ON Computers
BOB & JOY SCHWABACH
ZoneAlarm's new "ForceField" software wraps you in a virtual bubble of invisibility while you surf the Web. Since you're invisible, you can bank online or shop, without picking up any spyware or malware.
That's great, but most important of all, it knocks out "key loggers", which can be installed without your knowledge when you visit a malicious web site. For those unfamiliar with this kind of snooping software, what key loggers do is record all your keystrokes. Keyloggers can then collect what you have typed, including your passwords, email messages and any banking or credit card transactions you may have made. In a test run against key logger programs, ForceField blocked ten out of ten.
There are three basic controls in ZoneAlarm's ForceField:
1. You can click "Protection Activity" to see how many attacks were foiled.
2. Click "Site Status" to find out if the web site you're on is considered dangerous.
3. Click "Private Browser" to destroy all traces of your surfing history. We especially liked the fact that travelling from inside a bubble didn't noticeably slow down our web surfing.
ForceField sells for $50 and comes with an extra program called Password Manager. This is particularly handy when you are surfing the web under the protection of "Private Browser". Otherwise you would have to re-enter your passwords every time you go to a web site that requires them.
Zone Alarm Force Field reminds us of the "Cone of Silence" on the old Get Smart show. The program is for PCs only and does not interfere with your other anti-virus or protection programs. There is a free trial available at ZoneAlarm.com.
Internuts
Fimages.google.com. The best thing about the old LIFE magazine was its photographs. Now you can look at over 10 million of these and more from the Time/Life collection online here. Ninety-seven percent have never been seen by the public before. The archives include The Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination; The Mansell Collection from London; Dahlstrom glass plates of New York and environs from the 1880s; Hugo Jaeger Nazi-era Germany 1937-1944; celebrity shots; and photos by Margaret Bourke-White, Gordon Parks, Alfred Eisenstaedt and many others.
F350.com - Create a web site for free, using drag-and-drop templates with many design tools from Xara, a rival to Adobe Illustrator. Go to Library.350.com to find out how to add a calendar, map, video and other features to any website. If you don't want their ads on your site or "350pages" in the web site name, the cost is $9 a month.
The numbers report
FSeventy-four per cent of people surveyed by StrategyOne Research said they hope to receive electronic gear and software as gifts this year; 81 per cent of those surveyed wanted gifts that provided home entertainment
FIn a single 48- hour period recently, the world's spam decreased by 65 per cent when a Silicon Valley web hosting company, McColo Corporation, was shut down, according to a recent note from Symantec. The relief may be brief; the holiday spending months are high season for spammers and another web hosting service is likely to spring up to deliver more spam. No rest for the weary.
Hard driven
Seagate has a sleek new portable hard drive, the Free Agent/Go. Slender and slight and dressed in deep blue, red or silver, the drive has a capacity of 320 gigabytes and lists for $150 for the PC, $190 for the Mac. For another $25 you can get a docking station that let's the drive sit upright. The docking station is nice but not necessary.
Okay, enough with the ooh and ah description, there's something interesting going on here. Because at the same time we started reviewing the Seagate drive we got a tiny USB flash drive from SuperTalent (SuperTalent.com). It's about the half the size of a stick of chewing gum, sells for less than $48 and holds eight gigabytes of data. Easily fits on a keychain. It's not hard to do the numbers: The flash drive costs the buyer $6 per gigabyte of storage. The smallest Seagate drive costs 50 cents a gigabyte. That's a huge difference, and as each side drops it price, it forces the other to do the same. As the hard drive capacity goes up, the cost per gigabyte goes down.
As Bugs Bunny would say: "You know of course that this means war." On one side is the traditional hard drive, with a spinning disk inside; on the other are memory chips, which don't spin. Some day the price curves will meet, but that day is a long way off. Meanwhile, we can all enjoy the benefits of this retail battle.
Under the green umbrella
Now here's an idea whose time has definitely come: It's the Green Umbrella warranty at GreenUmbrella.com. It negates buying a store's "extended warranty", and covers everything you buy, as long as it was in the U.S.
Buying a store's "extended warranty" whenever you buy new equipment is one of the worst purchases you can make (and one of the most profitable for them). The extended warranty is expensive and you have to buy a new one for every piece of equipment.
What's wrong here is that every piece of new equipment, be it a computer, a monitor, disk drive or a vacuum cleaner, nearly always carries a warranty from the manufacturer. If it is going to break down, that failure almost always occurs in the first two years of use, which is almost always within the maker's warranty period.
For $10 a month, at GreenUmbrella.com, you can have all your products waranteed, as long as each one is less than $5000. Once you're enrolled, you can add an unlimited number of new products, as long as you register them while they're still less than 60 days old. GreenUmbrella.com is part of Experian Interactive, whose products include FreeCreditReport.com, PriceGrabber.com and Lowermybills.com, all very popular web sites.
Readers can search several years of On Computers columns at our new web site OnComp.com. We can be contacted by email at JoyDee@OnComp.com and BobSchwab@gmail.com
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