| Happy 20th Birthday, Smiley :) |
| Digital Photography and the Demise of the Wedding Photographer |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| Gentlemen, Choose Your Glue |
| Lots and Lots of Pics |
| Perfect for the Chess Drinking Game |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
BREAKING SURF
US National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace Draft
The White House has released a draft of the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace. This high-level strategy document was created with considerable input from non-federal organizations such as local governments, private companies, and universities and research institutions. This makes sense since much of the Net infrastructure resides in the hands of those entities and outside the direct control of the US government. The document itself is bland, mostly a call for common-sense security practices and closer cooperation between private industry and the government, including the inevitable desire to set up new US agencies to focus on the issue. A minor but telling nit: the font choice in the huge three-column PDF document makes it hard to read and no simple text or HTML copy is available. The Web site of the Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office (CIAO, baby) has many related links.White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov/pcipb/
CIAO: http://www.ciao.gov/
The Next Generation Space Telescope
NASA has announced details of the next generation space telescope (NGST), to be called the James Webb Space Telescope after NASA's second chief. The Webb observatory differs greatly from the Hubble telescope now in use. For one, it will park at the L2 Lagrange orbital point and so will be much farther from Earth than Hubble and thus less easily repaired. This orbit was chosen because it simplifies the cooling of the apparatus, which will feature a roughly 7-meter-wide mirror - Hubble's is less than 3 meters wide - composed of smaller hexagonal segments. The segments will be deformable under computer control to provide adaptive optics much like those on the largest terrestrial telescopes. The low temperatures the telescope will reach will let it see far into the infrared to glimpse the light of the first stars and galaxies which formed in the Universe. The telescope is scheduled for deployment in 2010. Make sure to check the link archive link for many telescope-related science papers.http://ngst.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Does Democracy Rule the Galaxy?
Would space aliens count snouts in order to select their leaders? According to a psychology professor at UC Davis, the answer is a resounding yes. Albert Harrison argues that stable and ancient societies are most likely to achieve that status not through autocracy and empire-building, but via democratic governance. His book, "After Contact", examines this concept in more detail, but you can derive the basic concepts from a couple of articles written by others at Space.com and SpaceDaily. The limitations of interstellar transport, the argument goes, resemble the limitations imposed by travel in the 18th century, when representative democracy arose to counter problems associated with communication rather than for issues of ethics or morality. If extraterrestrials have established long-term civilizations, tautologically, these societies have adopted the pattern of great efficiency - which argues for representative democracy as the glue that holds their society together. This is about as hypothetical as you can get, but the discussions are compelling. Don't forget to look for the book - it's out of print but demand could bring it back.Space.com: http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_vote_020815.html
SpaceDaily: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-02l.html
"After Contact": http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0306456214/netsurferdigest/
Testing the Great Firewall of China
We spoke a bit about the Great Firewall of China last issue, and we love the term so much, here's more. Researchers at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School have set up a Web site where you can test which Web pages are being censored by the Great Firewall of China. We wrote about these folks in NSD 8.29, noting their probes of Saudi Web filtering. That and this China-testing site are part of the center's project on worldwide online censorship. To test a Web site's availability in China, just enter the URL and hit a button. You can read more about the project in an interview with the researchers at Business Week Online. NSD is not currently blocked by the Firewall. We don't know whether to be gratified or insulted for not being considered subversive enough.NSD 8.29: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v08/nsd.08.29.html#BS6
Test: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/test/
Business Week: http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/sep2002/nf20020916_2066.htm
Scratch a fed and paranoia oozes out. Used to anyway, and we don't suppose it's much different right now. Back in the day, the subversive Mad Magazine - you know, Spy vs Spy, Don Martin, Alfred E. Neuman - liked to spoof the FBI and its then supreme honcho, J. Edgar Hoover, or J. Edgar Electrolux as the magazine sometimes called him. Hoover, no man to take a joke lightly, sent his boys to check into the decadent, commie rag, to make sure no speck of dirt went unvacuumed. This isn't something Mad made up, this was for real - one has got to keep organs of the state respected and feared, after all. Ed Norris obtained 239 pages of FBI files about Mad under the Freedom of Information-Privacy Acts and has put them online. Some of the stuff consists of letters from citizens with a poor sense of humor complaining about the magazine. Clearly, Hoover didn't appreciate what he considered a tasteless misuse of his name, or the magazine's ridicule of his agency. Material about the Draft Dodger Club, which invited members to write to the FBI for membership cards, is particularly amusing.
Background: http://www.collectmad.com/fbi/data/Bufile-Background.html
Files: http://www.collectmad.com/fbi/FBI-MAD-Bufiles.htm
Mad: http://www2.warnerbros.com/web/madmagazine/home.jsp
Bush's UN Talk and the Case against Hussein
There's no beating around the bush for President Bush: Saddam Hussein is a menace and must go. So he made clear in his address to the UN Sept. 12. Here's the text (if not the pronunciation) of his speech, and a 21-page report from the White House, "A Decade of Deception and Defiance", to back it up. The President warned the UN that the US will act on its own unless Hussein honors previous commitments to disarm and allows weapons inspectors unfettered access inside Iraq. In his speech, Bush assembled a blow-by-blow account of UN resolutions ignored or side-stepped, promises made then broken, charges denied then later admitted. Challenging the UN to decide if it will stand with the US to rid the world of this "grave and gathering danger", he left no doubt that the US will act, with or without the UN. As we go to press, Iraq has apparently blinked but Hussein's a wily character and we don't think it's the last we'll hear of war.Bush: http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/09/12/bush.transcript/index.html
Report: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/09/iraqdecade.pdf
"Hello World Leaders! Come join us, The United States, as we wage war on Iraq...." So reads the amusing invitation, allegedly from Evite but at Defective Yeti, that asks the nations of the world to join the US in the upcoming war. At press time, 30 nations have responded: the US and Britain with an enthusiastic "Let's Roll!"; Switzerland with a firm "Maybe"; and 27 nations with a "No", citing everything from "busy coming apart at the seams" (Argentina) to "we have tickets to Ozzfest that day" (United Arab Emirates).
http://www.defectiveyeti.com/iraqevite/
Researchers Model Sept. 11 Pentagon Crash
Researchers at Purdue University have developed a remarkable simulation of the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon. The research represents a leap in the ability to visualize the crash and to understand how the building and the plane responded to the impact. Take heed - the realistic graphics can be disturbing to watch. Nevertheless, such realism will aid building designers and architects in constructing resilient structures for the foreseeable future.Press release: http://news.uns.purdue.edu/html4ever/020910.Sozen.Pentagon.html
Simulation: http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/cmh/simulation/
Architects "Reimagine" Another World Trade Center Plan
The Sept. 11 anniversary made the emptiness of Ground Zero that much more apparent. What had once been the apple of the New York skyline's eye was the footprint of all that was gone. What is to be done with this nearly sacred piece of real estate is still up in the air. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation sponsored a design competition that produced plans which met with yawns and derision. In this New York Times Magazine article, long-time architectural critic Herbert Muschamp describes a project to "reimagine" the World Trade Center space. The resulting vision yields space for both a memorial to be designed and office space. Unlike the existing plans, which you can view in a nice animation window, the plan Muschamp presents honors those who died by revitalizing and reinventing lower Manhattan. Far more than the existing plans, the reimagined concept would link and invigorate the commerce, transportation, and culture of lower Manhattan.http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/magazine/08REBUILD.html
Dartmouth's Wirelessly Wired Campus
Wired takes a look at Dartmouth College's WiFi scene and comes away pretty impressed. This recent print article is reproduced online, and it's an interesting look at the scene. As one Dartmouth student says, "Nobody here knows anyone's phone number." Much communication on campus takes place wirelessly, between computer and PDA or whatever. Quaintly, the campus holds to a tradition established back in 1988, when its first e-mail system, called BlitzMail at the time, went live. Locals still use it as a term: "I'll blitz you when I get in." Perhaps the most interesting feature of the wireless world is what the students are doing with it. One has produced a little program that uses the wireless transmitters to triangulate the exact position of any given PDA or laptop; another has produced a personal security device the size of a cigarette lighter that uses similar triangulation technology to pinpoint the location of whoever hits the panic button. This is way beyond checking your e-mail at Starbucks. Unsurprisingly, Cisco is subsidizing some of the costs for WiFi-ing campuses. This gives that networking company a serious edge, as it gets an early look at usage patterns, network performance, and innovation. The phenom has already positively affected teaching at Dartmouth. Every innovation, it seems, creates ripples in places nobody would have thought to look.http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.10/dartmouth.html
How Congress Deals with E-Mail
It should come as no surprise that Congress faces a problem dealing with its large amounts of incoming e-mail - and no, this is not about spam. Congressional staffs have trouble distinguishing e-mail that actually comes from constituents from e-mail sent from anonymous "click here to vote" Web sites. In general, unless you include your street address and e-mail your message to your specific representatives, it will probably be ignored. Lobbying organizations, in consultation with Congressional staff, have come up with a solution - to channel your e-mail through Web forms that add XML tags with information such as your name and address. Such tagged e-mail can then be read by congressional mail systems and automatically sorted. This Roll Call article notes that partly for this reason more than half of all members of Congress have turned off their public e-mail addresses and have instead opted to use Web-based forms. Meanwhile, e-mail submitted by untagged systems, such as those used by users of Vote.com, goes unread.http://www.rollcall.com/pages/news/00/2002/09/news0916g.html
By and large, Linux has been spared the massive security problems - and attendant massive publicity - that have bedeviled Windows. This may be changing as Linux popularity grows, and that may explain in part the appearance of the Linux Slapper worm. The worm attacks Linux systems running the Apache webserver by taking advantage of its mod_ssl module, which secures communications between browser and server. A fix for the problem has been released with OpenSSL version 0.9.6g. Meanwhile, the worm is attacking a growing number of servers and creating a peer-to-peer network that can be used in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Reports indicate that several such attacks have already been launched. Two stories, from Wired and CNET, have details of the situation at press time.
OpenSSL: http://www.openssl.org/
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/linux/0,1411,55172,00.html
CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1001-958122.html
Businesses Urge Instant Messenger Services to Standardize
Instant messaging (IM) has become so important for many businesses that they're leaning on IM service providers to ensure interoperability. Several weeks ago, the newly created Instant Messaging Standards Board, led by several big-name financial services companies, held a meeting with AOL Time Warner, Microsoft, and other IM providers to pressure the rivals, who haven't shown much inclination to work toward or use a common standard, to do just that. Currently, nearly 13 million office workers use IM, and the financial firms want IM service to work just like e-mail. The trick will be finding a business model that gives business the service it wants and providers the money they need to make it worthwhile. Given the rivals' past mutual antagonism, and rival plans for interoperability standards, it's not yet clear that anyone has got the message. More at CNET.http://news.com.com/2100-1023-957787.html
Yahoo officially moved into the Internet access business on a Friday the 13th - auspicious timing, to be sure. Yahoo and SBC Communications, a telecom company, are offering co-branded DSL service in an effort, we suspect, to stem the bleeding from weak online ad revenues. Given the increasingly shaky relationship that Yahoo has with Wall Street, it's in its best interest to get this up and running quickly. SBC offers broadband in 13 US states, and the rollout of the co-branded product will include six-month incentives that vary based on the speed you need. Some see this as an attempt to compete with AOL and MSN, but it strikes us more as a move made by Yahoo in an attempt to save its skin. CNET has the tale, and links to prior speculation. Yahoo has the ad.
CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-957815.html
Yahoo: http://promo.yahoo.com/sbc/dsl/temp/
ONLINE CULTURE
Happy 20th Birthday, Smiley :)
Smileys and frowneys are the ubiquitous ASCII signifiers of emotion in e-mail, but where do they come from? Mike Jones, a Microsoft researcher, has revealed the answer to that question, and it's fairly simple. They come from the inventive mind of Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, some 20 years ago. If you want to see the very first emoticon, check out Jones's or Fahlman's pages; if you want to see what the smiley wrought, check out ComputerUser's emoticon dictionary. It's amazing what you can convey with a keyboard - Check out this baby Centrosaurus, an original: Jpq-Jones: http://research.microsoft.com/~mbj/Smiley/Smiley.html
Fahlman: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm
ComputerUser: http://www.computeruser.com/resources/dictionary/emoticons.html
Digital Photography and the Demise of the Wedding Photographer
Mark Stone recently got married and as part of the process had to deal with the wedding photographer. Stone, a reasonably prominent person in the Open Source establishment, wanted his wedding photos professionally taken and delivered to him on CD-ROM. His photographer was not crazy about the idea, for economic reasons. Once the photos were out there in electronic form, she would not make money selling reprints to Stone's friends and family. This set Stone to thinking about where professional photography is heading, at least as far as wedding and portrait photographers go. Stone thinks that such photographers will be gradually marginalized, much like portrait painters were pushed aside by photographers during the 19th century. His essay on the topic touches on intellectual property, economics, and the unexpected impact of the digital technology on one specific profession.http://digitalpilgrim.com/personal/photo.html
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Sahara: A Natural History
The Partly Cloudy Patriot
Essential Blogging
Worldmakers: SF Adventures in TerraformingSURFING SITES
The Rube Goldberg Way to Play a Vinyl Record
What happens when you bring together a geek, a scanner, a computer, and one of those little flat, round, vinyl things that people used to play on a turntable? Ofer Springer, the aforementioned geek, looked at an LP through a magnifying glass and realized that the bumps and grooves could be discerned visually. In an awe-inspiring feat of creativity, coding skill, and just plain coolness, he then put the record into his scanner and scanned a high-res image. That done, Springer slapped together some code that would try to read the scanned image and "play" the music - in this case, Vivaldi. While the code needs some work - the digital needle only decodes part of one channel and there's a lot of background hiss - this is incredibly imaginative work and it's amazing that it works at all. Follow the logic at Springer's page, where you can also compare MP3s of the original Vivaldi with some decoding attempts. The step-by-step is all here, as is a link to the code itself, which the author freely admits is buggy. Still, for a couple of late nights' work, this is pretty cool. Check this out, then fire up your scanner and see if you can improve on the extraction.http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/
There are many things that can be said about Leonard Nimoy's singing, but "better than Shatner's" is the most positive we can come up with. See him perform "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" in QuickTime, then play the file again to see whether those backing singers really are wearing Vulcan ears. Pick your jaw off the floor and watch it again, this time to savor the lyrics - "Bilbo (Bilbo), Bilbo Baggins, Greatest little hobbit of them all" - the jangly psychedelic guitar and keyboards, and the home-made porno production values and aesthetic. Pinch yourself to see whether you're dreaming, play it again and then the awful truth becomes clear - Leonard Nimoy is really digging this. The movie is on the Tolkien Collector Web site, a resource for collectors of Lord of the Rings merchandise and Tolkienalia, which we really must check out again after we've played that video just one more time. Is that dancer really wearing a badge that says "Admit Leonard Nimoy to the UN"? (Note: Tolkien Collector has run out of bandwidth, so here's an alternate source for the video.)
Ballad: http://www.tolkiencollector.com/bbaggins.mov
Tolkien Collector: http://www.tolkiencollector.com
Alternate: http://www.ussjoshua.org/bbaggins.mov
The Boy Who Just Wouldn't Grow Up
Randy Constan, a 48-year-old "eternal child" with a bowl-cut and a penchant for dressing up as Peter Pan, admits that Pixyland is something of a vanity page. This 2001 Webby Award winner (in the Weird category, unsurprisingly) gives Constan the opportunity to expound his theories of sexuality, talk about his interests in music and Web design, spread his message of religious tolerance, and show a load of pics of himself dressed up as Peter Pan, a purple pixie, and "a very Lovely Fairy Princess." As Constan admits, "it has been a difficult and lonely road to be so openly unique," and he is unashamedly on the lookout for his perfect partner and soulmate on the Peter's ISO Tinkerbell page. Over three million people have dropped into Pixyland, but Randy's still looking for his Tinkerbell. Are you a single female - mid 30s to late 40s - with a Peter Pan/Fairy fetish and in search of love? Randy's waiting for you. GSOH essential.http://pixyland.org/peterpan/
Animal lovers may remember when the first rhinocam was established some years back, at Oregon Zoo (and by a Netsurfer, no less). Set to relay images every 30 seconds, it allowed folks worldwide to peek in at the Zoo's first baby Eastern Black and her parents. That was a significant event, but one of even greater significance has occurred at Cincinnati Zoo, where the first captive birth of the critically endangered Sumatran rhino in 112 years occurred some months back. In conjunction with a local TV station and a broadband provider, the zoo has set up its own rhinocam. This one streams in real time, and you can control the cameras. Focus, zoom - control is yours for a minute at a time. Depending on how many folks are in the queue ahead of you, you might have to wait for a bit for cam control. On the other hand, it's even entertaining to watch novice camera-handlers try their luck. We visited just as the rhino mom and calf were admitted into a room for a noon feeding. Very cool! This is a definite winner, but you'll need broadband for best results.
http://www.aroundcinci.com/RHINOCAM/
Imagine R2D2 as a site foreman and a bunch of Lego characters as miniature construction workers with attitude and you have the basis of this quirky online comic that shows the crew assembling a computer from components. It's odd but at the same time charming. R2D2 replays the plan of the PC instead of a message from Princess Leia. Sometimes, the Lego workers take time out to pop the bubblewrap from the component packages. There are tragic industrial accidents, practical jokes between comrades, and massive group efforts just to turn the screwdriver. This Web site, heavy on images and low on text, had to be mirrored to ease bandwidth congestion at the original site earlier this summer. Now we're off to dust off our own Lego men to see if they know anything about improving a modem....
http://www.skizzers.org/andy/lego.html
PBS Tries to Clarify the Mid-East Muddle
Can anyone make sense of the mess in the Middle East? PBS provides excellent context with its new site, Global Connections, designed primarily for high-school teachers but clearly of interest to others as well. An interactive timeline highlights key 20th-century events and other info related to the Middle East in a Flash window that lists and describes events triggered by a question (such as "What factors determine the changing roles of women in the Middle East and Islamic societies?") or themes such as religion, culture, and economics. A neat, tabbed Flash map displays changing political borders as you mouse between 1600 and 2002. The timeline and map also come in non-Flash format. Lesson plans help teachers, but the meatiest area of this site is Educator's Resources, where teachers can develop lesson plans on US foreign policy, stereotypes, and other concepts. You can read case studies of how American communities responded to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, along with a useful glossary and a section on teaching with multimedia. Overall, the emphasis is on fact, not persuasion.http://www.pbs.org/globalconnections/
Those who view the British as a nation of stiff-upper-lip stoics should get down to the Peoples (sic) Page, a site that provides the British public the opportunity to "publish details of a consumer issue they have experienced" (read "whinge"). It gives the wider public a marvelous window on the British psyche. Mrs. P from Middlesborough booked her 80-year-old mother on a holiday to Morecambe in northwest England. "It was the ideal present for her," she writes - but the booking agent sent the mother to Wales. Mr. Johns was sold a dud antique umbrella by a London dealer and, when he telephoned to complain, was greeted with "a load of verbal abuse." Mr. D's beef is with Scottish Widows Pensions whose "so-called customer services are an absolute disgrace." The Peoples Page does not give advice to its readers, nor act on their behalf in any consumer issue; in fact, all it does is give you the opportunity to register complaints and, of course, to read them.
http://www.peoplespage.info/
Attention, butterfingers! If your hand-eye coordination gives you nightmares, approach the sport of cup stacking with caution. That's right - people stack cups in individual and team competitions. How fast do you have to be? Even the adroit will be surprised, and some briefly humbled, by the video at Speed Stacks, a site devoted to this indoor sport. If you can beat eight seconds, you ought to be the featured champion here. This site has just about everything you'd want to know about speed stacking, including the Stacker Finder (a search facility to locate schools that elevate the educational cup) and cup-stacking news. Read how a skeptical physical education teacher in Massachusetts became a cup-stacking addict and proponent. Check the calendar to find out when Speed Stacks will give a demo in your area. Fill a shopping cart with stacking cups onsite, if you're so moved. Practice makes a pyramid. All you need is a lot of time, patience, and the ability to explain your obsession. Still, your left brain may often wonder what the heck your right brain thinks it is doing.
http://www.speedstacks.com/qt_lg.html
Time to don your scuba gear and dive into the world of prawnography. Prawnography is a brilliant parody of online pornography Web sites, right down to the pop-up ads, that features crustaceans (and the occasional mollusc) in fetish gear and compromising poses. You'll either find yourself in hysterics or shaking your head at folks who have way too much time on their hands. Prawnography dips the world of online porn into an absurd cocktail sauce of shrimp, clams, and other underwater dwellers. From the disclaimer to the news section, every aspect of this site displays a "fishy" edge. Perhaps the most absurd aspects of this site are the galleries featuring actual photos of shrimp and other invertebrates in high heels, bondage gear, and various other sexual costumes. This Web site definitely gives new meaning to the phrase "A fish out of water."
http://www.prawnography.net/
Inspired by the motto "Higher Consciousness... It's not just for humans anymore," this Web site provides a light-hearted look at yoga where your partner-in-posture is your feline friend. Examples in the free online videos feature Yogi Ovaria (the "Original Yogakitty") and her friend Yogi Karl, around whose head she ends up wrapped. Ovaria is a stray ginger who promises spiritual awakenings and fewer hairballs to all who follow her well produced workout . At the very least, by following the online video instructions you will exercise your sense of humor and entertain your cat as you strive for strange positions that it can achieve with consummate ease.
http://www.yogakitty.com/index.html
Virtual Stickman Cops 'n' Robbers
If you're looking for a break, visit this online interactive game called Xiao Xiao No. 4. Simple graphics combined with easy game play make this a welcome interruption in a hectic workday. The game's a straightforward shoot 'em up which lets you vent your frustrations. It lacks the blood and guts familiar in today's games, which makes it feel more like an old-school arcade game. Add to that the stickmen villains and you'll think you've returned to the days of Atari. The game is short, with a completion time of about ten minutes. Who needs games that last days, when you've only got 15 minutes to spare before your next sales meeting?http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view.php?id=25718
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
"Because people have a need to glue things to other things" is the motto of thistothat.com, which informs visitors of the adhesive of choice when sticking one type of material to another. Need to paste Styrofoam to wood? Use the handy drop down menu to find the best brand for the job. You'll never be stuck wondering which glue to use again.http://www.thistothat.com/
Spend some time browsing here and you're sure to see something new. This online photo gallery features mostly military and law enforcement images such as celebrity mug shots, aviation, WWII posters, and much more. With over 2,700 photos in 18 albums, this site can easily enthrall you for hours.
http://www.theofficersclub.com/gallery/
Perfect for the Chess Drinking Game
Driver's ed teaches that your judgement is the first thing to go when you drink, but if two chess opponents indulge, that levels the playing field. Play with the Shot Glass Chess Set, and learn that nights spent out in the bars building up your tolerance may be as important as those spent with your head down over your pieces, brother.http://www.drinkstuff.com/shot-glass-chess-set.htm