The ADN Post

The 3rd Annual UIC Computer Camp was held from Monday, May 11, to Thursday, May 14, in the wilds of Lecture Center C and the ADN's facilities in SEL. More than 400 people from 190 different departments registered for the camp, each signing up for an average of five sessions.

The camp offerings began with the basics: email, word processing, Windows 95, and UNIX. In light of the university's UI-Online Internet-based distance learning initiative and the increasing enthusiasm among UIC faculty and teaching staff for Web- and multimedia-based learning, the camp's emphasis was on multimedia and the Web. Many of these sessions went way beyond the basics: Web authoring, design, and graphics; designing class materials for the Web; Web/database integration, including with Lotus Notes; streaming audio/video; Web copyright issues; GIS (Geographical Information Systems, a high-tech equivalent of a map); and three sessions on MS PowerPoint presentation software.

Did you miss the camp? Many of the camp's instructors prepared Web home pages for their sessions; visit them through links on the camp's home page:
http://www.uic.edu/orgs/camp/
Also check out the ADN's summer seminar schedule; some seminars -- many of the new ones -- are adapted from popular camp offerings.

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You know what email spam is -- the "get rich quick" or "cure your baldness now" commercial email that nowadays clogs everyone's email Inbox. Each piece of spam you receive was probably also sent to hundreds or thousands of other people; that's a lot of individual pieces of email. No Internet service provider wants their resources used in sending spam, so the people responsible for email spam, spammers, have taken to using clandestine tactics to send their mail.

Spammers can prepare their mail on their own, but they need an SMTP server to send it. (SMTP stands for simple mail transfer protocol; SMTP servers receive and distribute email.) Unfortunately, some spammers have discovered the ADN's SMTP servers and have been using them, and other SMTP servers at UIC, to send their spam. This isn't proper behavior, of course, but what difference does that make to them?

We've added some filters on the ADN SMTP servers to inhibit this misuse and make us better 'Net citizens. These filters won't protect us from receiving spam, but they will prevent the occasional "denial of service" problems we have had in the past. (Our servers were so busy relaying the spam that they were unavailable for our legitimate use, therefore "denying us service.")

Warning: If these measures aren't effective, we may tighten our SMTP filters up again, in various ways, and those changes may affect some people at UIC who read and send email from their personal computers. When you're on campus or you're using the ADN dialin lines, you can avoid any problems if you make sure that you use an ADN SMTP server when you send email, smptserv1.cc.uic.edu, for example. If you use a commercial ISP (Internet service provider) to connect when you're at home, change your home email program to use your ISP's SMTP server, not an ADN SMTP server. Then you'll never have to worry about this again.

None of this has anything to do with your using your netid at uic.edu as your email address for incoming mail, and you may, of course, continue to use your netid at uic.edu as your From: address regardless of how you send email or how you connect from home.
 

Yes, email spam is named after the famous canned meat. Hormel Foods Corp., the maker of the meat version of SPAM, has been a good sport about it and even sells "SPAM® branded" items on the Web, at http://www.spam.com/ (Of course!)

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The ADN is assuming the operation of the College of Business Administration's personal computer lab in L270 ESC, 1040 W. Harrison, and a new lab will be opened in 2500 SSB, 1200 W. Harrison. The SSB space was a Burger King restaurant in its previous life! Also the upgrade of the PCs in the existing ADN labs and their conversion to run only Windows95 is now complete. We announced this change in the Jan/Feb/March issue of the ADN Connection; the advantages -- personal, permanent disk space and faster booting -- will be significant. For more information on the ADN labs including their locations, hours, and available machines, see the ADN home page: http://www.uic.edu/depts/accc/pclabs/index.shtml

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The ADN Network Services Kit, a personal computer software package for connecting to and using the ADN and the Internet, on campus and by telephone, is now available on CD. The NSKit for both PCs and Macs is on one CD, and you can now purchase it for $15 at the Epicenter Bookstore on the east side of campus and the MicroStation on the west.