Despite the superficial glitter, a rather tragic life ended last week for a
woman who, perhaps naively, tossed herself into the vicious glamor of
British royalty. The official British Monarchy site has a condolences
registry but is well nigh inaccessible. The word that best describes the
Buckingham Palace press releases is terse, though frankly they come as a
refreshing change from the usual press release blather that continually
bombards us. The Royal News Page has excellent sections with links to just
about every major media outlet covering the story. Looking for pictures of
the deceased? One rumor that had the German tabloid Bild publishing gory
photos proved false. Bild published a blurry photo of the car after the
rescue team got there - nothing explicit. Newsbytes has that story and
reports at least one incident of a Net spam touting photos. Look below for
an article on relevant newsgroups.
Monarchy: <http://www.royal.gov.uk/>
Press Releases: <http://www.coi.gov.uk/coi/depts/GQB/GQB.html>
Royal News: <http://www.etoile.demon.co.uk/Rnews.html>
Bild: <http://www.bild.de/>
Newsbyte: <http://www.newsbytes.com/97/99275.html>
Because both Mother Teresa and Princess Diana worked to improve the lot of
the disadvantaged, comparisons are to some extent inevitable, though Mother
Teresa was the polar opposite of Princess Diana. A woman working with and
for the poor for half a century, she was the antithesis of glamor,
intentionally avoiding the glitzy high profile which defined Princess
Diana. When she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, she said, "I am
unworthy." She died of natural causes Friday at the age of 87.
Nobel: <http://www.almaz.com/nobel/peace/1979a.html>
Bio: <http://www.thomson.com/gale/teresa.html>
SERIOUS PGP 5.0 BUG FOUND, WORKAROUND AVAILABLE
The last thing you want to find out about your crypto program is that the
password is written to disk. It's Nightmare City for the already paranoid.
That's exactly what happens in the Windows version of PGP 5.0. A bug writes
the password, stored in a memory buffer, into the swap area of the hard
disk, where it can be easily recovered with disk utilities. Fortunately,
there is a painless fix. Using your preferences to change the password
expire time to something like one second will remove the password from
memory. CNet has the story. PGP, surprisingly, has no information on the
bug at their Web site. Shame on you guys. 'Fess up and plaster this on your
home page or you'll lose your credibility. If you want, an international
freeware version of PGP 5.0i beta is now available for Windows, Mac, and
Linux.
CNet: <http://www.news.com/News/Item/0>
,4,13853,00.html
PGP: <http://www.pgp.com/>
International: <http://www.ifi.uio.no/pgp/>
MARS SURVEYOR ARRIVES IN MARS ORBIT SOON
Check out the Mars Surveyor site to follow the deployment of the latest
mission to Mars. The orbital injection burn is the exciting bit when things
can go really wrong, but the actual mapping mission won't start until
March. <http://mpfwww.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/index.html>
After Basque separatist terrorists killed a popular Spanish politician in
July, hackers subjected the Web site of pro-Basque newspaper Euskal Herria
Journal (EHJ) to a denial of service attack. The ISP that hosted the site
at the time, a non-profit organization which provides services to various
activist organizations, shut down EHJ to prevent losing Net access for the
other organizations it served. The URL was made available in Spanish
newsgroups and newspapers in a campaign protested by GLIC, a freedom of
speech coalition. Now, the Internet Freedom (IF) organization has returned
EHJ to the Net. As usual, this silly censorship attempt only brought its
previously profoundly obscure target global publicity. Will these people
never learn?
EHJ: <http://www.easynet.co.uk/cam/censorship/ehj/ehj.html>
GLIC: <http://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/nii/cyber-rights/web/igc_gilc_english.html>
IF: <http://www.easynet.co.uk/cam/censorship/>
The big controversy leading into this year's Miss America contest was
whether to go to a two-piece bathing suit. Lots of ink - electronic and
organic - flowed debating the momentous question. In the end, we will get
to see more flesh this year, though contestants can choose between bikini
and one-piece. The Sept. 13 show can be seen in the US on ABC, but all fans
can check out the action at the ABC site. The well designed site - not
surprising given the money ABC/Disney can throw around - offers show
details, short bios of the contestants, and day-by-day snapshots in a Go
Behind the Scenes section in which every contestant grins from ear to ear
as if she were a surgically altered advertisement for the American dental
industry. It's silly, anachronistic, and cleaner then a Disnay bathroom.
Check the official site for more boring official information.
ABC: <http://www.abc.com/missamerica/>
Offical: <http://www.missamerica.org/1997/contestants.html>
LATEST DOMAIN COUNT SURVEY NUMBERS
Network Wizards has released their latest semi-annual domain name survey
investigating the amazing growth curve of the Net. The current number of
hosts stands at 19.54 million, up 21% since January of this year, while the
number of domains found was 1.3 million, up 56%. A nifty graph shows the
exponential growth curve in the number of hosts since the inception of the
survey in 1991 - very bacterial in nature.
<http://www.nw.com/zone/WWW/report.html>
The good, the bad, the ugly, the confused, and the bewildered - and that's
just us. Our readers are much more coherent.
<http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/letters/letter.03.28.html>
PRINCESS DIANA IN THE NEWSGROUPS
For your standard mourning and gnashing of teeth, check out the <alt.talk.royalty> and <alt.gossip.royalty> newsgroups. If you like your Usenet with an edge, a visit to <alt.conspiracy.princess-diana> may be more appealing. threads like "Don't Blame the Paparazzi" and "DIANA WAS PREGNANT BY DODI" compete for space with tongue-in-cheek posts like "The flower lobby did it" and "Flight 800 and Princess Di". Oh, and trust us when we say <alt.sex.necrophilia.royal-family> should just be avoided.
SPUTUM stands for "SubGenius Police, Usenet Tactical Unit (Mobile)" and
they hate Usenet spam. They were behind the recent Usenet Death Penalty
action against UUNet, which resulted in UUNet finally taking action against
spammers spewing from their servers. Now realize, pink boys and girls, that
these yeti sling the slang of the SubGenii, so reading their prose is kind
of like having your brain shaved with a rusty spoon. Try the Suit link if
it bothers you. They do however have some technically astute advice to give
to prospective spam warriors in their SpuTools section. Other material of
interest is the archive of posts from Spam wars ancient and glorious, in
which SPUTUM defended its beloved <alt.binaries.slack> newsgroup from
evil warez traders and sex spammers. Ahh, the glory of spontaneously
twisted community building. And for a good cause, no less.
<http://www.sputum.com/>
In an era when computer art is generally divided into 3-d games and
rendered images, Sebastian Marquez looks the other way. His computer art
aspires to comparisons with watercolors and oils, althougfh subject matter
varies from still lifes to nudes to abstracts. Sebastian offers putative
lessons on how to pixel paint, but to us it just looked like a series of
saved versions without comment. The site design and organization also
leaves something to be desired, but the art itself redeems it. You'll be
amazed these pictures were done completely electronically. One fascinating
yet poorly explained project seems to be an attempt to organized the Net's
biggest image - but we couldn't tell. The site comes in Spanish and Swedish
flavors, too. <http://www.remotecom.se/users/snmz/chano2.htm>
BANNED BOOK WEEK, SEPTEMBER 20-28
It seems not a week goes by without some self-branded morally superior
non-entity trying to ban a book for reasons as trivial as "it demeans
teachers and parents as dumb, and portrays the main character as handling a
problem on her own, rather than relying on the help of others" ("My Teacher
is an Alien" by Bruce Coville challenged in Elizabethtown, Penn. schools).
So it's fitting that we take a week out of the year to celebrate banned
books. The BookWeb, a neat site dedicated mostly to booksellers, devotes a
whole section to the event, and sells a promotional and educational kit
which can be used to set up displays and generally support the good fight.
Besides the expected resource guides and lists of banned books, material at
BookWeb includes book news, events listings, a bookstore database,
bookselling statistics, and much more. Like we said, a neat site.
<http://www.bookweb.org/abffe/394.html>
HIP MAMA: NOT YOUR AVERAGE PARENT'S E-ZINE
Hip Mama is just what it says and hopes it is - an irreverent,
left-of-center, mom-oriented parenting magazine for women who may still be
surprised that they're moms. Home-schooling, the travails of being a
teen-age mom, and recipes you'd never find in Good Housekeeping (in the
"Beyond Whirled Peas" column) are all ripe subjects for Mama. The site is
uncluttered and text driven, and the writing is sly and smart. A conference
board and chat center covers topics ranging from how to leave your husband
to how to deal with requests for Barbie dolls. For anybody looking for
parenting tips and sympathy with some soul, this is one mama's kitchen you
want to visit. <http://www.hipmama.com/>
TWENTY-SOMETHING E-ZINE FOR WOMEN
"20-Something", an e-zine for women, will impress you right off the bat
with its clean appearance and crisp navigation, especially if you hork
chocolate milk in your cush mobile while wallowing in bummage. (Check the
glossary in Diane Patterson's "Paperwork" for clarification.) The site is
updated every Tuesday, but it's still good reading the following Monday.
Most guys will wallow in bummage here. It's not that the diarists,
journalists, and other women authors have anything against men. It's just
that all the verbal goodies here are for women who might lean toward food,
drink, pets, gardening, relationships, sexuality, fashion, and other stuff
that (perhaps inevitably) gets carried over from successful supermarket
mags. Maybe this is the middle-class side of a Webgrrl? For butter or
wench, the Mining company has done a very nice job indeed!
<http://women20.miningco.com/>
ELECTRIC DREAMS ACROSS THE WEB
At one time or another, we're all amused or terrified or fascinated by the
images that our own minds conjure in dreams. Electric Dreams, the e-zine,
is an uneven pastiche of articles and online discussions about dreams.
Still, it should appeal to selective surfers. The "Best of" section is
aptly named, including explanations of the work of Freud and other
theorists. But the real gem, worth the visit all by itself, is a
fascinating article on the dreams of blind people, incorporating Helen
Keller's eloquent and disturbing description of sensations in her dreams
before and after Annie Sullivan opened the world to her. Helen Keller we
know. Unfortunately, the site is diminished - and our wariness of the
articles' content increased - by an ill-advised decision to give equal
prominence to articles on the relationship between dreams and tarot or
astrology. <http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/~mettw/edreams/home.html>
IMAGE MAGAZINE LOOKS SERIOUSLY AT FILM AND CULTURE
Image magazine isn't a mere outlet for current movie hype or star worship.
It tries and succeeds as serious but accessible comment on the exchanges
between film and culture. A recent issue, for instance, considers
blaxploitation films and the influence of auteur independent film-makers
Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin. More commercial concerns appear in an
evaluation of Clint Eastwood's film persona. Reviews include, but aren't
confined to, big studio releases and ratings are based in solid appraisals.
For fun, the editors take a look at Barbie and the old Saturday matinee
serials like Nyoka and Flash Gordon. Whether you're a real movie buff or
have only ventured by mistake into the "International" section at
BlockBuster, something in Image should catch your imagination.
<http://www.qni.com/~ijournal/index.html>
REDEFINING THE BOOK FORM WITH WEIRDNESS ON THE WEB
Weird. Bizarre. And somewhat obtuse. The Grammatron Web site is a funky
critter, strewn with links labeled with esoteric terms such as
"hypertextual consciousness". So what's it all about, anyway? The
Grammatron project, according to the Web site, is a "public domain
narrative environment" consisting of over over a thousand text "spaces",
thousands of links, original soundtracks, and animated and still life
images. Think of it as an experiment in expanding the concept of a book
incarnated on the Web, complete with a theory piece called, oddly enough,
"Hypertextual Consciousness", which purports to explain it all. The story,
if you can grasp it, is "about cyberspace, Cabala mysticism, digicash
paracurrencies and the evolution of virtual sex in a society afraid to go
outside and get in touch with its own nature". If you liked the Twilight
Zone, you'll appreciate this. <http://www.grammatron.com/>
IAN FLEMING BONDS WITH THE WEB
Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, the Web magazine of the Ian Fleming Foundation, is
a suitably spiffy site providing a robust database of information about
James Bond, his creator, and other spies and spoofs. Check out the latest
interviews, articles and photos. This is a must-see for Bond wannabe's and
spy novel fanatics. <http://www.nuvs.com/mkkbb/>
BODY MODIFICATION E-ZINE: YOU PIERCED YOUR WHAT?
The Body Modification E-Zine is perhaps not intended for the squeamish or
prudish among us. After all, there are some people who can't stand to even
talk about navel piercing, let alone see it in the flesh. The site reminds
us about the truly amazing things people do to enhance, decorate, and
mutilate their bodies, as well as how and why. It's all covered here, from
tattoos to, well, all sorts of additions. <http://www.bme.freeq.com/>
Are aliens infesting your basement? Are you receiving e-mail from Vega? Is
your TV directing you to build intelligent toasters? Well, my friend, you
could be qualified to run your very own Search for Extra-Terrestrial
Intelligence! Seriously, this grand experiment wants to harness the spare
power of hundreds of thousands of Net-connected computers to help out in
the search for ET signals from the great void. Starting in the spring of
1998, you'll be able to run a screensaver which will automatically download
a small chunk of radiotelescope data, process it for a few hours or days,
and return a result to the server. It's another of those grand experiments
in using idle globally distributed computer power to do intensive data
analysis. You'll find lots of cool details at this site.
<http://bigscience.com/setiathome.html>
SCIENCE TAKES A SWIPE AT DROSOPHILA
They're annoying little buggers, but every time you waste one of the
miserable critters, you're destroying a billion years or so of finely tuned
evolutionary data. Fortunately, the more enlightened among the scientific
community have developed a fly fetish that drives them to unravel the
genetic gold mine hovering around your half-eaten chicken leg. At some
point, they (genetic scientists, not flies) all hang out at the FlyBase,
a database of all things Drosophilid with: some 76,000 scientific fly papers
(heh!) in the Encyclopedia; archives of the <bionet.drosophila> newsgroup;
genes, genes, and more genes; bibliographies; addresses of fly fetishists
everywhere; and shockingly explicit images and movies of our fondly
featured flying fiends. This one site may very well contain the sum total
of human knowledge about these flies. Wow. <http://flybase.bio.indiana.edu/>
NEXT YEAR'S INVASION OF MARS: MARS SURVEYOR '98
The follow-up to the current Surveyor mission is a massive three-pronged
attack on Mars. An orbiter will launch in December of 1998, with a second
spacecraft, a lander, following about a month later. Both will arrive in
the fall/winter of 1999. The most interesting part of the mission is the
presence of two ground penetrating microprobes piggybacking on the lander
spacecraft. They'll separate before atmospheric entry and come screaming
down into the atmosphere, impacting the ground at about 200 mi/s. Yep,
that's per second. The aerobraking shell will shatter, and the ground
penetrators will slam themselves up to two meters into the soil. For two
days the microprobes will send back data about soil composition,
temperature, and pressure. Way cool technology.
Surveyor '98: <http://mpfwww.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/msp2.html>
Microprobes: <http://nmp.jpl.nasa.gov/ds2/>
The URL for the Artfest site was given incorrectly in the e-mailed copies
of our last issue. The site has an archive of all the neat RealAudio
programs from various public broadcasting radio stations in the US recorded
during the recent collaborative online arts festival. <http://artsfest.org/>
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