February 2006  Show Summaries

Show Summaries Below
  February 22, 2006  February 15, 2006  February 8, 2006   February 1, 2006  
 February 22, 2006 Show AudioArchives   TOP 

Another fund raising show. A trifecta, our third fund raiser in a row. Again, our thanks to listeners who pledged their support of WBAI. As is usual for fund raising, there were no listener phone calls.

We spoke briefly with Alex Eckelberry, president of Sunbelt Software, the makers of CounterSpy, an anti-Spyware program. There has been a recent rash of newly formed groups to combat Spyware. Is this a good thing? Sunbelt belongs to none of the groups. Alex maintains a security related blog at sunbeltblog.blogspot.com. It is, in no way, a sales pitch for his product. 

This week saw three serious bug in the Mac OS X. The latest effected the Safari browser and users can have their Mac infected just by viewing a malicious web page. Firefox on the Mac does not have this problem. Secunia called this bug extremely critical. There is no fix as of yet. 

 

 February 15, 2006 Show AudioArchives   TOP 

Another fund raising show. Thanks again to listeners who pledged their support of WBAI. 

We covered the computer news of the week and, as is usual for fund raising, there were no listener phone calls.

Hank gave his first impressions of TUT, The Ultimate Troubleshooter.

 

 February 8, 2006 Show AudioArchives   TOP 

This was a fund raising show. Our thanks to listeners who pledged their support of WBAI.

We also answered some email from listeners (there were no phone calls). 

One question dealt with fixing a computer that won't play any sounds. Another had to do with completely, totally and permanently erasing a hard disk before donating an old computer. A listener who wants to record radio shows that don't Podcast asked if there's a Tivo for radio shows?
 

 

 February 1, 2006 Show AudioArchives   TOP 

Update your anti-virus software. A virus is set to activate itself on February 3rd. If it's on your computer, it will delete many of your data files; Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and more. For more see: F-Secure Virus Information Pages : Nyxem.E 

Alfred is the HDTV Professor hdtvprofessor.com  

The show topic was free calls over the Internet using Voice Over IP or VOIP for short. 

The IP stands for Internet Protocol and refers to using the Internet as the transmission medium for the phone calls. While the old telephone network was analog, everything on the Internet is digital. Thus VOIP requires converting your voice into a digital format, something audio CDs have been doing for many years. 

We discussed Skype, Gizmo Project, TeamSpeak and others. All these programs let you talk from one computer to another for free, assuming that both computers are using software from the same company. They also, let you use a computer to make a phone call to a normal telephone - landline or cellphone. This, however is not free. But it's very cheap. Within the US, Skype charges two cents a minute. 

The Gizmo Project connects to many types of devices such as WiFi phones, other VOIP and IM directories (like GoogleTalk) and the open source Asterisk PBX software. These products allow you to make conference calls. Skype allows five computers per conference, Gizmo has a higher limit. 

How secure is Skype? See SKYPE SECURITY EVALUATION Tom Berson Anagram Laboratories October 18, 2005. 

A caller asked about removing a virus. Michael has links to many on-line virus scanners on his web site. 

The February 8th show will be a fund raiser. We will be on at our normal time. The membership premiums that we will offer are on this site (click the Membership Premiums button on the left).