46 MAXIMUMPC AUGUST 2004
IT’S POSSIBLE TO SEND AN
UNTRACEABLE E-MAIL
Let’s rephrase this one to make the issue
crystal clear. It’s possible to send fake e-
mail to a 90-year-old lady who uses AOL
dial-up. It’s not possible to send fake e-mail
to an entity that knows anything about
e-mail.
As one of our sources told us, “ Totally
anonymous e-mail is impossible—if it got
from you to there , it could be traced back
from there to you. There are measures you
can take to make your e-mail effectively
untraceable, (keyword: wingates ) but as it
involves breaking the law in at least three
countries—no kidding—I think it would be
unwise to detail them.”
The most popular way to send nearly
anonymous e-mail is to use a remailer that
essentially forwards your message from a
generic address. Even that method is prone
to failure because the host of the remailing
system is bound to turn you in if the Feds
come snooping around. As the anonymous
owner of Anonymous.To , one such remailing
site, cautions, “Do not use remailers for
illegal purposes. Sending death threats
and harassing e-mail is extremely obnox-
ious and illegal. Most remailer operators
will assist authorities in determining the
correct name and e-mail address of users
who abuse the system... as noted in
Anonymous.To’s Terms of Service.”
Bottom line: If you need to
hide, that’s your business. If you
need to break the law and do it
via e-mail, that’s nasty business
that probably will come back to
haunt you. Any questions?DEBUNKED!
APPLE INVENTED
THE GUI
There’s a simple one word
response to this one and that’s:
HOOEY. Technophiles know that
the graphical user interface
got its start at the legendary
Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research
Center). In the 1970s, PARC
was like a technology think
tank on steroids. The smart
men and women who worked
there invented everything from
Ethernet to the computer mouse
to a user interface that could be
maneuvered by clicking icons
with a mouse. Unfortunately,
Xerox was the ultimate loserbecause it never really did anything with
all the smart inventions it was financing. As
the legend goes, Steve Jobs visited PARC
and became determined to use what he
saw there for his own computer design,
which kick-started the graphical OS frenzy
that Apple is known for today.
A lesser-known twist to this story
involves the creator of the Apple OS, Jef
Raskin. Raskin claimed that while the PARC
guys were heading in the right direction, he
was already onto the whole graphical thing
and actually came up with other enhance-
ments that made his GUI better than what
PARC had cooked up. As he put it: “Click-
and-drag methods were invented at Apple
and not at PARC (or elsewhere, as far as I
know). I created this method for moving
objects and making selections after finding
the Xerox click-move-click method prone to
error. Bill Atkinson extended the paradigm
to pull-down menus. This all happened rela-
tively early in the history of the Mac. The
way my insight got extended by [Atkinson]
was typical of how things developed then.”
Bottom line: PARC was first (sorry, Jef),
but Apple was better at innovating over
time, which reminds us of another OS story
that started with a little program called
QDOS....DEBUNKED!
PLACING SPEAKERS NEAR
YOUR HARD DRIVE WILL ERASE
ALL OF YOUR DATA
With virtually every office desktop and
home computer happily using some sort of
speaker system in close proximity to hard
drives and sensitive monitor screens, it’s
surprising that anyone is still worried about
this one. But myths often have a life of
their own. That’s why we’re here to tell you
once and for all that it would take a stack of
incredibly powerful magnets to do a num-
ber on your hard drive.
Here’s why: Hard drives are magnetic
devices, meaning the platters are manu-
factured with a small layer of magnetic
coating. The key word here is coercivity. In
other words, the magnetic field of a device
like a speaker coil must be strong enough
to reduce the magnetic field of a device like
a hard drive to do any damage. Or in more
practical terms, an unshielded speaker
has a magnetic field length of about 1,000
Gauss. Sounds large, but even a stack of
10,000 Gauss rare earth magnets atop your
hard drive would be incapable of causing
coercivity.DEBUNKED! n
Is your speaker system putting
your hard drive data at risk of
total destruction?IT’S POSSIBLE TO SEND AN
UNTRACEABLE E-MAIL
Let’s rephrase this one to make the issue
crystal clear. It’s possible to send fake e-APPLE INVENTED
THE GUI
There’s a simple one word
response to this one and that’s:YOUR HARD DRIVE WILL ERASE
ALL OF YOUR DATA
With virtually every office desktop and
home computer happily using some sort of