NEWSLETTER
Volume 12, Issue 07
September, 2013
President: George Stosur, x6885
Membership: Dorothy Blakeslee x5667
Editor: Jean Young, x5599
Treasurer: William Hook, x6559
Computer Club Website: (with Smithey Calendar & links to recaps of meetings)
www.amvresidents.org/computerclub
President’s Message
I'm drowning in spam! What can I do?
Spam (not the tasty stuff in the can), a.k.a. junk email or unsolicited bulk
email, consists of nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients.
Many people unwittingly ask for spam in various ways:

Posting an email address publicly. If your
email address is visible on a web page
somewhere that anyone can get to, then that
includes spammers. They are known to
harvest email addresses from web pages on
the assumption that they are more likely to be
real, active email addresses than simply
guessing randomly (which they also do).

Responding to or acting on spam. Replying to any form of spam is
really just a signal to the spammers that they have a real, live person
at this email address, and that they can send you lots more spam.
Even if you ask them to unsubscribe you. Clicking on spammer's
AMV Computer Club
link, or - horrors! - purchasing a product through spam, tells
spammers "we’ve got a live one!”

Enabling pictures on spam. The reason that pictures are disabled
by default on most spam-filtered email is that the mere act of
accessing an image so that it can be displayed can tell a spammer
they have a real email address. Expect more spam.

Giving your email address to the wrong person or company. This
is actually one reason many people have more than one email
address or create "throw-away" email addresses. Many companies
share their email lists with others, or even sell the list of their
customer's email addresses. Reputable companies do not, so keep
shopping at Amazon and the like, but be careful when dealing with a
company you've never dealt with before. Consider creating and using
a different email address for this purpose.

Items that are not in your control: When you send a joke, a photo
or whatever to a friend, and he then forwards it on without removing
your email address from the forward, your email address is now "in
the wild". Worse, when a friend sends you an email like that and does
so by putting you and 100 other people on the "TO:" or "CC:" line, he
has just advertised your email address to everyone else that got that
email. And when they forward it without trimming those addresses,
your email address makes it out to potentially thousands of people
you don't know. Some may be spammers who look for such
opportunities to harvest live addresses.
You Can't Stop Spam. The bottom line is that anyone can send you email,
period. Anyone who knows your email address can send you junk trying to
sell you stuff or fool you into handing over your private information when
you shouldn't.
Blocking Doesn't Work. Why? Because spammers change their email
address often. Even worse, spammers fake the email address. They can
fake spam to look like it comes from your friends and acquaintances, for
example. Blocking just isn’t a viable approach any more. And, for the
record, deleting history does nothing with respect to scam.
Spam Filters Make Life Bearable. What does work, though not always,
are good spam filters. Spam filters work by looking not just at where email
comes from, but the nitty-gritty technical details of the email, what it's
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about, what it says, how it says it, and how many other people are getting
that same email message. If it looks like spam, then the email is simply
placed in your spam or junk mail folder instead of your inbox. So, if you get
50 spam emails every day, you are probably not protected by a spam filter
at all.
Training the Filter. The default filter at Gmail, Yahoo!, Outlook (Hotmail)
or most other major email providers is typically relatively good. But you
can, and should, make it better. When you see spam in your inbox, click
the checkmark next to its line in the list of email, and then click the "Spam"
button: This tells Gmail that "messages like this are spam to me." It then
takes this information and uses it to refine its spam filter. Keep doing that
and the amount of spam you find in your inbox should decrease over time.
There's no way to completely stop spam; you just have to deal with it in a
way that makes it less of an issue when you get it.
Valuable tips. Make separate accounts for different purposes, e.g. one for
family, friends and personal business, one for buying on the web, and one
for everything else. This works very well for me as I delete hundreds of
unwanted emails per week, often without checking them. At least have two
accounts: one for personal things and one for your “public” persona. The
public email account, then, can act as your primary spam collector.
You might consider creating a Gmail account for use as your primary email.
Gmail has a good spam filter. Almost all of the spam goes into your spam
box where it gets automatically deleted after 30 days, so you never even
have to look at it.
Again, never respond to spam and never try to “remove” your email
address from spammers. They will only send you more because they know
you exist. But it is usually OK to ask reputable companies to remove your
email from their lists.
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Monthly Computer Club Meeting
Date: September 11, 2013
Time: 7:15 pm in the Rosborough Theater
7:15 Q&A: Our usual question and answer session. Bring your question
and someone probably will be able to give you an answer.
7:30 Program: How the Web Works. You use the World Wide Web
every day. Ever wondered what goes on “behind the scenes” to make it all
happen? You will be surprised. For September, Club consultant Bob
Nisbet will explain how that Web page appears on your monitor screen
from start to finish. It is pretty amazing. Come to the first Fall Club
presentation on September 11 and find out for yourself.
Newsletter Articles
How the Web Works
By Robert Nisbet
It has been a couple of months, but you may remember the article in the
June issue of the Newsletter commemorating the 20th Anniversary of the
World Wide Web. We use the Web every day in some way. So, what
happens from the time you type an address into the Web browser address
bar and click the Go button and the Web page appears on your screen? In
other words, how the heck does the Web work anyway?
Well, there’s an awful lot going on behind the curtain in the Wonderful Land
of Oz that you don’t see. I will try to describe in as non-technical terms as
possible the journey from your request for a Web page until it appears on
your monitor.
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The browser
The application you use to view things on the Web is called the Web
browser. It looks simple, but really it is a very sophisticated piece of
software, as you later will see. Most of you with Windows computers
probably use the Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, as it comes with
Windows. Apple computers usually use the Safari browser that comes
with Mac, iPad, and iPhone computers.
Other browsers are available that work with either computer operating
system. Among the popular ones are Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and
Opera. Whichever browser you use, it performs the same service and both
requests and displays the contents of Web pages.
The Internet
We usually talk about the World Wide Web; however, the highway over
which all things email, Web, streaming videos, and the like travel is the
Internet. It is really the “thing” that gets stuff from point A to point B. The
World Wide Web is part of the Internet and not some separate entity. The
Internet, though, really is not a physical “network.” It actually is just an
agreed upon set of rules – called protocols – that permit all physical
networks and all computers world-wide to communicate with each other.
The Internet protocols provide a universal language for computer
communication, just as the telephone system does for universal voice
communication.
Uniform Resource Locator
For us humans, communications are built around words and text. So, the
Web addresses that we use, formally called Uniform Resource Locators
(URLs), are character and word-based descriptions of the Web page we
are trying to reach.
Each URL has some standard Web jargon at the beginning (http://), then
usually the “www”, followed by the two-part actual address: the domain
name (e.g., asburymethodistvillage) and the high-level domain (e.g., org, in
this example). Each part is separated by a period or “dot.” For example,
the full URL for AMV is: http://www.asburymethodistvillage.org. That is
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what you would enter into your browser’s address bar or click on. (You skip
the “http://” part, as it is universal and your browser automatically enters
that.)
Domain Name System
While humans do better with text, computers are number-based machines.
They work much better with numbers than words, hence the first player in
your request’s journey is the Domain Name System (DNS), or in actuality,
a DNS server somewhere out there in cyberspace. A DNS server is a
computer that acts as a translator between human-speak and computerspeak. The DNS server takes your word-based input and translates it into
the corresponding number-based address before your computer sends it
on its way.
Another task of the DNS is to help guide requests for Web pages and the
Web pages themselves in the proper direction so they reach their intended
destinations.
So, before sending the URL Web address you entered on its journey, your
computer queries a DNS server and asks it to translate the URL into a
numeric address the Internet understands.
Internet Protocol Addresses
The address resulting from the DNS translation is called an Internet
Protocol (IP) address. Due to the explosive growth of the Web over the
last twenty years, we fast are running out of available IP addresses. The
current address system, abbreviated IPv4, (the “v” stands for version) can
provide up to 4.3 billion unique IP addresses. Now, while that sounds like a
whole lot, consider that there are trillions of Web pages and that each
physical device on any network anywhere (such as your computer or
smartphone) has to have a unique IP address, also. Many creative workarounds have kept things patched together and running for the last few
years.
A new IP addressing system is in the process of being implemented. It is
called IPv6 and it will provide 7.9×1028 times more addresses than IPv4.
Or, as one scientist put it, that will be enough unique addresses to assign
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one to every atom on the surface of the earth and still have enough left
over to do the same for another 100+ earths. That may hold us for a while.
You normally do not see any of these IP addresses, but it is interesting to
look at what the computers are digesting in getting your desired Web page
to you.
Let’s take a hypothetical Web page whose URL is www.example.com.
Under the current IPv4 address scheme, its address would be something
like: 192.20.43.10. It sure is a lot easier to remember www.example.com,
don’t you think? Under the new IPv6 address scheme, the address would
look like: 2001:500:88b:200c::10. Now, who would want to memorize or
type in that?
Packets
Things get a bit technical here. Suffice it to say that the Internet cannot
digest large chunks of data. Things like Web pages are broken into small
chunks and packaged into things called packets. Each packet of data has
“header”” data – like the addresses on an envelope – indicating where it
came from and where it is going. I’ll talk more about packets on the return
journey to your computer.
The Journey Out
Your IP address is small enough to fit into one packet, so it is bundled up
and sent on its way by your browser.
There is no such thing as a “straight shot” on the Internet. The packet
making up your request for a Web page is going to follow paths of least
resistance. It is passed along from available network node to available
network node heading in the general direction of the address of the site you
requested. Along the way it will pass through major hubs controlling large
fiber optic bundles called Backbones. The Backbone links can carry tens
of millions of packets simultaneously as bursts of light.
Eventually, your request packet reaches your destination site and is
removed from its packet and read. Of course, “eventually” is a pretty brief
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time in terms of electrons flowing across networks and usually is about a
half a second or less.
Certainly, a key part of the request you sent on its way had to contain the
IP address of your computer, as was mentioned previously. Otherwise, the
Web page you wanted could never get back to you. The responding Web
site packages up the contents of the page you requested into a large
number of packets and sends them on their return Internet journey back to
your computer.
The Journey Back
In the telephone system, essentially a direct “wire” connection is formed
between you and the party you call. The Internet does not work that way.
The Web page you requested is far too large to fit into one packet, so it is
broken up into many pieces and each is fit into a packet with your
computer’s IP address in the header. Additionally, the packet contains
instructions as to where that piece fits into the whole. Essentially, the
page’s Ikea assembly manual.
The journey back to your computer is more akin to putting pieces of a letter
to a foreign country into several envelopes and dropping them into several
different widely separated mailboxes. The sub-letters make their way
through various postal “nodes” and eventually all the pieces reach the
mailbox of the recipient. Then, the recipient can piece the letter back
together and read it.
Each packet making up the Web page you requested then probably will
travel a different path from source to destination. Nobody is worried about
how it gets there. Of course, as mentioned earlier, there are certain
backbone hubs – such as at either end of trans-oceanic fiber optic cables –
through which all traffic flows. After that, each packet pretty much is on its
own journey.
When all the necessary packets to display your web page reach their
destination (your computer), they piece themselves back together into a
whole again, using the header data instructions, and create your Web
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page. An excellent video – a link to which appears at the end of the article
– explains packets and Internet travel visually.
In very simple terms, without going into the details of packet switching and
all that other technical stuff, that is the way Web pages travel when you
request one.
Your Web Page
Very shortly (usually) after you enter the URL and click the Go button on
your browser, all the packets making up the page you requested make their
way back to your computer and are reassembled. The page you requested
appears on your screen. It has travelled a long way in a very short time!
The information magically appears on your browser page.
We have grown up with the age of television, where pictures and words
somehow are sent over the air (or cable or fiber optics now) and appear on
a TV screen. You may think that is the way the Web works when you see a
fancy Web page, but you would be way off base.
It turns out that the Internet is a very simplistic communications path.
(Computers were pretty simplistic beasties three decades ago when the
Internet was formed.) The only data that can be sent over the Internet
consist of the letters, numbers, and symbols you find on your standard
computer keyboard. Web pages sure look more complex than that!
In reality, your Web browser is more like a stage actor than a TV. What the
distant Web site sent to you was a text-based “script” describing in word
terms what the page should look like. Your browser reads the script,
interprets it, and then creates on the fly what you see on your monitor. So,
as I said earlier, your Web browser is pretty sophisticated in reality. It
doesn’t just “show” Web pages, it creates them in milliseconds from basic
text.
That script it uses is written in a language called HTML (HyperText Markup
Language for the curious). I won’t get into more details about it here.
However, below is a snippet of the HTML script that puts the Asbury
Methodist Village Web page onto your monitor screen. The colors just help
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the author keep track of different components. Fortunately, browsers are
better trained a reading this stuff than you or me.
But wait! (As they say on the TV infomercials.) How on earth do all those
graphics appear on the screen if text is all that the Internet can handle?
More behind-the-scenes magic. It is done through an encoding-decoding
process called MIME. (No we’re not talking Marcel Marceau here, this
MIME is an acronym.) MIME stands for Multimedia Internet Mail
Extensions.
MIME started way back when all there was was email. It was developed as
a way to add non-text or foreign character attachments to email messages.
Now, it widely is used on the Web to encode graphics and non-text data.
Each graphic pixel is encoded at the sender’s end with MIME and then
decoded back into its original form before it is displayed on your monitor
screen. (After all, digital images really are nothing more than strings of
ones and zeros anyway.)
If you were to see a Web graphic that had not been properly decoded, all
you would see would be pages upon pages filled with seemingly random
keyboard characters.
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Around the Web in 800 Milliseconds
That simple little “www” address you put into your browser takes quite a
journey to present the end-resulting Web page on your monitor.
Fortunately, everything happens at the speed of electrons, so we really
don’t think about all the stops and detours and conversions along the way.
So, the next time you go somewhere on the Web, think about all that
happens before that Web page nearly instantly appears on your computer
monitor. There really is a whole lot going on out there to make it happen.
It ain’t magic, but it sure seems like it sometimes.
The Web Visually
For an easy to follow visual explanation which will help you understand the
Internet’s and the Web’s workings even better, click here to view the
excellent video. It is best viewed at full screen. Just click the button
(indicated below) on the video player’s toolbar to go full screen mode. The
ESC key takes you back to normal screen at the end.
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Money Saving Caveat
By Robert Nisbet
If you recently have upgraded to Windows 8 or bought a Windows
8 computer, save your money and DON’T buy a Windows 8 howto book! You will be upgrading to Windows 8.1 after its October
18 release and that version is so different, you barely will
recognize many of the things you find in the Windows 8 book. We
have to keep those starving authors in bread and caviar, so wait
until the Windows 8.1 books hit the market before you buy a help
book for your new Windows. I will be covering more about
Windows 8.1 in the October newsletter

JCA SenorTech Classes
Registration for most September-October classes will have closed by the
time you read this. There is one class in October that you really should
consider, however. It is our Stay Secure Online course. If you think your
antivirus software is all you need to keep you safe while online, you are
dead wrong!
This three-week course explains all of the various threats your computer
and you face while online. It explains the tools you have available to you to
counter the threats. And it offers a number of tips to keep your computing
secure. While primarily a lecture course, you do visit various Web sites to
learn how to find and use some of the tools at your disposal.
The course will be held in the Smithey Technology Center on Fridays from
October 04 through October 18. The cost for Asbury residents is $45.
Course catalogs with registrations forms are available in the Smithey
Technology Center or contact Alicia at JCA SeniorTech at 240-395-0916
on Mondays, Wednesdays or Fridays to register.

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Answering a Request
We have had a request that we list establishments in the area that may be
able to help with your computer problems. The Club does not endorse any
of them, but merely lists them here for you.
But please remember that our Asbury Computer Club Consultants are
there for you, also. Just call them or visit them during their hours in the
Smithey Center. They are very knowledgeable and usually will have an
answer for you.
Computer Repair Facilities near AMV
The Computer Place – 50 Bureau Drive – 301-330-6016
Staples – 660 Quince Orchard Rd. – 301-987-7611
Absolute Mac (Apple products) – 895 Quince Orchard Rd. – 301-417-0600
Best Buy, Geek Squad – 15750 Shady Grove Rd. – 888-229-3770
Office Depot – 15790 Shady Grove Rd. – 301-527-0315
MicroCenter – 1776 S. Jefferson St., Rockville – 301-692-2130
Computer Tidbits
XP Users Refuse to Let Go
With the official retirement for Windows XP on April 8, 2014 inching closer
and closer, the number of people using XP isn’t dropping. According to Net
Application, the number of XP users dropped by only half a percentage
point in April 2013. XP accounts for 41.7% of all Windows systems
worldwide, barely down from 42.2% this past March.
The hackers will have a ball come April of next year. Without Microsoft
patching up the inevitable security holes, the Black Hats can destroy or
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take control of XP computers with impunity. Think about that as you decide
to hang on to “ol’ Bessie” for a couple of more years. Bob Nisbet will be
telling you more about Windows 8.1 in the October Newsletter.

A Warning!
There is a recurring “phishing” (look it up) exploitation going around related
to UPS, FedEx, DHL, or USPS shipping information. You are sent an email
providing a Tracking Number for a package meant for you. They ask you to
click on the number given in message to obtain additional delivery info.
DON’T DO IT. It probably will implant a Virus or Trojan horse onto your
computer. Just as bad, you may be infected with a fake antivirus program
that will take over your computer and hold it for ransom.
Instead, just copy the Tracking Number and go to the shipping firm’s official
site (FEDEX, DHL, USPS, or UPS) and paste in that number. If it is
legitimate, you will get the information you are seeking. If it indicates that
the number is not valid, you know that you were being phished and will
have saved yourself a whole lot of grief.

Some interesting Internet Finds
How do I copy photos from my phone to my PC?
http://goo.gl/uq9Vx
Five Ways to Get Data from Your Desktop to your Android:
http://goo.gl/2Pb0d
The Ultimate Guide to Private Browsing on the Internet
http://goo.gl/XslrH
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Smithey Center Consultant Hours
Don Shenosky**
Tues & Wed: 2-4 pm
301-519-0696
Bob Nisbet
Thursday: 1-3 pm
301-963-5674
Club Related Email Contacts
President
George Stosur
[email protected]
Membership
Dorothy Blakeslee
[email protected]
Newsletter Editor
Jean Young
[email protected]
Apple Corps
Jeanne North
[email protected]
Club Consultant
Don Shenosky**
[email protected]
Club Consultant
Bob Nisbet
[email protected]
**Don Shenosky may be out-of-town for the remainder of the year.
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