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Do you jr. skulkers remember the "happy99" virus/trojan-horse that was going around a few months ago?  We hadn't seen it for a long time and thought it had died out, but its baaaaaaak!  WebSkulker is, among other things, the webmaster for an American company that receives most of its email from overseas, with a large portion from India.  In the last couple of weeks, more than one out of 10 of the emails from India had the "happy99.exe" attachment, so it may make another round in the U.S.  Happy99 was so well publicized in the U.S. that we won't say anything more about it unless we get email asking for details.
 

In our 9/17/99 issue, we mentioned a service called "Freeway" that you subscribe to at
http://www.broadpoint.com.  Long distance calls through Freeway really are free, even from payphones, but the gimmick is that you must listen to short advertisements first, as many as you want, one 15 second ad per 2 minutes of talk time.  Broadpoint is so over overloaded with requests for Freeway that when you fill out the application form, you must wait 4-6 weeks before they send email that your free account is activated.

Skulkers don't like waiting, and WebSkulker noticed that if you allow Broadpoint to pass on your personal information to a credit card company to order a Visa card, then Broadpoint will accelerate your application and set you up for Freeway in a couple of days instead of weeks.  The Visa card looked like an OK deal so WebSkulker filled out the credit application and did get Freeway access two days later.  Freeway works as advertised, but it is a little soft so it doesn't work well for calls to a voicemail system that need a lot of touch toning.

For jr. skulkers who want Freeway now, but don't want the credit card, WebSkulker wonders whether Broadpoint would notice an obviously phony credit application.  Freeway and the Visa card seem to be separate deals with the applications handled by separate companies.  One could probably get the accelerated account for Freeway because Broadpoint probably doesn't check the information.  The Visa company would see the phony entry and ignore it, but at that point you would already have the Freeway account and it probably wouldn't be cancelled. 

http://www.neotrace.com/neotrace

http://www.neoworx.com/neotrace/download.asp

In yesterday's issue, we discussed using the DOS-level command "tracert" to trace the path between your computer and any other site on the Internet.  We neglected to mention NeoTrace, a great program that does the same kind of tracing, but graphically and optionally on maps, with a lot of additional information about each node that your traffic passes through.  NeoTrace is a commercial product priced at $29.95, but you can download and run a demo version for free.  WebSkulker paid for this a long time ago and forgets what the restrictions were in the demo version, but it was quite usable and worth downloading.  Perhaps it expired after a time.

The first link above gives screen shots and a description of NeoTrace; the second link is for downloading the demo version.

This item was contributed by Jr. Skulker Bob Gudgel via our feedback forums at news://news.webskulker.com.  

http://www.oanda.com/converter/classic

The OANDA site specializes in information about currencies around the world.  The above link goes to their "Classic 164 Currency Converter" which asks you which currency to convert from and to (from a list of 164), the amount to convert, who will be doing the conversion (interbank, credit card, money changer, etc.) and the date of the conversion (today, or a past date back to around 1990).  Click on "Convert Now" to do the calculation.

http://alts1.kodak.com/US/en/corp/playground

This site acts like a suite of photo editing tools, but all right there on the web page without installing any software on your computer.  Go to the Kodak page and choose an editing effect or choose a conversion of your picture to an animal, a flower, or a cartoon.  Then choose any picture on your hard drive or any picture you see on any web page and the site will copy that picture to its server and perform the effect.  When done you can download the converted picture, have Kodak send it to a friend as a virtual postcard, or have it printed on paper, a cap, T-shirt, etc.  and mailed to you.

WebSkulker already has photo editing software so most of the effects on this site bored him, however the cartoon function worked rather well.  It really does take a photograph and turn it into something that looks like it was hand-drawn by a cartoonist.  Try it! 

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