Spring has finally arrived here in Montreal, and so has the April edition of ZooNews, from professional Web site design company Zoonini Web Services.

This spring I've been inundated with requests for site overhauls from some of my earliest clients – at least 3 remakes are in the works. (One of these sites was built back in 1999, in Zoonini's second year of business!) If you've had a Web site for a while, what better time than spring to take a good, hard look and ask yourself if it's time for a facelift. Does your site seem dated or stale? Is it using your current corporate logo and colours, or some older version? Could the look-and-feel use a freshening up to seem more current? The last thing you want is for potential customers to be turned off by a design that's passé, or that has simply lost its sparkle after years of use. You probably wouldn't keep using the same business cards or corporate brochure for years and years... same goes for your Web site! Of course if your site has anything in common with The Worst Web Site in the World (warning: loud music) it's definitely time to get that remake under way!

Over the last month there seems to have been a boom in a phenomenon called email spoofing. If you've ever gotten a spam message with your own email address in the From field (also called self-sending spam), or something looks like a bounced email from someone to whom you've never sent a message, you've witnessed spoofing in action.

Unfortunately, spoofing is prevalent because it's extremely easy for someone to forge the "From" line of an email message. A techie person looking at the full "headers" within the message would probably be able to tell that the email is faked, and didn't actually originate from your real account, but on the surface it looks like the message came from you, even though it didn't.

What can you do to prevent spoofing? Unfortunately, until the technicalities of email delivery change, not very much. What to do when you receive a spoof, whether appearing to come from your own email or another address you think is faked? As with any spam, never click on any links in a spoofed email message and of course don't ever reply to it. The FBI has actually compiled some decent tips on dealing with spoofing. eBay has also put together a tutorial that outlines common tactics used by spoofers, tips on detecting a spoofed email, and how to report eBay and PayPal spoofs (forward the full message to spoof@ebay.com or spoof@paypal.com).

If you're interested in learning how to decipher the true source of an email or want to find out more about some of the potential technological solutions that may one day prevent spoofing, check out this article from WindowsSecurity.com.

Got a technology term you'd like demystified in ZooNews? Send it to questions@zoonini.com.

Ottawa-based social-policy consultant Havi Echenberg's blog has launched! The new site, dubbed the Social Policy Café (now offline), provides an opportunity to foster dialogue on social issues, from poverty to housing to literacy. Guest contributors will also contribute to the mix. The brand-new blog will encourage community interaction, since readers have the ability to leave comments. A subscription option allows people to sign up to receive email notifications whenever the blog is updated. Head on over to the Social Policy Café, and join the conversation!

Last month I joked about my disappointment on discovering that my family ties to famed author Mordecai Richler were distant at best. Recently, though, I learned that a close friend's father (let's call him LS) had a much more astounding experience. LS was contacted by a man in the UK with the same last name as his, who had been researching the family history and had come upon LS's name in a family tree somewhere on the Web. After an exchange of email messages and photographs, it looks like the UK man is quite possibly LS's half-brother, with a second half-brother and their own two families nearby! As it turns out, LS's own father had left the family when LS was very young, and did not keep in touch. As LS just discovered, his father may have gone on to have two more children with another woman. Though LS always knew there could be the possibility of this having happened, the reality of it likely being the case is just starting to sink in. As for me, I'm amazed that thanks to the power of the Web, a 65 year-old may have discovered two long-lost half-siblings.

À la prochaine,

kp
aka Kathryn Presner