The security breach at the Dalhousie University computer system reported last week was traced to an Israeli computer system who were in turn being used by a remote hacker to break into other machines. They had been unaware that their security had been compromised and traced their break-in to an ISP in Pontiac, Michigan which the hacker had accessed through a dialup connection. The hacker's account was immediately cancelled and legal action is likely to follow.

         Users of ug.cs.dal.ca, is2.dal.ca, and borg.cs.dal.ca who used a telnet connection to connect with CCN between Monday April 12 and Thursday April 15 should change their CCN passwords as a precautionary measure in case they have been compromised. The hacker had put in a program that read the first part of each login session on the Dal machines, catching usernames and passwords. Only one CCN user appears to have had his account accessed by the hacker, who was only in the account for thirty seconds or so. The user picked up the unauthorized access by recognizing that he had not last logged in on the time the system reported to him.

         CCN Userhelp and CCN Tech have decided to return Tin, the original CCN newsreader program to active, fully supported status after months of use by beta-testers have shown no problems with the service. To access it, simply use the g)o tin shortcut, typing 'gtin' (without the quotes) when in Lynx. Regular readers of the Beacon will recall last issue's Full Sail Power User's column by Norman De Forest describing all the Tin commands. It is no longer necessary to subscribe to the beta-tin mailing list to use Tin and questions about Tin should be addressed to userhelp@chebucto.ns.ca now.

         More than fifty people braved inclement weather to attend the CCN Annual General Meeting at the North Branch library April 13th. A demo of the new Chebucto Plus PPP service opened the meeting, with displays of the new service's speed at getting web pages and downloading files making a favorable impression on audience members. David Potter and Andrew Wright also showed CCN members the new web-based email service IMP which enables CCN users to access their email from any common graphic web browser anywhere in the world and the new IP-FTP file transfer system for CCN Information Providers and answered audience questions.

         Several new CCN Board members were elected or confirmed in office for two year terms; David Murdoch heading CCN-Tech, Sue Newhook heading the CCN Communications committee, and Doug McCann, Krista Olmstead, Richard Rudnicki and Andrew Wright as new Board members.

         Board Chair Peter Morgan reported that CCN has now acquired federally registered charitable status as of this past week and we should have the official paperwork soon. He described the various contributions and advances made to the organization by its hard-working volunteers including new accounting systems and the many partnerships with other organizations including government and commercial agencies. He also outlined some of the many challenges facing CCN including increased graphical access to CCN driving the need to reorganize the online presentation of CCN information to better reflect the many facets of this diverse organization, declining memberships due in no small part to the incredibly competitive Internet environment in Halifax, and the need to get volunteers involved with more of CCN's activities.

         The CCN Board is now interviewing the applicants for the new Executive Director position, the full-time employee responsible for coordinating the development, management, administration, and representation of Chebucto.

         Office hours are now 1 PM - 4 PM Monday to Friday in Room 125 in the Chase Mathematics Building on the Dalhousie University campus. Messages to the office telephone 494-2449 may be left on the voice mail system and will be responded to as necessary.

         Chebucto users are invited to use the online help resources. Users with email access requiring assistance should send email to userhelp@chebucto.ns.ca detailing their problem. Chebucto Plus users requiring assistance not covered in the online help documentation at http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/PPP/Help can send email to ppp-help@chebucto.ns.ca.

         Investigations by the volunteer CCN Technical Committee into the continuing high system loads on CCN are continuing. The main suspect is a process which administers system resources to dial-up users as they login. They are attempting to recreate the problem on the old CCN machine by simulating repeated logins to it.

         Another contributing factor has been the ZMailer mail delivery program's sometimes compulsive behavior attempting to deliver undeliverable mail. Most often caused by users whose inboxes have been shut down due to their exceeding their quotas, the mail program has sometimes tried to send each email thousands of times to the same inaccessible user. It has been necessary for CCN-Tech volunteers to manually reset this several times and an upgraded version of ZMailer is being set up to help eliminate this problem.

         High system loads can have many effects upon a user's session: retrieving web pages can be slowed, data searches and email sessions can stall and a user may be logged out by the system when the session time is up without receiving the 5 minute warning usually sent by the system.

         The Chebucto Community Net's new graphical PPP service, Chebucto Plus, continues its phase in with groups of current members being contacted by email. They were offered the opportunity to upgrade their membership to the Sustaining Member level required for Chebucto Plus, with the unused balance of their current memberships counting towards the new membership level. A Sustaining Membership is $100 per year. The volunteer Chebucto Plus team wants to build the service slowly to ensure everything runs smoothly for users and will be offering it to more users as our resources allow. Members will continue to be contacted by email when they can be accommodated.

         Details on Chebucto Plus, including system requirements can be found at http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/PPP (note upper case) and information on available help and support for Chebucto Plus can be found at http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/PPP/Help/support.htm. You can read the original news release about Chebucto Plus here.

         The old CCN domain names ccn·cs·dal·ca and cfn·cs·dal·ca are being officially retired at the request of our upstream service provider, the Network Operations Centre at Dalhousie University. All links and bookmarks to pages and addresses on CCN using these names will soon no longer work. Changing these links and addresses to chebucto.ns.ca now will ensure trouble-free continuing access to them.

         Work continues on the purging of all references to these outdated addresses from CCN files and documents including User Profiles. Some Chebucto users may be experiencing slower logins as their file directories, addressbooks and web pages are checked for the now outdated domain names when they login. The search is a one time event though users did have to go through the process a second time after the holidays when a log file was accidentally deleted. Users are urged to remove any references to the old domain names and may choose to automate this process if they wish.