Forward My Calls -- Paul Durrant responded to the FAQtoids 005 item on how ISPs have local dialing numbers outside their main network center. He noted that Demon, a large ISP in the UK, actually works with British Telecom to have the phone call itself forwarded

Fear of an Encrypted Planet -- In response to Brady Johnson's first installment on computer crime in NetBITS-005, Edward Reid responds to a point on key escrow: Key escrow arose in response to regulatory agencies' fear of being unable to decode private messages, especially encrypted telephone conversations

Our Man in Botswana -- Phil Hudson writes from Gaborone, Botswana, with thoughts on who legislation on computer crime really affects: The increasingly important issue of computer crime needs to be debated with a better, clearer understanding of the main perpetrators, and that includes, unfortunately, nation-states, their governments, administrations, law enforcement agencies, and spies

Ramping Up Cheaply -- Ole Eichorn writes about a nifty device he's found useful to give himself a virtual router without woes. I've been using a WebRamp ISDN router in my house for six months, and it is wonderful

ISDN Purchasing Advice -- Louis Lee offers some advice from his experience as a major ISP network engineer in purchasing ISDN equipment for companies. Try to obtain demo models of the routers for which you are shopping

Who's There? Joe Bates points out an important element to the aggravation that is spam. Maybe I'm missing some essential point here. In all of the discussions of spamming, the legislative and administrative solutions available or proposed, it seems that it all comes back to one point: all email messages should have a legitimate email return address attached to them

Stop Your Glottis -- In response to our GIF pronunciation pronouncement in FAQtoids 003, Joe Clark wrote us a stern note about phonology that makes everything much clearer. There is no such thing as a hard or soft g, no matter what your second grade teacher told you

Omissions -- Robert Morse notes an omission from our list of excellent Web resources for developing sites and writing scripts in NetBITS-002: Not taking umbrage, but adding a reference

Speed Freaks -- Bob Nirenberg points out a missing element in FAQtoids 001 about ISDN and serial port limitations. I noticed you talked about the 115 Kbps limit for Mac serial port connections to ISDN, but you could have mentioned that some ISDN devices connect to your Mac via Ethernet, which relative to ISDN has unlimited capacity. Another reader noted that you can buy and install cheap, high-speed serial cards in Macs that have card slots and achieve the same results without buying a GeoPort compatible device.

It's "Jiff" and I Don't Want to Hear Another Word -- Logic may dictate the "g" in GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) is pronounced hard, like gift or gefilte fish, but that didn't stop dozens and dozens of readers from offering opinions, many of them hilarious. However, several people wrote to say that they either worked with folks at CompuServe or read the original GIF specification, all of which specified a soft "g"

AOL and Innocent By-Senders -- AOL offers an anti-spam feature called PreferredMail that its subscribers can activate. By doing so, an AOL account can bounce all mail from a list of offenders that AOL is constantly compiling

Netiquette for Execs -- Casimir Couvillion passed along an excellent suggestion that we'll be sure to work on for a future issue of NetBITS: I really liked the first issue of NetBITS

Kids on the Net -- Benoit Deshaies took slight exception with some of our comments about chat rooms and IRC: First of all, I'm 16 years old - soon to be 17 - and I've been using the Internet since 1991

U.K. Pronunciations -- Jonathan Sanderson commented on our FAQtoids 001 answer about the pronunciation of URL and a specific part of the URL: The U.K

Kind Words -- Jenny O'Brien sent along some kind words that were music to our editing ears, if that's not mixing metaphors too much. Though we have a small staff and a short deadline, we try our best to produce a professionally written and edited publication. Let me congratulate you on your fine first issue! My boss forwarded it to me - not too uncommon - but I usually find the recommended newsletters to be poorly written and edited - even downright boring sometimes