. During this time, he made the acquaintance of Dr.
John Shaw Billings, the man that was to run the 1890 Census.

Perhaps Hollerith had something else on his mind for a change because
apparently the main reason he soon became more than just an acquaintance
was that Billings had a beautiful daughter whom he wanted to make a good
impression with. It was during one of these first meetings when
Hollerith was invited over for dinner that he and Billings talked about
using some form of machine for performing the sums and counting needed
for the next census that was scheduled to start in about nine years.

After his stint in Washington, he went to MIT to teach. It was there
that he began inventing census machines. After only one year, Hollerith
was back in Washington, first working for the Patent Office, and then as
an independent, helping people patent their ideas as well as inventing
and patenting his own ideas. He built parts of and showed ideas for a
mechanical counting device to Seaton at the Census Office. They thought
the idea had merit and wanted a demonstration. Hollerith, with the aid
of his brother-in-law, took out a patent on "improvements in the Art of
Compiling Statistics" in 1884. Hollerith's new ideas started with a new
way of recording information. At first he played with the idea of
putting holes in strips of paper. Anticipating the future use of punched
paper tape for low and medium speed storage in personal computers, he
eventually discarded the idea in favor of stiff paper cards. At first,
Hollerith used punches around the edges, just as a train conductor would
on passenger trains, but soon he developed and patented machines to
punch not only the edges but the center parts of the cards too. This
ended being much like the punched cards that both Jacquard and Babbage
used for controlling their machines. We don't know exactly why, but
Hollerith never patented the idea of the punched card itself, but
rather, just the machines to create and manipulate them.

Although Hollerith clearly had the coming census in mind when he
developed his ideas and machinery, he wasn't going to be able to win the
contract that easily. It would have been like asking to take your
driving lessons at the running of the Indianapolis 500. Hollerith had to
prove his idea would work. Hollerith did it the hard way. He offered his
services in improving the keeping of health records in the city of
Baltimore. Everything was hand done by Hollerith himself, including the
punching of the cards perhaps 1,000 cards a day. Hollerith probably
suffered the first computer-induced carpal tunnel syndrome.

The hard work paid off. Hollerith proved that his idea would work and
that the new cards were much easier to handle and could be used to
generate many different types of information. People could create cards
and send them around to be used for many purposes. Sorting and other
things became possible because one card represented everything about a
single person. About this time, Hollerith invented a machine to select
cards automatically. He attached one to one of his card readers.
Whenever a card came in that had a certain hole pattern, it would fall
into a hopper. Other cards would continue into another hopper.
Mechanical sorting became possible. Based on his work in Baltimore, the
State of New Jersey and the city of New York asked him to help bring
order to their health records. These trial runs were also a resounding
success.

These successes did not go unnoticed. The War Department's surgeon
general's office needed help in tracking the health of those in the
service. They were willing to pay $1,000 a year plus the cost of
materials, if Hollerith's machines would work for them too. The
government being the government, wanted to keep track of everything they
could. For the first time, Hollerith had to keep track of information
about one person that couldn't fit onto one of the old cards. Hollerith
managed to get around it by having combinations of holes stand for
certain pieces of information. This saved on the number of holes he
needed and kept the government happy. To test his machine, Hollerith
went back to the city of New York and redid them with the new machines
and cards. They worked perfectly and the War department took delivery of
its first machine in 1888.

This work had made Hollerith famous in the United States and Europe. He
was invited to exhibit one of his machines in the Paris Universal
Exposition in 1889 and to demonstrate it in Germany. Back in the United
States, Robert P. Porter, a friend of Hollerith's had been made
superintendent of the 1890 census. He offered Billing's old job to
Hollerith but Hollerith turned Porter down. He intended to bid on the
contract for the tabulation. There would be conflict of interest if he
supervised it too.

Even with friends in high places, Hollerith had to show that his
machines and cards could do the job. Porter decided that an impartial
competition would be held to determine what would be used for the
upcoming census computations. Porter chose a small part of St. Louis and
conducted a mini-census, using the data from a prior census to challenge
the competitors. No one came close to completing the census in the time
Hollerith's machines did. He finished in just over 72 hours. The second
place entry, using chips and colored cards, took almost 111 hours.
Entering the data onto Hollerith's cards took most of the time. Once
entered, his machines processed the entire batch in just over five
hours, some several days faster than their next closest competition. The
Census Office ordered fifty-six of Hollerith's machines immediately and
believed that it would need as many more very soon. Hollerith agreed to
keep the machines running continuously, to fix them if they broke down,
and to pay a penalty for each day a machine wasn't working. His
immediately hired his first employee, his brother-in-law.

The entire world was impressed. Hollerith received awards and degrees
for his work and naturally, the press made a big deal out of the process
and the man who invented the machines. Hollerith's machines were
delivered to the census office in Washington and put into place.

Hundreds of clerks, including many young women, were hired to enter the
data and run the machines. Hollerith improved his machines so that they
could report on partial computations without waiting until the end. The
clerks frankly hated their jobs. The work was boring and there wasn't
much room for error. However, for the young women of the time, it was
the first major skilled clerical work done by women. Before then, it was
widely held that women couldn't cope with the demands of a highly
skilled job usually done by men. Their performance during this very
important piece of work showed the world that they were not helpless in
the office.

The 1890 census itself was a resounding success. It was completed in a
small fraction of the time taken for the 1880 census while processing
more data about more people. The way the census was run, the data that
was captured and analyzed, and even people's expectations of a census
were never to be the same again. Many technical fields finally became
possible because of Hollerith's machines. The usefulness of Hollerith's
machines for census work was immediately known. Within a few years,
Hollerith had conquered Austrian, Canadian, and Norwegian census
requirements. In the case of Austria, he had to compete against illegal
copies of his own machines made by the Austrian government.

Just from his census work and his patents, Hollerith would have been a
rich man. The work he had done up to the 1890 census would have been
enough to make his place in history, but there was still more to come.
Computing was now a legitimate government enterprise. Hollerith would
eventually make it a commercial enterprise and, eventually, his company
would form part of the fledgling CTR, just as he was about to retire.
That company hired a general manager named Thomas J. Watson in the
spring of 1914.


In Part 2, Rail Barons and Census Wars.

Most of the research for this article came from a recently republished
book: Engines of the Mind by Joel Shurkin, W. W. Norton, NY, 1996, ISBN
0-393-31471-5.


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

  Herb Chong has contributed many articles to WindoWatch. In this piece
  he looks at the beginnings of the computer as we know it doing the
  work it does best - counting and sorting. Herb is the Contributing
  Editor of WindoWatch!


   ww page 5
  What Is the New and Improved Win95 and Is It for You?
  


                        Windows95 OSR2 Mini-FAQ
                      Copyright 1997 by Sean Erwin


Revised 4 Jan 1997

Table Of Contents:
   What is OSR2?
   What is FAT32?
   How can I buy it?
   How can I identify it?


What is OSR2?

  Windows95 OSR2 is a service release of Windows95. Basically it
  includes all of Service Pack 1, and all of the later patches and fixes
  currently available on the Microsoft Web site, as well as Internet
  Explorer 3 and Personal Web Server. Additionally, it also includes
  several components currently not available for download, including a
  new file system, FAT32. The bugs present in earlier releases of
  Windows95 are fixed here. For example, the Incorrect Settings for File
  System Performance Profiles bug is fixed in OSR2.


Does OSR2 support USB (Universal Serial Bus)?

  No. There is an update, which can only be installed on top of OSR2,
  called usbsupp.exe. To date, this update has only been released to
  beta testers of OSR2. The literature with it states that it is to be
  released to OEMs for distribution to end-users with OSR2, but so far,
  no general OEM release of OSR2.1 has happened. This update adds
  support for USB (Universial Serial Bus) and WDM (Windows Driver
  Model), and changes the build # to 1212 (see below). OSR2 plus
  usbsupp.exe is also referred to as OSR2.1. After Microsoft has
  released this update to OEMs and not just to beta testers, we will
  update this FAQ to so reflect.


Under the original release of Windows95, I am able to dual-boot Windows
3.x and Windows95 by pressing F4 on startup. Can I dual-boot OSR2 with
Windows 3.x in this way?

  No. Beginning with OSR2, no future release of Windows95 will support
  dual-booting with Windows 3.x. You can still use a third-party boot
  manager, like those bundled with Partition Magic 3.0, Windows NT 4.0,
  or OS/2, to dual boot. So far, there doesn't seem to be a way to
  override this restriction.


Waitaminute! I have installed OSR2, and I can still boot my previous
operating system via F4 on startup. What gives?

  Here's the full story: When OSR2 was in beta testing, it had the
  ability, as do previous versions of Windows95, to be installed as an
  upgrade, and to be dual-booted with a previous operating system. These
  features were removed when the final release version was made.
  However, a non-crippled version of OSR2 somehow leaked out. Therefore,
  if you have a version of OSR2 that dual-boots with earlier operating
  systems, and that seamlessly upgraded your earlier version of
  Windows95 (see below), then, it appears that you are a software
  pirate.

  The information in this FAQ relates to the final OEM release and not
  necessarily to any illegal version of OSR2. There may be other
  differences between these versions of OSR2, but I don't know what they
  are or do I want to know. Do not ask me how to obtain the WAREZ
  version or any other questions about pirated software. Any such
  requests will be ignored.


What components of OSR2 are available for download, and what components
are not?

  A definitive list is contained in the Microsoft Press Release on OSR2.
  For more info on OSR2, see Microsoft's Description of Windows 95 OEM
  Service Release 2.


What is FAT32?

  Versions of Windows95 older than OSR2, as well as any DOS version,
  operate on a file system called FAT16 (or FAT12 in some cases). The
  existence of larger hard drives has led to bigger partition sizes,
  which mean large cluster sizes and wasted space: Under FAT16, a
  smaller cluster size is better, because a small file takes up a whole
  cluster if there is even one byte in it; the leftover space is called
  slack.

  To calculate slack ( the formula courtesy Drew Dunn):

                   S = (CS - AFSc) * NF

                   Where:  S = Slack
                          CS = Cluster Size
                        AFSc = Average File Size per cluster
                          NF = Number of Files

  There is a DOS utility called chkdrv which will calculate the slack on
  a given FAT16 partition. I have not dared to run this on my FAT32
  partitions.

  The table below shows the maximum partition size to get clusters of a
  given size. You cannot format a hard drive under DOS with a cluster
  size less than 2K.

              Cluster size     Partition  FAT       Notes
                                 size     type
            ----------------    ------    -----    ----------
            4K  (4096 bytes)     16 MB    FAT12
            2K  (2048 bytes)     32 MB    FAT16    (DOS v < 4)
            2K  (2048 bytes)    128 MB    FAT16    (DOS v > 4)
            4K  (4096 bytes)    256 MB    FAT16
            8K  (8192 bytes)    512 MB    FAT16
           16K (16384 bytes)      1 GB    FAT16
           32K (32768 bytes)      2 GB    FAT16


  Example: to have a cluster size no larger than 8K under FAT16, your
  partition must be 511MB or smaller.

  FAT16 does not support partitions larger than 2GB.

  FAT32 is an improvement, as it supports drives up to 2 Terabytes in
  size, and cluster sizes are 4K for partitions smaller than 4GB:

  The following cluster sizes are the defaults for FAT32 drives:

               Partition size     Cluster size
              ---------------     ------------
             less than 260 MB     512 bytes
               260 MB -  8 GB       4 kilobytes (KB)
                 6 GB - 16 GB       8 KB
                16 GB - 32 GB      16 KB
           greater than 32 GB      32 KB


  Note that the minimum size of a FAT32 partition is 512MB, that is, you
  cannot make FDISK/FORMAT or Partition Magic 3.0 format a drive with
  the FAT32 file system if it is smaller than 512MB.


Can I use earlier versions of Windows95 with FAT32? Is any operating
system other than OSR2 compatible with FAT32? Is Windows NT (any
version) compatible with FAT32?

  No! No, and No!


Is FAT32 compatible with my Motherboard?

  Your motherboard BIOS must support LBA mode to be compatible with
  FAT32 (that is, LBA mode must be enabled). Many 486 motherboards do
  not support LBA mode. Also, I have heard that FAT32 is incompatible
  with some laptop motherboards, such as the Thinkpad. Personally, I
  wouldn't dare put OSR2 or FAT32 on a laptop. If you have experience,
  good or bad, with OSR2/FAT32 on a laptop, please write me! So far I
  have gotten a few notes from people having no trouble with OSR2 on a
  laptop. Short answer: if your motherboard is new, then certainly yes.
  If your motherboard supports Pentium processors, then very probably
  yes. If your motherboard is a (not new) 486 motherboard, then maybe.
  If it is a 386 motherboard, then good luck!


Are there issues with FAT32 and third party Disk Managers such as
OnTrack?

  Yes. See the Knowledge Base Article for details.


How do I format a (hard) disk with FAT32?

  With the FDISK utility in OSR2. FDISK will only allow you to put FAT32
  on drives larger than 512MB. Inside FDISK, you must enable "large disk
  support," to choose FAT32. After exiting FDISK and rebooting, FORMAT
  the drive using the OSR2 version only.


I want to format my drive with FAT32 before I install Windows95 OSR2.
How do I do this?

  You need an OSR2 startup disk for this. To make one from the CD, do
  the following:

  Method 1:

    Begin the install of OSR2. Proceed until you are asked if you want a
    startup disk. Answer yes, and follow the instructions. After the
    start-up disk is made, cancel the install. Now you have a bootable
    floppy with the new version of FDISK, FORMAT, etc, to do with as you
    see fit.

  Method 2:

    You can also make an OSR2 startup disk if you have:
      1) any version of Windows95 installed on your system,
      2) the OSR2 CDROM and
      3) A floppy disk.

  To make an OSR2 startup disk from an older version of Windows95:

    1) Put your Windows95 OSR2 CD in the CDROM drive. Put a blank floppy
       in the A:\ drive.

    2) Go to Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs > Startup Disk, and
       click the Create Disk button. Follow the prompts.

  This will create an OSR2 startup disk with the new FDISK, FORMAT, etc.

  Method 2 is courtesy Lee Chapelle.


Is there a FAT16 > FAT32 conversion utility?

  PowerQuest has released one, as part of Partition Magic version 3.0.
  Here's a link to their online order form. It is possible to force an
  upgrade of an existing Windows95 installation, and then convert FAT16
  to FAT32 after installation of OSR2. See below for details.

  Microsoft has also developed a FAT16 > FAT32 conversion utility, but
  did not include it in this release. Personally, I have not seen
  Microsoft's conversion utility and don't know what it is called. It
  has not been distributed via MSDN.


Can I install compression on a FAT32 partition?

  No.


How does FAT32 affect system performance?

  To quote the Microsoft Knowledge Base article referenced below: "For
  most users, FAT32 will have a negligible performance impact. Some
  programs may see a slight performance gain from FAT32. In other
  programs, particularly those heavily dependent on large sequential
  read or write operations, FAT32 may result in a modest performance
  degradation."

  I have seen seemingly reputable information stating that "the more
  clusters, the slower the performance." For instance, the closer to 8GB
  your partition gets, the more 4K clusters, and the slower the
  performance. However, as your partition gets bigger, your slack vs.
  FAT16 improves.

  I have not seen any benchmark results comparing FAT32 with FAT16 (or
  FAT32 vs. FAT16 w/Drivespace 3 no compression). I will gladly post or
  provide links on my homepage for such things as I learn about them!


Will my present version of (any disk utility software such as Norton
Utilities) work on a FAT32 drive?

  Norton Utilities 2.0 and Norton Antivirus 2.0 now support FAT32.


Can I format an Iomega 1GB JAZ disk with FAT32?

  Yes, but you must be using Iomega JAZ Tools/driver version 5.0 or
  later. Earlier versions are not FAT32-aware.


I don't care about FAT32. Will OSR2 work with FAT16? Or do I have to use
FAT32?

  OSR2 does not require FAT32. OSR2 works just fine with FAT16.


All I want is for my DOS games to work. Are there any new issues with
OSR2 or FAT32 relating to DOS games?

  Since you can no longer boot via F4 to an earlier version of DOS, the
  easiest thing to do is to run them in DOS (ver 7.1) under OSR2.
  Neither OSR2 nor FAT32 should have any effect on the performance of
  your DOS games.

  For overviews of FAT32, see Microsoft's Market Bulletin on FAT32 and
  The Knowledge Base entry on FAT32. For detailed specs on FAT32, see
  Microsoft's online SDK files.


If I install OSR2 on a brand name PC or laptop that did not ship with
OSR2, will it invalidate my tech support?

  Yes. And Microsoft will also not support you. Many system builders
  like Dell may bundle OSR2 with your system, but do not use FAT32.

  Furthermore, they state that if you do use FAT32, then this will
  invalidate your tech support/warranty. Consider this carefully before
  making a decision to install OSR2 or use FAT32. If you do this, and
  end up with a serious problem, you could end up without recourse.
  Since OSR2 is relatively new, not all issues/bugs are yet known. Use
  at your own risk.


Will this new release fix known bugs in earlier versions of Windows95?

  There is nothing unique to OSR2 which fixes problems in earlier
  versions of Windows95. Bugs in earlier versions of Windows95 are
  either:

    * 1. Fixed by patches available for free from Microsoft or other
           vendors.
    * 2. Can be fixed by manually editing the registry/system files.
    * 3. Not fixed by any means, and also not fixed in OSR2.

  What IS unique to OSR2 are new features and capabilities such as
  FAT32, APM improvements, Bus Mastering support, PCMCIA enhancements,
  CDFS enhancements, MMX support, etc. See Microsoft's Market Bulletin
  on OSR2 for a complete list. Of course, any patches/fixes for
  Windows95 currently available from Microsoft are integrated into OSR2.
  Do NOT install any of these patches/fixes on top of OSR2.


Where can I find out more about issues with OSR2 and specific hardware
or software?

  Microsoft's Knowledge Base is your best bet. I have compiled a list of
  links to all Knowledge Base articles which reference OSR2. I highly
  recommend at least glancing at this list before installing OSR2, so
  that you can anticipate potential problems you may have with OSR2.


How can I buy it?

  OSR2 will not appear on retail shelves. The features unique to OSR2
  will not be available to the general public until the next major
  revision of Windows95, currently expected to become available the
  public third quarter 1997.

  OSR2 is only being distributed to OEMs, namely, companies that build
  systems. You can buy OSR2 from an OEM in the following ways: bundled
  with a new system, bundled with a motherboard, or bundled with a hard
  drive. Microsoft is quite specific in its instructions to OEMs. OSR2
  may only be legitimately sold bundled with this specific hardware.

  OSR2 is also included in the October 1996 release of MSDN
  (Professional Level and above). One year's subscription to the
  Professional level costs $499. However, since October 1996 has past,
  MSDN will run out of this edition soon. Call on the availability of
  the October 1996 release before ordering. See the MSDN home page for
  details.

  There have been reports of people selling OSR2 at computer shows in
  major metropolitan areas by itself rather cheaply in violation of
  Microsoft's OEM agreement. Personally, I haven't seen this, though.

  Finally, I am able to sell OSR2 myself as I am a computer consultant
  in San Diego, CA, and as part of my business, I build PCs. This
  qualifies me as an OEM, and enables me to resell OSR2 bundled with a
  hard drive or motherboard. I also, have a California business license
  and reseller's permit.


Okay, I want to go down to my local computer store and buy OSR2 with a
hard drive/motherboard. How can I be sure that they will sell it to me?

  Tips: Call them first. See if they know what OSR2 is, and whether they
  will bundle it with a hard drive or motherboard. If they say "yes",
  you should identify the package they give you as OSR2 before you leave
  the store.


How do I identify OSR2?

  OSR2 comes in clear shrink wrap, a manual and two CDROM disks. Without
  breaking the shrinkwrap, you should be able to see a single sheet of
  paper between the manual and disks. On the manual, the certificate of
  authenticity does not have a hologram of a little boy in front of a
  computer on it. It has a little white-on-white relief of Augusta Ada
  Byron on it instead, although newer pressings of the Original release
  CD also now have the Byron relief . If you can actually see the face
  of the CDROM, then, on the right side of the face, it says:

    For Distribution Only with a New PC
    1981-1996 Microsoft Corporation.
    All rights reserved.
    0796 Part No. 000-45234

  If anything is different, it is not OSR2.

  To determine if an installed version of Windows95 is OSR2: Control
      Panel > System > General

  Windows 95 should identify itself as version B, as in the figure on
  the right: or, alternatively, Microsoft Windows 95 4.00.950.1111 or,
  alternatively, type VER at a DOS prompt. It should report: Windows 95.
  [Version 4.00.1111]


My copy reports the version info stated above, but the face of the CD
looks different!

  You probably have a copy of the Microsoft Beta Tester's final release
  of OSR2, or the MSDN version.


The part number on the face of my OSR2 CD is 000-45236. What does that
mean?

  You have a CD which includes both OSR2 and the Plus! pack.


So does that mean that Plus! is compatible with OSR2?

  Microsoft claims that it is. The only part of the Plus pack which is
  not included with OSR2 or a free download from Microsoft are all the
  Themes and the System Agent, which is quite buggy and nasty, IMHO.


Are there any non-English (American) versions of OSR2?

  Yes, some, but I don't have a list, and don't know how to get them. I
  do know that these versions of OSR2 have different part numbers than
  the above. Check with an OEM in the country in which the language is
  used.


Why didn't Microsoft release OSR2 for retail sale?

  This is a contentious issue, and speculation abounds. My current
  opinion is the following:

  Microsoft really isn't sure that the enhancements in OSR2, especially
  FAT32, will work on every system in existence. So, they released it
  only to OEMs, so that the OEMs have to do the work of figuring out if
  it works on the systems they sell, given that the OEM has to supply
  tech support for OSR2, not Microsoft. Also, in this way, OSR2 only
  appears on new systems, eliminating having to deal with upgrading and
  legacy problems.

  Microsoft hopes to identify problems with new elements in OSR2 in this
  way, while simultaneously developing Memphis, the next retail version
  of Windows, which presumably will include FAT32 and a means to easily
  upgrade from older versions of Windows & FAT16. Memphis is currently
  due for retail release in 3Q 1997.

  I offer the information in this FAQ mainly because I got rather angry
  with Microsoft's intent to restrict the availability of OSR2, and so I
  decided to disseminate as much information as possible about it
  including how to buy it legitimately as easily as possible. I have
  received many emails of appreciation for my efforts, and lots of good
  feedback, and I thank all who have written me! I also try to
  personally acknowledge those who provide good new information on OSR2
  in the credits at the end of this piece.


Can I upgrade my existing installation of Windows95 to OSR2 with the
OSR2 disk?

  No. If you attempt to upgrade from an earlier version of Windows95, it
  will give an error message and not let you proceed. You can only
  install OSR2 on top of DOS, and the most you really need are a
  formatted hard disk, either bootable or with a boot floppy, and your
  properly configured DOS CDROM drivers.


Okay, but there's gotta be a way to fool it into upgrading from an
earlier version of Windows95 !

  Yes there is. Rename the file "WIN.COM" in the C:\WINDOWS directory.
  Then run setup on the OSR2 CD from the DOS prompt. This will upgrade
  your current version of Win95 to OSR2.

  Tip:

  Remove all entries from C:\windows\start menu\programs\startup before
  you upgrade. Of course, you will need your DOS CDROM drivers properly
  configured to read from your CDROM under DOS. Do not attempt this
  unless you are comfortable mucking around with system files. One final
  warning: If you currently have setup to dual boot Windows 95 (release
  version) with Windows 3.1. or DOS, and you force OSR2 to upgrade in
  the manner described above, you will lose the ability to dual boot.
  That is, you will no longer be able to choose to boot to DOS or
  Windows3.x. Microsoft has removed this ability from OSR2.

  For more information on this, see Microsoft's Knowledge Base Article
  on the subject.

  Finally, once you get OSR2 setup running, and you get to the screen
  where you specify which directory to install to, the default will not
  be C:\WINDOWS\. Manually change the install directory to C:\WINDOWS\
  (or wherever your existing version of Win95 is) to upgrade your
  existing installation. After the installation is complete, you can
  convert the file system from FAT16 to FAT32 using Partition Magic 3.0,
  if desired.


Let's say I do all of this. Will I have to reinstall all my
applications? Will my registry settings be retained? Will my Desktop be
the way it was before I upgraded?

  Your applications will be left intact, no reinstallations will be
  necessary. Your desktop will be as it was. As far as the registry
  goes, some changes will be made, but these changes will mainly reflect
  changes in the operating system, and also newer hardware drivers which
  may be installed upon upgrading. On the whole, your system should look
  and act much like it did before the upgrade.


I've tried all this and it still won't upgrade!

  You must rename all instances of WIN.COM present on any hard
  drive/partition in your system before this will work. This includes
  any WIN.COM from a Windows3.x installation. If this applies to you,
  and you currently dual boot by using F4 on Windows95 startup, be
  warned that you will no longer be able to do this after you upgrade to
  OSR2.

  Well, who knows, that may be my fifteen minutes right there. Gotta'
  live it up for all it's worth !


This is a nice FAQ, but I am still hungry for *more* information!

  I have compiled a list of all articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base
  which reference either OSR2 or FAT32. Check these out, it should take
  you a while to read them all!

  This information has been culled from the WIN95-L mailing list and
  from other sources. Thanks very much to the members of this list. To
  subscribe to the WIN95-L list, send a SUBSCRIBE WIN95-L command to
  LISTSERV@PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM. If you have questions about the list,
  write to WIN95-L-REQUEST@PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM.


Thanks also to individual contributors: Lee Chapelle, George Cifrancis
III, David L. Cook, Dominique Cormann, Drew Dunn, Dave Habben, K.J.
King, GT Smith, Gene and Travers.

Original content c1997 by Sean Erwin, all rights reserved.


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

  Sean Erwin is a doctoral candidate in Linguistics at the University of
  California, San Diego. He also is a freelance computer consultant in
  the San Diego area. Parts of Erwin's most recent FAQ on this subject
  will be published by WINDOWS SOURCES magazine in March of 1997.



   ww page 6
  Maximizing Word 7 for Windows 95
  


                    Part Six: Consider Your Options
                   Copyright 1997 by Jack Passarella


Introduction

What's the first thing you do when you buy a new car? No - after the
test drive? No - after signing all the paperwork? Right! You change all
the preset radio buttons to your favorite stations. Whether you like Top
40, Rap, Country & Western, Alternative or Classic Rock, you want the
radio station to be an extension of your tastes, and by extension, your
personality.

In past articles I talked about changing the gee-whiz, default toolbars
that come standard with Word for Windows 95 (Toolbar Time), defining
styles that change the way the text looks (Always in Styles) and
creating templates as formatted working environments (Terraforming
Templates). This time around I'll explore some of the options you can
find and reconfigure by selecting Tools, Options.


What are my Options?

Just by taking this road down the menu path, you unveil a twelve-tabbed
dialog box chock-full of options you can tinker with -- unlike your car
stereo, which probably allows only 6 FM and 6 AM presets. The tabs are:
View, General, Edit, Print, Revisions, User Info, Compatibility, File
Locations, Save, Spelling, Grammar and AutoFormat. Some tabs are more
relevant than others in my word processing world; your mileage may vary.

This dialog box remembers which tab you were on last, so View may not be
at the forefront of your screen. The persistence of this dialog box's
memory is handy, since you may toggle various settings to find your own
comfort level. This way you can make a change, click OK to dismiss the
dialog box, view the results, shake your head, then go back in and
change it back the way it was.


View

Views options vary slightly depending on which document view you are in
when you select Tools, Options, View. I spend most of my Word day in
Page Layout view, because WYSIWYG is the raison d'tre of Windows and
Windows word processors. Under-powered machines may prove more tolerable
in Normal view. Outline view is more of a specialty view.

In Page Layout view, the View tab's Show section lets you check -- i.e.,
show -- Drawings, Object Anchors, Text Boundaries (when using columns),
Picture Placeholders, Highlight, Field Codes, Bookmarks, and Field
Shading: When selected, Always and Never. I keep Highlight checked, just
in case, though I rarely use the new text highlighting formatter. Also,
I check drawings and want Field Codes shaded when the cursor is in them,
otherwise I don't need to know they are there. In a form, I might want
them always shaded. You might want to turn on Object Anchors -- yes, they
really do look like tiny anchors on your page -- if you are going to drag
your graphics around.

In Normal view, the View tab's Show section now omits Drawings and
Anchors, as well as Text Boundaries. You do get the choice of choosing a
Draft Font for even better performance on an older system, and the
ability to Wrap to Window, presumably for legibility.

One item of note: there is a particularly nice feature in Normal view,
in the Window section of the Options/View tab. You can specify a Style
Area Width. Increase the width from 0 inches up to about an inch or so,
then switch back to your document. In a left column, you will see the
name for the styles employed at each paragraph. Even though Page Layout
gives you complete WYSIWYG, I would like to see my style names in a left
column pane now and then. Alas, you only get the option in Normal view
Options.

Also, in the Window section of the View tab, I keep the Status Bar
checked, along with the Vertical Scroll Bar. I'd be lost without it...
until Word 97 comes along. (Note: If you have the new Microsoft
IntelliMouse with wheel, you can use the wheel to scroll through your
documents, spreadsheets, etc. in Office 97. Currently the wheel works
with Internet Explorer 3 and the Windows Explorer. This little wheel
could render vertical scrollbars obsolete.)

I turn off the Horizontal Scroll Bar because I never work with a
document whose margins are wider than my screen view. Just can't do it.
Sorry! Unfortunately, by turning off the horizontal scrollbar, I do give
up the view selector buttons. (My solution was to create a single button
that does a triple toggle in my freeware template UtilPro.)

The final section of View tab is for the display of Nonprinting
Characters. The power of Word lies in its paragraph marks, which hold
all the paragraph style info. If your styles are acting strange or seem
to be replicating incorrectly, it's probably because of a stray
paragraph mark spawning ill-behaved progeny. Look into my eyes: Turn on
paragraph marks. I know they are a distraction at first, but you will
have fewer mysteries to solve and eventually, you will learn to
selectively ignore them. I also check Tab Characters; these appear as
little, right-facing arrows. I feel comforted knowing where all my tabs
are. (I think this is a neurosis left over from my WordPerfect DOS
days.) Spaces, I leave unchecked. If you check Spaces, they appear as
mid-line dots that can drive all but the most dedicated typesetter over
the edge. The rest I leave unchecked and invisible except for special
duty.


General

Less meat here. Aside from some comfort for reformed WordPerfect users,
this is where you can turn the Tip Wizard on or off. Also, you can
change your default unit of measurement to Inches, Centimeters, Points
or Picas. Call me old-fashioned or simply provincial, but I still
prefer inches. If you are using a mail product with Office, you can also
check that Mail is sent as an attached Word document automatically.
Finally, you can increase the number of Recently Used Files to nine,
instead of the default four. I don't know why four is the default, but
nine is about all that will display on the File menu on most displays.
Go ahead and switch it to nine. Save your memory and file browsing
chores for something more significant.


Edit

The Edit tab has some of the most subjective settings in all of the
Tools Options world. They are: Typing Replaces Selection; Drag and Drop
Text Editing; Auto Word Selection; Use INS key for Paste; Overtype Mode;
Use Smart Cut and Paste; Use TAB and Backspace to Set Left Indent; Allow
Accented Uppercase; as well as a selection for Picture Editor. This is
where you make your stand, declare yourself a Classic Rocker or a Line
Dancer. I recommend that you try these settings both ways and see which
way suits you.

The subjective heavyweights here are Typing Replaces Selection, Drag and
Drop Text Editing, Auto Word Selection, Use Smart Cut & Paste. After
some thought and not a little practice, I turned off Typing Replaces
Selection. I worried about having some text selected when I didn't
realize it and typing, which would wipe out the selected text. The
danger is that if you don't intentionally select the text to be
replaced, you may never notice that it was selected or that it is now
gone. The result is, you never realize you should Undo the deletion.
Turning off this feature requires that you press the Delete key after
the selection, then begin typing the replacement text. It's an extra
step for safety's sake. You may be bolder than me.

Drag and Drop Text Editing is another one of those gee-whiz features
that makes perfect marketing sense, but in practice may drive you to
distraction. With it enabled, you can drag a selection of text to
another location. The problem occurs if you get mouse cramp now and then
and start to drag text when all you really wanted to do was extend the
selection. I take this one on faith, that it is the logical thing to do
and even though I don't use it that often, I leave it enabled.

Automatic Word Selection is another feature that makes oodles of sense,
as you extend a selection, the selection advances a word at a time
instead of a character at a time. This probably works for most users.
Not for me. For some reason, the auto-word hopping distracts more than
helps me, and it tries my patience when I'm attempting some precision
clipping. Try it and see on which side of the fence you fall.

Use Smart Cut and Paste is another one of those features which I accept
and enable purely on faith. To quote the help text, it "removes unneeded
spaces when you delete text and adds spaces when you insert text." If
you are quick on the keyboard and tend to fix mistakes with the alacrity
of a 100 word per minute typist, all this Intellisense second-guessing
takes a little getting used to. It may even be worth it.

Lastly, a note about Overtype Mode. I enable the use of the Insert key
for Paste and leave Overtype mode disabled. Knowing my penchant for
safety and concern for mysteriously missing (i.e., deleted) text, you
will know why I eschew Overtype mode. One reason why I enable the use of
Insert to actually "insert" clipped text, is that it simultaneously
disables the toggle between Insert & Overtype modes. I don't want to
accidentally go into Overtype mode, and using the Insert key to insert
what you've cut or copied is certainly mnemonic enough for me.


Print

Next on Tab Row is Print options. You can specify Draft Output. If your
laser printer prints pages face up, you can specify Reverse Print Order
so that you don't have to resort the stack of a print job. You can
instruct Word to make sure that Fields are updated before printing (a
good idea), you can also Update Links. Finally, under Print Options, you
can specify Background Printing to get back to an active document window
faster -- another good idea if you are the impatient sort.

Then you have the Include With Document section, where you can instruct
Word to print Summary Info, Field Codes, Annotations, Hidden Text and
Drawing Objects. Some users always want Summary Info printed, some ask
me what the heck it is and "how do I turn it off?" Here's where.

Another option of note, down by itself is to Print Data Only for Forms.
You would want to do this if you had preprinted forms where only the
user data changes. The user sees the matching screen form, but doesn't
want to print it atop the already preprinted areas.


Revisions

This tab lets you set Colors for Inserted or Deleted text, either by
author or set colors for the type of revision. You can place and color
the lines indicating where revisions have been made: Outside, Left,
Right or None. Finally, this is where you can change the default color
of your Highlight pen formatting tool.


User Info

This is where you can modify or enter your Name, Initials and Mailing
Address. You might need to change this if your name is still listed as:
Satisfied Customer. Or if you inherited the PC from another user and
prefer that your name, department, etc. appear on envelopes and letters.


Compatibility Options

You use this feature to control how a converted document acts, behaves,
appears in Word. There are recommended options for various incarnations
of Word for Windows, DOS, MAC and for WordPerfect 5.X. There is also an
option to control Font


Substitutions.

Again, in the words of Word help: "Changing the options affects only the
display of a document while you're working with it in Word. It does not
permanently change any formatting in the document. If you later convert
the document back to its original file format, the formatting appears as
it did before you converted it to Word."

Bottom line is that you won't mess up the formatting of a friend's or
co-worker's document by using any of these options. As long as you save
it back in the original format.


File Locations

This is where you can tell Word the default location for various file
types. The categories are fairly broad: Documents, Pictures, User
Templates, Dictionaries, StartUp Directory location, etc. A wrong entry
here might explain why all your documents are being saved in
C:\MSOFFICE\WINWORD or C\MYDOCUMENTS instead of in C:\JOE-SMITH\DOCS.


Save

If you are the mercurial sort, you might want to check the Always Create
Backup Copy checkbox. It will save a copy of the previous version of a
document when you save a modified copy. Word saved the backup version of
this file W7OPTIONS.DOC with this filename: Backup of W7Options.wbk.
Throwing caution to the wind in this particular instance, I leave Always
Create Backup Copy unchecked.

Allow Fast Saves is checked by default; I uncheck it. It gives you a
modest performance boost by only saving the changes to a document,
instead of a complete document save. What it will cause is file size
bloat. I'd rather save a complete copy of the document, rather than a
patchwork quilt.

Prompt for Document Properties will instruct Word to stop your save in
progress to fill out the type of information that only a search engine
could love. I leave it checked on principle. Some day I hope to get
organized.

Prompt to Save Normal Template will ask you every time you make a change
that can be stored in a template if you want to modify NORMAL.DOT.
Usually, when I want to change Normal, I open Normal. So I leave this
unchecked.

Embed True Type Fonts ensures that the font you selected for the
document is the font that your readers will see, even if they don't have
that particular font on their system. This is subject to permissions
allowed in the font itself. Third party fonts often limit their
distribution. Also, embedding fonts in your document will increase its
size.

Here again, forms users can select that only the data in the form be
saved, not the form itself. This type of save lends itself to database
exporting/importing.

Make sure you check the Automatic Save Every checkbox, then specify an
interval in minutes not so short it leaves you constantly tapping your
fingers on the mouse pad, but not so long that a lot of your work will
vanish in the event of a power failure. Word is fairly good at
recovering a file from a crash, but I look at this box as a free
insurance policy. You do carry automobile insurance, right? When I say
free, I mean as long as you don't count the brief delay the actual
backup save takes. If your system is slower, you might give yourself a
longer interval between saves; think of it as a higher deductible.

One convenient usability feature about the automatic save is that it
waits for a user pause before it initiates the save. When you pause to
ponder, it scrambles the hard drive heads into action. WordPerfect used
to wrest control from my fingertips like clockwork for it to take care
of its business, regardless of what I was trying to do at the time. Even
then, I kept the automatic save feature turned on. Word, at least, tries
to cooperate with your working rhythms.

Lastly, you have File Sharing Options for the active document. You can
specify that the file be read only for others, you can lock it
completely with a password, or just lock out the ability to write to the
file, barring use of a write reservation password that you specify. Even
though you are the owner of the document, you need to remember the
password or you might find yourself locked out as well.


Spelling

Under the Spelling Tab, you can turn off automatic spell checking.
That's the feature new to Word 7 for Windows 95 that places a squiggly
red line under all your spelling errors as you create them. Or you can
choose to leave the checking on, but Hide Spelling Errors in the Current
Document.

Next, I advise that you have Word Always Suggest Replacement spellings.
We need all the help we can get! And leave From Main Dictionary Only
unchecked, which lets you create and use custom dictionaries for custom
jargon, names, etc.

I have spell checking ignore words in Uppercase as well as words with
numbers in them. Next to this group, is a button to wipe out all your
current Word session's Ignore All list. If you mistakenly told the spell
checking system to Ignore All, when you really only meant to Ignore a
specific instance, you can use this button to flush the buffer. The word
will now be flagged again as misspelled.

The Custom Dictionaries button will take you to a screen where you can
add, edit or remove custom dictionaries or change your default language.


Grammar

In all my years of using computers and software, everyone I've met likes
the theory of grammar checkers. However, I've only found one person who
actually liked them in practice. Creative writers cringe at the idea.
And we've all heard the stories about how grammar checkers, if given
their way, would reduce the great speeches of human history to bland
drivel which would inspire no one, despite getting high readability
scores and grammatical gold stars.

That said, Word's grammar checker comes with many flexible options. You
can select predefined sets of rules in these categories: Strictly (All
rules enforced); For Business Writing; For Casual Writing. In addition,
you have the ability to modify any of the presets or to create up to two
custom sets of rules. I will leave it to you, the intrepid language
maven, to peruse the list of rules, to check what you want checked and
uncheck what you think unimportant and give the whole grammatical
exercise a whirl. Who knows, you may even like it. (I will be curious to
see how well Word 97's on-the-fly grammar checker works!)

Lastly, you can include a spell check and have the grammar checker
display a readability score based on several contradictory scales. I've
seen the scales vary from grade 5 to collegiate for the same document.
And I don't think it has anything to do with the diverse quality of our
educational system.


AutoFormat

This Tab has two faces. The AutoFormat side specifies what Word will
attempt to AutoFormat when you select Format, AutoFormat. When you use
this feature you are given the opportunity to review the automatic
changes Word made so that you can approve or disapprove of them. Since I
prefer to roll my own styles, I don't use this feature of the Format
menu.

On the other hand (or face, as the metaphor began above) of this tab,
the AutoFormat as you type is a little more interesting in that it's an
extension of the marvelous AutoCorrect concept. Here, under Replace as
You Type, is where you can toggle the Straight Quotes with Smart Quotes.
Smart Quotes are the curly ones that look like typeset quotation marks,
seemingly embracing the text they encompass. I like these a lot, but
beware if you save a document as DOS text. Word does not convert them
back to straight quotes for you. Instead you get graphic blocks.

You can also control the on-the-fly replacement of Ordinals with
superscript -- 1st becomes (superscript) 1st -- common fractions with
true-looking fractions -- 1/2 becomes  -- and symbol characters with
symbols -- (c) with the copyright symbol. Microsoft will even convert an
email smiley face :-) into a, uh, real smiley face, .

Along with this on-the-fly character replacement, are options for Word
to automatically figure out when you want a bulleted or numbered list.
In theory this is a natural, in practice you might get odd results if
your numbered list has an item that begins with a number in the
description area. The description could get lost as Word assumes you
want numbering top to bottom. For bulleted lists, if you begin a line
with a dash or a asterisk, you get auto-converted into a bulleted list.
If some of these settings annoy you, you now have the know-how to
disable them.


Conclusion

There you have it, more or less. All twelve tabs. You should now have a
passing familiarity with each tab's features. If some of them seem more
suited to your work environment than mine -- e.g., document revisions or
grammar checking -- you may want to invest some time into getting the
most out of them. That's what it's all about: customization.

I started this article comparing the Tools Options settings to preset
radio stations on your new car's stereo. And just as my taste in music
probably varies from yours, so too will my taste in Word options. Just
don't make the mistake of assuming Microsoft's default choices should be
yours.


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

  Jack Passarella does these Word articles with great individuality and
  authority. Nothing canned or trite here! This busy guy is the Word
  conference host for the Ilink BBS network, maintains his own homepage,
  develops neat Word templates - and lots more!



   ww page 7
  The Computer Brawl in the Schools and Does it Matter?
  

                         Computers in Education
                    Copyright 1997 By Frank MacGowan


This is my first tentative step into the murky waters of public
discussion of the role of computers in the field of education. As a
teacher, obviously, it is an issue I've thought about, discussed with
colleagues, and in general terms, followed. In this column I hope to
raise issues that we can examine in the next several months. Please feel
free to express your views, as I intend this to be a dialogue rather
than a monologue or diatribe. Send your email messages to me at
frankmac@concentric.net

I promise to read your input carefully, and to draw upon it as
appropriate, giving credit where due unless you prefer to remain
anonymous.

The first question to get out of the way is whether computers even have
a place in schools: you might as well ask whether books belong there
although I suspect this may become a not-so-rhetorical question in a few
years. Computers have been in our classrooms for so long they're taken
for granted, just as ink wells once were. It's much more difficult to
dip pigtails into Apples or PC's however. As with books, it's not a
question of whether; it's a question of how. How do we ensure that the
tools we're purchasing with our hard-earned tax dollars are the best for
the job? How do we know that the software loaded onto the computers is
right for our students? How do we judge the competence of our teachers
to use the computers? How do we (fill in the blank with the issue of
your choice) make sure that this technology is delivering some of the
promise it holds for students at all levels.

You get the idea.

Being a natural skeptic, my immediate reaction to the announcement of
any freshly-minted panacea is disbelief. In a nutshell, "I'm from
Missouri." I've seen too many cure-alls turn into disasters of Titanic
proportions to switch paradigms in a trice (a trice being defined as a
millisecond or less). Those of us born before 1940 once learned, and
believed, that atomic power would be the answer to all our energy needs.
Skepticism, however, is not the same as closed-mindedness. Give me
enough evidence, and I might change my mind.

Therefore, when it comes to computers as educational tools, my views are
somewhat ambivalent. There's no question that computers, when properly
used and widely available, are powerful educational instruments. Even
so, I retain a soupon of doubt. Just as there are poor textbooks, there
are, I suspect, poor educational software programs. It's important that
we separate the digital wheat from the chaff. As technology advances,
this becomes much more difficult. Everyday, it seems, another truckload
of software is produced, promising enlightenment to the masses.

The explosion of the Internet, especially the Web, raises the stakes
exponentially. Where classroom computers were once chained to
stand-alone software, they are now linked to information sources
anywhere in the world. With all these hyperlinks, how do you avoid the
blind alleys or the roads going off the cliff? Do we need some kind of
clearinghouse, or (gasp!) governmental agency to handle these issues?
Whatever became of the notion to do away with the cabinet position of
Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare?

Is the answer to leave it up to the individual? Is home schooling the
way of the future? Are we headed for virtual schools? Even as I write
this, I'm looking up some information about calculus, a subject I
managed to avoid throughout my sixteen years of education, but which
now, as I approach my dotage (assuming I'm not already there), I have a
hunger to know about. (Language mavens will note the preposition
dangling precariously off the end of the preceding paragraph.)

Lo and behold, there's lots of information about calculus, some of which
even makes sense to me, an admitted innumerate who breaks out in hives
on hearing a phrase like quadratic equations. However, the problem is,
how do I know that what I'm reading is correct? Who has vetted the
information to assure me of its quality? This is truly an instance of
reader beware.

This morning's Boston Globe provided me with a capsulized version of the
problem in the form of a Zippy comic strip, in which Zippy challenges
Griffy to disprove the existence of Atlantis. I won't say much more,
since I don't want to risk copyright violation, but the essence is that
there is much on the Web that is dangerous nonsense. The adage "Don't
believe everything you read" needs to be updated by adding "even if it's
on the Internet." Ask Pierre Salinger where that gets you! What it got
him was a load of ridicule for espousing the theory that TWA 800 was
shot down by a missile, which he apparently found credible for having
read it on the net. Of course, he may yet prove to be right.

A broader question is whether all education is a good thing. If by
education we mean edification, then of course its goodness can't be
doubted. But we learn many things in the course of a day, much of it
from electronic media. Does anyone question the power of television to
educate? For half a century, we've been learning from what we see and
hear on the almighty tube. The effects of this learning are
incalculable, so it's pointless to ask if the profits outweigh the
costs. Still, I can't help wondering if the self-help therapy industry
came into being because we're a nation full of people who grew up
thinking Ozzie and Harriet had the model family, or that father really
ought to know best! It's hard to make that case, given that the
character of Chester A. Riley was also a weekly presence, as were a host
of other bumbling, befuddled TV dads and their dysfunctional broods, but
the notion persists.

Little wonder that I view the inexorable spread of the Web with a high
degree of trepidation. The power of TV is evident everywhere in society.
Fads and fashions come and go as rapidly as the ephemera of a rock
video. Non-linearity is in. Carefully wrought immutable artworks are
replaced by the fractured reflections of the kaleidoscope. Changes in
language, once occurring at a glacial, evolutionary pace become part of
the lexicon instantly with every malaprop uttered by a semi-educated
talking head anchoring a news broadcast. Yogi Berra replaces Clifton
Fadiman. Like its predecessor, the Web will probably be both boon and
bane, when it comes to providing knowledge. One only hopes that the two
at least come in equal parts, if the good can't outweigh the bad. When
all is said and done, the computer is just another educational tool.
It's up to us to figure out how to use it.


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

  Frank MacGowan is a teacher, science writer, and a regular WindoWatch
  columnist. Frank is our resident Suites guru who has responded to an
  editorial request in the above content area. We welcome your comments.



   ww page 8
  Two Products for Different Needs                  Evaluation and Review
  


                     Cryptography Software Reviewed
                    Copyright 1996  by John Campbell


Norton Your Eyes Only and SecureDevice

Before we examine the products being reviewed this month, it would be
helpful to consider why certain data needs to be secured, and the most
common methods used to accomplish that task.

The need to hide certain information from prying eyes has existed since
the advent of written communication. The earliest evidence of written
cryptography supposedly has been traced to Egyptian Scribes who used
nonstandard hieroglyphs in an inscription around 1900 BC. Julius Caesar,
in government communication, sometimes used a simple coding scheme,
whereby letters were shifted by a fixed amount ( a became d, e became h,
etc.) There are other examples of ancient encryption schemes used by the
Greeks, Persians, and Hebrews, among others. Most people are at least
vaguely aware of the importance secret codes played during World War 11.
The Battle of Midway, a turning point in the Pacific war, was won by the
allies largely because the Americans had broken the Japanese Naval
codes, and therefore had considerable knowledge of enemy fleet strength
and deployment.

Today, the need to keep sensitive information out of the hands of the
wrong people is even more evident, as computer usage expands, and more
valuable data passes over the often unsecured machines that make up the
Internet, and among the computers that are connected to corporation
networks. There is also the risk of theft, especially of portable
computers, which may contain sensitive business data, that in the wrong
hands, could ruin a company.

So, the need for protecting important data is obvious. But how? The most
popular Cryptography products are based on three different encryption
algorithms. One widely used system is DES (Data Encryption Standard),
developed by IBM in the 1950's and adopted as an official Federal
standard in 1976. Another is RSA, named for its inventors, Rivest,
Shamir and Adleman. Developed in 1977, RSA is the property of RSA
Laboratories, as are RC4 and RC5. The third currently popular algorithm,
IDEA, dates from 1991, and was developed in Switzerland. A newer entry
in the field, Blowfish, developed by Bruce Schneider, is designed for
32-bit processors.

Popular cryptographic software, such as PGP, Phil Zimmerman's Pretty
Good Privacy, as well as the two products reviewed here, use one or more
of these algorithms. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, as we shall
discover.

To understand how these products work, it is important to understand the
two basic methods used to store or transmit secured data. All of these
systems use one or more computer-generated keys (strings of
randomly-generated bits) to lock and unlock vital data. When the same
key is used to both scramble and unscramble data (DES, IDEA, RC4, RC5),
the term symmetric key system applies. When two different keys are used
(RSA), we are dealing with a public key system. It is not hard to
visualize a lock that uses a single key to both open and close it, but a
system requiring two keys requires some explanation. Why then, two
different keys? A conventional lock is only secure until some
unauthorized person steals the key. To insure security when data is
transmitted to another computer, an exact copy of the key used to
encrypt the data has to somehow be passed to the intended recipient in a
secure manner. And therein lies the problem! Dual key systems bypass
this requirement in an ingenious manner. Imagine a lock having two
separate key holes. One key, or the public key, closes but cannot open
the lock. A second, private, key is needed to open the lock. Using the
electronic equivalent of such a lock, I can freely distribute my public
key to anyone who may want to send me encrypted data. Only I have access
to my private key, so only I can decrypt that data when I receive it.
Any snooper who intercepts a coded message along the way is out of luck,
so long as I safeguard my private decoding key.

Actually, there is more to all this than I have described, thus far. For
example, there is the matter of authenticating public keys. As an
example, does this key really belong to John Doe?

I believe I have now provided enough background to begin a review of the
actual security products that are the topic of this article. For those
who are interested in the mechanics of modern data security techniques,
I suggest doing a Web search, using the key word cryptography.


Norton Your Eyes Only

The Windows 95 successor to Symantec's popular DiskLock program, Norton
Your Eyes Only, henceforth referred to as YEO, is intended as an
all-purpose answer to the data security needs of both individual PC
users and business users on corporate networks. The program requires at
least a 486/33 machine with 8 MB ram, but 16 MB is recommended. Seven MB
of disk space is required if all components are installed. YEO is
intended for end users. A companion program, Norton Your Eyes Only
Administrator, is available for corporate users working in a networking
environment. It provides, among other things, centralized configuration
and monitoring tools.

YEO installed smoothly on my Pentium 166 computer from the three
diskettes furnished by Symantec. During the setup process, I was asked
to provide a user name and password for the primary user of the system.
This step also generates the primary user's Private/Public Key pair that
will later be used to encrypt/decrypt data. So, it is necessary to
digress a bit, and look at key size. The bit size of the keys one
chooses affect both the security and speed of the program. Larger keys
make it more difficult for someone to break the security encryption
provides, but at the expense of speed. It takes longer to encrypt and
decrypt files. You can choose any size from 356 to 2048 bits, but values
below 512 bits are not considered secure, according to Symantec. The
recommended default user key size is 768 bits. Once the choice is made,
it can't be changed later for the primary user. However, key sizes for
other users can be selected and changed at will.

Several other choices are provided during the install process. The user
can choose to install BootLock, which is a utility intended to prevent
unauthorized persons from assessing the computer's hard drive, even if
they boot from a floppy disk. If installed, it requires that a username
and password be entered during the boot process, before the Operating
System loads. The user can also choose to create an Emergency Unlock
disk, which can be used to boot the system and unlock protected files in
case of hard drive problems. I did not install BootLock. I already use a
utility, V Communications' System Commander, that rewrites the boot
sector, and I saw all sorts of problems in using another program that
messes around with boot sector code.

Once YEO is installed, the user has to reboot. As the Windows 95 Desktop
appears, so does a dialog box that asks for user name and password. This
can be bypassed, but doing so disables operation of the program. A new
icon, having the appearance of a padlock, is added to the System Tray.
This icon activates the Your Eyes Only Control Center. Here, the user
has extensive control over how the program operates.

Assuming you are a Primary user with full access rights which is the
default on a single-PC installation, you can do the following. Activate
a ScreenLock feature to conceal the screen after a specified idle time,
or when you leave your machine; change your password now, or at prompted
intervals, determine whether passwords must contain a non-alpha
character, or whether a recent password can be reused; set the desired
key length to use when creating additional users (via the User
Management tab); bring up an Audit Management screen that displays a log
of system activity; and a File Management screen that can be used to
display a list of protected folders (called SmartLock folders), and
advanced settings that control which files and file extensions are never
to be encrypted. Usually, there is no need to encrypt execution and
certain other type files, since these don't ordinarily contain sensitive
data, and automatically encrypting these would noticeable slow
execution. YEO has a default list of almost fifty such files, including
EXE, OVL, INI, STACKER.LOG, and WINBOOT.*. None of these can be removed
from the don't encrypt list, but additional file types can be added, if
desired For instance, if you really want to encrypt, say, an INI file
for Internet transmission, this can be accomplished manually. There is
also a box the user can use to specify applications that should not
automatically decrypt files they open. A case in point is that you might
want to transmit file attachments in encrypted form via email, and, if
so, so you would here specify your email program. Also, you normally
don't want your file backup program to be slowed down as YEO
automatically opens and closes files, so you will also want to include
that program on the list.

Using the User Management tab, additional users can be granted temporary
(Guest) or permanent (Secondary) access to your computer, and can be
configured and assigned keys individually, or the keys for existing YEO
users can be imported from a file.

There are several other tabs that control mostly cosmetic functions,
such as the message that is displayed at logon, and an About box.

YEO encrypts data using a combination of symmetric and public key
methods. Why both? Symmetric-key encryption is inherently much faster,
but has the disadvantage noted earlier. Public-key encryption is slower,
but doesn't involve shared keys. This combination approach isn't new.
PGP, for example, also uses it.

Let's look at an example of the program at work, assuming that a file is
to be transmitted to someone else. Merely securing files on your own
machine is easier, as we shall see later, when I cover SmartLock.
However, this example will show how the underlying technology works.

I want to send Susan a file, via The Internet. I first add Susan's
Public Key to the list of users who can access that file. I then use
Windows Explorer to locate the file, right-click the filename, and the
pull-down menu that appears includes the option to encrypt.

Choosing that option brings up a dialog box that allows me to choose
from a number of encryption algorithms. I choose to use RC4, the
default. The program generates a unique symmetric key for this
particular message, then encrypts the file with that key. The program
now uses Susan's Public Key to encrypt the just-generated symmetric key.
Finally, the encrypted symmetric key is added, as a header, to the
encrypted file. I can now safely transmit the file to Susan via my
Internet email program. When Susan receives my message, she uses her
Private Key to decrypt the symmetric key from the message header. That
key, in turn, is used to decrypt the file itself. Of course, all of
these steps are performed automatically by Susan's copy of YEO. Sounds
complicated? Yes, it is, but it makes sense when you stop to think about
each step of the process.

A fast, but relatively insecure key was used to encrypt the message.
Then, a slower, but more secure key was used to encrypt the first key.
Since the data part of the file can be assumed to contain considerably
more bytes than the symmetric key contained in its header, the longer
time required to decode the symmetric key is offset by the speedier
decoding of the file, which takes place once that symmetric key is
extracted to do the decoding.

You may want to re-read this paragraph, as you visualize the process.

The user has the choice of the following algorithms when using YOE:

     RC4 and RC5 are two algorithms devised by one of the inventors of
     the RSA standard, and are the property of RSA. Both use 128-bit
     keys in YOE. RC4 is faster, but not as secure. (But, unlike RSA
     itself, these support Symmetric Key operation.)

     DES uses a 56-bit key, and is not considered very secure, so YOE
     also offers a Triple-DES option, which encrypts three times with
     three different keys. This effectively doubles the security level
     over standard DES.

     International RC4 and DES use weaker 40-bit versions of their
     regular counterparts, primarily due to certain U.S. export
     restrictions.

     Blowfish is a fast, proprietary algorithm using a 128-bit key,
     and was designed specifically for 32-bit computers.

RC5 and Blowfish are considered by Symantec to be the most secure of the
coding schemes available in YEO.

The centerpiece of YEO is the SmartLock folder concept. Files in
designated folders can be encrypted and decrypted on the fly, as
applications open and close them. The user designates SmartLock folders
by right-clicking on them in Windows Explorer, then choosing Enable.
This brings up a dialog box from which to specify the encryption method
and the files' authorized user(s). Thus, different users of the computer
can be either granted or denied access to specific programs and data.

I created a test folder to demonstrate this operation. I copied into
this test folder a 1 MB mixture of execution and data files from another
folder. Using RC4 encryption, with my 768-bit key, it took 34 seconds
for the program to encrypt all of the data files. As a more stringent
test, I tried encrypting my CIS Offline Reader, OzWin 11. This program
contains about 12 MB of non-executable files. Encryption took 6
minutes, 30 seconds, and OzWin then required 55 seconds to open, versus
5 seconds before encryption. However, load time of a graphics viewer
(ACDSee), appeared to be unaffected by encryption of a directory full of
JPEG files. Clearly, using YEO can involve some tradeoffs, depending on
the application and how it handles files. Incidentally, once opened,
OzWin appeared to be as snappy as ever when loading and displaying
message indexes and text files. Had I chosen a more secure key length
than the default 768 bits, or a more secure algorithm than RC4, the time
required for encryption and application initialization would have been
substantially greater. All this is on a Pentium 166 with 48 MB Ram!

If you only want to safeguard individual files instead of complete
folders, you can right-click on any file, from within Windows Explorer,
and both Encrypt and Decrypt options will appear on the menu. There is
also a Secure Delete Option. Deleting a file in this manner causes the
clusters it occupied to be overwritten with random bits, in accordance
with Department of Defense standards.

This pretty well covers the features. However, I would be remiss if I
didn't mention a few problem areas I discovered. In addition to the
speed penalty in can impose, I found one serious nit to pick regarding
YEO. Others might not think it to be serious that the software does not,
in any way, hide encrypted folders or the files within them. They appear
normally when viewed by Windows Explorer, or any other utility that
displays a disk's contents. Suppose you want to guard a folder
containing the following files: MAFIA BOSSES.LST, and MY DRUG
DEALS.TXT. Do you really want a casual snooper to see those file names?
Okay, I'm being facetious here, but I'm sure you get the point. Symantec
really should devise a way to hide encrypted file names. I also
discovered that the Click Here for Related Information button at the
bottom of many of the Help screens doesn't work. That too needs fixing.
Finally, the manual claimed on one page that the program could be
loaded, under certain conditions, even if the user bypassed the initial
logon screen when the computer was booted. Other sections of the manual
stated correctly that YEO can only be loaded by means of the logon
screen.

So, is YEO a program worth considering if you need to hide sensitive
data? The answer depends on what you intend doing with that information.
If you need all of the bells and whistles YEO offers, then yes, it may
be work the $85 asking price. But if your needs are simpler, a less
complex (and less expensive) program might suffice. And this brings me
to the other cryptography product being featured in this review.


SecureDevice

Developed in Europe by Max Loewenthal and Arthur Helwig, Secure-Device
(SD) is a program that uses 128-bit Symmetric Keys, and the highly
secure IDEA algorithm. It is intended to hide data on a single computer,
and therefore is not suitable for file transfers. However, it has the
distinct advantage of being Freeware. In operation SD creates a virtual
drive, by means of a device driver in CONFIG.SYS. The process, in
theory, is similar to the operation of the Stacker and DriveSpace disk
compression utilities. The computer is fooled by the device driver into
believing that a file stored on an existing drive is really another
physical drive, called a volume. Everything transferred to this volume
when it is open will be encrypted using the IDEA algorithm, and when an
application opens a file stored here, the data is automatically
decrypted. The mechanism is transparent to DOS and other application
programs.

SD, itself, is a DOS program, but it works equally well with Windows 3.x
and Windows 95. I learned of its existence while I was looking for a
replacement for the Diskreet encryption utility that shipped with DOS
versions of Norton Utilities. Unfortunately, that program would not work
under Windows 95. I discovered that SD, although it has a command-line
interface, does almost everything Diskreet did, and does it better. It
is much faster, is more secure, and supports much larger volumes. I
created a 150 MB volume with no problems.

To use SD, you first run a MKVOLUME utility to create the volume that
will contain your data. You choose a file name, the desired volume size,
and the password you will use to access the data. Multiple volumes, each
having a unique password, can be created. Each will be physically stored
as a hidden file in the root directory of whatever Drive you designate.
CONFIG.SYS is then modified to add the required device driver.

Volumes can be accessed in two ways. A TSR can be loaded to prompt for
your password when you attempt to open the Drive letter assigned to a
volume, or you can run an included LOGIN utility from the DOS command
line, and key in the password when prompted. Depending on your setup,
you can log out of a volume by means of another included utility
(LOGOUT) by activating a hot-key TSR, or automatically after a specific
period of inactivity. Still another included utility is used to change
passwords.

The most recent version of SD (ver. 1.4) dates back to 1994, and the
program may no longer be supported by its authors. But it is worth
finding, if your security needs are not extreme, and can be met by
placing all sensitive files in a password-protected volume that when
closed, becomes just another file on your computer. How secure is this
program? Since the underlying algorithm is one of the most secure known
at this time, sensitive data should be as safe as it would be using
programs like PGP, even thought the key size appears small

SD is not easily found on FTP sites in this Country, no doubt due to the
fact that it was, at one time, too strong to be exportable under U.S.
regulations. I am not sure if that is still the case. I was once told
that it is on Compuserve, but that you have to first contact the proper
Sysop and certify that you are a U.S. citizen and are not going to
export the program, before access to the download is available.

SD is readily available on a number of foreign FTP servers, usually
under the file name SECDEV14. The extension varies, and is often of the
UNIX variety.


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

  John Campbell is a regular WindoWatch contributor. When not fooling
  around with pin ball machines, exploring esoteric features of various
  operating systems, he manages the local Unemployment Compensation
  Office in Elkins, WV.


  

Editorial Note:

There was an interesting piece by Simson L. Garfinkel in the Mercury
News of Dec 19, 1996 reporting on a survey done using Dan Farmer's
controversial SATAN. According to Garfinkel, "nearly one-third of the
Internet's most commonly used addresses, or sites on the Internet's
graphically oriented World Wide Web, are highly vulnerable to attack.

The study, which surveyed more than 2,200 Web sites on the Net was
conducted independently during the past two months by Farmer, the
controversial co-author of the SATAN network security tool. SATAN, an
acronym for Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks, was both
hailed and reviled by computer security experts when Farmer released it
in April 1995. The program ostensibly was designed so that computer
network administrators could find and then plug security holes before
the crackers found them. But with its easy-to-use automated programs,
SATAN also is an ideal tool for people with even rudimentary skills to
use as a weapon for infiltrating computer systems."



   ww page 9
                              SURFING THE NET
  


                     An NT 4.0 Homepage of Excellence!
                           By Linda L. Rosenbaum


In my wanderings looking for new and interesting Web sites, particularly
for users of NT 4.0, I recently discovered one that impressed the heck
out of me. I was so struck by its quality that I thought it our readers
would like to hear about it. It not only has information specific to NT
but a wealth of other information, too. There's enough here to please
almost any Web surfer!

The exact location http://www.stefan95.net is maintained by Stefan
Assmann, an accountant located in Belgium. When first entering the site,
you are greeted by frames, colors, a variety of choices and a warning
that this site is best viewed using Internet Explorer.

I strictly use Netscape (currently using version 3.0) but decided to
overlook his warning and take a look around, - and was I glad I did. I
spent quite a bit of time exploring Stefan's page and intend to go back
often so I can see how Stefan adds to and improves upon his Web site.

I think Stefan's NT 4.0 Primer is excellent reading for anyone
considering a switch to NT 4.0. He discusses the hardware requirements,
how to proceed with installation and what to do when you first restart
NT 4.0. He also has a nice write up on getting DUN (Dial Up Networking)
installed as well as a section which discusses the various components of
the Control Panel and File Systems focusing upon NTFS.

Also of interest to would be NT 4.0 users as well as new NT users is
Stefan's Windows NT FAQ. That is located under Software and Hardware. He
has also has a Windows 95 FAQ located in the same section. One can
easily scroll through the entire FAQ or select the specific topics of
interest. In this same area is a nice write-up of new and upcoming
software. It seems to be written with the NT user in mind presently at
least, emphasizing NT 4.0 compliant or specific software.

The Office 97 Preview Section is the area I spent the most time reading
and looking at when I first went to this site. Given the impending
availability of Office 97, and in various flavors, I was interested in
seeing what someone who has been using the beta product thinks of it. I
was impressed enough to order the Office 97 Standard upgrade for myself!
We had already placed an order for the Office 97 Professional upgrade
for my husband.

Within the Office 97 Preview area, Stefan first discusses the overall
product itself and what is new and different. He liberally includes
screen shots which one can view by clicking on anything that looks as
follows: "SS: Text in blue". Actually these screen shots appear in
various other write-ups too. In the Office 97 Preview area, Stefan also
has sections devoted to Word 97, Excel 97, Access 97 and PowerPoint 97.
While there have been articles appearing for some time in various
magazines on the upcoming Office 97, I found Stefan's previews easy to
read, easy to understand, and enticing enough to want to get it.

The Internet News section contains articles of interest to Stefan and
his readers. When I last was on his site, it included a section for
October 96, November 96, and December 96. I understand his January 97
edition will include information on NT 5.0. I eagerly await being able
to read all about it.

In Personal Info Stefan includes a few facts about himself as well as
detailed descriptions about his software and hardware. I suggest you
only read the hardware section if you are first prepared to be jealous.
All kidding aside, Stefan has a setup, both hardware and software, worth
being envious of. In the Personal Info section a reader can also send
feedback to Stefan.

For those of you using Netscape, I did run into a few problems in
Netscape on this site. One was I got frequent Java script errors. These
seemed harmless enough and just required me to keep hitting an OK button
to clear the error message screen. I also found some of the windows hard
to read because they were in very dark blue. I have no idea if this is
due to using Netscape, or whatever my video/video card setup is in NT
4.0. However I am using the same video card as Stefan (Matrox Millennium
4MB) although likely a different resolution and number of colors. The
worst problem was that I got occasional Dr. Watson errors/screens from
Netscape. Only Netscape closed up and I was easily able to restart
Netscape, get back on Stefan's page and back to where I was when I had
the problem.

In summary I think Stefan Assmann's Home Page is well worth a visit (or
even several)! I know I enjoyed it quite a bit. There is a tremendous
amount of information on it and I look forward to returning frequently.


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

  Linda Rosenbaum lives and works in a suburb of New York City. She is
  an assistant controller at the World Headquarters for a large global
  manufacturing company. She has two young children and a husband whose
  full time job is to take care of the kids. When not working, Linda can
  be found on a variety of online services and the Internet reading and
  writing about her experiences with NT, networking, and multimedia. She
  maintains a home network of four systems using a combination of NT and
  Windows 95. Linda is the NT Editor for WindoWatch and can be reached
  via Email at either lindar@cyburban.com or 71154.2622@compuserve.com.



   ww page 10
  The Industrial Strength Email Client! A Product Review
  

                             Eudora Pro 3.0
                   Copyright 1996 by Daniel Christle


Eudora has long been heralded on the Internet as the premier mail client
having perhaps the largest installed base of users. Recently Qualcomm
the makers of Eudora released version 3.0 of the Pro version which adds
several new and powerful features and incorporates a major facelift.

I tested the 32bit demo version of Eudora Pro 3.0 on a 486DX2/66 running
Windows 95 with 24 MB RAM. Once I had downloaded the software it was
just a simple matter of double clicking on the file and letting the
install program do its work. The installation was quick and without
error messages or other problems. All that remained to do was to launch
Eudora and respond accurately as it prompted me for my connection
information.

One of the nice things about the setup options for Eudora is how user
friendly they are compared to other mail programs. It is simply a matter
of scrolling down the list and selecting the icon for the option you
want to set or adjust. You can set options for how often Eudora checks
mail, whether you want to have it start up in off-line mode or have it
check for mail on start up. Other options include the maximum size of
messages to download, when to send your mail, if you want a signature
attached to every message sent and what method to use for encrypting
attachments. Eudora will allow you to encrypt attachments using mime,
binhex or uuencoding plus allowing you to determine the directory where
you want attachments saved. There are features you can customize in
Eudora, including screen fonts (avoiding the boring Arial 10pt font),
spelling, and styled text. Styled text lets you view messages much as
you could in a word processor with formatting and color. If you are
sending to another Eudora user they can also view your mail exactly the
way you formatted it, otherwise your message is sent out as plain ASCII
text. This is a nice way to add a personal touch without clogging
someone's in box with multimedia effects. Another important option to
mention is that Eudora can intercept Netscape's mailto URL's. This is
great for keeping all you mail in one application for more efficient
handling and retrieval.

However, when I tested this feature, it was necessary to have Eudora
open otherwise Netscape would launch it's own mail program. This never
happened with Internet Explorer which also can use Eudora as its default
mailer.

The first thing you notice once you are ready to actually use Eudora is
the new interface. On the left had side of the screen is the folder pane
allowing you to view your folders and messages side by side. This makes
it easy to drag and drop messages between folders when you are sorting
your out mailboxes, the Qualcomm metaphor for folders! On the right hand
side of the is the message list. The entire screen can be customized by
adding or eliminating which columns you want to view. The toolbar gives
you access to most of the common commands and if you want more the
default buttons can add one for any of the menu items Eudora offers. You
can also add addresses to your address book with a single click making
collecting addresses fairly painless if not although it would be nice if
the additional entries were automatic.

One new feature is Stationary. Stationary is a template or rubber stamp
that allows you to send out common messages instead of retyping them.
This can be a real time saver. Stationary can also be used in
conjunction with another great feature - filters. Filters can be setup
to answer incoming mail with stationery messages or to manage your
incoming mail based on the headers. I found the filters to work quite
well, especially after setting up filters to move messages from my in
box having either "$", "cash", "opportunity" or "money" in the subject
to another folder for later review and likely termination. Or if you
like you could transfer them to the Trash folder. I also used the
filters to move messages from a listserv subscription to a separate
folder so I could more easily read them off-line.

An extraordinary new feature in Eudora is plug-ins. These are add-ons to
Eudora that add features much in the same way you would use a plug-in to
Netscape or Internet Explorer. Plug-ins can be anything from security
enhancements such as encryption to language conversion. Eudora comes
with a couple of its own plug-ins allowing you to change the case of
letters and words and sort the information in a message. This makes
formatting much easier than it has been in the past. With plug-ins there
is no end to the customizations that can be made to Eudora.

In terms of performance, Eudora is very stable and rather quick on this
486 proving that speed and functionality can be had in the latest
offerings of Internet applications. I highly recommend Eudora to anyone
who is looking for an industrial strength mail program to control the
ever increasing mail in your inbox.


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

  Dan Christle wears many hats for the proprietary trucking industry
  network that employs him: Sales, tech support, and new user father
  figure! Dan has shared his interests in Email use and abuse in recent
  WindoWatch articles. He can be reached at christle@mb.sympatico.ca



   ww page 11
  Revolution!
  


                      Reflections of a ModemJunkie

                   Copyright 1997 by Leonard Grossman


Of late, Web pages seem to be getting more complex and take longer and
longer to download, even using faster and faster modems. Sometimes I get
so fed up, I angrily click on the stop icon and go on to something else
or even, heaven forbid, go to bed.

However, a couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine received an award from
the Web Design Group (WDG) http://www.htmlhelp.com for excellence in Web
page design. She has another excellent, and amusing page, The Care and
feeding of Web Pages to be found at http://www.jcu.edu.au/~imla/web.html
A link there will take you to her award winning home page. WDG
represents a revolution in Web thinking. It is grounded in the notion
that bigger is not necessarily better. It is grounded in the radical
concept that information presented on the Web should be easily accessed
by the largest possible audience.

This is a concept closely related to principles that regular readers
know I have long held dear. It militates against planned obsolescence.
For years I held out against Windows and hung on to my a 286 machine.
Only when I wanted full Internet access, did I bite the bullet and move
up to a 386 and a graphical interface.

Good design does not have to be boring. And good design does mean that
any specific tool must be excluded. It does mean that coding must be
accurate, and it does mean that pages should be validated to the
strictest standard capable of displaying the information to be
presented. Utilizing these principles means that countless viewers will
still have access to pages and won't get rude warnings announcing that
the page requires one specific browser or plug in or another. In other
words, by adhering to good design I could foster the same principles I
had been defending, long before I became a Web author.

So I decided to try myself. This meant meticulous editing of my web
pages. It meant submitting them to on line validation which checked the
formal coding of my pages for technical accuracy. As an aside, there are
many collections of validation tools. One of the best is maintained by
Harold Driscoll of the Chicago Computer Society found at
http://www.ccs.org/validate/index.html . My time on line was going up --
not down so I submitted two of my pages for the award.

And then, during the last few days of the year, I received notice that
my home page, Notes from a ModemJunkie, http://www.mcs.net/~grossman had
received the WDG Award. I even discovered the added bonus that my page
is quite comprehensible using Lynx, a text based browser which does not
require high powered computers or color monitors, making my ramblings
available to countless individuals who can't afford to keep up with the
Gates'.

Now I can slow down, I thought. But I also received a critique of the
other site, The Gropper Windows: Genesis in Glass found at
http://www.mcs.net/~grossman/gropper.htm  In addition to some technical
errors which were easily corrected, the page had nearly 80k of graphics.
It took nearly a minute to fully load. Because all of the images were
already cached on my machine it seemed and was faster to load. But the
first time viewer must have shared the same frustration I feel on
reaching some of the more complex, graphic intensive, sites.

Even though the page is dedicated to celebration of graphic images,
couldn't I do something to bring my page within acceptable limits.

So I looked carefully at the page. I re-thought the concept. I quickly
realized that there was a whole section of the page which could be
separated and presented on its own. A click on the index item will take
the viewer directly to this section. Here is a snippet from the index:

  <LI> <a href="#windows"> The five individual windows</a>
   and their stories.<P>
  <LI><a href="gropsel.htm">Selected panels</A> A page of thumbnail
   images linked to full screen true color scenes from this series<p>

The first line takes the viewer to a section of the home page while the
second takes the viewer to a separate page which contains five or six
thumbnails.

That page was simply cut from the original and made into a separate
page.

Originally the code from the second line read:

  <LI>Selcted<a href="#panels">panels</A> Thumbnail images linked to
   full screen true color scenes from this series<p>

It takes only a few seconds longer to go to the separate page than it
did to go down to the original location of the material.

The page will appear to the viewer almost exactly as it did before. Only
now the home page loads in slightly more than 24 seconds instead of just
under a minute. I don't know whether that page will receive an award or
not, but by using the application of good design principles, I have made
it more accessible and inviting to the casual viewer. Further
information about the WDG award can be reached by clicking on the icon
available on the WDG page referred to above.

Last month I discussed Opera, the new browser from Norway. The
downloadable file is less than one meg. The other day the long awaited
Netscape Communicator 4.0b made its debut. The complete package
downloaded at just under 10 megs. That's TEN megabytes. That's nuts!

There is a revolution going on. We can't hold back the tide. But as one
portion of the Web devolves into just another corporate media
extravaganza, dedicated Netizens are uniting to foster good design and
accessibility. As AOL slows and the bandwidth fills with noise, there
will be those who continue to raise their voices for reason. WDG and
others who recognize and foster basic principles should be recognized
and applauded. Less really can be more!


  [Editorial Note:

  Following submission of this article, Leonard learned that his Gropper
  Windows site has received the Web Design Award for excellence in
  design. The page has also been selected as the first Currently
  Featured Site on Gene R. Thursby's Religion, Religions, Religious
  Studies Page, the premier index of religious related sites.
  http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/gthursby/linkrel.htm


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

  Leonard Grossman, is an attorney who works for the government. He is a
  WindoWatch regular and has been contributing "Reflections" for some
  time. Leonard's home page was chosen as a "Best o'
  comp.infosystems.www.announce" site during April 1996. He is also
  president of his local user group in Chicago. Comments can be sent to
  grossman@mcs.com.




Having a Cow?   Another David vs. Goliath Squabble!

In a fax to CPU, a Canadian Computer News Service, Frank Harris, an
in-house Gateway lawyer, wrote in defense of the company's much
publicized position against Tucows, that his company's "actions have a
strong legal basis, and are similar to what Disney would do to defend
Mickey Mouse. Any further reports from your news service may result in
action being launched against your company." CPU has been articulate in
its defense of Tucow's Holstein logo! The Canadian news service
responded: "We at CPU agree that this is a Mickey Mouse issue. We hope
we do not have a cow over it." Despite CPU's less-than-serious approach,
Gateway may have the last laugh; the law just may be on its side. They
use a Holstein on their shipping cartons!



   ww page 12
  From the Keeper and WebMaster of the CIMM  Web Pages
  


                     Care and Feeding of Web Pages
                    Copyright 1997 by Lynn J. Alford


It is a little known fact that science has determined the simple Web
page (also known as an HTML document) is, in fact, an organic life form.
The vast proliferation of web documents in the public domain should be
enough to prove to anyone that web documents are reproducing. No one has
determined if the web pages are animal or vegetable yet, and any
conclusive evidence should be sent somewhere to someone. Unfortunately,
it isn't clear whom you should send this evidence to.


WebMaster

There are many netters who wonder at the term WebMaster. This is because
many web pages start wild. A WebMaster is someone who has trained long
hours for the difficult task of bringing rampaging web pages under
control. Webmasters frequently keep some tame web pages available as
role models for new pages brought into their care. It can take weeks or
even months for a new page to be tamed and readied for viewing by the
general public.

Frequently, after the pages are tamed, they are left under the control
of the WebMaster for some time, which means that the WebMaster must also
be a page keeper.


Web Page Keepers

Generally this job is somewhat simpler than that of the WebMaster. You
start with a limited number of pages, or a limited amount of space
available to keep them. Also, many of the pages have been tamed by the
WebMaster and are trained for their first appearance in this world and
therefore are not too difficult to handle. The keeper of the pages must
ensure on a regular basis that they all still conform to standards.
Unfortunately, web pages seem to mutate on a regular and very frequent
basis. Page links must be inspected frequently, the species being a very
mobile lot with a marked tendency to appear in new places. Pages need to
be inspected for old information which should be updated promptly.


Feeding a Web Page

Generally speaking, web pages should be fed according to their
respective use. When web pages were first released on the world, they
were all quite happy with a diet of ASCII text. The occasional page was
fed a gif or two, but these were generally small simple pages with small
and simple needs.

Web page fodder now includes: gifs, jpegs, animated gifs, JavaScript,
Java applets, frames, Shockwave, QuickTime, audio, Virtual Reality, and
the occasional bit of ASCII. Every day, new and different things can be
added as web page fodder. There are disadvantages to such additions.

Many sites have yet to understand how overfeeding a page can render it
useless. Too many animations, too much embedded information and people
get bored with waiting for the web page to waddle its way down to the
browser.

Some web pages are dependent on their looks to inform people. These
pages are useless to many who refuse to see the picture and wish for
some text based information to be passed their way.

The other things certain sites depend upon is using all of the latest
and greatest bells and whistles on their web page. Unfortunately, unlike
normal bells and whistles, the ones on a web page generally require that
those who wish to view the page must download something to their
computer. Worse, they may well have a difficult time finding and getting
the new items, therefore never properly visit the web page that requires
them.

Then there are those demanding web pages. They want the user to have a
particular browser, set a certain screen size, use certain fonts or they
promise not to look very good. Web pages should be willing to conform,
or at least try to conform, to any viewing situation. People may have
their own strong opinions of what fonts, sizes, and browsers they like
best. Such people will resent the demands of the web page and will avoid
that page in the future.


The Steps for Ensuring a Healthy Web Page

  1. Visit your web page regularly. If you don't, who will? They will get
     lonely and pine away with too much neglect.
  2. Check the links on your page. Pages entertain themselves when left
     alone by visiting their friends. If their friends have moved, they
     will be most unhappy.
  3. Groom your page. There are few things uglier than a page with old
     outdated information left hanging off of it.
  4. Do what you can to ensure your pages maintain a basic
     attractiveness. Ugly pages will not attract visitors.


Somewhat more serious information.

Try the Web Site Development Information page which has many pointers to
some of the best resources on web page development.

Go to the homepage of the woman who may be responsible for this. This
bit of silliness is still copyright by Lynn J. Alford. Or send email to
lynn.alford@jcu.edu.au now.


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

  As the ModemJunkie informed us this month, Lynn won a much coveted
  award from Web Site Development for her page expertise. She is a
  university teacher, a humorist, and also reviews game software! We
  hope that this will be the first of many articles from Lynn!


   ww page 13
  Spoofing the Internet
  


                        A Quick Look at Spoofing
                            by Lois Laulicht


Contrary to the commentary we have currently seen on the Internet,
Spoofing has long been identified as an extremely serious problem as it
relates to the invasion of private monetary transactions or as a method
for hackers to access proprietary information. Recently, the New York
Times carried yet another article, this time citing the work done at
Princeton. The article seemed to imply that this was a new finding.
However work in this area goes back to the late eighties, at least that
was the earliest citation FastFind could discover on the search term
Spoofing! The purpose of this piece is to bring to the attention of
new-to-the-net and long time Internet users, readily available resources
explaining what and how spoofing threatens sensitive areas of security
and privacy.

There were many documents to look at and this list covers but a few. I
strongly recommend that if you have administrative responsibility for
the security of your servers you look into this area with care. Much of
the resource information covers Unix systems. However we all access Unix
servers using a variety of operating systems daily and in our case,
Windows!

The first is a public and heavily edited document from the Department of
Energy which dates back to 1994. This was an advisory notice of Internet
Address Spoofing and Hijacked Session Attacks and released to the public
in early 1995 even though dated 1994. It creates the history and
describes in detail the spoofing attacks!

--------------------------------------------------------------------
The U.S. Department of Energy: Computer Incident Advisory Capability

                            ADVISORY NOTICE

         Internet Address Spoofing and Hijacked Session Attacks

January 23, 1994 1100 PST                                Number F-08

PROBLEM:       Sophisticated new attacks on Internet systems based
               on forged IP packets and hijacked login sessions.

PLATFORMS:     Primarily Unix systems connected to the Internet,
               although all systems that support session authentication
               based on IP addresses are potentially vulnerable. Systems
               protected by packet filtering firewalls may also be
               vulnerable.

DAMAGE:        Unauthorized privileged access to systems.

SOLUTION:      Enable router packet filtering on inbound Internet
               traffic, and protect systems against root compromise.

VULNERABILITY: These attacks represent a significant new threat to
               Internet systems.

ASSESSMENT:    Without proactive measures in place, these attacks are
               very difficult to detect or defend against. CIAC strongly
               recommends sites implement the solutions described below
               as soon as is possible.


Critical Information about the Internet Attacks

CIAC has received information regarding a new attack technique on
systems connected to the Internet. These attacks are based on the
exploitation of two separate vulnerabilities: forging or spoofing the
source address of IP packets and hijacking already established login
sessions. Although these vulnerabilities are currently being used
together to attack systems, each may also be used on its own. Both of
these vulnerabilities must be addressed in order to keep systems secure.


IP Spoofing Attacks

Description

The first vulnerability, spoofing IP packets, allows an intruder on the
Internet to effectively impersonate a local system's IP address. If
other local systems perform session authentication based on the IP
address of a connection (e.g. rlogin with .rhosts or /etc/hosts.equiv
files under Unix) they will believe incoming connections from the
intruder actually originate from a local "trusted host" and will not
require a password. This technique is especially damaging when root
connections are permitted with no password.

Services that are vulnerable to forged IP packets include:

     SunRPC & NFS; BSD Unix "r" commands, including rlogin Services
       secured by TCP Wrappers using source address access control;
       and X Windows.

It is possible for forged packets to penetrate firewalls based on
filtering routers if the router is not configured to block incoming
packets with source addresses in the local domain. It is important to
note that this attack is possible even if no session packets can be
routed back to the attacker. Note also that this attack is not based on
the source routing option of the IP protocol.

The IP spoofing attacks are very similar to those described in section 2
of "Security Problems in the TCP/IP Protocol Suite" by Steve Bellovin.
This paper was published in Computer Communication Review, vol. 19, no.
2 (April 1989), pages 32-48. It is also available via anonymous FTP from
research.att.com in the file /dist/internet_security/ipext.ps.Z.
Additional information is available in the paper "A Weakness in the
4.2BSD Unix TCP/IP Software", by Robert T. Morris. It is also available
via anonymous FTP from research.att.com in the file
/dist/internet_security/117.ps.Z.


Detection

IP spoofing attacks are currently very difficult to detect. If your site
has the ability to monitor network traffic on the external interface of
your Internet router, examine incoming traffic for packets with both a
source and destination address in your local domain. Such packets should
never be found entering your site from the Internet and are a strong
indicator that an IP spoofing attack is in progress.

Prevention

Currently, the best defense against IP spoofing attacks is to filter
packets as they enter your router from the Internet, blocking any packet
that claims to have originated inside your local domain. This feature,
known as an input filter, is currently known to be supported by several
brands of routers.

If your current router hardware does not support packet filtering
oninbound traffic, a second router may be installed between the existing
router and the Internet connection. This second router may then be used
to filter spoofed IP packets with an output filter.


Hijacked Session Attacks

Description

The second attack currently being observed involves the use of a tool
called "tap" to take over existing login sessions on a system. This tool
allows an intruder with root access to gain control of any other session
currently active on the system, executing commands as if they had been
typed by the owner of the session. If the user session has previously
performed a telnet or rlogin to another system, then the intruder may
gain access to the remote system as well, bypassing any authentication
normally required for access.

Currently, the tap tool is only known to affect SunOS 4.1.x systems,
although the system features that allow the attack are not unique to Sun
systems.

Detection

The owner of the hijacked session may notice unusual activity, including
the appearance of commands typed by the intruder. Users should be
notified of this possibility and encouraged to report any suspicious
activity.

Prevention

The primary defense against this attack is to prevent root compromise
through careful system management, installation of security patches, and
network controls such as firewalls. The tap tool currently in use makes
use of SunOS loadable module support to dynamically modify the operation
of the running Unix kernel. CIAC recommends that sites not requiring
loadable modules disable this feature on their SunOS 4.1.x systems.

--------------------------------------------------------------------


The following was in response to an earlier piece, again in the NY Times
1995 by John Markoff from a group at the University of California at
Berkeley. This commentary clearly speaks to software developers of
Windows tools heavily relied upon to access the Internet!

When reading also add the phrase Internet Explorer to mentions of
Netscape. Internet Explorer cloaks itself to most servers as the
Netscape Navigator and for the most part would not be identified as the
Microsoft product.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

"Basic Flaws in Internet Security and Commerce" from

   Eric Brewer, brewer@cs.berkeley.edu
   Paul Gauthier, gauthier@cs.berkeley.edu
   Ian Goldberg, iang@cs.berkeley.edu
   David Wagner, daw@cs.berkeley.edu


They start by saying:

"We've gotten a bit of press on this so far...

The NYT article (The Markoff piece) seems to imply that we discovered
these holes. We did not discover them, and we never claimed to have
discovered them. We wrote the following document to an audience who we
assumed also knew that these were not new security holes. We wanted to
discuss them for the following reasons:

Many security products (Kerberos, AFS, NFS, Netscape, Microsoft) have
ignored (for all practical purposes) the issue of trusting your
executables.

To show how easy it is to mount attacks on the integrity of software
(for example, via distributed file systems, NFS specifically)

Why there should be concern about endpoint attacks now more than ever
(financial incentive for attacks, strong protocols forcing attention to
the endpoints).

Discuss the details of the NFS exploit. We knew of no other actual
implementation of this well known potential breach of security. The ease
of the attack and the subtle variations possible were interesting.

We believe that the current focus on secure session-layer protocols and
sufficient randomness have obscured more fundamental flaws in end-to-end
to security. In particular, secure end-to-end transactions require two
parts: a secure protocol to communicate over untrusted channels, and
trusted code at both endpoints. The latter problem has received less
attention, but destroys security regardless of the quality of the
protocols or of the random numbers.

We have implemented a series of related attacks utilizing IP spoofing:

We can spoof NFS to patch binaries on the fly if we are on any subnet
between the NFS client and NFS server. We used this to turn legitimate
Netscape browsers into versions that used a fixed key (known only to
us), thus invisibly eliminating security.

The same trick allows us to defeat Kerberos security by attacking kinit.

We can also spoof NFS file-handle lookups, so that we can replace any
file (such as .login) with another file that runs with root access
privileges (even if the requesting user cannot).

These work because the trusted path to executables is really not
trustworthy in most environments. Although we use on-the-wire patching
to compromise executables, the client binaries can also be compromised
during download, by on-the-wire patching of FTP or HTTP transfers.
Trojan horses and viruses could also patch the client software after
it's on the local disk, especially on systems like Windows 95 that do
not provide access control for files.

Given that these are realistic threats, we believe that these issues
must be resolved before internet security and commerce are realistic. We
began to consider in more detail some fundamental weaknesses of common
network security practices that would lead to trivial further attacks on
Netscape as well as many other security tools like Kerberos. It was our
goal to demonstrate that it is trivially possible to patch executables
on-the-wire to completely compromise their security.

In doing so, we hope to reinforce the point that security is an
end-to-end problem that is far harder than getting the protocols
correct. Strong, correct protocols only make more subtle endpoint
attacks more likely, especially in light of the potential for financial
gain as the amount of commerce on the Internet increases. Most of the
attacks we discuss are suitable for the systematic exploitation of large
groups of users: an entire organization, or even a large fraction of the
user base of a particular piece of software.

In many computing environments a pool of common executables, like the
Netscape binary, are provided to clients by a fileserver. In such
systems, including NFS, AFS and Windows NT, there is no authentication
of the file contents sent between clients and servers.

In these systems there are provisions for sophisticated access checks to
determine file permissions, at open or handle lookup time. But the file
contents that are read from the server are not authenticated in any
secure way. The client has no way to determine if the bytes are indeed
being sent by the server.

Our first attack model is one in which the attacker has (promiscuous)
network access to any machine on any ethernet subnet between the
fileserver and the clients under attack. In under a day we produced
software that can exploit the lack of authentication in NFS to patch the
object code of any executable on-the-wire as it travels between the NFS
server and the client machine.

The technical details of the attack are rather simple. To retrieve data
from the NFS server a client sends a short request message detailing
which block from the file it is interested in (where a block is a range
of bytes). The attack software is located on an ethernet segment between
the client and the NFS server, so is able to snoop this traffic.

The attack software snoops, waiting for any request for a particular
block of a particular executable; for example, the block containing the
session-key generation code in the Netscape executable. It is then able
to forge a reply from the NFS server and transmit it to the client. If
the forged packet reaches the client before the legitimate reply, it is
accepted and the legitimate reply is discarded as a duplicate.

There is obviously a race condition between the injection of the forged
response and the true response. Since the attacking software is focused
solely on this task, while the fileserver is certainly servicing
requests from many clients, it stands a very good chance of winning the
race. We have observed that the attacking software wins the race a large
fraction of the time.

Given this ability it becomes possible to compromise the security
features of any executable loaded from the network. We have examined the
Netscape v1.1N executable and located the code that selects the session
key. By patching only 4 bytes we were able to cause the selection of a
predictable session key every time the browser engages in the SSL
protocol. It is then trivial to snoop and decrypt all traffic from the
browser to secure servers, obtaining credit card numbers or other
private information.

Since this is really an attack on the client, it is not limited to the
Netscape browser. On the contrary, it is extremely widely applicable. An
appropriate patch to the Kerberos kinit executable makes possible the
compromise of any passwords entered by users, and therefore all of the
authentication facilities provided by Kerberos.

In many environments, including our own here at UC Berkeley, all the
Kerberos application binaries are served from an NFS server. This
represents a major flaw in security as our attack demonstrates. Having
authenticated file services (kerberized NFS or AFS) is useless if the
integrity of the kinit executable cannot be ensured (most easily by
obtaining it from local disk).

However, making local copies of crucial binaries is not sufficient in
the face of a more serious set of variants on the NFS spoofing attack.
The spoofing software can be placed as before, in a position to snoop
requests to the NFS server. As clients issue a lookup filehandle request
the spoofing software can return the handle to a different executable
and also forge its attributes. By tricking users into executing code
that is setuid root, unlimited access to the client's workstation can be
obtained easily.

It is possible to mount NFS partitions so that setuid root executables
will not be honored by the client. Still, the spoofing software can make
arbitrary NFS filehandle lookup requests succeed, and substitute a
trojan of some sort. The attacker could cause misspellings of commonly
executed commands to appear to succeed, or could spoof other files that
are trusted by the operating system. For example, the user's .login file
is a natural and easy target from which to leverage further damage.

This implies that it is unsafe to execute any program obtained via an
insecure channel to an NFS server, no matter what the privilege level of
the client user.

Neither is it limited to NFS or file-serving protocols in particular.
Protocols based on TCP, rather than UDP, are just as vulnerable. It is
possible to hijack non-authenticated TCP connections, although it is
somewhat more complicated.

Attacks based on spoofing traffic coming from the distribution site of
popular software packages is also possible. Berkeley, for example, is a
mirror site for the Netscape browser. Any student with promiscuous
network access on a machine between the ftp server and the main link to
the larger Internet could have installed similar patching software to
patch the huge number of copies of the binary that were retrieved from
server.berkeley.edu.

More mundane attacks based on trojan horses or viruses remain viable
today. These attacks must exploit some other weakness in a system's
security to infiltrate, but once in place they can perform patches to
local binaries to fully compromise a system. Previously such attacks
were mostly motivated only by ego or malice; it is now more valuable to
compromise a client invisibly, so that the user believes the system is
secure. Thus, unlike traditional viruses, the new strains will aim to
have no visible effect on the system, thus making them difficult to
detect and easy to spread unintentionally. Our patch of Netscape has
this flavor.

We realize that it is impossible to eliminate all security holes; one
can always question whether it is safe to trust the hardware, or whether
outside channels used for communication of public keys or checksums are
truly secure, etc. Fortunately, in practice it should suffice to handle
far less than all of these risks. We hope to have demonstrated one
gaping hole in practical security today, and to have highlighted the
problem of the trusted endpoint.

There is one simple step that we can suggest that would go a long way
towards improving the security of endpoints. Increasing the practice of
software providers widely publishing cryptographically secure check-sums
of their executables would be extremely helpful. A small amount of
paranoia and care must be applied to securing the executables used in
the verification process. A read-only floppy disk would be appropriate
to hold the verification software, for example.

We are concerned that security on users' workstations and PCs is
currently insufficient. When real money is at stake, endpoint security
must withstand greater scrutiny. In summary, protecting the
communications channel doesn't help if the endpoints can be subverted.
We implemented and discussed several related attacks that replace
legitimate programs by compromised versions. Until we can trust every
program that executes between the time we boot and the time we finish
the secure protocol, we cannot reliably authenticate anything. Today
there is no basis for this trust."

A copy of this post is available as
http://http.cs.berkeley.edu/~gauthier/endpoint-security.html

---------------------------------------------------------------------


The last piece we'll just mention, is the work at Princeton that was
mentioned in the latest NY Times piece of Jan 1997. It can be found at
their Web page at http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip

This paper is very well written and easily understood by non-techies!

What we are reporting on is no laughing matter. The only way you will
keep your computer secure is to insist that software developers take
remedial steps to make the applications you use less accessible to those
with unsavory motives.


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

  Lois Laulicht is the editor of WindoWatch


   ww page 14
  Tonic Water or Snake Oil?
  


                    The Impact of Internet Marketing
                   Copyright 1966 by Daniel Christle


You would have to be dead not to notice that the Internet is going
commercial! Spam and unsolicited mail is on the rise. The number of
secure and non-secure web sites for the purchase of all sorts of goods
and services is astounding. What does it all mean, in terms of
resources, convenience and freedom? Are the resources on the Internet
being clogged by ruthless marketers? Is shopping on the Internet really
convenient or even a good idea? Are companies infringing on your
personal freedom with the methods they use to get your attention?

In terms of utilizing the resource of the Internet, marketing is a
double edged sword. When you talk about purchasing on the web there can
be no real complaints about draining resources away from the Internet.
Bandwidth is not wasted, as each web site is dependent on the power of
the server it sits on. As with any other type of web site, it too is at
the mercy of Internet traffic snarls, peak periods, your modem
connection and the reliability of the ISP's at each end. A web based
site has to compete in a variety of ways. Getting themselves listed by
as many search engines as possible is yet another way, along with the
more traditional media, to flog their site and get maximum exposure. It
is when marketers resort to mass mailing of unsolicited email that there
is a problem. Spam as we all know is quickly choking the life out of
Usenet. Everywhere you go, someone is advertising a product across
several thousand newsgroups daily. It wouldn't be so bad if they were at
least advertising something that would be relevant to the stated content
of a particular newsgroup. However that day is not likely to arrive
anytime soon if this great deluge of spam is any indicator. Usenet was
at one time a powerful resource on the Internet, full of great
information covering a great variety of subjects. With the dramatic
increase in spam it is getting harder to treat Usenet seriously unless
you are willing to employ an industrial strength kill filter ( My
personal recommendation is Agent if you are a Windows user). The
information is still there it's just getting harder to see through all
the advertising. It is here where valuable Internet resources are being
wasted. There seems to be a figure of approximately one terabyte that
everyone agrees represents the amount of newsgroup postings that are
moved around the globe daily. The cost of this is ultimately borne by
the end user whether payment is by the click or a flat rate. In effect
this type of marketing requires that the end user pay to see the
advertisement. It was rather refreshing to see that many of the Internet
marketing consulting firms were posting on their web sites that they
will not resort to spam in their quest to make their potential clients a
successful Internet advertiser. Out of ten sites I visited only one
didn't have this type of promise anywhere on their site. Interestingly
enough several of these marketing sites are excellent examples of pages
that are designed to attract a specific audience and demand interaction
on the part of the prospect. Perhaps there is hope for a decrease in
unsolicited mail, after all.

How convenient is shopping on the Internet to the average consumer? The
primary issue is one of security of the purchase. It really is not that
scary if you stick to secured sites and take some common sense measures
such as recording the details of your purchase and how you paid for it.
I usually print off the receipt page that is displayed at the end of
every purchase I have made. It normally shows what you have purchased,
the date, whom you have paid and the final amount. There are however
other issues which must be balanced against convenience. For example,
are you really getting a good deal? It really does pay to read carefully
any terms and conditions of the purchase, given that you can't touch or
see what you are buying. You need to know what recourse is available to
you if the product doesn't live up to its promise. Can you return or
exchange it? A reputable firm may offer a great deal on a product only
to charge you a high shipping and handling charge. They do this to
appear competitive and to recoup the cost of their online presence.
There have been many times I have seen a great product advertised on the
Internet, only to see it cost the same or less in a local store,
particularly if you account for the cost of shipping and handling. If
outside the country of the products origin there is the cost of exchange
in currency and even higher shipping costs. There are tremendous buys on
the Internet, however, the WEB companies with whom you are dealing are
not exactly next door. The other issue you face is credibility. Does the
vendor have a track record and if so is it traceable? Again common sense
should be your on this one. Whenever possible deal with known vendors.
If the company is not known to you check around and see if anyone else
has heard of them or better still, done business with them. Chances are
someone has an opinion or knowledge about the vendor. You can usually
find a newsgroup where that particular item would be on topic and ask
about it.

And of course, there is privacy and the abuse of same. As users paying
for an Internet connection and the online time use for it, is business
impeding on your right to anonymity? There is a big difference between a
free service such as Juno where your access to email is subsidized by
advertisers and you expect to see ads and receive targeted mailings as
part of the arrangement. Juno is very up front about this whole process.
Right now if you are using an ISP for full access, marketing companies
are hunting you down. There are easily half a dozen products available
on most of the large shareware archives that are aimed solely at mass
mailings. Do a little more digging and you can get software that scours
Usenet and web pages for email addresses. In short, if you have made a
public posting on Usenet or have a home page you will end up on a
mailing list somewhere.

It turns out that this is actually a bigger issue than it would first
appear to be. You didn't get to object to being put on a list until an
after-the-fact debate that has been raging for years regarding other
types of media. The issue has been addressed by many companies using
more traditional approaches to marketing. Just witness all the little
check boxes on subscription forms, registration and credit forms that
let you object to your name being added to lists.

So while you can't object before hand to the lists being compiled in
this Internet marketing free for all there is always the option to pull
one's name -- after the fact! If requesting to be removed from a mailing
list doesn't produce results, write to the postmaster at the domain from
where the mail originated (postmaster@domain.com). You should also be
aware that the more one posts on Usenet, the more information one is
providing which allows a marketing firm to determine your likes and
dislikes. Don't believe me? Spend some time on Deja News
(http://www.dejanews.com/) and you can build a profile of any email
addresses in their database. Go and perform a search on yourself and see
what comes up. I did a search on a friend and shocked him when I read to
him not only what newsgroups he had posted in but what he had written in
his postings. As for myself, a little while back I posted into one of
the Windows newsgroups about Telnet software and not long afterwards I
got an email from Telegrafix Communications advertising their Telnet
software and admitting that they got my name from that posting. Actually
I have to respect this, as he was honest and it was on a subject I am
very interested in. Yet there are many other pieces of mail that show up
in my inbox that seem lacking in either integrity or a professional
approach. When you look at this strategy further, scouring Usenet for
prospects seems little different than a salesperson going through the
white pages in search of business. The salesman side of me sees this and
can accept it. It's simply that I am unsure if I want to pay to have
someone target advertising to me.

I don't pretend to have the answers to issues of privacy invasion and
when a company has crossed the line. Remember one person's junk mail is
another's resource. What I can do is recommend resources available to
you that can shield you from unwanted marketing attempts. Get a mail
program that has filtering capability so you can set up filters that
will move unwanted mail to a folder for later review. It won't stop the
mail or even detect all of it, but if you're like me and use email quite
a bit it will help you manage you inbox more effectively. I recommend
Eudora Pro, Pegasus or Agent for Windows users. Take the time to send an
email to the company that sent it you and tell them you aren't
interested. Most of these people are smart and if they get a strong
response against unsolicited email they will figure out a way to get
your attention that is more palatable to you. I think the saddest thing
is that until some of these people wise up they will kill and make
undesirable such valuable resources as Usenet. This is in particular the
most controversial aspect of Internet marketing, where literally
hundreds of unsolicited postings are placed everyday to a vocal and
objecting audience. The spam wastes quite a bit of bandwidth which
compounds the problem as users post their objections.

Is it tonic water or snake oil? The best advice to remember is buyer
beware! Send me your comments on marketing on the Internet.


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

  Dan Christle can be emailed at christle@mb.sympatico.ca



   ww page 15
  Internet Humor                             Anonymous Sources on UseNet!
  


When you were a kid, a millennium ago, did you exchange punch lines with
your friends neglecting to tell the whole joke? For those of us in that
category of story tellers, the following is indeed a gold mine. For
those who object to this pass time, a land mine!


One Liners to Satisfy any Punch line Junkie!

   I can see clearly now, the brain is gone...

   I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.

   Mental Floss prevents Moral Decay.

   Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.

   Ever stop to think, and forget to start again?

   A conclusion is simply the place where you got tired of thinking.

   I don't have a solution but I admire the problem.

   Don't be so open-minded,  your brains fall out.

   If at first you DO succeed, try not to look astonished!

   Diplomacy - the art of letting someone have your way.

   If one synchronized swimmer drowns, do the rest have to drown too?

   If things get any worse, I'll have to ask you to stop helping me.

   If I want your opinion, I'll ask you to fill out the necessary forms.

   It's not hard to meet expenses, they're everywhere.

   Help Wanted: Telepath. You know where to apply.

   Look out for #1. Don't step in #2.

   Budget: A method for going broke methodically.

   Shin: A device for finding furniture in the dark.

   Demons are a Ghouls best Friend.

   Headline: Bear takes over Disneyland in Pooh D'Etat!

   What has four legs and an arm? A happy pit bull.

   Cannot find REALITY.SYS. Universe halted.

   COFFEE.EXE Missing - Insert Cup and Press Any Key

   Buy a Pentium 166 so you can reboot faster.

   2 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2.

   Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes.

   Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are.

   My software never has bugs. It just develops random features.

   * C:\WINDOWS C:\WINDOWS\GO C:\PC\CRAWL * C:\DOS C:\DOS\RUN RUN\DOS\RUN

   <-------- The information went data way -------->

   Best file compression around: "DEL *.*" = 100% compression

   BREAKFAST.COM Halted. Cereal Port Not Responding!

   C:\ > Bad command or file name! Go stand in the corner.

   Bad command. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaay..

   Why doesn't DOS ever say "EXCELLENT command or filename!"

   As a computer, I find your faith in technology amusing.

   Southern DOS: Y'all reckon? (Yep/Nope)

   Backups? We don' *NEED* no steenking backups.

   ... File not found. Should I fake it? (Y/N)

   Ethernet (n): something used to catch the etherbunny

   A mainframe: The biggest PC peripheral available.

   An error? Impossible! My modem is error correcting.

   CONGRESS.SYS Corrupted: Re-boot Washington D.C (Y/n)?

   Does fuzzy logic tickle?

   A computer's attention span is as long as its power cord.

   Disinformation is not as good as datinformation.

   SENILE.COM found . . . Out Of Memory . . .

   Who's General Failure & why's he reading my disk?.

   RAM disk is *not* an installation procedure.

   Shell to DOS...Come in DOS, do you copy? Shell to DOS...

   All computers wait at the same speed.

   DEFINITION: Computer - A device designed to speed and automate errors.

   Press -- to continue ...  Smash forehead on keyboard to continue...
   Enter any 11-digit prime number to continue...

   ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI!

   E-mail returned to sender -- insufficient voltage.

   All wiyht. Rho sritched mg kegtops awound?

   Error: Keyboard not attached. Press F1 to continue.

   "640K ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates, 1981

   Hidden DOS secret: To your CONFIG.SYS add BUGS=OFF

   Press any key... no, no, no, NOT THAT ONE!

   Press any key to continue or any other key to quit...

   Excuse me for butting in, but I'm interrupt-driven.



   ww page 16
  The Last Word                                     A WindoWatch Feature!
  


                          A Look Back at 1996
                    Copyright 1997 by Ben M. Schorr



Random Thoughts for Random Times!

1996 was supposed to be a big year! Hard drives were getting bigger, RAM
was getting cheaper, Microsoft was going to be nice to its competitors,
the aliens were going to return Elvis, unharmed, to Graceland, telephony
was going to take us by storm, and the Internet was going to
revolutionize business!

Is it Just Me or is This Business Getting Flakier?

After nearly a year of promising Windows95 drivers, Okidata has decided
to abandon development of those drivers for it's Doc-It line of
multi-function units. Apparently they don't have the technical
wherewithall to create Win95 drivers for their own proprietary hardware.
As you can imagine, this comes as quite a disappointment to the
customers who shelled out over $2000 apiece for their robust machines.

At the same time, Rolodex has apparently sold it's PCLink line to
Franklin Electronics. During the interim orders were lost and calls not
returned although checks were still being cashed. It seems like Franklin
finally has the situation under control, but Rolodex has stuck them with
a questionable PC Link product. Has anyone with a Rolodex PowerPad
actually uploaded data to their PC through a PC Link? According to an
anonymous staffer at Franklin Tech Support very few customers have had
success doing so.

Intel's MMX chip has been released and is getting generally favorable
reviews. But Intel has admitted this version of MMX won't help most 3-D
applications or any software that frequently switches between floating
point and graphics. They expect to release a second version of the chip,
a .1 version you could say, to address these issues. How much
improvement will we see for non-MMX programs? It depends upon whom you
ask. Some say none; some say the larger L1 cache gives as much as a 20%
improvement to non-MMX applications. Others fall somewhere in between.


The Year of Win95?

It looks as though 1996 was the year that Win95 finally started to gain
acceptance in the IS world. Or was it its big brother, WinNT, that
really stole the show? Many of the IS managers that I talk to began 1996
skeptical and wary of Windows 95. However, most of them are running it
now.

At the beginning of the year, a lot of IS managers were loyal to Netware
like a Dalmatian to a fire truck. Today many of them envy our new Compaq
ProLiant 2500 running WinNT4 Server. In fact, some of them excitedly
message me with their NT Server's specs.

Not nearly as wary as they were initially, end users and IS managers
alike, now seem generally pleased with Win95 and there is a certain
amount of positive expectation for the future, when WinNT and Win95
become increasingly blended into a single operating system.


The Internet Marches On

As telco's watch the onslaught with nervous excitement, more and more
people are jumping on the Web at a frantic pace. There are people in our
office who a year ago didn't know Netscape from Raymond Burr. Now these
people are offering me design suggestions on our home page and asking if
I read the cover article in this month's issue of Wired.

But as more and more people are scrambling onto limited resources a
whole a lot of lip service, and not much else, is paid to bandwidth
concerns. A lot of complaints are registered and hands slap to cheeks
with fearful gasps but it seems like few companies are actually laying
new cable or replacing inadequate-for-the-net hardware to deal with
expanding services.

AOL recently announced a new universal pricing plan. Oh how happy their
users will be with it! Right? Wrong! The new pricing plan meant an
incredible surge of usage. $19.95 a month isn't such a bargain when you
can't get past busy signals for days at a time. They say they're adding
new lines and modems as quickly as they can but the busy signals
continue.

And what of the domain name system? There seems to be an increasing
controversy over the Domain Name System and InterNIC's handling of it.

Trademark disputes were a hot topic in 1996, especially as they related
to domain names. Many companies scrambled to trademark their domain
names or risk losing them to another company with the same or similar
names. So now alternate systems and hierarchies are being offered. On
every street corner, it seems, there is someone with their own unique
idea of how to reorganize the whole thing.

E-Mail has become an essential business tool; it's becoming less common
to find a business card without an E-Mail address on it and most,
including mine, also feature a Web address. But what happens when a
E-mail server or three grab their electronic ankles and decide to shut
down for an hour or twelve? If your business is built around electronic
access you're not going to be very happy.

And what of USENET, that wild, wild west of messaging where just about
anything seems to go? Of course, you can find nice people and useful
information in the newsgroups, after you sift through the people posting
obscene messages, illegal "Make Money Fa$t!" schemes and a wide
assortment of conspiracy theories. Like a really big, loud block party
where every 3rd person seems to be the guy at your bus stop who sings
Big Ten fight songs to the mailbox while wearing just a fez and boxers.

I have to wonder if eventually all of the decent folks will abandon
USENET and just leave it to fester into a seedy underworld full of aDd
Me to the WARez LiSt tOO teenagers and people posting their scientific
inquiries into why white high school dropouts are truly the master race.


All hail the Network Computer!

So says Larry Ellison, IBM, a host of former terminal manufacturers and
even, cautiously and belatedly, Microsoft. But is the Network Computer
going to be the story of 1997? Not in my office. Few proven
applications, or demonstrable support savings for a small office means
that we're going to hold off on them for a while. You can always tell
the pioneers, goes the saying. They're the ones with the arrows in their
backs. We're going to be content to let the big boys play with their
thin clients for a while. We don't need to be on the bleeding edge. Call
me when WordPerfect for Java is shipping.

But again we get back to bandwidth. What about all of those offices
running 10Base-T LANs on 486 Netware servers across Category 3 cabling?
Are they going to be able to support those thin clients with an
infrastructure like that? Maybe, but I don't want to be the one to find
out.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Companies still spend far too much on upgrading their equipment and far
too little on upgrading their personnel. Adding more RAM to the computer
doesn't mean much if the person sitting in front of it still doesn't
know which mouse button to click.

Software continues to be big, bloated and buggy. As hardware races
forward and 32Megs of RAM becomes standard, programmers have all but
abandoned the ideals of keeping code tight and fast in an effort to meet
the impossible deadlines that marketing sets for product releases.

Hardware product cycles, especially for notebook computers are still
short. By the time you get that glossy catalog with the fancy looking
notebook on the cover it may be too late to order it. It's the rare
notebook that survives three months without being discontinued for a
faster, smaller cousin.

People who don't really understand technology are too often the ones
making decisions about it. All over America IS managers who read that
sentence just cracked a knowing smile. Anybody who's ever had to explain
to their boss how a mouse works and then convince him to approve power
backups for their LAN knows exactly what I mean. Far too often the IS
people aren't given enough authority and those who have the authority
are "too busy" to learn about the technology before making decisions.


So what's new for 1997?

1996 was a good year for Information Services. The Internet matured and
started to define itself. The technology grew more powerful and less
expensive. Software matured and we started to get a peek at what's on
the horizon.

I think 1997 will be a consolidation year. We'll all be gearing up to
see what the new Microsoft OS is all about. WindowsNT will continue to
grab market share hand over fist in the network OS market.
Infrastructure will reach a critical mass and there will be a mad
scramble to upgrade hubs, routers, cabling and phone systems. Telephony
may finally arrive, late and disheveled, but ready to get some work
done. By the end of 1997 business cards without an e-mail address will
be quickly discarded. Those without a URL will receive the knowing smile
formerly reserved for cards printed on perforated paper with an inkjet
printer.

Pentiums will be fading, Pentium Pros will be the rage and, if MMX lives
up to its billing, Klamath will be the thing to have. OS/2 fans will
still be making a lot of noise, but even some of them will have boarded
the life rafts. Bill Gates will make a lot more money and the Justice
Department will investigate Microsoft, again, for the way it does
business. Screens will get bigger (15" is now becoming standard) and
people will start asking about flat panel technology. Modems will still
be too slow and unreliable, but a growing class of technocrats will be
happily dialing from the suburbs with their 56K modems - and they'll
still complain about how slowly the Playboy site loads.

The great shakeout we saw in the consulting industry will start to
happen on the Web as increasingly sophisticated companies realize that
their "Web Consultants" were reading HTML for Dummies on the side.

Printers will get faster...and a little cheaper. Embedded technology
will start to take hold and all of the children of the world will join
hands and sing, in the spirit of peace and harmony. Oh, yes! Those
aliens really WILL bring Elvis back this year. (Can't believe I got that
one wrong in '96)

Got any predictions or reflections to share? E-Mail me at
bms@hawaiilawyer.com.


                             =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

  Ben M. Schorr is the Information Director of an Hawaiian law firm. A
  former west coast computer consultant who exchanged earthquakes for
  monsoons, Ben still maintains his association with the Ilink network
  as its Consultant conference Host. He has been a WindoWatch
  contributing writer from the earliest days.



   ww page 17
  WindoWatch Annual Index 1994 thru 1996
  

[Please note that this index is formatted to 100 characters per line and
 will probably look garbled if your text viewer is set to wrap long
 lines. We recommend that you turn word wrap off to view this section.]


Author                Title                                               Vol   No    Date
-------------------   -------------------------------------------------   ---   ---   ----------

Allaire, Jeremy       Web Based Conferencing                               2    4     May-96
Anonymous             Beta Bits                                            1    3     February-95
Anonymous             Elephant Hunting                                     2    5     June-96
Anonymous             Internet Humor - A Collection                        2    7     September-96
Anonymous             Internet Humor - A Collection                        2    10    December-96
Anonymous             Is There A Logo In Your Life                         1    8     October-95
Anonymous             Making the Connection!                               1    2     January-95
Anonymous             Our Obsession with Gates                             1    8     October-95
Anonymous             Picking Everyone's Brains on FAT32                   2    4     May-96
Anonymous             Undocumented Windows Errors                          2    2     February-96
Apple Corp            Shaping Tomorrow's Software                          2    3     April-96
Balak, Vlad           Muddies for Tea! Windows95 for You! A '95 Conversion 2    9     November-96
Balak, Vlad           Why '95? Why Not!                                    2    7     September-96
Barlow, John Perry    A Cyberspace Independence Declaration                2    2     February-96
Bayles, Len           Polling the Web                                      1    1     December-94
Bentkowski, Kent D.   DTP Standard Bearer: A review of PageMaker 6.01      2    6     July-96
Bentkowski, Kent D.   The Secrets of a WebMaster - Part 1                  2    4     May-96
Bentkowski, Kent D.   The Secrets of a WebMaster - Part 2                  2    5     June-96
Bentkowski, Kent D.   The Windows95 Registry                               1    9     December-95
Bernie                Why WinZip: A Retrospective                          1    6     August-95
Blow, Bob             A Hardware Note                                      2    3     April-96
Blow, Bob             Hardware Notes                                       2    4     May-96
Boggan, Scott         Creating Documents with Word for Windows             1    2     January-95
Buchler, Derek        A Christmas Carol                                    1    1     December-94
Buchler, Derek        A Guide to Software Revision                         2    1     January-96
Buchler, Derek        An Announcement: Brain Doubler 1.0                   2    2     February-                                                                                             96
Buchler, Derek        C-Net Shows You Won't See                            2    5     June-96
Buchler, Derek        Cartoon Laws of Physics                              2    4     May-96
Buchler, Derek        Computer Horror Stories                              2    3     April-96
Buchler, Derek        Derek Discuss '95                                    1    7     September-95
Buchler, Derek        If Operating Systems Were Beer                       1    8     October-95
Buchler, Derek        It's That Time Again                                 2    3     April-96
Buchler, Derek        On Windows95                                         1    2     January-95
Buchler, Derek        Smart House                                          1    0     October-94
Buchler, Derek        The Engineer's Song                                  1    8     October-95
Buchler, Derek        The Geek                                             1    4     April-95
Buchler, Derek        The Many Faces of Santa                              1    9     December-95
Buchler, Derek        The Skeptic                                          1    3     February-95
Buchler, Derek        Twas the Night Before Christmas                      1    9     December-95
Campbell, Ambrose     32Bit Fax                                            1    2     January-95
Campbell, Ambrose     An NT Update                                         1    3     February-95
Campbell, John        A Windows NT User Looks at MERLIN                    2    9     November-96
Campbell, John        Change of Address: A Review                          1    7     September-95
Campbell, John        Getting Warped                                       1    5     June-95
Campbell, John        Getting Warped (A reprise)                           2    1     January-96
Campbell, John        Milk Truck: A Product Review                         2    3     April-96
Campbell, John        OLX Offline Reader Goes Windows: A Review            1    4     April-95
Campbell, John        Pipeline Internaut for Windows                       1    3     February-95
Campbell, John        Surfing the Net from the Sticks                      1    9     December-95
Campbell, John        System Commander: A Review                           1    6     August-95
Campbell, John        Test Driving QModemPro for Windows95                 1    7     September-95
Campbell, John        The Breaking CIS Story: A Quickie!                   1    4     April-95
Campbell, John        The Power Users CompuServe Navigator-OZWIN           2    6     July-96
Campbell, John        The Quest for The Best                               2    2     February-96
Chong, Herb           A Delphi Tutorial                                    1    6     August-95
Chong, Herb           A Thousand Times                                     2    1     January-96
Chong, Herb           Behind the Scenes: Creating the Art Gallery          2    10    December-96
Chong, Herb           Computer Created Art Gallery                         2    9     November-96
Chong, Herb           Computer Generated Art                               2    5     June-96
Chong, Herb           Herb's Art Gallery                                   2    7     September-96
Chong, Herb           Herb's Computer Art Gallery                          1    7     September-95
Chong, Herb           Herb's Computer Art Gallery                          2    1     January-96
Chong, Herb           Internet Appliances                                  2    3     April-96
Chong, Herb           Lean and Mean - Web Graphics                         2    9     November-96
Chong, Herb           Mainstream Windows Application Development Tools     2    7     September-96
Chong, Herb           Needles and Haystacks                                1    4     April-95
Chong, Herb           Open Docs, etc.                                      2    5     June-96
Chong, Herb           Personal Web Servers at Home and Work                2    8     October-96
Chong, Herb           Programming for the Masses                           1    4     April-95
Chong, Herb           Signposts on the Information Superhighway            2    2     February-96
Chong, Herb           Software Bloat - Is It Here To Stay                  1    1     December-94
Chong, Herb           The Computer as an Appliance?                        1    3     February-95
Chong, Herb           The Many Faces of Windows: An Introduction           1    3     February-95
Chong, Herb           VB & Delphi: Separate Views of Component Programming 1    5     June-95
Chong, Herb           VRML: Worlds of Imagination                          1    9     December-95
Chong, Herb           Web Surfer - Computer Created Art                    2    6     July-96
Chong, Herb           Win95 and OS/2 Warp                                  1    7     September-95
Chong, Herb           Workgroups and Collaborative Computing               2    6     July-96
Chong, Herb and       The WindoWatch Art Gallery                           2    10    December-96
  Paul Kinnaly
Christie, Daniel      Cookies In The Oven                                  2    10    December-96
Christie, Daniel      Sandwich Meat and Unwanted Email                     2    9     November-96
Cullagh, Declan       The CDA Challenge: Day 2                             2    3     April-96
Dern, Daniel          Internet Predicts Overloading of Bob Metcalfe        2    7     September-96
Elect.Freedom.        EFF Fights Back                                      2    2     February-96
Freeman, Kyle         A Consultant's Catastrophe                           1    4     April-95
Freeman, Kyle         A Trip to All Points...Everywhere                    1    9     December-95
Freeman, Kyle         Is NetCruiser by NetCom in your Future?              1    6     August-95
Freeman, Kyle         Thanks for the Memory                                1    5     June-95
Grossman, Leonard     A Windows User Reports on Windows95                  1    5     June-95
Grossman, Leonard     Confessions of a Modem Junkie                        1    6     August-95
Grossman, Leonard     Confessions of a Modem Junkie                        1    8     October-95
Grossman, Leonard     Dear Santa                                           1    9     December-95
Grossman, Leonard     Editorial                                            2    1     January-96
Grossman, Leonard     Reflections of a Modem Junkie                        1    7     September-95
Grossman, Leonard     Reflections of a Modem Junkie                        2    1     January-96
Grossman, Leonard     Reflections of a Modem Junkie                        2    2     February-96
Grossman, Leonard     Reflections of a Modem Junkie                        2    3     April-96
Grossman, Leonard     Reflections of a Modem Junkie                        2    4     May-96
Grossman, Leonard     Reflections of a Modem Junkie                        2    5     June-96
Grossman, Leonard     Reflections of a Modem Junkie                        2    6     July-96
Grossman, Leonard     Reflections of a Modem Junkie                        2    7     September-96
Grossman, Leonard     Reflections of a Modem Junkie                        2    8     October-96
Grossman, Leonard     Reflections of a Modem Junkie                        2    9     November-96
Grossman, Leonard     Reflections of a Modem Junkie                        2    10    December-96
Gunn, Jim             A Brief History of the Computer                      1    6     August-95
Gunn, Jim             DriveSpace3                                          1    9     December-95
Gunn, Jim             The Fine Art of Techno-Gibberish                     1    5     June-95
Halpern, Jon          Windows95 Arrived!                                   2    1     January-96
Helis, Jon            Internet Addiction                                   2    8     October-96
Helis, Jon            Teaching 1st Reader                                  2    6     July-96
Helis, Jon            The Evolution of a Windows Hater                     2    7     September-96
Henschell, Todd       Coming Soon                                          1    8     October-95
Hommel, Gregg         First Impressions: ProComm 3 for Windows             2    3     April-96
Hommel, Gregg         On the Road to Windows95                             2    1     January-96
Hommel, Gregg         ProCommPlus For Windows: A Review                    1    0     October-94
Hommel, Gregg         Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks: HTML I                 2    8     October-96
Hommel, Gregg         Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks: HTML II                2    9     November-96
Hommel, Gregg         Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks: HTML III-A Tutorial    2    10    December-96
Hommel, Gregg         The World of HTML                                    2    7     September-96
Hommel, Gregg         Windows Aspect Tutorial, Part 1                      1    1     December-94
Hommel, Gregg         Windows Aspect Tutorial, Part 10                     2    2     February-96
Hommel, Gregg         Windows Aspect Tutorial, Part 11                     2    3     April-96
Hommel, Gregg         Windows Aspect Tutorial, Part 12                     2    5     June-96
Hommel, Gregg         Windows Aspect Tutorial, Part 13                     2    6     July-96
Hommel, Gregg         Windows Aspect Tutorial, Part 2                      1    2     January-95
Hommel, Gregg         Windows Aspect Tutorial, Part 3                      1    3     February-95
Hommel, Gregg         Windows Aspect Tutorial, Part 4                      1    4     April-95
Hommel, Gregg         Windows Aspect Tutorial, Part 5                      1    6     August-95
Hommel, Gregg         Windows Aspect Tutorial, Part 6                      1    7     September-95
Hommel, Gregg         Windows Aspect Tutorial, Part 7                      1    8     October-95
Hommel, Gregg         Windows Aspect Tutorial, Part 8                      1    9     December-95
Hommel, Gregg         Windows Aspect Tutorial, Part 9                      2    1     January-96
Jensen, Russ          Charles Babbage - A Computer Pioneer                 2    10    December-96
Jones, Lance          The In-Touch Sampler                                 1    9     December-95
Jones, Lance          The In-Touch Sampler                                 2    1     January-96
Jones, Lance          The In-Touch Sampler                                 2    2     February-96
Jones, Lance          The In-Touch Sampler                                 2    3     April-96
Kanner, Stan          A Note From The Middle East                          1    8     October-95
Kanner, Stan          A Report from Israel                                 1    9     December-95
Kanner, Stan          A Report from Israel                                 2    1     January-96
Kanner, Stan          A Report from Israel                                 2    2     February-96
Kanner, Stan          A Report from Israel                                 2    4     May-96
Kanner, Stan          What is CompuHigh?                                   1    7     September-95
Kindle, David         The Making of a Genius                               2    10    December-96
Kinnaly, Paul         Before You Plunge                                    1    7     September-95
Kinnaly, Paul         HTML Shareware Tools: An Overview                    1    6     August-95
Kinnaly, Paul         Norton Utilities for Win95                           1    8     October-95
Kinnaly, Paul         The "586" Upgrade                                    2    1     January-96
Kinnaly, Paul         The Authoring Series: WordPerfect Envoy Review       1    1     December-94
Kinnaly, Paul         Transition Time                                      2    7     September-96
Kinnaly, Paul         Whither Windows                                      2    1     January-96
Kinnaly, Paul         Windows NT 4 - Beta 1: A First Look                  2    4     May-96
Kinnaly, Paul         Windows NT 4 - The Workstation - Beta 1              2    5     June-96
Kriz, Harry           Windows and TCP/IP for Internet Access               1    2     January-95
Laulicht, Jerry       A Challenging Suite of Games                         2    2     February-96
Laulicht, Jerry       Education Tools for Kids                             1    0     October-94
Laulicht, Jerry       Fun and Games                                        1    5     June-95
Laulicht, Jerry       Masterpieces from Talent Software                    2    1     January-96
Laulicht, Jerry       New Approaches to Computer Assisted Training         1    1     December-94
Laulicht, Jerry       Peter's Many Things v.4: A Review                    2    6     July-96
Laulicht, Jerry       Quarterdeck's Web Author: A Review                   1    6     August-95
Laulicht, Jerry       Reflecting on the Internet and its Impacts           2    1     January-96
Laulicht, Jerry       The Chinese Game of Strategy and Chance              1    7     September-95
Laulicht, Lois        Adobe's Acrobat v.3 Flies High: A Product Review     2    10    December-96
Laulicht, Lois        A Modest Proposal: The Mole Patrol                   2    7     September-96
Laulicht, Lois        Acrobat Compression                                  1    3     February-95
Laulicht, Lois        Are You Ready for NT? A Resource List                2    4     May-96
Laulicht, Lois        At the Forum                                         1    3     February-95
Laulicht, Lois        Bellying Up To The Web for Fun and Profit            1    6     August-95
Laulicht, Lois        Computer Applianced Networks                         2    1     January-96
Laulicht, Lois        Gregg's Page                                         1    5     June-95
Laulicht, Lois        Is the Internet Under Siege                          2    2     February-96
Laulicht, Lois        It's Bare Fisted Mayhem                              1    1     December-94
Laulicht, Lois        Opening the NT 4.0 Administrative Toolbox            2    6     July-96
Laulicht, Lois        Plug of the Month                                    1    3     February-95
Laulicht, Lois        Plug of the Month                                    1    5     June-95
Laulicht, Lois        Plug of the Month:                                   1    2     January-95
Laulicht, Lois        Potholes and Detours in the Electronic Highway       1    2     January-95
Laulicht, Lois        Quicken 4 for Windows: A Review                      1    1     December-94
Laulicht, Lois        Shareware Plug of the Month                          1    6     August-95
Laulicht, Lois        Successful Modem Sharing: Ishare from Artisoft       2    9     November-96
Laulicht, Lois        Surfing the Net                                      1    0     October-94
Laulicht, Lois        Surfing the Net                                      1    2     January-95
Laulicht, Lois        Surfing the Net                                      1    3     February-95
Laulicht, Lois        Surfing the Net                                      1    4     April-95
Laulicht, Lois        The Dylan Greene Windows95 Starting Pages            2    4     May-96
Laulicht, Lois        The NT 4.0 Controversy                               2    8     October-96
Laulicht, Lois        The Saga of WorldNet                                 2    3     April-96
Laulicht, Lois        Wsock32 - A Product Review                           2    7     September-96
Laulicht, Lois        You Forgot The Dot Dummy                             1    0     October-94
Laulicht, Lois        Searching for the Middle Ground                      2    10    December-96
Lee, Thomas           Accessing the Internet Using Windows95               1    5     June-95
Leonard, Phil         A Windows95 TCP/IP Tutorial                          1    8     October-95
Leonard, Phil         Disaster Prevention and Data Recovery                1    9     December-95
Leonard, Phil         More HTML Authoring Tools                            1    6     August-95
Leonard, Phil         Norton Navigator for Windows95: A Product Review     2    2     February-96
Leonard, Phil         ProCommPlus For Windows Internet Tools               1    7     September-95
Leonard, Phil         Windows95 Nits and Picks                             2    1     January-96
Lillystone, Angela    askSam for Windows: A Review                         1    2     January-95
Lillystone, Angela    BOB: Microsoft's Home Market Entry                   1    3     February-95
Lillystone, Angela    Crossties: A Review                                  1    0     October-94
Mabry, Robin          What is a Winsock?                                   1    7     September-95
Mabry, Robin          Why Wizards Aren't So Wonderful                      1    9     December-95
Marchi, Jeff          Windows95: A Beta Report                             1    3     February-95
Marchi, Jeff          Windows95: Virtual Memory - An Interim Report        1    4     April-95
Mark, Rich            A Guide to Select BBSs using Telnet                  2    3     April-96
Martin, Dennis        Windows NT File System Security                      2    4     May-96
McGowan, Frank        Corel Presentations: WordPerfect Suite Part III      2    10    Dec-96
McGowan, Frank        An Essential Utility for Win:95: FDFormat            1    7     September-95
McGowan, Frank        Doc-To-Help: A Review                                1    3     February-95
McGowan, Frank        I Have Seen the Future                               1    8     October-95
McGowan, Frank        Micro Cookbook for Windows: A Review                 1    4     April-95
McGowan, Frank        Office '95 Professional - Access 7                   2    6     July-96
McGowan, Frank        Office '95 Professional - Excel 7                    2    5     June-96
McGowan, Frank        Office '95 Professional - PowerPoint 7               2    7     September-96
McGowan, Frank        Office '95 Professional - Word 7                     2    4     May-96
McGowan, Frank        Plug-In for Windows: A Review                        1    5     June-95
McGowan, Frank        Plug of the Month                                    1    4     April-95
McGowan, Frank        The 16bit Suites: Access vs. Approach                2    2     February-96
McGowan, Frank        The 16bit Suites: AmiPro vs. Word                    1    9     December-95
McGowan, Frank        The 16bit Suites: Excel vs. Lotus                    2    1     January-96
McGowan, Frank        The 16bit Suites: PowerPoint vs. Freelance           2    3     April-96
McGowan, Frank        The Corel Suite, Part 1 - WordPerfect 7              2    8     October-96
McGowan, Frank        The Corel Suite, Part 2 - Quattro Pro 7              2    9     November-96
McGowan, Frank        Time and Chaos: A Review                             1    6     August-95
Miller, Bob           Cousin Mike                                          1    2     January-95
Miller, Bob           Idiots Redux                                         1    4     April-95
Miller, Bob           Idiots Redux                                         1    5     June-95
Miller, Bob           Idiots Redux                                         1    6     August-95
Miller, Bob           Idiots Redux                                         1    7     September-95
Miller, Bob           Idiots Redux                                         1    8     October-95
Miller, Bob           Idiots Redux                                         1    9     December-95
Miller, Bob           Idiots Redux                                         2    2     February-96
Miller, Bob           Stanley Does Windows                                 1    5     June-95
Miller, Bob           Stanley Does Windows                                 1    6     August-95
Miller, Bob           Stanley Does Windows                                 1    7     September-95
Miller, Bob           Stanley Does Windows                                 1    8     October-95
Miller, Bob           Stanley Does Windows                                 1    9     December-95
Miller, Bob           The Cat's out of the Bag                             1    4     April-95
Mishkoff, Hank        A Diary: A WebServer Installation with NT 3.51       2    5     June-96
Moderator             A Windows95 URL List                                 1    8     October-95
Neuendorffer, Peter   A Matter of Taste                                    2    9     November-96
Neuendorffer, Peter   Address to the Foundation                            1    8     October-95
Neuendorffer, Peter   Alice Confesses                                      1    4     April-95
Neuendorffer, Peter   Alice Cooks Data                                     1    3     February-95
Neuendorffer, Peter   Alice Delivers Mail                                  1    5     June-95
Neuendorffer, Peter   Alice Goes Surfing                                   1    4     April-95
Neuendorffer, Peter   Alice Plays the Piano                                2    6     July-96
Neuendorffer, Peter   Alice Writes a Column                                1    9     December-95
Neuendorffer, Peter   Alice's Doors                                        1    9     December-95
Neuendorffer, Peter   Alice's New OS                                       1    8     October-95
Neuendorffer, Peter   Alice's North American Atlas                         2    2     February-96
Neuendorffer, Peter   Alice's Travels                                      1    1     December-94
Neuendorffer, Peter   An Interview with a Compuholic                       2    5     June-96
Neuendorffer, Peter   Borland's Delphi: A Review                           1    5     June-95
Neuendorffer, Peter   Cellar 2020                                          2    1     January-96
Neuendorffer, Peter   Computer Programming Without Spaghetti               1    7     September-95
Neuendorffer, Peter   Digital Alice                                        2    4     May-96
Neuendorffer, Peter   Hunting Bugs                                         2    2     February-96
Neuendorffer, Peter   Junk Mail - An Alice Adventure                       2    7     September-96
Neuendorffer, Peter   Making a Museum                                      2    9     November-96
Neuendorffer, Peter   Moving to Windows                                    1    2     January-95
Neuendorffer, Peter   Multi-Alice                                          1    7     September-95
Neuendorffer, Peter   Producing an Idea                                    2    7     September-96
Neuendorffer, Peter   Search and Ye Shall Find - Maybe!                    1    6     August-95
Neuendorffer, Peter   Shareware Shenanigans                                1    3     February-95
Neuendorffer, Peter   Software Update: Bugs                                1    0     October-94
Neuendorffer, Peter   SpringCleaning                                       2    5     June-96
Neuendorffer, Peter   Stellar Alice                                        2    8     October-96
Neuendorffer, Peter   Super Programmer                                     1    6     August-95
Neuendorffer, Peter   The Disposable Database                              1    2     January-95
Neuendorffer, Peter   The Interview                                        1    0     October-94
Neuendorffer, Peter   The Latest Thing                                     2    3     April-96
Neuendorffer, Peter   Try Before You Buy                                   2    3     April-96
Neuendorffer, Peter   Visual Basic 3: The Transition from DOS to Windows   1    3     February-95
Neuendorffer, Peter   Writing a First Program in Delphi                    2    8     October-96
Passarella, Jack      Always in Styles: A Word 7 Series                    2    6     July-96
Passarella, Jack      It's Toolbar Time                                    2    9     November-96
Passarella, Jack      Keyboard Shortcuts: Word 7                           2    5     June-96
Passarella, Jack      MS Exchange Server 4.0: A View from a Client         2    7     September-96
Passarella, Jack      Terraforming Templates                               2    10    December-96
Passarella, Jack      The Basics of Word Basic                             2    8     October-96
Plumb, Jim            A Web primer                                         1    8     October-95
Plumb, Jim            Creating Acrobat Files:An Acrobat Tutorial, Part 1   1    4     April-95
Plumb, Jim            Creating Acrobat Files:An Acrobat Tutorial, Part 2   1    5     June-95
Plumb, Jim            Jim Gets His Dream Machine                           1    9     December-95
Plumb, Jim            Microsoft's Internet Assistant                       1    6     August-95
Plumb, Jim            NT 101 - An Overview of 3.51: Part One               2    5     June-96
Plumb, Jim            NT and Unix - Issues of Connectivity                 2    9     November-96
Plumb, Jim            Taming of the Wild DNS: A MetaInfo Product Review    2    10    December-96
Plumb, Jim            The Authoring Series: Acrobat Review                 1    2     January-95
Plumb, Jim            Win NT - Connectivity Issues                         2    8     October-96
Prevo, Ken            A Reasonable Operating System Discussion             2    2     February-96
Rosenbaum, Linda      Adobe's PhotoDeluxe for Windows: A Review            2    10    December-96
Rosenbaum, Linda      NT 4.0 - The Release Version                         2    8     October-96
Rosenbaum, Linda      NT in the Home                                       2    1     January-96
Rosenbaum, Linda      NT Tools 1.0 and QuickView Plus                      2    7     September-96
Rosenbaum, Linda      Symantec's Internet FastFind                         2    9     November-96
Rosenbaum, Linda      Windows NT 4 - The Server - Beta 1                   2    5     June-96
Rosenbaum, Linda      Windows NT 4 - The Server - Beta 2                   2    6     July-96
Schorr, Ben           Approach: A Review                                   1    2     January-95
Schorr, Ben           The Last Word                                        1    1     December-94
Schorr, Ben           The Last Word                                        1    3     February-95
Schorr, Ben           The Last Word                                        1    4     April-95
Schorr, Ben           The Last Word                                        1    5     June-95
Schorr, Ben           The Last Word                                        1    7     September-95
Schorr, Ben           The Last Word                                        1    8     October-95
Schorr, Ben           The Last Word                                        1    9     December-95
Schorr, Ben           The Last Word                                        2    2     February-96
Schorr, Ben           The Last Word                                        2    3     April-96
Schorr, Ben           The Last Word                                        2    5     June-96
Schorr, Ben           The Last Word                                        2    9     November-96
Schorr, Ben           The Last Word                                        2    10    December-96
Verisign, Inc.        Digital IDs - Part 1                                 2    4     May-96
Verisign, Inc.        Digital IDs - Part 2                                 2    5     June-96
Williamson, Paul      Backup with Software with LongFileNames              1    8     October-95
Williamson, Paul      Mobile Computing Using Lotus Notes - Part 1          2    7     September-96
Williamson, Paul      Mobile Computing Using Lotus Notes - Part 2          2    8     October-96
Williamson, Paul      The Future of DOS                                    1    1     December-94
Williamson, Paul      Understanding PC Memory                              1    5     June-95
Williamson, Paul      Where is Windows95 in Corporate America              1    7     September-95
Williamson, Paul      Windows for Workgroups: Is It In Your Future?        1    3     February-95
Wright, Jim           Upgrading the Box                                    1    8     October-95
Zimmerman, Phillip    Testimony: The Encryption Debate                     2    8     October-96



   ww 


EDITORIAL

Editor:                        Lois B. Laulicht
Contributing Editor:           Herb Chong
HTML Editor:                   Gregg Hommel
Ascii Edition Editor:          Lin Sprague
NT 4 Editor:                   Linda Rosenbaum

Contributing Writers:          Vlad Balak, John M. Campbell, Dan
                               Christle, Leonard Grossman, David Kindle,
                               Jerry Laulicht, Frank McGowan, Peter
                               Neuendorffer, Jack Passarella, Jim Plumb,
                               Ben Schorr, and Paul Williamson

EDITORIAL BOARD                Herb Chong, Gregg Hommel, Lois Laulicht,
                               Paul Williamson.

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                               Editor: WindoWatch
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WindoWatch (c) 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997 all rights reserved, is the
property of Lois B. Laulicht and CCC of WV Valley Head, WV 26294


  
  Vol.3 No. 1 ww End

