Yes, it's the season when the desperation in parents' faces contrasts nicely with the rictus of avarice on the faces of their kids. What could it be but the annual holiday of commerce, Christmas. We thought we'd give you a break and have some fun with holiday netsurfing by putting together this little site. It's an update of a concept we first attempted in 1995, featuring some diverting and eclectic links which we think you'll enjoy. Have fun, and happy holidays. "http://www.netsurf.com/12sites/12sites96.html"
APACHE DOMINATES, MICROSOFT GAINS IN LATEST SERVER SURVEY
Netcraft has released the latest in their ongoing round of automated Web server surveys. After accessing 603,367 servers, they report that Apache runs at 41% of all sites, dwarfing the shares of commercial servers and a hair up from the last survey. Second-place Netscape servers declined slightly from 13.75% to 12.96%, apparently at least partly due to gains in fourth place Microsoft's share, which went up to from 9.37% to 9.52%. NCSA server continues to lose ground, though it's still in third place with 12.63%. Details can be found at the Netcraft site. "http://www.netcraft.com/survey/"
NEWSWEEK LAUNCHES GUIDE TO CHILDREN'S SOFTWARE
Just in time for the holiday season, Newsweek launched this site featuring just about everything you could possibly want to know about children's software. Aside from regular reviews of new educational and entertainment software, the site features a database of over 600 programs and a forum area where you can chat about your tykes' favorite programs. There's also a frame-rich page with an assortment of columns with the now familiar big-media generic titles like "The Net: Childs Play?" and "Your Kid's School and How You Can Help". It's a fairly straightforward site dedicated to one topic which it does cover quite thoroughly. If you're in the market for kids' software, a stop here could be rewarding. "http://www.newsweekparentsguide.com/"
Many of you know EPIC as the electronic privacy organization which was formed to center attention on issues of electronic privacy and civil liberties in cyberspace. In that role, it has just opened a bookstore section which features an excellent assortment of privacy and related books at their Web site. It's a comprehensive assortment of books, ranging from the epic "Applied Cryptography" to fiction such as "Snow Crash", various technical journals, and obscure but tantalizing titles like "The Naked Consumer: How Our Private Lives Became Public Commodities", and "Computer Crime Techniques Prevention and Detecting Crime in Financial Institutions". Lots of good browsing for laypeople and technical pros. "http://www.epic.org/bookstore/"
GENERAL REASONING PROGRAM PROVES THEOREM
This is kind of an esoteric item, but it marks a significant step in the development of artificial intelligence software. Some years back, the very first computer proof was done, when a computer exhaustively proved the famous four-color map conjecture after being programmed to do so. Recently, another computer discovered another proof, but this time the beast was programmed to do generic reasoning, not any specified problem. For the first time, we have a tool which can, to some extent, exhibit the same mathematical reasoning power that top human mathematicians use to crack difficult abstract math problems. With this proof, the quality of our artificial intelligence knowledge has taken a quantum leap. For the mathematically masochistic, the technical details of the Robbins Conjecture proof are at this site. Read the Press Release link from there for the non-technical info. "http://www.mcs.anl.gov/home/mccune/ar/robbins/"
SENDMAIL CERT ADVISORY AND WEB SPOOFING SECURITY ALERT
CERT has issued an advisory for the sendmail program. It seems that it is possible for a user to gain group permissions of another user. The advisory has details and suggests that you upgrade to Sendmail 8.8.4. In a separate development, there seems to be yet another security flaw in the generic Web infrastructure. It goes by the euphonious name of "Web spoofing" and basically means that an evil hacker can listen in and modify the traffic between your browser and any Web server you are trying to access. Read all about it on the Safe Internet Programming page, an interesting and useful resource in its own right. Sendmail: "ftp://info.cert.org/pub/cert_advisories/CA-96.25.sendmail_groups" Spoofing: "http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/News.html"
THE STILL ONGOING HISTORY OF APPLE
Glenn Sanford presents the manic history of Apple Computer in broad strokes with six short, sharp synopses of the Woz and Steve's brainchild. Read along as Apple forges ahead or falls behind under the guiding hand of the company's notoriously woozy management. While there's certainly more to be said and read (a good "further reading" list for the interested is included), Sanford has pulled together an excellent thumbnail history of the people behind Apple, and has managed to compile decent, detailed histories for every machine Apple has introduced to the market. An opinion section adds depth to the history by offering comment and criticism from some of the folks who helped make that history. If you're an Apple a day kind of nethead, it's tasty eating. "http://www.apple-history.pair.com/"
JUMBO! REPORTS ON US GOVERNMENT DOWNLOADS
Tony Heinz, webmaster of Jumbo!, decided to investigate how much time users from US government domains (.gov) spent from August to October at the online shareware emporium. He found that the feds spent over 5,000 hours at the site, equivalent to ten employees doing nothing but searching and downloading. NASA's Ames Research Center employs the biggest federal bandwidth suckers, who accessed over 25,000 pages over 950 hours, way ahead of numbers two (National Institutes of Health; 180 hours) and three (US Postal Service; 112 hours). The Executive Office of the President logged 4.8 hours, but with the campaign and all.... Downloads included Quake, Homer Simpson belching sound files, and business-related software and utilities. "http://www.jumbo.com/"
CENSORSHIP MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE FOR INTERNET USERS
This according to the latest indispensible GVU's WWW User Survey. Fully 35% of the 15,000-plus respondents said that censorship was the most important issue facing the Internet today, with privacy coming in second place at 26.2%. In addition, more than 2/3 of respondents (67.6%) reported that they were not willing to pay additional fees for accessing Web materials. The survey ran throught October and November of this year. As usual, there are many, many more interesting results then we can report here, so we urge you to take a look at the site for a fascinating snapshot of our online culture. "http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys/survey-10-1996/"
ONE IN NINE US HOUSEHOLDS USE WEB, A QUARTER OF THEM SHOP ONLINE
A new survey of about 10,000 households by PC-Meter leads that company to estimate that about 11 million households use the Web in the US. Not surprisingly, 33.1% of households with annual incomes over $100,000 use the Web, as opposed to only 5.5% of those with incomes of $25,000 or less. Similarly, advanced degree holders hit the Web more (28.0%) than do those with only high school degrees (5.3%). Another survey reveals that 25% of Web users now visit shopping sites, with the number one shopping destination being Shareware.com. Other top shopping sites include Columbia House, ZD-Net, CUS, and Amazon.com. These fun facts and more can be found in the latest PC-Meter press releases, and details can be had if you subscribe to their market research service. "http://www.npd.com/pcmpr19.htm" "http://www.npd.com/pcmpr20.htm"
ELECTRIC OLIVE STUFFED WITH RENDERED ART, NOT PIMENTO
There's a lot of art out there, but this is really good. We can't easily categorize Ken Fair's rendered images. There are landscapes to abstracts, most in strict, slick, rendered-image style, but here and there there's grayscale and images built to resemble watercolor or chalk. Nice touches include artist's notes and the quickly loading thumbnail versions. "http://www.electricolive.com/Index.html"
Web designer Amber Lamperti has free art for you to use for your non-commercial, personal home pages. There are Theme Sets that include coordinated backgrounds, bullets, icons, and horizontal rules to use in building an attractive Web site of your own. There are 15 theme sets and over 75 backgrounds, although some may be too dark to be practical. New images are added to the site on a regular basis. The price is right, so read the rules and take some home with you. "http://www.solarflare.com/freeart/"
If you don't have much time but you want to feed your soul a bit of art, drop in on Pascale Abraham. You can be in and out of this 3-D illustrator's site in no time flat. It's offered in either French or English. "http://www.infobahnos.com/~hotdog/"
MULTIMEDIA "ALICE IN WONDERLAND"
This CD-ROM-quality story is complete with music and animated illustrations of the original Tennile drawings. We think books are still best, but this site could foment interest in a classic which may appear a little old-fashioned in its original form. The site is graphic intensive and the "Say Hi to Alice" is a little kitsch, but it's a high quality production. "http://www.megabrands.com/alice/"
ROMANCING THE TOME: ENGLISH RENAISSANCE LITERATURE
There you are, reading the mellifluous works of Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, Elizabeth I, and old William Shakespeare himself, when suddenly you hear the gentle sounds of Renaissance chamber music playing in the background. How sweet it is to find graphics that appropriately evoke time and place. Oh, what joy. Oh, what ecstasy hath herein been discovered. "http://www.alchemyweb.com/~alchemy/englit/renlit/"
Ah - the men's movement. Despite our reservations, Manhood (relax, it's an e-zine) proves to be intelligent and relevent. With issues like Family Court blues, midlife job redundancy, and prostate monitoring, it presents an insightful and uncomplaining look at life after feminism. The site even recommends reading feminist literature to grasp the change in roles. A good quality read, for men and women. "http://www.manhood.com.nf/"
Want to hear it first? Don't bother with newsstands. Check out Entertainment News and the world's gossip, TV, movie, and music news is at your fingertips. We were shocked that Burt Reynolds was bankrupt, relieved that Tommy and Pam have reconciled and bemused by the male runner-up in the Miss Australia beauty pageant. All the news and faster than hard copy. MuchMusic, by the way, is Canada's answer to MTV, except MuchMusic stills plays music. "http://www.muchmusic.com/rapidfax/"
THE PREMIERE PLACE FOR HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE IMAGES
Who can resist the greatest show in the universe? You can view and save hundreds of images with an out-of-this-world viewpoint taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. You'll find outstanding images with color and clarity that's hard to believe. You might use one of these images as wallpaper for your computer screen. If you're really impressed, there's also info on getting prints. "http://www.stsci.edu/pubinfo/Pictures.html"
TWO SITES DEDICATED TO YOUR HEALTH
HealthLink," an online magazine that's truly a pleasure to read - interactive health quiz and all. If you'd like to get even more technical, try the National Center for Infectious Diseases (NCID), a great place to look up what's ailing you and the rest of the world. Stanford: "http://healthlink.stanford.edu/" NCID: "http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/ncid.htm"
We use Eudora Light and we were pleased to discover a new version out for the Mac and in beta for Windows. The plusses of version 3.0.1 are the addition of e-mail filters, plug-ins, clickable URLs, drag-and-drop implementation, and a host of new settings. The minuses include rare but bizarre occasions on which opened e-mail appears exactly like TV static (cured by closing and re-opening the program) and a few other bugs we ourselves haven't yet experienced, but which can be read about in the comp.mail.eudora.mac and comp.mail.eudora.ms-windows newsgroups. No word yet as to whether or not it abuses our NSDs. "http://www.eudora.com/"
NETSCAPE GUIDE TO COMMERCIAL DEVELOPMENT TOOLS
This new site from Netscape lists about 70 commercial development tools, and is of definite interest to Internet programmers and content developers. It's divided into three sections. Core Components lists tools for developing Java, CGI, graphics, and multimedia applications. Application Building and Integration lists HTML editors, JavaScript tools, and database connectivity tools. Deployment and Management lists site management and performance measurement tools. These are commercial tools for serious developers with serious bucks to spend. Netscape also announced a bundling deal with several of the tools in one package, called SuiteTool. Read the press release for more info. Tools: "http://developer.netscape.com/library/tools/index.html" SuiteTool: "http://home.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease303.html"
PRETTY GOOD PRIVACY WEB SITE FEATURES COOKIE BLOCKING SOFTWARE
Phil Zimmermann is the founder of Pretty Good Privacy, Inc., and he wants you to control your own fate. You probably know him as the government-hassled creator of the PGP encryption program. His company, founded last March, is just gathering steam, notably with PGP e-mail products and the much-needed PGPcookie.cutter application. The cookie blocking program enables you to control the cookies (essentially hidden footnotes) Web sites leave around on your machine. If you want anonymity when browsing the Web, look at this little gem. PGP will also ship an e-mail add-on called PGPmail4.5 which will enable you to easily exchange encrypted e-mail, especially from the ubiquitous Eudora mail client. Check out their new web site for the entire scoop. "http://www.pgp.com/index.cgi"
This well thought out site bundles information and images to help you identify and understand drugs. Slang terms, paraphernalia, and pictures all work to help parents find out what their kids are involved in, or kids to know what is what. Drug Free America focuses on the negative influences of everything from cigarettes, steroids and inhaled household products to heroin and cocaine. It's an invaluable resource and educational for anyone curious. "http://www.drugfreeamerica.org/"
Trancenet.org boasts that it broadcasts "20 megs of unfiltered information" about "exploitative psychological techniques and those who use them." It offers a deluge of data composed of public and private records, research, and personal histories that expose the seamier activities of groups from the Unification Church, The Way International, the Transcendental Meditation movement to the latest craze in gurudom. While the site invites contributions from "true believers", most material appears to come from those whose lives have been shattered by their association with exploitive groups. With wit and bite they show that the guru has no clothes, and worse. Even if you've never had any contact with "alternative philosophies", it's a neat site to check out. "http://www.trancenet.org/"
WORLDPAGES ISN'T REALLY FOR STALKERS
Tim Dick, president and COO of the WorldPages directory we featured last issue, is a tad miffed that we called his baby a "one-stop stalker's shop." He wrote us to say WorldPages carefully ensures that only information which is publicly volunteered appears on the site. He adds: "We must request that you position us differently ASAP as we'd rather not get into legal and libel issues. I suggest 'The First One-Stop Directory - find people, business, URLs, e-mails all in one place'." So there you go. "http://www.worldpages.com/"
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