| Massive Spam Attack on Religious Newsgroups |
| Demographic Delights for Digerati |
| Top 10 Movies - AFI's and Yours |
| Movie Highlight Crib Notes |
| History of Hair, the Musical |
| Antique and Vintage Carousels |
| Art de Provence |
| Netsurfer Book Recommendations |
| Laughing Matter |
| Forget the Whales, Save the Language |
| We Netsurfer, You Jane |
| Go to Mars |
| SeaWiFS and the Pulse of the Planet |
| Medical Marvels |
| Kids with AIDS |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
BREAKING SURF
Clinton Testimony Tape Release
We're jumping the gun on this a bit. After an apparently highly partisan debate, the House Judiciary Committee voted Friday to release a large volume of supporting evidence to the public, including the President's videotaped grand jury testimony. The material will be released Monday morning (Sept. 21). The video seems to be the most sensational item, and even Friday press releases touted its upcoming availability on the Internet. Both Broadcast.com and RealNetworks have said they'll put the video online and you can bet it will be available on the major news and search engine sites, too. Monday will be a very busy day on the Net.Broadcast.com: http://www.broadcast.com/
RealNetworks: http://www.real.com/
Letters and Other Fallout from the Starr Report
Relevant Knowledge reports that online news sites experienced a 95% increase in traffic for two days following the release of the Starr Report. Clearly, lots of people wanted to read the document. Of our more than 70,000 subscribers, 29 sent e-mail about our coverage of the Report in the last NSD. This topic dominates our Letters to the Editor this week, with letters ranging in tone from silly to grandiose, but all heartfelt. Among the vitriol sent our way, all but one letter took us to task for saying "Just about nobody outside of Washington DC gives a rat's behind about this issue." Let's take a poll and see who's right. Support democracy and don't multiple vote - in any event we have ways of telling when someone is trying to stack the deck.Letters: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/letters/letter.04.28.html
Traffic Stats: http://www.relevantknowledge.com/Press/release/09_14_98.html
A Look at the New York Times Web Site Hack
The online version of the New York Times was down for about nine hours last Sunday after a serious hack against their servers. Many services, such as the classifieds, discussion forums, and search capability were still down several days later - unusual for such a prominent media site. The attack was ostensibly aimed at two NYT writers, John Markoff and Carolyn Meinel, both authors of books about hacking and hacker martyr/poster boy Kevin Mitnick. Antionline has a copy of the hacked pages, notable for their amusing typography.Antionline: http://www.antionline.com/archives/pages/www.nytimes.com/
NYT: http://www.nyt.com/
Live African Watering Hole Cam
When used creatively, technology engages our imagination. Most people brought up with TV have at one time or another seen an African nature documentary and imagined themselves striding the veldt amidst the herds of wildebeest. The images captured every 30 seconds at this South African watering hole are compelling less for their raw image quality then for the surprise factor - you never know what will turn up. One camera stays trained on the waterhole while the staff of the Djuma Game Reserve move another to wherever the animal action is. In addition to the live cameras, the site has an archive of images captured by visitors, a terse diary from the rangers, and an active message board. Just a few days old, the site is already one of the most popular in South Africa.http://www.africam.mweb.co.za/
Yahoo Changes Account Creation Policy as a Result of Lawsuit
Itex recently sued about 100 anonymous individuals for posting what the company says are libelous comments on Yahoo Finance message boards. Yahoo told Itex that it could not identify the posters because it does not collect enough information to do so. Yahoo's policy has always been not to give out user information unless legally compelled to do so. However, as a result of this lawsuit, Yahoo will now attempt to verify the e-mail addresses it collects during the registration process, presumably to better legally protect themselves in such situations. CNet has more detail about the lawsuit and Yahoo's new policy, including comments from Yahoo.Itex: http://www.itex.com/
Lawsuit: http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,26134,00.html
Yahoo Finance: http://quote.yahoo.com/
Yahoo Policy: http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,26441,00.html
This description of how to hack into Hotmail accounts illustrates perfectly why you should never assume your Internet access is private. This exploit less concerns vulnerabilities in Hotmail itself - though it does suggest a security change - than how someone else on your network can steal information about your Hotmail account. Basically, a hacker can get the URL of your Hotmail session and under certain circumstances fool the free mail service into thinking he is you - there goes your e-mail privacy. Explicitly logging out of Hotmail after you use it helps thwart this attack, so don't just walk away. The hack recipe will be of most use to - you guessed it - technically knowledgeable hackers.
http://rubicon.cx.net/~munkean/hotmail.html
Another Draft of Domain Name Proposal
Private meetings between the Internet Assigned Names Authority (IANA), which manages IP numbers, and Network Solutions, which administers the bulk of domain name assignments, gave rise to this draft. Until this round of negotiations, the two differed in opinion on how to administer IP/domain assignments in the future. The draft proposes a non-profit corporation based in Los Angeles. Predictably, the public forum on the site abounds with dissenting opinions, mostly protesting the lack of broad-based participation in the process. Dry reading, but this bureaucratic beast will have a significant impact on how you obtain your Net sites. Click on "New Cooperative Proposal from IANA and NSI" for the text.IANA: http://www.iana.org/
Discussion: http://www.iana.org/comments.html
Updated Encryption Policy Document
The White House this week released updated guidelines for handling the export of encryption products. This short press release summarizes the changes. Exports of 56-bit DES products will be streamlined and key recovery plans are no longer required. Also, exports of unlimited strength encryption products will be streamlined for various type of firms, notably insurance companies, health and medical organizations, and online merchants who want secure commercial transactions. ext.1http://www.pub.whitehouse.gov/uri-res/I2R?urn:pdi://oma.eop.gov.us/1998/9/17/5.t
Second Beta of Netscape Communicator 4.5 Released
Aside from numerous bug fixes, this version is somewhat more integrated with Windows, except on the Mac version. Seriously, the Windows version more aggressively offers to make a variety of Netscape services - such as the browser and mail client - the default choice in your Windows9X/NT setup (and there really are new Mac and Unix releases, too). Make sure to read the list of known bugs in the release notes before you play.http://home.netscape.com/eng/beta_central/
ONLINE CULTURE
Massive Spam Attack on Religious Newsgroups
Two as yet unidentified women mounted a three-day spam attack against several alt.religion newsgroups this week. The two opened accounts with a small Los Angeles ISP, paying with cash and giving phony contact information. They then seem to have used automated software to redirect thousands of posts from other newsgroups directly to the religious discussions. The ISP disconnected the accounts after learning of the attack and has turned over caller ID records to the cops. The ISP gets its newsfeed from a company called Altopia, which itself has seen some bad press for its loose spam policies. The possibility of just such an attack from Altopia has been discussed on the news.admin.net-abuse.usenet newsgroup. Wired has the story.http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/15086.html
Demographic Delights for Digerati
You'll get the most out of the Atlas of Cyberspaces if you've been on the Net for some time. It may confuse or intimidate newbies, but it's likely to fascinate statisticians, network analysts, and other lovers of carefully constructed graphic interpretations of reality. Digital fruit of mostly academic and financial research, the Atlas of Cyberspaces is a compendium of statistical maps of Internet structure and usage, organized in categories such as Conceptual, Geographic, Traceroutes, Info Spaces, and ISP Maps. It's full of weird, colorful freeze-frames from scenes in futuristic Hollywood movies in which a heroine grabs her handheld and exclaims over a crescendo of explosions, "Oh, my God - their military net has 27.86 percent of all global activity, and their browsers are all pointing at us!"http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/atlas.html
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Top 10 Movies - AFI's and Yours
Perhaps the top top-100 list of all time, the Top 100 Greatest American Movies, compiled by the American Film Institute (AFI), was featured on a June CBS-TV special and a 10-part series on TNT. Now, it takes on new life in a new medium. AFI's 100 Years ... 100 Movies commemorates the first 100 years of American moviemaking with an interactive tribute to these classics. AFI provides background on the selection process, and describes each movie with a thumbnail paragraph, but the best of the site is a database-driven ballot. How can you resist responding to the ballyhoo of the Hollywood establishment? FYI, the top three movies, ranked by AFI, are "Citizen Kane", "Casablanca", and "The Godfather". The public's top three are "Casablanca", "Gone with the Wind", and "The Godfather".http://afi.100movies.com/
Are you essentially a lazy, misguided weirdo with no time for movies? Movies for Busy People provides you with a rundown of the latest videos and theater releases, so you can share your peers' cultural experiences at the water cooler. This scary idea obviously has a market, although we wouldn't rely too heavily on the "what people are talking about" section of each review. The "hilarious scene" of doggy resuscitation in "Something About Mary" was easily overshadowed by the post-bathroom befuddlement - but that's just our opinion. Not that we have time to go to the movies. Not with all this work to do....
http://members.tripod.com/~Ideaguy/main.htm
Nudity. Dancing. Hippies. Anti-establishment. "Hair" had it all, including some nasty court cases and moral issues which made a whole country think. If details, details, details on Hair - past cast members, plot and musical numbers, history, various Hair events - thrill you, then this site, which features intense discussions on every dusty corner of the play, will be like a good scalp massage. Hmmmmmmmmm.
http://www.stanford.edu/~toots/Hair/
If you want to learn about antique and vintage carousels in general, extrapolate from the specifics of the wonderful histories found at this site. The profiles of these vintage carousels read like biographies of the most interesting people you've never heard of. Woven through are details about the nature of artisanship and a sense of what community was like before expressways and shopping malls. There are photos to be sure, but surprisingly few; again, detail wins over the big picture. True to traditional carousel form, for instance, the lead horse on Kit Carson County's Philadelphia Toboggan Company carousel is armor clad, ready to receive Achilles, perhaps, or Constantine - but the photo concentrates on the craft that produced the proud expression on the horse's face and the defiance in his eye. We admit we expected the site to be laden with gorgeous graphics and short on context. We're pleased to have been disappointed.
http://www.carousel.org/
On the Art Sol site, four French artists display their work in a pleasing and comfortable format, allowing a stroll through their gallery with fast download times and superb image quality. As an added bonus, words accompany some of the work, either reviews and comments from noted art critics or the thoughts of the artist. Art devotees may relish the words of critics, but even those of us who may not see echoes of "the disturbing theatricality of Arroyo" will still derive pleasure from viewing some beautiful artwork on a well designed Web site.
http://artsol.org/indexa.htm/
BOOKS & E-ZINES
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Netsurfer Book Recommendations Books our staff likes and you might too. Click on the cover or title to order the books at a hefty discount from Amazon.com and send a few pennies our way as well.
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The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection
Maximum Security: A Hacker's Guide to Protecting Your Internet Site andhttp://www.humor-me.com/
Forget the Whales, Save the Language
Save the Language is a contest running on TW3, a site some of you may remember from NSD 3.24 ("Pop Lit"). Readers submit words or phrases they'd like to see stricken from the dictionary, or at least from regular use. Whatever. It runs through the end of September and challenges those whose core competency on the information superhighway is thinking outside the box. You could call it a way to build a best of breed out of the very worst. So like, we only wish this were around a decade ago, you know? Fer sure.http://www.pictograph.com/contest.html
Based on the paper version of the magazine with the same name, Jane does the girly thing with ease. With Makeunders ("effortlessly take her from day to night"), interviews with stars like intellectual studmuffette Janeane Garofalo, and articles with Shoshanna Lonstein talking about underwear, blind dates, and "burning beauty questions", Jane should just about cover every inch of the female body.
http://www.janemag.com/
SURFING SCIENCE
Mars has a voice on Earth: the Mars Society, a nonprofit charity that seeks to "further the goal of the exploration and settlement of the Red Planet." That's also the name of the society's Web site, where its founding declaration urges humans to go to Mars in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, technological innovation, and a rebirth of a sense of adventure that has dwindled since we abandoned the Moon. The site aims to be both inspirational and practical as it encourages inquiry, dishes updates and news, and promotes chapters around the world with a sober purpose and immensely skillful elegance of design. However you weigh problems on Earth against the extravagance of a voyage to Mars, you'd have to look hard to find proponents of, say, an orbiting space station or a lunar base with such an impressive launch.http://www.marssociety.org/
SeaWiFS and the Pulse of the Planet
Simply, the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) Project monitors the color of the oceans. Subtle changes in ocean color signify changes in types and quantities of marine phytoplankton (microscopic marine plants), the knowledge of which has both scientific and practical applications. Fortunately, the instrumentation on the satellite can also monitor the state of land-based vegetation. All this translates to some spectacular newly released orbital images which show changes in our world's biota over the course of the past year. In addition to large planet-wide images, you'll love the great close-up shots of coastlines, cities, and even several hurricanes. Not only great science data, the images are also excellent eye candy. Look under Pulse of the Planet for the latest views.http://seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEAWIFS.html
The Medical Multimedia Group's Web site provides basic information on preventive care, problems such as carpal tunnel syndrome and back pain, and a variety of health education topics. Not a substitute for your physician, but lots of useful information.
http://www.sechrest.com/mmg/
COMMUNITY SUPPORT
Joy and Jim Jenkins adopted two infants who carried HIV antibodies at birth. Those antibodies may have belonged the babies' birth mothers, crossing the placentas; the babies would then not be harboring HIV. The other option is that they are infected with HIV. It can take as long as a year to get an answer. The Jenkinses' experiences have prompted them to establish the Kids with AIDS Project, a resource center offering information on HIV and AIDS, and adoption. They've also become a matching service, maintaining a list of couples seeking children and matching them, where possible, to adoptable children with special needs. This seems to be a labor of love for the Jenkinses, and it's taken them to the White House and into the pages of well known publications. The site includes words from Wendy's founder Dave Thomas, himself an adoptee, whose company has taken a leading role in offering adoption leave to its employees and financial help for adoptive parents.http://www.aidskids.org/