Date: Wed, 23 Apr 1997 14:34:33 -0700
From: Patrick Douglas Crispen
Reply-To: TOURBUS-Request@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
To: TOURBUS@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
Subject: TOURBUS -- 24 APRIL 1997 -- VIRUSES IN E-MAILS?! / ALTAVISTA LIVETOPICS
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\___/ \___/ T h e I n t e r n e t T o u r B u s \___/
TODAY'S STOPS: VIRUSES IN E-MAILS?! / ALTAVISTA LIVETOPICS
TODAY'S ADDRESSES: http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/cta293.htm
http://www.tcimet.net/mmclass/PatrickFred1.htm
http://www.altavista.digital.com/
Hi, kids! :)
If you have been a passenger on our little bus of Internet happiness for
any amount of time, you will no doubt know that I am very adept at
shameless self-promotion. For example ...
For those of you who may have missed my recent story in USA Today (yes, USA
Today actually printed my hideous-looking picture in their newspaper last
week), you can see the text of their story on the Web at
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/cta293.htm
and you can find the picture of me (driving a bus!) that appeared with the
article at
http://www.tcimet.net/mmclass/PatrickFred1.htm
Once you see my picture, I think you will understand why the United States
Congress is so adamant about passing laws to keep frightening Internet
images such as this out of the hands of our children! :P
VIRUSES IN E-MAILS?!
--------------------
Is it just me, or has there been a FLOOD of virus warnings on the Net
recently? I have received so many of these warnings over the past couple
of weeks that I decided to write a "canned reply" so that I would be able
to respond to all of these virus warnings.
Wanna see my "Viruses in E-mails?" canned reply? Here you go! (And you are
more than welcome to steal this if you want.)
Thank you for your recent letter concerning e-mail-borne viruses.
Unfortunately, most of the virus warnings floating around the Net
right now are hoaxes. There are, however, two rules that you
need to remember to be able to sort out the true virus warnings
from the hoaxes, and to protect yourself from becoming infected
with a virus or a Trojan horse:
1. Regular, plain-text e-mail letters -- the plain old
vanilla e-mail letters (like this one) that you receive
every day -- can *NOT* contain viruses or Trojan horses.
Period. It does not matter what you may have heard from
your friends, co-workers, newspaper, government, or
religious leaders. Plain e-mail letters can not contain
viruses or Trojan horses. It does not matter WHAT the
subject line of the letter is -- "Good Times," "PenPal
Greetings," "Deeyenda," "Irina," "AOL4FREE," "I AM A
REALLY MEAN VIRUS AND I AM GOING TO EAT YOUR HARD DRIVE"
-- plain text e-mail letters simply can not contain
viruses or Trojan horses. If anyone tells you otherwise,
they are either lying or are badly misinformed.
2. Files that are attached to e-mail letters -- like Lotus
or Excel spreadsheet files and *especially* Microsoft
Word files -- can, and probably do, contain viruses and
Trojan horses. How can you protect yourself? VIRUS
CHECK EVERY SINGLE ATTACHMENT THAT YOU RECEIVE THROUGH E-
MAIL (AND EVERY SINGLE FILE THAT YOU DOWNLOAD FROM THE
INTERNET). If your boss, best friend, worst enemy,
family pet, significant other, insignificant other,
teacher, tribal member, or political leader sends you a
file attached to an e-mail document, VIRUS CHECK THAT
FILE. It does not matter what the subject line of the e-
mail letter to which that file is attached is called.
VIRUS CHECK THAT FILE!
I hope this clears things up. :)
ALTAVISTA LIVETOPICS
--------------------
Ask a computer guru to name their favorite Internet search engine and more
likely than not the guru will mention AltaVista. By now, however, you
should be well aware of my utter disdain for AltaVista. Even when I use a
whole mess of Boolean operators, AltaVista always seems to return either
10,000 hits or ZERO hits. It doesn't seem to be capable of reaching a
happy medium.
Well, the folks at AltaVista must have heard of my disdain, because they
have created a new search tool that has turned my disdain of AltaVista into
an overwhelming respect. Here's how this new search tool works ...
First, you need to go to AltaVista's homepage at
http://www.altavista.digital.com/
and then run a regular keyword search by moving your cursor to the search
box, typing in the keyword(s) for which you are searching, and then hitting
the "Submit" button. Just for giggles, try a keyword search for "Patrick
Crispen."
Once you hit the "Submit" button, AltaVista will run its regular search and
display its results on the screen. For example, a search for
Patrick Crispen
will generate about 10,000 hits, and a search for
"Patrick Crispen"
(with the quotes) will generate about 2,000 hits. By using the phrase
"Patrick Crispen," we've limited our search to only those Web pages that
have the word "Patrick" directly next to the word "Crispen."
"Okay," I hear you ask, "what's new about THAT?!" Nothing. We haven't
covered the new stuff yet! :)
Once you do a keyword search for "Patrick Crispen," AltaVista returns
10,000 hits. Obviously, that is *WAY* too many hits. Is there a way to
"prune" this down a little?
YES! After you do a search, look for the sentence "Overwhelmed by ####
documents?" This should appear near the top of the page, below the tally
of the number of documents that AltaVista has found, and just above the
first "hit." Below the "overwhelmed" sentence, click on the word "Tables."
AltaVista has a new tool called LiveTopics, and clicking the word "Tables"
launches LiveTopics. According to the folks at AltaVista:
LiveTopics is a tool that helps you refine and analyze the
results of an AltaVista search. You can use it to
- Select additional words to refine a query that is too
broad or vague.
- Eliminate topics from search results that are too numerous
to be useful.
- Learn about a subject by exploring the topics related to
your query.
How does LiveTopics work? Well ...
LiveTopics analyzes the contents of documents that meet your
original search criteria and displays groups of additional words,
called topics, to use in refining your query. Topics are
dynamically generated from words that occur frequently in the
documents that match your initial search criteria. Topics appear
in order of relevance, and words inside a topic are ordered by
frequency of occurrence.
[quoted from http://www.altavista.digital.com/av/lt/help.html]
Wait, it gets better! LiveTopics lets you go through the list of topics
that your search generates and either "include" or "exclude" those topics
in your next search. For example, here are a couple of topics that a
search for "Patrick Crispen" generates:
Crispen listserv tourbus lesson
roadmap subscribe bobrankin commands
patrick unsubscribe mhv retrieve
alabama send rankin ftpmail
Clearly, some of these topics match what we are looking for, and some of
these have absolutely nothing to do with what we are looking for.
LiveTopics lets you "edit" your search by selecting the topics that you are
interested in and deselecting the topics that you aren't interested in.
So, let's prune our search for "Patrick Crispen" a little.
Next to each topic that LiveTopics displays are two checkboxes. The first
checkbox (the one under the big red X) excludes that particular topic from
the next search, and the second checkbox (under the big green check mark)
includes that topic in the next search. We can now go through all of the
topics and exclude/include to our little heart's content.
One word of warning, though: don't get too carried away. AltaVista will
show you DOZENS of different topics. You'll only need to include or
exclude a mere handful of topics in order to prune down your next search
substantially (I've found that excluding/including between 6 and 10 words
works quite well). Your best bet is to only exclude or include those words
that you feel the strongest about. For example, in the list above, I'd
certainly want to include the word "Crispen." The other topics are pretty
"iffy."
As I said earlier, LiveTopics will give you DOZENS of topics to choose
from. Scroll through the topics, and pick between 6 and 10 topics that you
want to exclude from or include in your next search. Once you have done
that, click on the "Submit" button (located at either the top or bottom of
the page) and see what happens.
If you have picked some good topics, chances are that your new search will
generate a much more reasonable number of hits. Better still, most of
these hits will actually have something to do with what you are searching
for!
Cool, huh? That's it for this week. Have a safe and happy weekend!
TODAY'S STOPS: VIRUSES IN E-MAILS?! / ALTAVISTA LIVETOPICS
TODAY'S ADDRESSES: http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/cta293.htm
http://www.tcimet.net/mmclass/PatrickFred1.htm
http://www.altavista.digital.com/
--------------------------------
TODAY'S SOUTHERN WORD OF THE DAY
--------------------------------
KUMPNY (noun). 1) Business, 2) group of invited guests, 3) a
Southern euphemism for the CIA.
Usage: "Put yo overalls on, Bubba ... kumpny's coming!"
(Special thanks to *ME* for today's word.) :)
YOU CAN FIND ALL OF THE OLD SOUTHERN WORDS OF THE DAY ON THE SOUTHERN WORD
HOMEPAGE AT http://ua1vm.ua.edu/~crispen/word.html
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TOURBUS - (c) Copyright 1997, Patrick Crispen and Bob Rankin
All rights reserved. Redistribution is allowed only with permission.
Send this copy to 3 friends and tell them to get on the Bus!
(\__/) .~ ~. ))
/O O ./ .' Patrick Douglas Crispen
{O__, \ { The University of Alabama
/ . . ) \ crispen@campus.mci.net
|-| '-' \ } http://ua1vm.ua.edu/~crispen/
.( _( )_.'
'---.~_ _ _& Warning: squirrels.
