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| Take One Fine Artist, One Graphic Designer, and Stir |
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| Emoticons Strip |
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| The Latin Epic |
| Online Newspapers of the World |
| Horton Sees a Who |
| Something in a Different Vein: Bloodstain Pattern Analysis |
| National Weather Service Alerts |
| ICQ 99 Beta |
| W3C Releases Resource Description Framework for Web Metadata |
| Come, Not Play Prawns |
| Itty Bitty Blackboard Grows up |
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BREAKING SURF
Pentium III: Possibly Spook-Inspired Serial Number Hacked
The Pentium III chip from Intel comes with baggage - and a coded Processor Serial Number (PSN). For the chip itself, check out the official site at Intel. Privacy advocates have instigated a boycott of the chip amid concerns that someone other than yourself could get at the PSN and abuse your privacy. Intel, downplaying worries, offers users a way to turn off the PSN feature. Oh, yeah? Experts at the German tech magazine "C't" have found at least two ways to hack it. So much for user options.... Lastly, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) - one of the boycott advocates - has used the Freedom of Information Act to request from the FBI, CIA, and NSA documentation of any US government role in persuading Intel to create the PSN. Conspiracy buffs will tell you such a scenario is not far-fetched - the feature has uses in building secure encrypted networks as well as usage tracking applications.Intel: http://www.intel.com/pentiumiii/
Boycott: http://www.bigbrotherinside.org/
C't: http://www.heise.de/ct/english/99/05/news1/
EPIC: http://www.epic.org/alert/EPIC_Alert_6.03.html
New Media Face for Old Silicon Valley
The San Jose Mercury News, generally considered one of the premier technical news outlets, covers Silicon Valley. It's a tautology, really. Anyway, the Merc, as it's fondly known, has just launched a brand new Web media outlet that focuses on technology and computer news. The slick, professional effort covers tech news from around the world, with feeds from AP, Reuters, and other international sources. Links lead to the usual array of data and shopping sites and to a variety of columns from the paper's Mercury Center Web site. Anyone interested in technology business news should peek at this high-quality major media outlet.http://www.siliconvalley.com/
The media are all over Drugstore.com, with good cause. This new site is exactly what you'd guess - an online drugstore, the Amazon.com of off-the-shelf drugs, personal care products, and cosmetics. It even offers to deliver prescription drugs to your door - an irresistible opportunity for social engineering by the more daring hackers out there. The comparison to Amazon doesn't come entirely coincidentally. Amazon owns 46 percent of Drugstore, a sweet chunk of what we expect will prove a very successful site, if for no other reason than the amount of press it attracts.
http://www.drugstore.com/
Frigidaire has introduced a refrigerator that incorporates a Windows PC connected to the Net, a built-in screen, and bar code scanner. Run out of salsa? To get more, all you do is run the bottle through the scanner. The information follows the wires to your local supermarket, which automatically sends you another bottle. Neat, but just think of the juicy hacking opportunities. Meanwhile, let us introduce a cautionary marketing tale. Frigidaire sent out press releases about the nifty Net appliance but no one bothered to add any information about it to the company Web site. Product development in the Internet age, marketing in the steam age.
Net Fridge: http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,32924,00.html
Frigidaire: http://www.frigidaire.com/
Official Internet2 Network Launch
Universities, government, and industry formed the Internet2 partnership to create a bleeding edge broadband network and applications which can exploit it. The Internet2 community plans to rapidly disseminate technologies pioneered in this environment into the broader Net community. This week, the networking part of the project was launched, linking 37 universities and spanning 10,000 miles at 2.4 Gb/sec. Qwest, Nortel, and Cisco supply the hardware and fiber. You'll find lots of interesting technology lurking here, such as fancy distributed storage algorithms, digital video applications, and details of the network itself.Internet2: http://www.internet2.edu/
Launch: http://www.internet2.edu/abilene/html/abilene_launch.html
Another Netscape Window Spoofing Exploit
Netscape Navigator appears to be vulnerable to another variation of content spoofing. In NSD 4.35, we wrote about how frames in both Netscape and Explorer can be manipulated to seemingly hijack the content of a legitimate Web site. Since then, Microsoft has released a fix for Explorer (NSD 5.01), but there's no word yet about a fix from Netscape. Meanwhile, a new exploit has been found which uses a different mechanism to achieve a similar effect with some clever JavaScript. This page has details and a demo.http://www.nat.bg/~joro/b14.html
Quick - name the first state to put a URL on its license plates. California? Nope. Pennsylvania? Wrong. New York? Nuh-uh. Well, actually it is Pennsylvania. We just wanted to throw you for a loop. We wonder how many accidents will be caused by squinting drivers trying to write down the URL.
http://www.dot.state.pa.us/penndot/railway.nsf/webcast?readform
ONLINE CULTURE
Timing the Beat of the Internet
Swatch, the Swiss watch company, has come up with quite the marketing gimmick and - who knows? - it might even change the world. It has unleashed a new time measurement for the Net. Swatch divided the day into 1000 "beats", each equivalent to almost 1.5 minutes, and based upon the beats a time zone-free universal Net time standard. The 24-hour environment of the Internet might find useful a single, easy to grasp label for universal time. Swatch's virtual day begins at midnight in Switzerland (GMT+1) and time passes in beats - for example 217 Internet time is 217 beats past midnight in Biel, or 23:12 EST. You can download applets which show SBT on your Web pages, desktop, and Palm Pilot - along with a discrete Swatch logo, of course. The company also sells digital Beat time watches. You can argue both the utility and implementation of Beat time - and people on the message board do, along with some hilariously off topic posts.http://www.swatch.com/internettime/beatnik_fs_time.html
EarthLink Lists Internet Service on eBay Auction Site
Wouldn't you have loved to attend the meeting in which EarthLink decided to list its $19.95 ISP service at the eBay auction site? Clearly, bidding on the service won't do anyone any good, making the auction in effect an advertisement for EarthLink directed at eBay users. EarthLink placed three auctions on eBay on Feb. 23 and eBay, after two days in a stun, finally removed at least one of EarthLink's ads Feb. 25. The auction site had to act or risk becoming overrun with spam disguised as auction items. CNet has the original story and an update.CNet: http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,32904,00.html
Update: http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,32957,00.html
eBay: http://www.ebay.com/
EarthLink: http://www.earthlink.com/
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Quieter and less ballyhooed than the crisp white Getty in LA, or the titanium-biceped Guggenheim Bilbao, another Frank Gehry-designed art museum, the Weisman, lives at the University of Minnesota. It stands on a bluff above the Mississippi, gleaming with Gehry-esque stainless steel protuberances. The university has used a Web site, aimed at a roughly secondary-school audience, to introduce its acquisition. Squiggled sketches turn into squiggles of three-dimensional metal. Parts of the building identify themselves by the nicknames given them by construction workers: Lower Belly; Upper Belly; and Nose. Views show how the building fits into its site amid the startled buildings that surround it. And a key anecdote, laudatory in intent, reveals that Gehry had no comprehension of the physical characteristics of the thin sheets of stainless steel out of which his building was to be built. Find out how in architecture, too, a bug can become a feature.http://hudson.acad.umn.edu/surprises/index.html
Take One Fine Artist, One Graphic Designer, and Stir
For every fine artist who extols the exciting possibilities of new media, probably two or so secretly dread the tonnage of technology being foisted on them. The 911 Media Arts Lab of Seattle and the Henry Art Gallery of the University of Washington are attempting to foster the vitality that can emerge from the conjunction of technology and art. Their experimental collaboration, dubbed the New Works Lab, pairs fine artists with more technically oriented creative types. It provokes seasoned artists into experimenting, and possibly leading the way, with new expressions as they produce interactive art meant to be co-created not simply with a technical partner but with the audience, the people who will later experience it through interactive technologies. The modest project skips lightly around big talk but wades heavily into imagination.http://www.911media.org/features/newworkslab/
The great marketing minds at Showtime must have come up with this cartoon premise: "a sassy 20-something super-heroine fighting to save the world from an evil media-tech empire." Joined by her equally sassy slacker friends, Whirlgirl "will tackle such provocative issues as 'talk show justice' replacing the trial-by-jury system, the perils of sacrificing personal freedom for the sake of public comfort, addiction to media, and love in the workplace." OK, it's pretty laughable, but if you do tune in, you'll get to see some state-of-the-art online animation with a happenin' soundtrack. Grin at the transparent attempt at demographic hijacking, but tune in for the technology. New episode every Friday.
http://www.showtimeonline.com/programplus/whirlgirl/
Camp Chaos Animations takes Shockwave to the max. We consider the cartoons instant classics with incredible quality imaging, yet one of the fastest downloads on the Net. The site is jam-packed with quizzes, games, cartoons, excellent links and some talented graphic work. The Presidential Advisor column by Linda Stephanopoulos blows the lid on the real problems with the TeleTubbies. Gay? That is the least of their worries! (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) A slick, professional and well presented site with rich, entertaining content and high quality imaging, Camp Chaos is a bookmark natural.
http://www.campchaos.com/
Punc and Mark are emoticons (a.k.a. smilies), those once-clever ASCII faces still used by those denizens of the Internet who either have insufficient vocabulary to communicate mood with words, or think they are tres cool. Still, with reason, emoticons have their place, like in the Punc and Mark comic strips - without a doubt the best use of smilies on the Net. Simply drawn, simply presented, and simply hilarious. Check out the Blackout episode, or the Religion strip! :-))) By the way, meet our baby Centrosaurus: Jpq-
http://heather.greatbasin.com/~paiva/buck/punc_mark.htm
BOOKS & E-ZINES
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Items our staff likes and you might too. Click on the image or title to order at a hefty discount from Amazon.com and send a few pennies our way as well.
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Outwitting Squirrels: 101 Cunning Stratagems to Reduce Dramatically the Egregious Misappropriation of Seed from Your Birdfeeder by Squirrels
Us and Them: Symphonic Pink Floyd
Blow Your Coolhttp://www.zolatimes.com/
This solemn site explains the various aspects of the Latin Epic. You can learn about the nature of Epic poetry, wrap your noggin around terms such as meter and scansion, and more. Good for memorizing facts and phrases that will wow them at your next party, such as Virgil's "reges et proelia" ("kings and battles", Eclogues). Now how cool is that? Very.
http://www.sjc.ox.ac.uk/users/gorney/index1.htm
Online Newspapers of the World
Tired of your local newspaper? Want to find out what people on the other side of the world read over their coffee? Online Newspapers of the World has over 4,000 newspapers and magazines sorted by region and country and a proficient search engine as well wrapped up into one excellent, clean, efficient resource.http://www.metagrid.com/
SURFING SCIENCE
Now you can see elephants without going to either the circus or the bottle. You don't even have to leave your computer. The National Zoo in Washington, D.C. has hooked up video cameras overlooking the elephant area. Scheduled events (e.g. foot care demo) take place at 10:30 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. EST most days, but you can view the elephant enclosure anytime. During scheduled events, a chat runs alongside the broadcast, often with a zoo staffer or volunteer present to answer questions. There's a possibility for a future naked mole-rat cam - you know with the word "naked" on it, the page will get a lot more hits.http://zootv1.si.edu/
Something in a Different Vein: Bloodstain Pattern Analysis
"The interpretation of shape, location, size and directionality of bloodstains relative to the forces that created them." You don't hear that everyday. The Blood Pattern Analysis site is basically an online brochure for BPA Consulting, a forensic consulting company. The site is geared towards police and the legal community but there is some interesting info here, as well as rather strange examples of BPA's work, such as the "Find the bloody hammer transfer impression!" page. No mention of the shape of the stain left by a keeper who tried to clean an elephant's foot against its will.http://www.bloody1.com/
National Weather Service Alerts
This site not only tells how to get a computer to automatically alert you when a weather warning for your area is issued, it tells how to set off a whole series of alarming events: activate your pager, shake your bed to wake you, trip sirens, flash strobe lights. A company called Xenocode has created software which intercepts via the Net the EMWIN (Emergency Managers Wireless Information Network) broadcast from the National Weather Service. Download trial software free; pay $80 if saving your fellow villagers from needless death by flood, tornado, avalanche, hypothermia, etc. means anything to you.http://www.byteblast.com/usmap.asp
SOFTWARE
ICQ has released a new Windows version of its popular personal chat software. The 99a version has many interesting new features, notably the ability to send e-mail through the ICQ servers, a complete record of every ICQ communication event you sent or received, better search commands, the ability to generate ICQ home pages, and a bunch of visual/aural bells and whistles. This major upgrade makes the useful product even more useful.http://www.icq.com/
W3C Releases Resource Description Framework for Web Metadata
The spec deals with how to define metadata on the Web, in other words, how to specify things like the Author, Title, Format, and Publisher of a document on the Web. The advantages of having such data are obvious - better searching, better document databases. There's a press release and the XML-based spec itself.Press release: http://www.w3.org/Press/1999/RDF-REC
Spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/
CORRECTIONS
Despite having one excellently rooted Aussie on our NSD staff, we somehow misrepresented her native phrase "Don't come the raw prawn with me" as "Don't play the raw prawn with me." Dunno how that happened. Maybe we were a bit too rooted. Oh, come now - don't play Mr. Innocent with us....Itty Bitty Blackboard Grows up
We reviewed the Itty Bitty Blackboard in NSD 5.02 and it's has expanded into a new URL. Along with the new address, the site has introduced search capability, a forum, and a link program.http://explorezone.com/