E-Musings Mon Immorata

Ye Olde Four-One-Nine Scam I'm sure you've been spammed (and frequently at that) by people claiming to have stashed away vast amounts of money. All these scams appear to originate in Africa. And in each case the correspondent asks for your bank account details. Although I've yet to engage in a dialog with the "scammers" others on the web have. And often it's the spammer who blinks first and walks away. Generically it's know as the "Nigerian Scam" or the 'Advance Fee Fraud', '419 Fraud' (Four-One-Nine) after the relevant section of the Nigeria's Criminal Code and 'The Nigerian Connection' (mostly in Europe). Nigerian have dubbed it the plain old '419'. And since 1996, it's earned over $5 Billion to the scammers. Not to mention several lives lost. The Nigerian Government now runs a special web site to explain what the scam's about and how to avoid becoming a victim. The problem is quite acute in the US and many retiree's have lost their life saving, and in some isolated cases their lives too. The US Secret Service is concerned enough too to offer a special section on the scam. In other stuff, AOL's finally pulled the plug on Netscape. But has pledged $2 million to the Mozilla Foundation; which effectively has driven what Netscape-based browser development there's been. New this week is another (incremental) OpenOffice.org release. v1.1 RC2, add tiny bug fixes. These include an easier install for Windows 98 users as well as improved export to PDF, SWF and DocBook format, better on-line Help. Plus single-user installation update capability, Bitstream Vera fonts, enhanced proofing and hyphenation and new Microsoft Office filters. Unfortunately, OpenOffice.org is not getting better. Indeed its worse now that earlier builds. Either they aren't bug-testing new features enough. Or there's new untested code that's been included. The new 1.1 variants are memory hogs. And several menus seem to have been rebuilt as well, but the Help file had still to catch up! I'm beginning to prefer OfficeXP for lots of functions still missing in OpenOffice.org. There's also another MyIE2 build, taking the current version to 0.8.220 from x.130. This is just a maintenance release to fix several bugs. And to wrap up, have you checked out Aida32? This neat and free system reporter also undertakes diagnostics and benchmarking. You can view results in real-time, print them, or save to a Web page. The app supports multiple formats including CSV and XML. The enterprise edition offers command-line switches, network audit with audit statistics, remote system information, and network management.