Squeaky clean...

Citation

Ellis, B. (1999), "Squeaky clean...", Soldering & Surface Mount Technology, Vol. 11 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ssmt.1999.21911aag.001

Squeaky clean...

Keywords Cleaning, Intranet, Printed circuit boards, Viruses

Squeaky clean...

Today, I am going to concentrate on cleanliness. The review part of this commentary will be devoted to products for cleaning electronics assemblies after soldering. However, before we enter into the meat of the subject, let us talk about another type of cleanliness: that of your hard disc.

Most of us who use e-mail will have received messages similar to "if you receive a message with the title 'Holidays in the Bahamas', do not open it. This message contains a virus which will wipe your hard disc clean. This virus was notified by Microsoft only yesterday. Please pass this message on to all the persons in your address book". The actual wording of the message will change but the gist will always be the same. Do not be deceived, this is a malicious hoax.

Please let me explain why this is a hoax. There are many types of virus but they all have one thing in common: they can infect a computer only if they are attached to an executable file. These files, on a PC, usually bear the extension .COM or .EXE. Theoretically, .DLL files could also be infected, although this is less common. There remains one other type of executable file which could be infected and that is a macro attached to an application. The most common form of macro virus infects .DOC files used in versions of Microsoft Word earlier than 97. An e-mail message can never be an executable file and can never carry a virus. To put it bluntly, such a virus warning must therefore be codswallop (for our transatlantic friends, this very English word may be translated as "male bovine excrement" or something similar).

However, the subject does not end there. It is also possible to send attachments to an e-mail message. These attachments may be any kind of file, executable or otherwise. If you receive an unsolicited message with an executable file, a certain prudence would be necessary. Notwithstanding, downloading such an executable file onto your hard disc will never cause you any problem, even if it is infected with a virus. You can therefore safely copy it to your computer and perform a virus check using the latest version of your favourite anti-virus software. If you consider that it is not infected, then it should be safe to run the software but ­ be warned ­ not all viruses are detected by all the anti-virus softwares, so there is still a remote possibility that it could be infected. If you do decide to run an executable file of doubtful origin without having checked for viruses, then this is at your own risk and peril ­ and you deserve what you get!

In France, it is common to see a warning at level crossings without gates stating "Caution! One train can conceal another". Something similar may occur on your PC. That unsolicited file which you have seen attached to an e-mail message may have the extension .ZIP or similar. Now, a zipped file cannot be infected but it may contain an executable file which is infected so that prudence is still de rigueur if you see that the attachment has been zipped or otherwise compressed. Some of the anti-virus programs will detect executable files hidden within a compressed file, if they are infected, although some reports have been made that this form of protection is not infallible.

In summary, do not hesitate to read any e-mail message that takes your fancy: you may never suffer from a virus by doing so. Be prudent if an attachment is made to a message of uncertain origin, especially if it is an executable or may contain an executable file. Your computer will become infected only if you run or double click on a downloaded infected executable file.

The question may be asked as to why these hoaxes are perpetrated. There are two possible reasons, each one as malicious as the other. The more common one is probably as bad as a virus itself and is probably the creation of a warped mind wishing to cause as much havoc as possible. For the sake of argument, let us assume that the average address book for e-mailing contains 40 addresses. The creator of the message may send it to his 40 addresses and, if each one of these does the same, 1,600 messages will be sent in the second phase. If this exponential curve is forwarded without a break, over 100 million messages will be sent on the fifth phase. Of course, this is theoretical but it can be easily seen that millions of such messages are likely to be forwarded in a matter of hours, if the message is sufficiently convincing. This volume of extra messages on the Internet will totally overload the various nodes on the backbone and the Internet will grind to a halt, or nearly so. This happened with the famous Budweiser hoax a few months ago, with low transmission bandwidths lasting for two weeks. For the record, I received "warnings" about the Budweiser frogs from 14 different sources! Other cases have had nearly similar effects. This type of motivation is pure malice and the only correct response is to delete the message and not to respond in any way. The same applies, of course, to any chain letter whether it promises advantages or not. A recent one I received "warned" me not to use toothpaste or shampoo containing a common surfactant, otherwise I would have a one in two chance of contracting cancer. As nearly all cosmetic and household products contain this substance and have done so for over 50 years, the population is very slow in dying off. It was possibly started by a toothpaste maker who uses a different surfactant in his products.

The other type of hoax is less malicious in one way, but more malicious in another. Imagine the case where A works for a company and is friendly with B who works for a rival company. A wants to find out the e-mail addresses of all of B's correspondents. He knows that B sends him messages regularly and guesses that his own name is in the address book (maybe they work on the same committee!). A composes a hoax message and sends it anonymously to B from, for example, a cybercafé. B receives it and panics, forwarding it to everybody on his address list including A who can then read and copy B's address list! This may seem far-fetched, but it is believed that it ­ and some variations ­ has happened on many occasions. If you have a sensitive address list and you send out circulars of any type, do so only as blind copies (Bcc). This could also help to protect you and your correspondents against "spamming" or the transmission of junk e-mail.

There are a great number of products available on the market for cleaning printed circuit assemblies after soldering. This range can be divided into a number of categories, such as saponifiers, HCS (hydrocarbon/surfactant, otherwise known as semi-aqueous), flammable hydrocarbons and halocarbons. The Web sites of various manufacturers show a remarkable range of technical information ranging from almost zero to great detail. Obviously, those sites with sufficient detail to allow potential users to select what they require will achieve much more success than those which give no detail whatsoever.

Our first visit will be to the American site of a German company at http://www.wackchem.com .

Unfortunately, this site has a large graphics on its home page which, combined with a poor bandwidth at the time that I looked at it, meant that the downloading time seemed interminable. Other than that, the site was of a good, simple design with the ability to communicate well with the visitor. The details available of the Zestron range of products were adequate. It is a pity that the individual pages had to be with different colour backgrounds for each one, because this did reduce the readability of a few of them.

Moving from an HCS product to a halocarbon at www.dupont.com/vertrel/products, one can find that the product for cleaning electronics assemblies is called Vertrel SMT. The site itself is simple and rapid and the product details are available by downloading a PDF file. This is probably a compromise, which makes it easy for a supplier to reproduce his literature, but it is less preferable to having a web page devoted to each product. I must admit that I tend to avoid downloading pages, just to be able to read them. This is probably because I am both lazy and not disciplined enough to delete the download files after I have finished with them. In time, my hard disc fills up and it takes a few hours to sort out which files I can safely delete in order to make space.

Petroferm is a company which was well known for being among the first for promoting HCS solvents some ten years or so ago. Their web site at http://www.petroferm.com/file/filecabinetfr.htm is exemplary in that it gives all the technical details on both the Bioact and Axarel ranges in an easy-to-read and easy-to-navigate form. Even the long Material Safety Data Sheets are explicit and easily downloaded.

Another manufacturer of HCS solvents can be found at http://www.dow.com

The site has a good product finder to locate Dowanol or any other blend but the navigation to find a product's data sheet is far from easy. Even worse, to obtain a material safety data sheet not only requires the downloading of a PDF file, it also insists on the user logging in. My experience with this kind of unnecessary bureaucracy is that half the persons logging in will give fantasy names, such as Mickey Mouse or Monica Lewinsky, in order to avoid being bombarded with commercial junk mail, whether it be electronic or by post. When this involves such an important issue as safety, one must question whether it is not superfluous.

Another manufacturer, this time of saponifiers, as well as other solvents, can be found at http://www.electrolube.com

Unfortunately, Electrolube has a large graphics-intensive but otherwise simple home page (see Figure 1). On the other hand, it has probably the easiest selection guide to choose the required products. However, the most negative point on the system is that it requires an X-Framemaker plug-in for the browser in order to see technical data sheets and material safety data sheets. I could not get this to work with Netscape Communicator 4.06. Again, I suggest that simple HTML pages offer the best solution for data sheets on web sites. Using the search facility is easy but, if it does not produce the desired results, one is blocked from accessing other parts of the site without a manual operation of recalling the home page URL. To say the least, this is bizarre!

To round off this quick survey, I propose going to three soldering chemicals suppliers to see what they offer. I hesitate going to the first one at http:/www.multicore.com because I have given very negative criticisms of this site on previous occasions. Most of my prior remarks regarding the poor design and implementation are still valid but it would seem that, in some parts of the site, an effort has been made to improve it. Unfortunately, this is not the case regarding cleaning products. In fact, although there is a page devoted to the subject, the only thing one can learn about it is the name of their key product, Prozone. No technical details or even a material safety data sheet is offered. If you wish to know more about Prozone, you need to ask for it. This defeats the whole purpose of the Internet as a source of information.

I did not have much better luck with Kester at http://www.kester.com

Figure 1 Electrolube's home page

Their home page was fairly graphics-intensive and it has a nasty bug built into it. The menu is in the form of several lines of text, each one preceded by a button. Press a button and you will be taken to a page which bears no relation to the text beside it! In order to go where you wish, it is necessary to click actually onto the text. Having got into the page which lists cleaning products, again there are no details given. This is peculiar when one considers that the same site is excellent when it comes to flux selection, which gives full details of each product. I suggest that Kester may consider rectifying this anomaly, as well as the bug. At the same time, they might care to see whether the navigation could be improved.

Finally, let us have a look at at the Alpha Metals site at http://www.alphametals.com

This is not much better than either of the two preceding ones. It is also graphics-intensive, although navigation is somewhat easier. By entering into the correct page, one learns that this company resells the Petroferm Bioact and a product called Armakleen from Church & Dwight, as well as their own range of saponifiers. Unfortunately, no details are available without filling in a request form. My advice to anyone wanting to find out more details of Bioact would be to go to the Petroferm site. To find out anything about Armakleen, it is useless to go to the manufacturer's site, as it just refers you back to the Alpha one!

From the above, it would seem that it may be possible to draw the conclusion that suppliers of fluxes and suchlike chemicals may be better at their alchemy than they are at devising Internet web sites! It is interesting that manufacturers of cleaning products and who do not manufacture fluxes are much more informative. I cannot draw any moral from this conclusion!

Table ISubjective judgement of sites mentioned

URL	Technical information		Site quality
http://www.wackchem.com		****		***
http://www.dupont.com/vertrel/products		**		****
http://www.petroferm.com/file/filecabinetfr.htm		*****		*****
http://www.dow.com		***		**
http://www.electrolube.com		**		*
http://www.multicore.com		*		**
http://www.kester.com		*		*
http://www.alphametals.com		*		**

Table I shows my subjective judgement on the sites mentioned. The technical information is judged on the ease with which one can obtain sufficient information to select a product directly from the Web pages. The site quality is judged from the time required to download the appropriate pages, the ease of use, the readability and the ease of navigation between pages.

Brian EllisMosfilotiCyprusb_ellis@protonique.com