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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 04, Issue 31 Tuesday, October 20, 1998 |
BREAKING SURF
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BREAKING SURF Netscape Releases Communicator 4.5 After months of beta testing, Netscape has released a final version of Communicator 4.5. As we reported previously, the big changes in this version include smart browsing features and major enhancements to the e-mail client. Another important change is a fix to recently discovered privacy bugs (see item below). Netscape has bundled Macromedia Flash and RealNetworks G2 players with Communicator. Netscape no longer supports Communicator 4.5 on Windows 3.1, but as usual you can download Windows 9x/NT, Mac, and Unix versions. The download site has details.http://home.netscape.com/computing/download/index.html
Major Privacy Holes Fixed in Communicator and Explorer Browsers Last week, we mentioned serious privacy bugs in both the Netscape and Microsoft Web browsers. Hackers exploiting the bugs could easily steal sensitive files from your computer. Both companies released fixes this week. Netscape fixed the problems in Communicator 4.5 (see above) and Microsoft has posted a patch for Explorer on their security page. You definitely want to install these fixes as soon as possible.Explorer: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/security/paste.htm Communicator: http://home.netscape.com/computing/download/index.html Jon Postel was one of the original architects of the Internet and an immensely respected figure in the online community. For many years, he was synonymous with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the agency responsible for managing IP numbers - the bedrock of the domain name system. He created and molded the IANA, and its authority grew more from Jon's reputation than from any bureaucratic mandate. His death comes at a particularly awkward time for the organization. The IANA is in the midst of a difficult transformation from a quasi-governmental entity to a globally inclusive non-profit administration. Jon was a very private person, and remarkably little is publicly known about him. His concise and spare Web site stands in stark contrast to his towering reputation as one of the original Net Gods. Postel: http://www.isi.edu/~postel/ IANA: http://www.iana.org/ Memorial: http://www.tnl.net/what/postel.shtml Before the Nobel Prizes came along, there were the Ig Nobels. At least this year, according to the calendar. The Annals of Improbable Research award the Ig Nobels to deserving recipients, whose unusual research and/or deeds merit profound consideration. We've wanted to attend a ceremony for a while, and this Oct. 8, we finally sent one of our almost-East-Coasters to Boston to do so. Gird your loins, kids, because you are about to encounter "RoboCop, Pseudotherapy, and Penile Length: The 1998 Ig Nobel Prizes". Oh, and there's a heck of a lot of duct tape, too. While you're at it, check out the recently awarded Nobel prizes. IgNobel: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/misc/ignobel.html Nobel: http://www.nobel.se/announcement-98/index.html
AOL Hacked by Spoofing Domain Name Configuration America Online ran into an unusual hacking problem which redirected e-mail and Web accesses to a third party. Somebody contacted the InterNIC and asked for a change to the AOL nameserver. Normally a site like AOL can choose several ways of verifying its identity when dealing with the InterNIC. The least secure method of identification - surprisingly, the one AOL used - is for the domain name registrar to verify that any change requests come from a specific e-mail address. In this instance, hackers forged the e-mail headers and managed to convince InterNIC that Internet requests destined for aol.com should be redirected to Autonet.net. The new domain name directions filtered through the Internet for several hours and caused problems for many users trying to reach Aol.com. CNet offers more details.http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,27655,00.html In what we promise just might maybe be this month's last take on the Starr issue, we bring you a virtual mailbag virtually stuffed with e-mail. For your convenience, we've pre-sorted it into piles: Specific Poll Results Feedback, General Starr Report Sense and Nonsense, Nice Stuff, Neat Stuff, Other Stuff, and the always popular People Titillated by the Word "Ass". http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/letters/letter.04.31.html SURFING SITES As media critic A.J. Liebling said, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." Christopher Locke, talented editor of Entropy Gradient Reversals (NSD 2.38) and a big, whiny baby (trust us), looks at the benefits of online publishing and discusses grand, non-whiny themes like the motivation of communication, how technology facilitates publication in a broader sense, and the tradition of the writing art. With impressive presentation and research and enlightening analysis of online writing, Chris discusses how the Net allows "amateur" writers to put forth alternate and original viewpoints on more than just the Starr Report (we said maybe).Locke: http://www.rageboy.com/webwriting.html NSD2.38: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/v02/nsd.96.12.01.html#BEZ2 What's a woman engineer to do when her boss doesn't invite her to shoot pool with her male engineer colleagues? Is there life after coding for a long-in-the-tooth programmer? What do you do when you feel guilty about netsurfing on company time? Does management think you're a "super-geek rebel without a cause" because you suggest the eminently sensible step of abandoning Windows for Linux? Our careers are filled with these pesky litte conundrums, and sometimes a little sensible advice will dilute that urge to strangle our boss. Which is where Joanne Eglash, spawn of Netsurfer, comes in. Joanne, one of our treasured writers from waaaaay back, edits a new "Career Chat" column for TechWeek. She puts your career questions together with sage advice from real-life career-management types. You could do a lot worse then letting her deal with your work-related whining, and we're not just saying that because she's one of ours. Give it a look. http://www.techweek.com/articles/10-19-98/career.htm If communication interests you (as in media studies, rhetoric, and all those other warm fuzzies of a liberal arts education), then this communication studies, cultural studies, and media Web site will prove a treasure chest. The intricate design opens the door to both on-site and off-site links on a variety of topics that will entertain and educate the general public as well as students. You can even take some online tests to see if you qualify as a great communicator! We don't. http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/ In her FAQ, 23-year-old Lorraine, apparently a fan of e.e. cummings, calls herself "webmistress extraordinaire. the ultimate cyberspacewoman of the philippines." A friend of hers deems Lorraine Land, one of her home pages, "like disneyland, but with lorraine instead of disney!" The innovative color schemes and quirky fonts grab you from the start. Even her personal trivia, so coyly and cleverly presented, interested us, though we could do with less drug worship. That's one minor reason we like Lorraine's other site, Pinay. The major reasons include her strengths: creativity; playfulness; satirical charm; evident enthusiasm; and astonishing design skills. Lorraine Land: http://www.philippines1.com/lorraine/ Pinay: http://www.chickpages.com/rants/pinay/ Pauvre Celine Dion! Even with her millions, she still seems unable to get a square meal. Luckily, this site comes to her rescue, with an opportunity to donate money to the Celine Fund (perhaps - a disclaimer states, "note: donations may be used to support me") and a look at the bizarre world that does not seem to sympathize with her dreadful plight. "Is she spending all her money on clothes? Cars? Cabana boys?" We think so. http://139.146.236.139/celine.html The Fourth World Documentation Project We might quarrel with the definition assigned by the Fourth World Documentation Project (FWDP) to First, Second, and Third World nations, but the fact remains: disenfranchised, marginalized groups exist. The Fourth World, according to the FWDP, consists of nations forcefully incorporated into states, nations with a distinct political culture but not international recognition. Conquest and colonialism redrew borders to serve distant alliances or the resource demands of empire rather than local populations. Most readers will be familiar with, say, Native Americans or Australian Aboriginals, but the FWDP also points to less familiar groups. Colonialism, dead or alive, still has to answer for many of the threats to Fourth-World nations' culture, language, and well-being. The site, text-heavy and content-rich, will help you understand a good part of the headline news.http://www.halcyon.com/FWDP/fwdp.html Royal Troon, Turnberry, and St. Andrews will resonate for sports enthusiasts, three courses in the rota of links that host the Open, the British leg of golf's grand slam. Sad to say, we spend more time surfing than swinging, but we liked Golfeurope's colorful history pages. Golf's 15th-century origins lie in St. Andrews; kings once banned it because the game distracted Scots from war. We also liked the history of golf clubs and the ball - though the information fails to mention that golf ball technology is judged to have the most influence on the game's future. (Never underestimate the complex physics behind those little dimples.) The site also offers biographies of a few great golfers, particularly Europeans, from Allan Robertson, the first celebrated golf professional, to Colin Montgomerie, the unassuming Scot whose play threatens annually to reclaim the claret jug for his country. http://golfeurope.com/almanac/almanac.htm Aviation enthusiasts, military buffs, backseat dogfighters, and groundbound wannabes: climb aboard Historic Wings, an online aviation magazine with feature stories, background articles, and other goodies that honor and celebrate aviators and aircraft. If you choose not to jump right into the randomly chosen first article, click the Main Menu link for the motherlode, which includes a look at the Battle of Berlin, articles on outer space, and Flight School 101. You can buy flight paraphernalia through Pilot Supply and let off hot air in the forum. Crave more? Sign up for the free monthly newsletter. All that's missing are clubs, auctions, interviews, and insurance forms... all of which might pop up next time you land here. By the way, you can download a new, spiffy, free desktop calendar here each month. http://www.historicwings.com/ Advance, Lunge - Wait, I Think I Pulled Something Advance Lunge, a fencing site built by high schoolers, introduces newcomers to the sport and provides aficionados with some amusement. The History and Tutorial sections get non-fencers up to speed on the lingo, while the Games section allows visitors to test their knowledge. If the site piques your curiosity, the designers have included a whole page of contact information in which you might find a club in your area. The best bit of the site, where the guys really show their personalities, is the "grudge match" between Demis and Rick over who got to write the epee section of the tutorial. As you visit, keep in mind that three high schoolers created this site. We just love reviewing ThinkQuest competition sites because it makes us feel so old. Thanks guys, we need that.http://library.advanced.org/15340/ Fortified with good primary source material, the Afro-American Almanac loosely charts both the history of a culture and the paper trail of America's on-going struggle with racism. Read the charter of the Ku Klux Klan and the text of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Get a summary of how the southern states came to enact the Jim Crow laws. The folk tales are wonderful: "Why There Is Day and Night" tells how day and night came into eternal opposition. http://www.toptags.com/aama/ Despite the catch-all term, the US's 29.7 million Hispanics vary greatly in culture and origin. This Mining Company site embraces that spectrum. Topical features have general interest: demographic trends and corresponding political issues; aid to victims of hurricanes in the Caribbean; and the divisive issue of bilingualism. History and scholarly studies here help distinguish the various Latino and Hispanic immigrant groups. Music styles such as tejano, mariachi, Andean folk music, salsa, and merengue have their own links. And, book lovers, a literature tour that takes you all over the globe in Spanish and English. http://latinoculture.miningco.com/ Humans beings need to dream to stay sane, but the images we see, the actions we perform, and the feelings we have in our dreams can prove disturbing. Who hasn't woken up to have a half-remembered dream fade away into a sense of unease? The Dreams Project has a simple goal - to have people with sufficient writing skills and a clear memory record their dreams and evoke the dream atmosphere. It makes for creepy, slightly disturbing reading with a jolt of familiarity - the sudden switches of time and place, the seemingly illogical logic, that we all have in dreams. A fascinating site, and a place to share your dreams. http://www.gobox.com/dreams/ Do-It-Yourself Free Mailing Lists There's a ton of Web chat out there, little of it interesting to any one person. One of the most efficient and private methods of group communication on the Net is a mailing list. Until recently, however, you had to be handy with keyboard and servers to establish and maintain a list. ONElist and eGroups let everyone into the game. You can build your own list, or join other lists, or ask to join private lists after you register. You can receive messages through your e-mail account or read them at the Web page. All e-groups can be moderated - if you create a site, you're the moderator - and spam-free. Anyone can make good use of these.ONElist: http://www.onelist.com/ eGroups: http://www.egroups.com/ Got a question? Experts are waiting to answer it. Allexperts.com is a Web site with directories on topics such as sports, music, and cars. More directories are on the way. To use it, click on a category, such as software, then navigate down through the layers until you reach the exact topic of your query where a volunteer expert awaits. Should you consider yourself an expert, the Web site owners are eager to sign you up! Ask. Ask! Aaaask!!! http://allexperts.com/ Finding data in a database can be difficult, and it's even harder when your data consist of images. One step in the right direction is Arthur, an academic image database for the visual arts. Arthur searches 300 Web sites containing 30,000 images and associated text. It fetches thumbnail images based on proximity searching: you display sample images and search for others by clicking a "Similar" button. The search criteria are visual (find images similar in shape and color) or contextual (find images with similar text near each). An elaborate pop-up vocabulary can help you choose keywords for searches by artist, place, or term. In a way, the whole search process is the graphic equivalent of drilling down through menus of hyperlinks in a directory like Yahoo! or Infoseek. It's interesting and easy, and the small images load quickly. http://www.gii.getty.edu/arthur/ ONLINE TRAVEL If you have an IMAX theater in town, you've probably seen "Everest", a documentary about how difficult it is to climb that mountain. Welcome to Skiing Everest, which proposed not only a walk to the top with cameras, but a nice leisurely ski back down, an extreme thrill for people who apparently have too much oxygen in their lives. Well, it's not going to happen, because the conditions made the trek to the summit too dangerous, but you can still visit the site to check out the logistics. The technical team at base camp was going to provide live coverage for the event with a satellite link, but an unfortunate power surge has nixed the idea of real-time. However, they're still taping and plan to upload when they get back to Katmandu. And let us not forget Plan B.http://www.skiingeverest.com/ When did the French take over the Vietnamese government? Having trouble remembering the national currency of Djibouti? Drawing a blank on the number of languages spoken in India? Altapedia supplies not only physical and political maps of the world, but concise socioeconomic and political profiles of every country. (Answers: 1947; the Franc; more than 1,600 languages and dialects.) http://www.atlapedia.com/ FLOTSAM & JETSAM What's Another Word for Proficuous? These are two highly useful sites for anyone who wants to be grammatically correct. Dictionary.com searches several dictionaries. Thesaurus.com, the fast and fantastic online edition of Roget's Thesaurus, provides a variety of options.Dictionary: http://www.dictionary.com/ Thesaurus: http://www.thesaurus.com/
The Mining Company Searches the Web Those who're familiar with the Mining Company's specialty interest sites know the site guides mine the best links relating to the topic. Information at this site can save untold amounts of time, no matter what you're looking for on the Web.http://websearch.miningco.com/ The Amazing CowCam will introduce you to Hamburger, Cheeseburger, and various other edible denizens of their field in Alloway, N.J. Pictures are taken every five minutes. Remember to hit reload to catch the latest hilarious cow antics, like tail swishing and hay eating. http://www.accsyst.com/cow.html Watch Me Turn These Ordinary 1s and 0s into Moolah Magic Tricks, which has an online presence primarily to sell merchandise, manages to work in some interesting additions for folks not looking to add an arm chopper to their collection. The Magic Trivia section in particular shows promise, as does the array of heckler lines.http://www.magictricks.com/ Fancy a flutter on the stock market? Always wanted to try your hand at bulldom or bearhood? Then join the free Marcopoly game site, grab your 100,000 Euros, and with the aid of real-life stock price history, neatly presented, you can try to become a virtual millionaire. http://www.marcopoly.scorpioweb.com/ SOFTWARE Do you overclock your processor? If this kind of question keeps you up at night, you may need to get your next infofix at Hardware Junkies, a collection of news and reviews for those who need specs on the latest motherboards, chipsets, or cards. You don't have to be a computer geek to gain insight here, but some familiarity with the jargon will help. This site could use some editorial attention - links to press releases produced a "File Not Found" message - but that's a minor complaint. Hardware Junkies lags a couple of years behind larger hardware sites with more evidence of financial backing, but its "Bottom Dollar Shopping Agent" is useful, and there's certainly potential here.http://www.hardwarejunkies.com/
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