First, an important addition to your constantly burgeoning social calendar. Our local Mac User Group, affectionately called MMOOS (Maine Macintosh Owners and Operators Society), will meet this Tuesday, February 15th, at 7:00 PM, in the Multi-Purpose Room at Brunswick High School. Make plans to attend.

Valentine’s Day is fast approaching. Smooch smooch. Computer security firms are warning of increased spam and viral trafficking by the unseemly side of the internet (and the seemly side as well). You’ll probably get a lot of “legitimate” email hawking chocolate, flowers, and cute, mushy, greeting cards, but just remember that those fronts can be used by “phishers” trying to get you to click onto their website hawking something, let’s just say, a little less romantic.

If “phishers” is a new word for you, phishing is the act of sending an email to an unsuspecting computer user, claiming to be a legitimate enterprise, asking the user to got to a website and voluntarily “update” personal information (like credit card numbers, bank account information, etc.). The website’s address and “look” are close enough to the real thing to not arouse suspicion in the unwary customer, and their identity is stolen. You may recall recent phishing scams involving eBay and Earthlink. Remember, it’s highly unlikely that a legitimate firm is going to all-of-a-sudden “lose” you, and need to confirm your credit card number or bank account. When in doubt, contact the real firm directly through another means, like (and I know this will sound so “yesterday”) a phone call. Scary, isn’t it?

Now, as Mac users we don’t have near the amount of security concerns as our Windoze friends have. For example, should we receive an email with an attachment containing a nasty virus, our Mac cannot be affected by it. We can, however, pass it on to someone using that “Swiss cheese” operating system. Don’t be a computer “Typhoid Mary”.

Instead of just clicking the “Forward” button to send that cute Valentine’s Day limerick or photo of a cat and dog curled up on the sofa together to everyone you know “as is”, spend a few moments cleaning it up. Get rid of other addresses, header information, other replies from people you (and your receivers) don’t know, and any other extraneous text. Then, make sure that the attached photo is indeed a photo. If there’s an attachment with an “.exe” extension, definitely don’t send it to your Windoze friends.

© 2005 Peter F. Zimowski