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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 05, Issue 05 Thursday, February 18, 1999 |
NETSURFER LINKS
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BREAKING SURF Dow Jones Creates Internet Stock Index Noting that Internet stocks have become the most popular and volatile of the stock market, Dow Jones & Company - of Dow Jones Industrial Average fame - has created a new index to track Internet industry stock performance. The index is split into three components, an Internet Commerce subindex of 15 companies, an Internet Services subindex of 25 companies, and a combined index of all 40 companies. The 40 stocks represent about 80 percent of the market capitalization of Net stocks. The Web site has details about the companies, and a graph which traces the indexes back to June 30, 1997.http://indexes.dowjones.com./djii/djiihome.html
Freedom Server Software Protects Your Anonymity Last week at the Demo 99 conference, Zero Knowledge demonstrated a new system of servers that cloak specific Internet protocols such as SMTP, HTTP, and DNS in an anonymous cloud of machines deployed across a wide geographic area. Users use client software to access those services via anonymous requests. Independent operators will run the networks and get a cut of revenue from the distribution of the client software. The technical paper has extensive system architecture details, along with a fine bibliography of online tech literature about building anonymous networks. This project should interest ISPs who may wish to run the servers and earn some extra revenue and ordinary users who want to protect their online privacy.Freedom Server: http://www.zks.net/ Architecture: http://www.zks.net/products/Freedom_Architecture.html Amazon Charges for Book Features, Netsurfer Doesn't Amazon.com found itself in a bit of a public relations swamp earlier this month when the New York Times noted that the online book seller charged for book review space. Amazon countered that it was doing nothing worse than what brick-and-mortar bookstores do when they charge publishers for premium shelf space and in-store displays. To its credit, Amazon has offered full refunds to buyers of such recommended books and has promised to indicate in future which review placements have been paid for. Wired concisely summarized the story. Fans of our Netsurfer Recommendations section and Netsurfer Books (NSB) e-zine know we use Amazon as our retail partner and that we get a modest fee for every item you order through our links. However, we cover, like everything in NSD, just what interests us. In fact (shameless plug alert), check out the latest NSB for some neat stuff which caught our eye this month.Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/news/business/story/17826.html NSB: http://www.netsurf.com/nsb/nsb.01.04.html How to Disable Internet Explorer's Content Advisor Censorware Last August (NSD 4.25), we reported on Brian Ristuccia's workaround of the Netscape Net Watch, a feature that can block Web sites based on their PICS rating. Brian recently found a way to do the same thing in Microsoft Explorer. Brian has posted three different methods to disable or circumvent the Explorer Content Advisor feature.http://www.osiris.978.org/~brianr/nopics-ie/ Amid the Valentine's Day frenzy, we stumbled upon this little gem. It's a touching essay on one man's love affair with a powerful cybernetic abstraction - the Unix operating system. Thomas Scoville waxes eloquent about the depth of feeling evoked by Unix, and throws in some not undeserved swipes at its flashier, more gaudily made up rival, Windows NT. Amusing. http://unix.oreilly.com/news/unix_love_0199.html SURFING SITES My Boot, His Journal, and Our Videos You'll find My Boot quirky, off-beat, and strange - okay, it is totally daft, but with a wealth of Monty Python-inspired humor here. The What the (expletive deleted)? section features a bizarre photo and hilarious visitor explanations as to what the (expletive deleted) is going on. The Movie Theater vault holds the Net's cult-classic videos (Troops, Bad Day, and others) along with a variety of other odd/funny clips, including a snip from a Levi ad running in the UK right now. (Every time it appears on TV you can hear 56 million people saying "huh?") Site owner Craig Mitchell's beautifully written and dryly witty journal will eat up all your time with sudden bursts of hilarity (look for Mr. Instinct and the date with the Porsche driver) that had our Netsurfer howling with laughter. It's one of the best we've seen - at least from a male perspective - since we covered Bryon Sutherland in NSD .Craig: http://www.myboot.com/ Bryon: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/2646/index.html Ahh, the pain, the suffering. We at NSD searched our minds (and hearts) for anything resembling happy first loves but, like most of these stories, they were all about distress and unrequited longing. As one contributor to the Ember.org site, Mike Larosa, admits, "It's dangerous how one person can ignite the fire of your spirit, then turn around and stomp it out." These stories are both entertaining and theraputic, allowing the writer to turn tragedy into entertainment and the readers to find someone else worse off than themselves. http://www.ember.org/ The Smoking Gun dishes the legal dirt on celebrities from Jerry Seinfeld to Dean Martin. Using Freedom of Information Act requests and court records, the site's producers provide scanned images of documents such as Jimi Hendrix's rap sheet, the psychiatric evaluation of a man charged with threatening to kill Howard Stern, and a traffic ticket issued to David Duchovny. And lest you think investigation of presidential peccadillos is a contemporary phenomenon, The Smoking Gun even features a recently released FBI report that suggests then senator John F. Kennedy may have "entertained" prostitutes with rat-packer Frank Sinatra. Visitors can also purchase a T-shirt adorned with a mug shot of Bill Gates or the signature of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. Let's just hope the Smoking Gun doesn't get hold of Monica Lewinsky's blue dress. http://www.thesmokinggun.com/ In American Memory, the US Library of Congress has realized a virtual museum of staggering proportions. The site includes materials ranging from recordings of political speeches to images of turn-of-the century (the last one, not the upcoming one) baseball cards from 1887 to 1914. Although organized under broad classifications such as history, technology and applied sciences, and recreation and sports, the depth and breadth of the material available can not really be appreciated without extensive exploration. To simplify the endeavor, you can search for items with a collection-specific search engine or use a cross-referenced index to look for time or place. You can also browse by context or online file format. Despite or perhaps because of the tremendous volume of information, this site is still largely idiosyncratic and incomplete. Nonetheless, it impressed us. Indeed, even in its current format, this virtual museum is a serious organ of social research, an important contribution to the canon of American history, and a promising glimpse of what is to come. http://memory.loc.gov/ The subjects are various: everything from McGeorge Bundy and colleagues giving an insider's account of the Cuban Missile Crisis to people having lived through the breakup of the Soviet Union discussing the fate of ethnic groups buried beneath the bricks of collapsing utopias; from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Research Project to dark matter in the universe. The presentation is as old as the agora: guys sitting around talking, many of them Nobel Laureates or other looming authorities. The technology is up to date: download a sample of voice or image in RealPlayer format, decide whether it's to your liking, then order a videotape of the lecture or discussion to pop into your player at home. http://www.ideachannel.com/ Now that that has been swept under the Senatorial rug, watchers of the drawn out debacle known as the Clinton impeachment can sample an historical perspective on the issues by examining the 1868 impeachment of Andrew Johnson. Harpweek has created a fascinating site with contemporary articles, savage political cartoons, and commentary on the impeachment of Johnson. The parallels are striking, as is the contrast between the mood of the 1868 media and the more - er, liberal media of today's America. There is also an Impeachment Simulation game for students, beautifully constructed by Eric Rothschild, designed for in-depth study of the whole process. http://www.impeach-andrewjohnson.com Does "Bueller? Bueller?" ring a bell? "Come on Eileen"? Ever sport a haircut that could only be described as "experimental" or thought "Tron" the height of movie special effects? If you answered yes to any question, you might be a child of the '80s, Should the questions awaken in you a need to revisit the Thompson Twins, Duran Duran, Cyndi Lauper, or Phil Collins, make Radio80s.com your next stop. The site offers frills like chat and movie-based RealPlayer audio feeds but the focus remains the non-stop broadcasting of '80s pop. Wondering why anyone would do that? Remember that for all the Thompson Twins and Hooters out there, there were also the Cure, the Clash, U2, REM. http://www.radio80s.com/home.html All '80s, but Only Weekdays at Noon ET We can't let the above site go without mentioning one of our own simple pleasures. Way up in the northeast corner of the US, where the deer and the antelope freeze their little tails off, Cap'n Steph runs WBTZ, a.k.a. 99.9 The Buzz. The station follows a standard repetitive alternative format, although the young crew keeps the banter unique and entertaining. At noon eastern time, the Cap'n herself takes the helm for the Buzz Back Lunch, an hour of music from the 1980s. The show covers the eclectic '80s, the decade's mainstays, and a healthy dose of cheese. We love it and try to listen to the online feed whenever we can, even if the station has no Hoodoo Gurus. Allow us to wield our editorial power to ask you to write the Buzz and suggest that it buy a Hoodoo Gurus album or three.http://www.999thebuzz.com/ Bali Highway, Your Potpourri Rest Stop Get rolling down this highway. Various experimental artists, musicians, and designers have their own exit ramps. Dr. Pullover provides sendable cards vaguely reminiscent of Bruce McCall. A wild ride down an animated two-lane blacktop with leaping coyotes, falling trees, and desert vistas lets you choose new selections with each fork, and then lets you replay them in a final meld. Instructions on how to create various flying machines out of paper accompany ministories that hint of confinement and release. And the Boston Museum of Natural History, just starting up, promises to reveal vistas of past mysteries: a leather trunk is opened, objects are revealed, a long-closed journal is unfolded, and a journey into the dark recesses of a museum without blaring video screens or a Starbucks is begun.http://www.balihighway.com/ The Web was designed for text, and if you spend time browsing Dee Dee's Loonie Bin of Jokes, you may soon be convinced that it's a better medium for topical humor than magazines and often better than TV. As you might expect, the Bin contains lots of jokes about President Clinton's marital infidelities. One of our favorites is entitled "Bill Clinton steps out onto the White house lawn in winter." You're invited to submit your own jokes; this huge catalogue is updated every two weeks. As you'd expect from a joke site, you have to watch out for abundant raunch and sexual innuendo. But there's also plenty of goofy stuff, puns, and satire. We found no jokes about lawyers, probably because so many other sites occupy that niche. Still, if Noah had to take only one Web site aboard the ark, this might be it. http://www.looniebin.mb.ca/ These stories will provide hours of entertainement, from the one about the old lady who traded a tank of gas for a ride in a helicopter to the one with a too polite girl who can't refuse a man on crutches and ends up feeding him cotton candy at a local jamboree. The site is a dumping ground for the dumbest admissions as well as a collection of silly stories. Think about the poor zookeeper who suffocated under elephant dung as he gave the animal an olive oil enema. Or get a new perspective on what gets good grades when you read one student's answer to the question of whether Hell is exothermic or endothermic. Definitely worth a bookmark. http://www.thedamnedestthing.com/ Chess Lab will likely make any chess game you already have seem antiquated. Its free Web database - updated every week - contains the moves of more than two million chess games played since 1485. We can verify neither the number nor the age, but you'll probably believe both when you explore options and play a few games for yourself. With a Java interface, you can analyze your next move and click a "Play it" button to spare yourself the bother of moving the piece manually. The site's most powerful feature is "Search Games", which lets you find similar games based on the positions of the pieces in an ongoing game. You can restrict your search by game result. Will budding grandmasters benefit from Chess Lab? If so, will they ever need mentoring from a meat-based grandmaster again? http://www.chesslab.com/ You need it all in one place. Your seed catalogues are all over the house, dog-eared, question-marked. You've piled up flats, hoping that this year you will start germinating seeds sometime before July. You have no idea whether the campanula will look good next to the coreopsis, and, well, you're not even sure what the coreopsis (is it threadleaf or not?) will look like all by itself. And next fall, you promise yourself, you'll clean your tools before you put them away. So scrub now, then sit down. At GardenGuides you can look up a variety of annuals, bulbs, and perennials, find out how to grow them, what they look like, and why you want them. You can read essays by other ardent gardeners. And you can use the place as a green portal to the rest of the Web. http://www.gardenguides.com/ One reason many journalists, including some NSD staff, like consumer technology is that the constant stream of new products generates a constant need for reviews - not only for writing, but for reading. One review site we enjoy is Digital Eyes, an independent (unsponsored but ad-supported) collection of news items, specifications, articles, and reviews that give you the scoop on "scanners, digital cameras, and the software that drives them." You can't order products here, but many descriptions are linked to an e-commerce site where you can. Photographers who have yet to abandon their beloved emulsion film might learn something new by reading "Living with a Digital Camera", one of editor G. Armour Van Horn's informative articles, which provide a nice balance to the abundance of product listings. http://www.image-acquire.com/ ISPs have almost as much on their plates as a Microsoft lawyer, what with cable operators trying to scoop up broad swaths of their territories, the new open-Net lobby lead by AOL, new federal and state regulation proposals, virtual private networks, encryption and other international security issues, and, of course, spam. The ISPortal covers all these issues, mostly by linking to respected trade and popular press outlets. If you're at all concerned with ISPs for reasons other than making a connect, pay a visit. http://www.isportal.com/ ONLINE TRAVEL Cass Gilbert is cycling from Sydney to London in support of the Children With AIDS Charity. He expects to make the 22,000-km journey in about 16 months. Cass left the Sydney Opera House on Nov. 9, 1998 and so far has made it to Bali. High spirits and high adventure through the harsh outback and along the beautiful coastlines of Australia as well as his bizarre traffic experiences in Bali make for great reading, if only to marvel at his courage and dedication. Learn along with him about local cultures as he makes his way to London, and try to figure out why when Aussies say "Don't play the raw prawn with me," they mean "Don't play Mr. Innocent with me."Cass: http://www.CycleSydneyLondon.com/ Charity: http://www.cwac.org/ This community photo album and visual documentary of Halls Creek - in the Kimberly Region of Western Australia, an area so isolated by the six-month wet season that you can only fly there - views local issues and dramas through the eyes of locals. The project organizers gave cameras to residents, some of whom had never before used one, and asked them to record their lives. In conjunction with a successful radio program, this collaboration explores the difficulties of the majority indigenous people and the social challenges of intergration and unemployment. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/awaye/post/Opening/Post_default.htm While it has all of the obligatory sections in a travel site, the Irish Tourist Board's Ireland Travel site succeeds in providing a more rounded experience than your typical "What to Do/Where to Stay" listing. One of the most innovative sections of the site is the Personal Brochure, with which you can keep track of items of the site that interest you. You have to register with the site to create a brochure, but you won't be receiving mail which invites you to come visit Ireland (unless you want to) since you needn't provide either your e-mail or your snail mail address. With video clips and 360-degree panoramas of the Irish countryside, Ireland Travel is the next best thing to being there. http://www.ireland.travel.ie/ FLOTSAM & JETSAM A new recording format is useless until it cranks tunes in your car. A new MP3 playback box/radio sits in your dashboard and holds about 500 MP3 tunes you'll download in Windows, although the unit itself runs on Linux for stability and economy. The tentative price upon release in March is about $1000.http://www.empeg.com/main.html Sunset Radio offers links to live Internet broadcasts by hundreds of stations in two dozen countries. The site is organized by country flags, but don't worry if your knowledge of national standards isn't encyclopedic - you can always cheat. http://sunsetradio.com/ Movie showtimes across the US, movie reviews, movie news - it's all movies, all the time, at FilmFrenzy.com. Great place for all you wild and crazy film fanatics looking to fly to Des Moines to catch "Office Space" (wait till Friday). http://www.filmfrenzy.com/ They're Raving, and You've Got a Craving The Rave Reviews Web site offers guess what? Could it be rave reviews of places to eat and stay, and fun stuff to do? Yes! The authors promise that every rockin' joint listed has received rave reviews at least twice in newspapers, magazines, and guides.http://www.rave-reviews.com/ Sell Your CDs - but Not All Those AOL Freebies You know how you hear a song on the radio and rush out to buy the CD only to find out that the only decent song on the whole recording was the one you can hear for free on the radio? Get rid of those silver coasters at Cash for CDs. They'll give you an instant quote. Too bad they don't take 8-tracks.http://www.cashforcds.com/ Well, we resisted temptation and are including no lawyer jokes in this review of Law.com. "Your Portal to the Law" includes free e-mail, legal guides, a locate-a-lawyer feature, and - they promise - a "'You've Got Cash' CONTEST Coming Soon!" The better to sue you with, my dear. http://www.law.com/ This page basically links to a series of communist groups and newspapers with socialist ideologies. There's an article on Cuban communism next to one on the impact of Y2K from a Marxist standpoint. Get your own copy of "The Internationale" in Basque. You never know when that's going to come in handy. http://www.angelfire.com/la/cominternet/ CORRECTIONS Back when the Net was still primarily a coal-based medium (last issue), we covered NetSlaves ("Workers ofhe Web Unite"). The site has added a li'l ol' "s" to the URL and can now be found at:http://www.disobey.com/netslaves/index.shtml ADMINISTRIVIA We've had some complaints about blank NSDs showing up in Hotmail mailboxes. We're working on the problem and we think we've narrowed it down - to Hotmail. It looks as if a few weeks ago someone at Microsoft (which owns Hotmail) threw a switch that somehow made the Hotmail e-mail service conflict with NSD. We're not absolutely sure, however. If you use Hotmail, please send a little note to editor@netsurf.com to tell us whether or not NSD comes through properly. We do realize that if it doesn't, you won't see this, but that's life, isn't it? |
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