Keith Rowland, Art Bell’s webmaster, reveals the 1997 April Fool’s prank on artbell.com—a fake FBI press release about Heaven’s Gate, using a modified SDI seal—that sparked 30–50 shocked emails before the FBI intervened. By May 9th, they demanded removal of the unauthorized page, though later thanked him. Rowland details site features like bandwidth-efficient design, registration filtering for chat rooms, and compatibility with Lynx for blind users, while addressing technical hurdles like printing and RealAudio encoding. The episode underscores how early internet moderation and legal boundaries clashed, shaping Bell’s platform’s evolution to serve millions despite growing complexity. [Automatically generated summary]
The man who brings you my website, who does all the work on the website, which is quite considerable, Keith Rowland is going to be my guest for this hour.
Now, the first reason that we're bringing him on is to explain the April Fool's situation and the FBI, involvement with the FBI and the State Department, and what happened, how it happened, and where we now stand, and whether we will all have to collectively send Keith Rowland a file and a cake.
So that coming up, and then we will allow you to ask Keith Rowlings about the website.
It is a gigantic one now, indeed.
So all of that coming up in a moment.
2669.
All right, that's 1-800-659-2669.
Ah, only I can interrupt myself.
Silly, huh?
I mean, I did the commercial.
I had to know when it's over.
All right.
April 1st was a strange day on my website.
And let me begin by telling you that I had no idea myself what was about to occur.
And innocently, as I always do, in about the first hour or two of the program, I pulled up my website and damn near had a heart attack.
As a matter of fact, I almost did have a heart attack.
Keith, welcome to the program.
Hello there.
Hi.
From non-smoking Mesa, Arizona.
That's us.
Here is Keith Zeroland, who runs my website, www.artbell.com.
Now, tell them, Keith, you didn't tell me you were going to do that, did you?
unidentified
No, I didn't tell anybody what I was going to do, so I could pull one on you, too.
But basically, I'll paint a picture for anybody who didn't get in on the joke.
Normally the web page is a nice black background with different colored headers and stuff, and it lists the items of the day, new items, and the different pages of the website.
And there's a nice graphical picture of you at the top of the page, and it just basically announces itself quite well.
And so everybody's used to going up there every day and seeing the same picture and same-looking background.
And all of a sudden, one day you click on that, you get this big white screen with the U.S. Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation logo sitting up in the top left-hand corner.
And it's showing a press release from Washington, D.C. And it's dated for immediate release, April 1, 1997.
Now, if you were really sharp, that would have caught you right there.
It said, quote, the Art Bell website, www.artbell.com, has been removed pending an investigation initiated by the San Diego Field Office Commander John Wesijoke.
Lead special agents are conducting the investigation as fast as possible into the connections to the Heavensgate suicide case.
We will return the website into operation after determination of the amount of involvement of the parties who operate this website and the material presented.
If you have any information pertaining to the involvement of the website operators and the Heavensgate membership, please contact Special Agent Ms. May I Polyleg at our San Diego field office.
And for more information on this case and others, see our website.
And I gave that address.
I gave the address of the San Diego FBI building.
And then at the bottom, I said, P.S., if you're still with us, you'll be happy to know that this is really a joke.
And you can click here to visit the real homepage.
Now, having said all of that, Keith, even so, when I saw it, with all the names in there and with even the disclaimer at the bottom, I still just about had a heart attack.
And I can tell you, so did a lot of my audience, because, of course, you only sort of, you quickly read something, no doubt, something you were depending on, and you get shocked.
And it worked very well indeed.
And I had hundreds of messages.
unidentified
Yes, I camouflage the names so that if you're reading them, you don't know what they are.
But if you actually speak those names, as in was a joke, or may I pull your leg, then you kind of get the picture.
And so what I had done is I had taken basically the layout of another SDI press release and just kind of copied the layout of their press release.
So it looked very much like theirs.
Sure.
And I took their logo off their website and I doctored it up a little bit, kind of blurried it up and obscured it a little bit.
So it wasn't an exact copy, but it looked like an official looking seal, kind of a generic-looking seal.
And so that got posted up there and we had it up there for the day for 24 hours and then we took it down.
And then I took all of the email comments that you and I had collected and I posted it on the page below this and I put a link up there saying, you know, here was our April Fool's page joke with all the comments that we had.
And I had, you know, probably 30, 40, 50 email Messages of people describing the shock and disbelief and comments that they were making as they had read the page.
And we put that up there for about a week.
And then I removed the link off of the home page so that you couldn't see it anymore.
But I did leave the page up on the website on the file server.
And then you got a letter of thank you from the FBI who really got a kick out of that in San Diego, right?
unidentified
Approximately 30 days later, dated May the 9th, we got a letter sent to Myron, who is my partner in the operation here, who was the official name that was on the domain name at the time.
And they wrote a letter to him, dear Mr. McLeod, on April the 1st, 1997, an altered news release depicting the official seal of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been downloaded and altered to appear on the ARPBEL website as an April Fool's joke.
So they knew all about it here.
Your name appears as the administrative contact of the ARPBEL page.
Please be aware, regardless of intention or the appearance of a disclaimer, misuse of the FBI name and or seal without authorization of the FBI is punishable by law.
Apparently I should have asked permission.
Although the aforementioned joke can no longer be reached via the homepage, it is accessible at and they give the direct address and should be removed immediately to avoid further contact from the FBI.
And they say they close with the U.S. Attorney's Office, San Diego, has also been appraised of this matter, appraised of this matter.
And it's signed by special agent in charge.
So my plan was, okay, I will remove the April Fool's joke page and I will post their letter because now I no longer have to take it from their website.
Was there ever a moment when you thought, you know, a couple guys in suits with badges would show up and cart you off to someplace?
unidentified
Well, actually, I didn't believe it for a while because they went and contacted, you know, Myron in San Diego, and I'm here in Arizona, and I'm the official webmaster.
I would have at least expected an email to me or a phone call to me, but they kind of just cut to the official administrative name and sent it that way.
And when I got this email from them telling me what they had said, I just, I had a hard time believing it.
Okay, we should tell everybody it has become so large, the website, that we had to finally install a search engine.
And that is there.
In other words, if you want to find something, this is really a good piece of advice to give because I get so much email saying, where's this?
Where's that?
I look for it.
I can't find it.
There's a place on the website where you can go and just enter a word or two and it will go find what you're after, right?
unidentified
That's correct.
Right.
Yeah, we have a lot of different pages.
We broke it up into smaller chunks, and we tried to list an index of all of the pages on the home page.
So if you scroll down the home page, you'll get an idea of all the different pages we have.
But within each one of those pages, there's lots of material on them, and you may not know which page I put something on after I've had it on the website for a little while.
Because initially, when we get new things, we put them up in the top of the page saying, here's the new items.
And so they're temporarily for the first week or so.
You can go to the new stuff immediately by clicking on them.
But after a while, they're not new anymore, and they find a permanent home on a page somewhere.
And if you want to come back at another later time, you're not sure where it was, you can type in a couple words or phrases or something and let it do the searching.
And it will come back and give you a list of all of the pages that have those particular words on them and give you the hot links to them.
So then all you've got to do is kind of look at the right one.
It gives you a little sampling of the text that's on those pages.
And then you can click the one that you think it is, and it'll take you right to the page.
And for somebody who's not into computers, and that takes a little while, there's a real love-hate relationship between computers and human beings, at least for me.
Web TV is so simple.
unidentified
I think what it'll do is it'll get people involved in the net to the point where they're going to save their pennies and buy a real computer in the end.
For a lot of people, it may be enough, because, I mean, on the one I market, for example, there's a printer port, and you're going to be able to attach a color printer to it.
unidentified
Yeah, that's very nice being able to print it because I don't think you can save any of the files, but you can go to a web page and print it out on paper.
That's what a lot of people do.
I should know I had a lot of complaints about printing on our webpage, if you recall.
Yeah, so I picked the color scheme that I had seen at another website and picked the colors in the background, and so it looks kind of nice.
But when you print it on a color printer or a printer that wants to, you know, even if it's a black and white monochrome printer that wants to print approximately the colors, it wants to print all of the black letters on paper, and so sometimes you'll get an all-black page, and that's kind of a wasteful of ink.
On the other hand, if a printer situation is set up that prints the text only and ignores the background, well, we have white letters on black background.
When you print white letters on white paper in your printer, you don't see nothing, and that is the problem.
They don't print the black background, but they print the white letters.
Microsoft Internet Explorer seems to be smart enough in most cases to ignore the white color and go ahead and print it in black, or you can configure it that way.
In Netscape, there's some parameters in some of the setup that you can tell it to print alt text in black and ignore the colors.
So I have a browser printing tips page on our website that goes through the step-by-step instructions on how to configure your browser to be able to print it correctly.
You know, I get a new little toy, handheld scanner, something like that, and I will sit there for at least two hours getting angry and frustrated that I can't do what I want to do before I pick up the manual and read.
unidentified
Yeah, I have a frequently asked questions page also up there that I'm constantly referring people to.
It's a link at the bottom of every page, F-A-Q.
And if they click on that, they can get a lot of answers about the website and real audio and transcripts and all the little statistical questions I get.
You know, one thing you could do for me, my biggest complaint I get is the guest lineup.
And I like you to tell them why I don't have a guest lineup for next week.
The reason he doesn't is because I haven't given it to him because I don't know who's going to be on.
Sometimes I know ahead of time who I'm going to schedule.
A lot of times, I don't know until an hour before the program whether I'm going to have somebody on, whether I want to have somebody on.
In other words, I don't know, so Keith can't know.
And that also applies to a lot of things.
In fact, even most of the things evolve on the website.
For example, I'll get up in the evening, peruse my email, find something absolutely incredible, send it to Keith about 30 minutes before airtime, and he's in a scramble to get it up there just before airtime.
I would say that occurs about 70% of the time, wouldn't you?
unidentified
Yes, if there's a phone call here between 10 and 11, it's generally you.
And generally, you have been in a state where you stay up during the program.
unidentified
Well, yeah, my work schedule previous to even getting involved with the web page was working late into the night, as a lot of programmers like to do.
And so that's how I picked up listening to you.
And so it just kind of naturally developed and evolved over time.
And so I'm up anyway.
And now that we're doing the web page, I stay up the whole duration of the show the best I can.
I now tape record the entire show on videotape.
I have those instructions on the webpage so that if there's any particular excerpt or special call or special event that happens, I can go back through my tape recording and grab it and convert it to real audio and put it on the website.
For example, the Area 51 call and when good old JC calls and things like that, it's kind of nice to go back and grab those segments and put them up on the website.
When we come back from the bottom of the hour, I have one more thing that I want to address that will keep us from having consistent headaches, and that is real audio.
In other words, the archive programs or the ability to listen to the show live on the internet.
A lot of people think that we are the ones who are in control of that, and I would like to tell the story so they know what's going on.
All right, coming shortly, the FBI's favorite webmaster, Keith Rowland, from Mesa, Arizona, once again.
If you have questions for Keith, come now.
We're going to discuss real audio here in a moment and answer a few questions about that that will prevent endless email.
Maybe, I thought.
North American Trading, America's trusted name in private hard assets.
You don't have to be rich to own gold, just smart.
That's right.
All right, back now to Keith Rowland and subject real audio, what's called real audio, which allows you to listen to my program live on the internet worldwide or even listen to archived shows.
Now, there's a big misunderstanding about who provides real audio and why when something goes wrong, we can't respond to complaints.
unidentified
Keith?
Hi there.
Hi.
Well, a couple, let's get some of the terminology, I guess, out of the way.
Real audio is a software program that you can download into your web browser, your computer, and allow you to listen to streams of audio coming over your modem and listen to them on your sound card.
Right.
A company called AudioNet has taken that technology, purchased the server software, and have gone out and recruited different sources of material and provide them on the net.
So they're like a big provider of programming.
They use the real audio technology and they provide programming.
And they've gone and recruited different radio stations from talk to country to rock and roll, put them on the net.
They have special programs.
They even have some internet-only programs that are available.
So it's a really nice way to have access to programming all over the country and all over the world without having to be trying to tune it in on your radio.
So what happened about, oh gosh, this must have been a year ago, several of the radio stations that you were carried on were also on the AudioNet system.
And so if you went to the AudioNet site, you could listen to a certain radio station who was carrying you and we could hear you.
So if you didn't have in your own town, you could pick it up that way.
Well, as that popularity grew and grew, AudioNet decided, well, the bandwidth of the signals coming from these radio stations was just not high enough to handle the amount of users.
And so probably six months ago, they decided to get their own satellite network feed and provide a direct Art Bell circuit right there on the AudioNet site.
So in other words, it comes direct to Dallas, they're in Dallas, I believe, by satellite, and they couple it directly in.
unidentified
Exactly.
They put it right on their server and right through the internet from the network feed rather than going to a particular server or through a particular radio station.
They also increased the bandwidth and dedicated some servers just for us because, as it turns out, I think the Art Bell program is the number one listen-to-AudioNet program on their whole system.
And the arrangement is, for those who don't know, is AudioNet does that free of charge to us and we don't pay them for the service and they don't pay us for the programming.
A lot of the things on the Internet is kind of a share and share alike type situation.
They will take the programming and put it on the internet for us and we have that ability to spread your program to people that don't get it.
In return, they have a business to operate and they want to sell advertising on their website and they'll generate their revenue through people visiting their website and looking at their ads and so on.
And then on our website, which is also sponsor-driven and is paid for solely by the advertising on the webpage, we want people to come to our webpage and look at our ads.
Now, arrangement that we have with AudioNet is such that we don't have or agreed not to have a direct link to the actual feed itself.
We've agreed to have our page link to their page, and then once you're on their page, you can then link and look and listen to a show in the archive or the real feed.
In turn, they don't put descriptions of all the programs on their page.
People have to come back to our page to look at the descriptions to figure out which program you want to look at.
So we kind of have a webmaster's agreement that we're letting people go to both websites and we're maximizing the exposure of both websites.
Now, occasionally, with all technical things, and this is a brand new technology, they will, for some reason or another, miss a program or a part of a program or something.
And when that happens, it's like the world comes crashing in on you, I know, and certainly on me, email-wise, and they say, how can you let this happen?
unidentified
Yeah.
Well, there's a crew of people that work at AudioNet throughout the night that are in charge of taking care of the program.
But from time to time, various glitches do occur.
I'm sure people have had their computers hang and crash in the past themselves.
So the same is true in big-time Internet servers.
They do have their glitches from time to time, too.
And occasionally somebody will either forget to throw the switch or a hard drive might crash or the hard drive filled up in time.
And it's strictly an honest mistake that will happen from time to time.
And considering the number of programs that do get done correctly, I think the number of mistakes are rather small and they should be commended for what they are doing.
By the way, I've also noticed that whenever a program is missed, everybody who writes email accuses either AudioNet or us of intentionally, conspiratorially, eliminating a specific program because of some nefarious reason.
unidentified
Yeah, I'm here to say that I have not received any FBI letters to tell us to remove a certain AudioNet program.
All right, look, there's a bunch of people who would like to ask you.
unidentified
I want to say one thing before we get to the phones.
I want to thank everybody who provides the material for the web page.
I could not do this all myself.
I have lots of people out there who are scavenging around the internet and find a lot of these links and web pages and send them to me, and then I review them and put them up on the site.
I have a lot of people send us images and pictures, as you know, and we get them and put them up on the website.
And so there's a lot of work being done by the listeners out there who are finding a lot of these things and provide them to me.
And so I just have to, I can't respond to every one of them in email, but I hope they appreciate the fact that I do appreciate that they're doing that, and I do put the information up on the site when I can.
You know, we've got some great logos that people have submitted in.
We've got some great artwork up on the page, and the cat pictures, it's just great stuff, and the listeners are just really risking one and all of them.
First time call our line, you're on the air with Keith Rowland in Mesa, Arizona.
unidentified
Yes, thank you.
Thank you for taking my call, Art.
Hi, Keith.
Hello there.
I have a quick question.
I emailed you about a month ago.
I'm a regular visitor to the Art Bell website, and I wanted to make use of his chat rooms, but you need a password, and I need to get it from you.
And then I recently emailed you again to get password requests, and haven't heard back from you yet.
Okay, this is a problem that comes up from time to time.
Right now, we have our bulletin board system and our chat rooms are by registration only.
It is a free registration.
It's just that we want to know who you are and an email address to contact you.
And that goes into the little database and we save that.
We have a little form on the web page that you just fill out and put in your name and email address and click it and it emails it directly to me.
Now I will take that name and I'll register it and then I have to send back through email your password that I assign you.
If by any chance that the email address you've given me is bad, wrong, goes to the wrong place, I can't contact it, then I can never get back in touch with you to give you that password.
And then you'll come along a couple weeks later and send me another request and I'll say, okay, fine.
I go into there.
I'll look you up.
I say, oh, you're already registered.
I'll try to send you back another note saying you're already registered or somebody else has your same name.
You may have registered before, but your email address was bad and I could not get in touch with you.
But I have processed all, I generally try to process all of the registrations every day.
And so if you don't hear anything back in a day or two, double check your return address that you're entering in and make sure it's a working address.
And again, the reason we have a registration system is because in chat rooms, people already know it.
There is a small group of people, like in a classroom when you're a kid.
One kid can disrupt an entire class.
And we try to keep the language relatively clean.
And anything goes pretty much, but we don't want people intentionally disrupting an otherwise intelligent chat.
Is that about right?
unidentified
That's about right.
There are plenty of other places on the internet that you can be totally anonymous and say whatever you want.
There's the Usenet system that you can post anything you want.
There's IRC that's pretty much open to anything you want to do.
So what we're trying to do is establish a separate section on the web page that not be afraid of getting attacked or having bad language on the bulletin board.
And also in the chat rooms, if people are personally attacking people or being nasty or using bad language, we want to be able to eject them from the system and they're not welcome back.
But simply, we're trying to make it a reflection of what we do on the program.
Pretty much.
unidentified
Now, a lot of people will say, well, Pri Department lets anything go on the air, and then why don't you let anything go?
And I tell them, that's correct.
Nobody's going to get on the radio and just start personally cutting down somebody or starting throwing around swear words or going ad nauseum as one topic.
I just wanted to say that I visit the website almost every day, and I wanted to thank Keith for putting the link up for the Austin chat club.
If anybody wants to attend our next meeting, they can go to that link and click on it and find out when our next meeting is, or if they're in the Austin area, they can call 603Chat.
I wanted to mention that I happen to have WebTV myself, and I have a 52-inch color TV, so it's pretty convenient for that.
And being a programmer, I can verify that they did a really outstanding job.
Because we had intended all along when we first to have it be a registered system.
It's just that the Parachat software was very costly to do that, and we found an alternative one, but it was always intended to do that.
I mean, the BBS system went on the website, and it was a registered system.
You know, if we had a lot of trouble in the Parachat room, you may not have seen it, but I would say on a daily basis, we had people coming in there and being vulgar and attacking people.
And that's just something that we don't want in our chat room.
And there's plenty of other chat rooms on the internet to go to that you can do that.
This one is just not going to be one of them.
Now, when you register for the chat room, only I know your name and your email address.
You can still go into the chat room.
You pick whatever alias name you want, whatever nickname you want, and nobody can figure out who you are.
In fact, you can't even track down their IP address like you could with Parachat.
So our room is, in fact, more anonymous than the Parachat system, yet I have the ability to kick out any troublemakers, and that's what I want to do.
You know, again, you mind your manners.
You're welcome to come in there as often as you want.
Well, unfortunately, while you are sort of separating the wheat from the chaff, as it were, a lot of the wheat went with the chaff.
And some people have sort of accused of being a quote-unquote fascist.
I don't want that kind of material on the air, and I don't think that kind of material has to be on the air for the show to be popular.
In fact, I have now proven that.
And it's exactly the same in the chat rooms.
There can be conversations.
It can be hot and lively without using vulgar language.
And we intend for it to be a place like that.
And you can call it fascism if you want.
But as Keith pointed out, you can go to lots of Usenet locations and be as vulgar as you want.
But you're not going to be doing it in our chat rooms, right, Keith?
unidentified
That's pretty much it.
Now, if I have mistakenly banned someone from the room who was misrepresented somehow, I would certainly listen to any argument and reinstate somebody.
Generally, when people use different names and come and impersonate other people, sometimes you mistake people.
And so there's a lot of people in there.
And so I apologize if somebody got booted out that wasn't worthy of that, but I'll try to make amends where I can.
Yeah, you can anything that's on your web browser screen, you can highlight it with your mouse and cut or copy and then call up any one of your favorite editors or word processing programs, paste it in it, and then use that program to print it.
I think somebody told me that if you are not touching any keys in the keyboard or something after a certain period of time, it may time out on you, and so you might have to occasionally do something on the unit.
But pretty much, it calls up a little real audio window and can access the page.
My guest is my webmaster, Keith Rowland, the FBI's favorite webmaster.
If you have any questions about the internet, specifically our website, or computers in general, he's your guy, Keith Rowland, back in a moment.
4627.
End the pain now.
And by the way, tell him, Art Bell told you to call.
1-800-557-4627.
All right, here is a quick message or question for Keith by email.
Art, I have a suggestion for Keith with regard to an addition to the website.
Though I do not know exactly how you'd feel about it, Art, I think it'd be great if you would allow a real-time feel of a video image that would refresh at three to four minutes.
The image could include your studio and allow those of us who are curious to see just how you do what you do.
And that's a good question.
Keith, what's going on?
unidentified
Yeah, well, we've been talking about that for several months now, haven't we?
That would solve all the problems because then I would have an address for them and I know how to get in touch with them and I can send them back a password.
How far do you think we might be from that, Keith?
unidentified
It's a matter of just cleaning some projects off the table here and doing some research into the software.
Let me just specify, tell everybody what I'm looking for, and somebody can probably send me an email tonight and tell me where to find it.
What we need is a piece of software that will run on Art's Windows 95 machine that will just snap an image, grab an image and save it to a GIF file or a JPEG and upload it to a site, through FTP or some kind of a connection to our website, and just have it sit there and like every 30 seconds grab an image and upload it, grab an image and upload it.
And then what we'll do on the website is have a page that when you go to it, it will grab the latest image and display it on your screen.
And then if you want an update, you click it again and you'll get an update.
You click it again, you get an update.
And that is the best way to save bandwidth because a lot of these technologies, you can get nice, wonderful streaming audio like those internet cams that come out there and you click on them and you've got this continuous data feed of video.
And that's wonderful when you've only got three or four people going to a particular site and looking at a camera.
But as you know, with the popularity of our website, when we say we have real live video on the site and 20,000 people go to the site to look at it, it's just going to suck all the bandwidth out of the internet.
So we have to think up a practical way of doing it that doesn't consume a lot of bandwidth and is still kind of nice to see.
We're looking for some software to reside there at your end to upload it to the site because you're in Prompt, the web server's in Phoenix, I'm in Mesa, so it all has to work over the Internet and not tie up too much bandwidth.
Yeah, I have a few websites that I've built over the last few months.
I didn't know anything about it until last November.
And I started doing it.
And I'd recommend it to any of your listeners who have anything to share with the world, any kind of information, any kind of thing they want to put up on a website, some information they'd like to share.
Just for the sheer fact that it really helps to learn how to manipulate all the files, to use a program manager, to rename things, just knowing the little bits helped me feel a lot more comfortable about doing things on my computer, just building the site, which I thought was pretty fun.
I find myself spending quite a bit of time building websites now.
In fact, computers, period, represent a very steep learning curve when you jump into them for the first time.
So when you begin jumping into the world of website creation, Keith, is it going to get easier to create websites?
I mean, right now, you've got to deal with all kinds of HTML code and all this sorts of things.
unidentified
There are some good software programs out there that are what's called WYSIWYG, where you can just come up with a screen and you can drop an image on it and write some text and move things around and draw some boxes and things like that, and it'll automatically generate the HTML for you.
And you can upload it to a site.
So it is getting easier and easier because the software is getting better and better.
The tricky part is having that software create HTML that works with all of the browsers.
And we still have a little war going on between Microsoft and Netscape, and there's still some incompatibilities between them.
So things get tricky when you try to do a website that's compatible with the most amount of people.
You have to watch all the little details.
And some of these editors might not handle it that well.
And so the lower level you go in writing HTML, the more compatibility you can get.
But you can put up a web page with a fairly simple program and get it published.
It may not be all that complicated, but it can be done.
And it's not going to be any more complex than calling up a nice word processor and type of stuff.
The other thing is we are always staying on the very cutting edge, I like to think, on this program and on the website.
So we're always exploring new territory.
And sometimes things go right and sometimes they don't.
That's the way life is.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Keys Rowland.
unidentified
Hi.
I have two questions.
Within the Netscape browser, can you, with the Web TV use PointCast Network to get a constant, consistent download of news, sports, and weather items with the Web TV?
Oh, that is a good question, and I'm not sure of the answer.
Do you know Keith?
unidentified
I have a lot of blind people that are using text-based web browsers.
One in particular is called Lynx, and they appreciate the fact that my web page is well compatible with that.
So they'll have their normal text-to-speech processor on their computer, and they can go to the website and browse through there and read all the material, and it's very compatible for them.
So it can be done if the web page is done right, and I choose to make sure that it is done right to handle that.
The problem with that is right now is that anybody can go to those and use any name they want and get their mail.
And then when they can register with our system, abuse it all they want, we boot off them.
They can go back to one of these email services, use a different name, get a different address, and register again, and they can just keep irritating and irritating and irritating me, and there's no security in that method.
So currently, I'm not allowing email addresses that are aliased like that because basically you don't have to be a real person when you join them.
And again, we want this to be a place regarding the chat rooms and the BBS and the site itself where families can go, where children even can go without having to see and hear a lot of things that are elsewhere on the web.
unidentified
If there's too much smut and bad sites out there now, it would be nice to have a place where you don't have to be afraid to go to the ArtVille website.
Well, I thought with that, see, I'm a Web TV user, and I've been very happy with the system.
Now I can exactly figure out what happened.
And when I was asking various hacker buddies, they had said that email of itself was not necessarily secure, and that if someone could, say, figure out your code in general, they could even go into your email and check it.
She mentioned Usenet, the news groups, and that's separate from email.
But when you set up your email program and you set up your newsreader program, you program your name and your address in it.
And so anybody can program any name and any address into their email program and into their newsreader program and go to these news sites or send email to people and actually look like there's somebody else.
But generally buried in the information and the tracking header information that comes along with a piece of email, you can kind of backtrack and figure out where it came from.
But there's a lot of impersonations that can go on.
And now if you post something to a newsgroup, somebody can get your email address and then go and use that and post on the same newsgroup and impersonate you.
Well, Keith, I want to thank you publicly for all you do because you're there.
You know, it's a kind of a symbiotic relationship between the radio program and the website.
And that's only possible because of your constant, unrelenting attention so that when we get something, we can instantly get it up there for zillions of people to see.