TCS - Internet Sig Meeting

Internet Sig Meeting

by Don Singleton
Tulsa Computer Society
From the September 1997 issue of the I/O Port Newsletter

Thanks to Pat Crowley for taking down the questions posed at the meeting so I could respond to them in detail in this report.

What Is the Best Way to Find An Email Address For Someone?

The BEST way is to call them, or write them, or otherwise contact them and ask them what their email address is. The 2nd Best way is to call, write, or otherwise contact someone you think might know them, and ask that person what the email address is of the person you want to contact.

There are other ways to try, of course. If you check out http://www.tcs.org/search.htm#PEOPLE you will find five web sites that offer search capabilities to try to locate email addresses, and under some situations these will work, particularly if the person you wish to reach is associated with a university, because frequenly universities will make their directories available to these web sites, but since there is no central authority for the internet, there is no central place to check to see what email addresses exist, and who they are for.

At the meeting we did a search to find individuals with a given last name in the UK, and with just one of the sites we found 30 people with that name. There is no guarantee that any of them are members of this members family, but there is a good chance if he sends email to each of them, and each of those identified by the other four web sites, he may find some individual with genealogical information sought by our member.

What Is the Best Way to Get Your Web Page Noticed?

Use one of the two web publicity sites at http://www.tcs.org/search.htm#REGISTER to register your web page with a number of the search engines at one time. Those search engines will dispatch their robots (or spiders, or worms, or whatever you call these automated programs) to check out your web page and select index terms to be used to help people find your web page.

Is There a Way for Parents to Keep Track of What Their Children Are Looking At On the Internet?

Absolutely. If you check http://www.tcs.org/parents.htm you will see links for several programs, including Surf Watch, Cyber Sitter, and Net Nanny, that parents can use to track what children are doing on the net, and to block sites they should not be able to access. There is even a link to http://www.tcs.org/safekid1.htm which is an article I wrote some time ago summarizing what some of these programs do. If I can find the time, I may do those reviews again, because I know the programs have improved significantly since I wrote that article.

Is There a Way to Find the Routing On the Net to a Site?

In Windows 95 you can go to DOS and run the program TRACERT in which you give it a particular domain name, and it identifies each "hop" along the route from your ISP to that domain name.

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Tulsa Computer Society 08/15/97