(with pictures:
spamassassin.org
www.mountains2002.org
www.redcolony.com
www.bbcurdu.com
www.plantlife.org.uk)


THE INTERNET COLUMN
By Giles Turnbull


ANYONE who has seen the new Steven Spielberg epic Minority Report will have noticed one of the more frightening aspects of his future world - advertising that follows people everywhere.

Interactive billboards recognise passing pedestrians and whisper suggestions in their ears. Even cereal boxes talk.

In recent years the internet has become overrun with advertising in much the same way. Cookies stored on your hard disk identify you as you surf, and adverts are presented to you based on the web sites you've seen, and any adverts you've clicked on before.

By far the most annoying kind of advert around on the net today is the pop-up, or pop-under, type.

These are the ones that appear in their own little window all by themselves; although as time goes on they are getting bigger and more intrusive.

But I rarely get bothered by them any more. I have discovered a world free of pop-up adverts, and I can tell you that it is an absolute delight.

The simplest way to reach this nirvana is to change your web browser. If you use Internet Explorer, there is no way to get rid of pop-up adverts without installing a separate pop-up killer program.

But if you download and install an alternative web browser, like Mozilla or Opera, you can kill the pop-ups with just a couple of clicks.

In Opera (www.operasoftware.com), advert-killing is as simple as calling up a menu with the F12 button, and selecting "Refuse pop-up windows".

Of course, if you want to use Opera without paying for it you still have to put up with banner adverts embedded in the program itself, so that may not be the best solution.

That's why you might consider Mozilla (www.mozilla.org) instead. With this browser, a descendent of the Netscape of old, you can switch of pop-ups by clicking on the "Edit" menu, then choosing "Preferences".

In the Preferences dialog box, click on "Advanced", then "Scripts and Windows". Un-check the box marked "Open unrequested windows" and click the "OK" button - that's all there is to it.

Adverts aren't only restricted to the web, though. All of us face the daily deluge of junk mail - spam - in our email inboxes.

But there's a weapon to use here as well, one that works extremely well.

It's the new wave of intelligent mail filtering - software that looks at all your incoming email and tries to work out if it is spam or not, based on a set of established rules.

Mail filters conduct "tests" on each mail message and apply points to it. If a message scores more than a fixed number of points - say, five - it is automatically moved to a "spam" mailbox.

The beauty of a system like this is that it does not delete anything. You are able to delve into the spam mailbox whenever you like, just to check if any legitimate emails have been mistakenly tagged as spam.

If so, you can then teach your filtering software that it has made a mistake, and it will learn not to repeat it.

Similarly, sometimes a spam will get through the net and appear in your mailbox. Again, it's a relatively simple task to tell the software what it has done wrong.

Periodically, when your spam mailbox gets too large, you can empty out all the junk in one go.

My email provider installed a system like this, called Spam Assassin (spamassassin.org),  about two months ago. Since then, it has caught over 1400 spam messages, with an excellent accuracy rate. One or two personal messages were considered spam, and a handful of spams made it through to my inbox. But other than those minor glitches, it has been extremely successful.

Your email provider may not be prepared to install something like Spam Assassin on your behalf (it is software that sits on the email server, not on your personal computer), although you should ask if they will consider it.

But if that's not an option, you can run mail filtering software on your own computer. 

Mac users can upgrade to the latest version of Apple's free Mail application, which has filtering built-in.

Windows users can buy a plug-in for the Outlook email program (SpamAssassin Pro, from Deersoft - www.deersoft.com) for under 20 dollars.


BROWSING AROUND ...

:: 2002 is the International Year of Mountains (www.mountains2002.org)

:: Red Colony is a place planning missions to Mars (www.redcolony.com)

:: The BBC now has a news web site for Urdu speakers (www.bbcurdu.com)

:: Read about plant conservation efforts at the Plantlife site (www.plantlife.org.uk)

Giles Turnbull has a web site at gilest.org

ENDS