Let people know how you feel about your Broadband provider.
This survey is being conducted by the operators of the independent broadband users forum, Whirlpool.
Australian Broadband Survey / 2003

After a Californian anti-Spam law was strengthened last month, a court fined a marketing firm $2 million for sending out millions of unsolicited email messages. The owners of the company involved were also barred from advertising on the internet for 10 years..

After January 2004, the Californian law will allow individuals to sue spammers for damages of up to $1,000 per email.

See BBC News Item.

Many countries are pushing through anti-spam legislation, and hopefully it will have some effect on the deluge of unwanted mail that is choking up the internet.

Consumer site www.notgoodenough.org publishes a list of 10 gripes every week. This week, the top of the list is a complaint from jred13, who is facing bankruptcy over a demand for $25,000 relating to excess usage on Telstra’s ADSL account.

Recently, a TV program told of a woman who incurred a bill of over $10,000 for excess bandwidth.

How Can Excess Usage Happen?
Well, if your kids do a lot of gaming, or download movies, your entire months allocation could be used in a very short time.
If you have an cable or ADSL connection that is on permanently, a virus or worm on your system, or use file sharing programs such as KaaZaa, you could be responsible for transferring a LOT of data that you don’t even know about. Hundreds of people from all over the world could be receiving files from your computer - at YOUR expense if you’re not careful.

If you are in a situation where you are charged for excess bandwidth and are looking for some sympathy - forget it. Telstra’s Excess Usage Policy states that YOU are solely responsible for any usage caused by viruses, worms., etc.

Some ISP’s have a system where ADSL downloads over a certain limit are slowed down to 56K, and no charges are made. It’s unfortunate that jred13 wasn’t with one of them.

**UPDATE 29th October.
Many, many people on whirlpool.net.au are complaining about bills for excess usage on big Pond Broadband plans. If you are hit for such a bill, Telstra don’t have to give you any details of why you incurred the extra charge.
This is in clause 7.4 of your agreement with them.
http://www.bigpond.com/broadband/access/ADSL/TermsandConditions/

Comments? - click below.

If you need a good graphics program, get a copy of the October 2003 edition of Australian PC User.
It contains a CD ROM with a free full version of JASC paintshop Pro version 5, a top quality graphics program.
To use it, you’ll have to register it online before 10th November 2003 so that you can obtain the registration key.

Lots of tutorials for this program are available free on the internet.

(you’ll also find Paragon 2002 Partition Manager, and a full version of a Cricket Statistics program on the disk)

(If you are a WebAngel hosting client, please see the bottom of this message)

The Telstra email system is currently suffering severe problems, and mail messages are being lost and delayed. Apparently thousands of websites on the Big Pond system have also disappeared.

Here’s an article from ZDNET:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/ebusiness/story/0,2000048590,20279675,00.htm

The claimed reason, a “20% surge in traffic caused by SPAM”, is a furphy in our opinion. A 20% traffic increase should not cause this type of problem - unless the system was overloaded in the first place.

There appear to be long standing, chronic problems with the whole BigPond infrastructure as discussed in the Whirlpool “Big Pond” forum at www.whirlpool.net.au
To find out the experiences of other broadband users, just click on the Discussion Forum link on the left side of the page, and select “Big Pond”

Edit: 17th Oct: iPrimus boss says that Telstra is lying.
Read articles from Australian Financial Review, Whirlpool.net, and some amazingly frank comments from other Broadband users.
http://whirlpool.net.au/article.cfm/1202?show=replies

If you are thinking about getting Broadband installed, don’t automatically go for Big Pond. There are many better alternatives. The “BROADBAND CHOICE” link at the Whirlpool forums gives an excellent summary of the providers servicing your area.

One of our directors who is based in Sydney has recently changed from Telstra to Swiftel. He now gets 3 times the speed, and nearly three times the data transfer for the same price. (and also saves several hundred dollars a month in excess bandwidth fees.
(Since his Bigpond account has been closed, his SPAM message count has also been reduced by about 100 messages per day.)

*************************************************
Hosting your website with Telstra?
WebAngel can save you hundreds of dollars a year.
See www.webangel.com.au/hostcharts.htm
*************************************************

In Hobart, we’ll also be moving away from Telstra Broadband - probably to Netspace.
(Three times the speed, three times the data transfer, slight increase in cost compared to Telstra. Apparently there is also a NetSpace rep in hobart who actually answers the phone, and gets things done when you have a problem.)

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TO WEBANGEL HOSTING CLIENTS
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If you are having your email forwarded to your Telstra ISP account instead of using your WebAngel mail server, it is probably being caught up in Telstra’s mail delays.

If you want to receive your mail without these delays, we recommend that you use your WebAngel mail server instead of Telstra’s.
All you need to do is to setup a default mail box on your hosting account, remove the redirection to Telstra, and set up your email program to check the WebAngel Server instead of the Telstra server.

Instructions for doing this were in the setup email you received when your account was opened.
If you don’t want to get your hands dirty, we’ll set it up free of charge for one or two mailboxes
(Additional mailboxes: A small charge may apply)

A year or more ago it was revealed that a CD copy protection system could be defeated by running a marker pen around the edge of the disk.

The industry has obviously been working pretty hard after that embarrassment, and SunnComm has come up with a new system called MediaMax CD3 which turns out to be even easier to defeat - you don’t even need a marker pen.

The company is threatening a student with a $10m lawsuit for pointing out that the system could be defeated by pressing the shift key while inserting the disk.
Full story in The Register

Good job that the developers aren’t working for banks - our credit card numbers would probably have only one digit.

Australia’s anti-spam legislation has passed through the lower house, and will now go to the Senate. Here’s the report from the australian newspaper.
Australian IT - Spam bill goes to Senate (Staff writers and wires, OCTOBER 09, 2003)

The proposed legislation gives authorities wide powers to enter premises without warrants, and to search and seize items suspected of being associated with SPAM.

Here’s our previous blog on the topic.
The Australia card caused an outrage when it was proposed. How did this get through?

In our opinion, the best way to deal with SPAM is to take responsibility for it yourself.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for governments to come up with effective ways to stop the flood of SPAM messages into your inbox. And allowing your ISP to make the decision for you may result in the loss of mail that you really wanted to receive.

One very effective method is to take charge of filtering messages yourself, using one of the powerful new “Bayesian” filtering tools that “learn” about your individual definition of what is spam.

These days, there seem to be hundreds of companies promising to filter spam for you. Here are a few that we can recommend.

At WebAngel, we have been using Eudora 6 for almost a month now. You’ll have to buy the registered version to use the SPAM management facilities, but these are the easiest to use and most effective that we have seen. (www.eudora.com )

In addition to its own very effective SPAM filtering rules, Eudora quickly “learns” about what YOU regard as SPAM. After a couple of weeks use, only two or three spams make it to my inbox each day. The other 200 or so are silently placed in the JUNK folder. I spend a few minutes a day reviewing these, to make sure that Eudora has not junked the odd message that I want to keep (ie a “False Positive”).

SPAM Filter For Outlook Users:

InBoxer from www.inboxer.com, appears to be the leading anti-spam product for integration into Outlook. It costs $US24.95 and has a 21 day free trial.

SPAM filter for any email program

Another effective program is MailWasher, www.mailwasher.net. There are free and paid versions. This program sits between your mail program and your internet mailbox, and lets you get rid of spam and other unwanted email before you actually download it to your computer. If you are on a dialup connection, this could save you a lot of time.

A good SPAM filter will pay for itself in no time.

You may be reluctant to spend money on an email program or SPAM solution. Just do the sums on how much of your time is wasted by shuffling and identifying SPAM messges, and you’ll probably change your mind.

Other Anti-Spam products:
Have a look at www.download.com for software and user comments about all kinds of software. Just search for “spam filter”, or “email” and you’ll get lots of options.

Australia has jumped on the worldwide anti-spam legislation bandwagon, and introduced proposed anti-spam legislation into parliament on 18th September 2003.

This legislation has many problems according to Electronic Frontiers Australia Inc, a non profit organisation concerned with Internet freedoms and rights.

Their thorough analysis concludes that while the legislation would prevent sending some spam, it would also

- Authorise “special senders” such as government organisations, religious bodies, political parties, and charities to send spam.
- Prohibit the sending of some messages that are not spam
- Apparently allow government employees and police to enter your premises and examine and sieze email and computers without requiring a warrant - even if your only involvement is to RECEIVE the spam!

Read more: EFA Analysis of Australian Spam Bills 2003

We don’t think that legislation against spammers will be very effective.
Think about it - who knows more about techniques of spaming: politicians, or the spammers themselves. I’ll put my money on the spammers in getting around the legislation - or just clogging up the court system for months or years when any action is brought against them.

We have advised clients several times about the activities of a company called Domain Names Australia.

The ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) has now commenced Federal Court Proceedings against the company and its director Chesley Paul Rafferty for alleged breaches of sections 52 and 64(2A) of the Australian Trade Practices Act involving misleading or deceptive conduct in relation to the registration of internet domain names.

More information at www.accc.gov.au

If you send out an email to everyone in your address book, you could be divulging confidential information in breach of Australia’s privacy laws. (See our website article)

Here’s some tutorials from “somewhere In Time” that show you how to avoid this problem in Outlook, Eudora, and Netspace by use of the BCC option. How To forward emails using BCC
(There are also instructions for cleaning up the unwanted garbage when forwarding emails. )