Bill Hopkins is the Webmaster of PhotoSourceFolio* (www.photosourcefolio.com) and a regular contributor to PhotoStockNotes. Send comments via Email to wh@photosourcefolio.com. Fax: 1 818 831-0916. Or US Mail: PhotoStockNotes. (*Display 6 of your images on our Web site!) For on-line marketing questions, contact him on the Cracker Barrel at www.photosource.com/board

The current moratorium on new Internet taxes will expire in October. Rep. Christopher Cox (CA) and Sen. Ron Wyden (OR) have introduced legislation that would extend the moratorium for another five years AND make a ban on Internet access taxes permanent. That’s one you don’t hear much about, taxing ACCESS to the Internet. Unless you live in one of a handful of states that enacted access taxes before the 1996 ban went into effect, you’re not paying any taxes on your Internet access, whether dial-up or broadband. This bill would make it clear that there are to be NO TAXES for Internet access. Period. Of course, the governors haven’t given up on trying to figure out how to more efficiently extract sales tax on Internet (and other out-of-state) purchases.

So you got a new (or replacement) computer and started getting it all set up, installing your programs, and suddenly got this cold chill as you wondered how you were going to copy over all your Internet favorites (or bookmarks in Netscape) to your new computer. Here’s how. If using Internet Explorer, you can copy all the little files in your \Windows\Favorites folder to the same place on your new computer. You can also use Explorer’s built-in export utility, which creates one file containing hyperlinks to all your favorites. You simply open up this file in your browser on the new computer, and click on wherever you want to go. For Netscape users, look for a file named bookmark.htm, generally located in \Program Files\Netscape\Users\<name of user>, where <name of user> is your profile name. You can also just search your hard disk for the file "bookmark.htm." Exact location of these files on your old computer and where they should be on your new computer will depend on your version of Windows.

New holes continue to be discovered (and in many cases, exploited) daily. One of the latest is with wireless networks, where companies and home users set up their networked computers without interconnecting wires, relying on radio-frequency transmitters and receivers instead of cabling (remember the interference you had on your cordless phone when your neighbor bought his cordless phone?). Presumably, the WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) encryption algorithm is supposed to protect the data from eavesdroppers. Now some folks at Berkeley (and no doubt others) have shown that not to be the case. One computer security consultant in New York said he was able to access the computer network of a major financial-services company on Wall Street while sitting on a bench across the street. It was as if he just walked through the lobby and sat down at someone’s computer. That is a unique challenge of wireless networks. They transmit data beyond the walls of most buildings.