Wierd Williys FREE software superstore

[Gnomercy]

Don't ask... the title just seemed appropriate :)

This one from my NNT mail list.

CATFISH. I have no idea how it got its name, but Catfish, a disk
catalog browser, is a handy utility. It's small enough to carry with you
on a diskette and it takes snapshots of the directory/file structure on
your hard drive and removable media such as Zips and CDs. Why is this good
to have? You can quickly find and display files even when the drive is
unavailable, view them by sort order, export them as text files, refresh
contents, launch apps and docs, and ... well, see for yourself. It's free
at http://www.equ14.com/catfish and can be used with Win 3.1, 9x, and NT.

[Gnomercy]

NAVISCOPE. A reader suggested we tell everyone about Naviscope a free
Web acclerator and package of Internet tools at http://www.naviscope.com/
. It purports to block ads, cookies, backgrounds, blinking text,
Javascript, and sounds; perform Internet diagnostics with logging and
analysis capabilities, stop objects from loading, adjusts the computer
clock to the NIST atomic clock, and more. If they had coffee-making I'm sold!


This one also from my NNT list

[Gnomercy]

This one from my LangaList

Interesting Anti-Spam Tools

I'm still sorting through the huge number of emails I've been getting
about various good and bad anti-spam tools. But one promising new class
of tools seems to warrant immediate discussion:

Fred: I just started using a fairly easy to use Anti-Spam
software called SpamNet from Cloudmark (
http://www.cloudmark.com ). It's currently a free download in
pre-release but I've had no problems using it (and it doesn't
"spamify" your newsletter!). You just connect to the common
server and upload all your identified spam and it lets others
in the network keep informed of the latest versions of spam
circulating out there. It does only work with Outlook 2000 or
Outlook XP right now, but other versions are promised. --Gil
Levesque

Thanks, Gil. SpamNet is starting to get quite a buzz because of the way
it works. It's actually conceptually akin to two other systems, as
explained in the excerpt from David Strom's "Web Informant" newsletter
(see http://www.strom.com/awards/index.html and http://www.strom.com ):

[T]hree products that I looked at, and used over the past
several months, are Cloudmark.com's SpamNet (
http://www.cloudmark.com ), MailFrontier.com's Matador (
http://mailfrontier.com/ ), and Sunbelt Software's IHateSpam (
http://www.sunbelt-software.com ) . The first two are free,
the Sunbelt product costs about $20.

Sunbelt makes two versions one for Outlook, and another for
Outlook Express. All of the products make use of peer-to-peer
networking in a new and unusual way. Every time a user
identifies a message as spam, a note gets sent to the vendor's
server. As more and more people make this designation, more
and more messages get blocked by the software. It is a neat
idea, and in my tests I found each product was able to block
about 75% of the hundreds of spam messages that I receive
daily. It isn't perfect, but it helps to keep the traffic down
in your mailbox. And the nice thing about these three
products is that they didn't make any mistakes, as far as I
could see none of the messages that were marked as spam were
actual messages from my correspondents that I wanted to keep.
In science, this is called a lack of "false positives" and it
is a good thing indeed.

Each product has slightly different user interfaces and
controls, although each allows you to add people or domains
that you want to correspond with to be added to a "white list"
(meaning that messages from these individuals will always be
delivered to you) and people or domains that you never want
to see can be added to a "black list." I liked SpamNet the
most, and IHateSpam the least, although the differences among
the three products were not that significant.

Fighting spam is a tough war, indeed. But these three products
give us all a chance to take back control over our Inboxes.

It's an interesting approach--- an application of Napster-like peer-to-
peer networking. But instead of sharing music files, users share
information about what is--- and what is not--- spam. This approach has
the potential of being just as effective at blocking true spam as
anything else out there, but without the collateral damage caused by
"false positive" reports of spam.

This is radically different from approaches like SpamCop's blacklist,
where the system only tracks negative reports. There, a handful of
malicious or intellectually challenged people can totally skew the
rankings. I won't beat the dead horse, but in one recent instance 17
(false) reports of spam from among my 160,000+ readers were enough for
SpamCop to decide I was a spammer.

In a peer-to-peer service like SpamNet, if most users agree that
something is spam, it will be flagged as such. But if most users agree
that something is NOT spam, it won't be listed. In other words, false
spam reports can be "outvoted" by positive reports from other
users. (I'm oversimplifying, but you get the idea.) Plus, in
SpamNet, suspected spam mail isn't blindly blocked; it's moved to a
"spam" folder, so even if something is incorrectly labeled as spam, your
mail won't be lost.

It's a noteworthy approach that places control over what is and is not
defined as spam in the hands of the *total body of recipients* instead
of a small group of self-appointed censors. Non-spammers won't get
blocked, but spammers definitely *will*. In fact, even the most subtle,
clever spammers will be caught because--- as the saying goes--- "you
can't fool all of the people all of the time." Very interesting!