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| Eric Raymond: Take My Job, Please! |
| Lifestyles of the Rich and Net-connected |
| The BBS Archive |
| The First Internetted War |
| Saul Bass - You've Seen a Lot of His Work |
| The Horizontal Bopper |
| 'Twas a Dark and Stormy Salon |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| Praise We Can't Live Without |
| Salon's Silicon Follies |
| Babel around the World |
| News by State |
| Mars |
| New Mars Orbiter Images |
| Pythagoras Would Be Proud |
| Hospital Report Cards |
| Kid Nutrition |
| Aspirin's 100 Years Old |
| Linux Kernel Versions 2.2.5 and 2.2.5ac1 Released |
| The Missing Haida |
| Punc and Mark Move on |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
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BREAKING SURF
Melissa Virus - Same Old, Same Old
What's causing companies all over North America to shut down corporate mail servers? The Melissa virus - or, more accurately, fear of the Melissa virus, which is really nothing more than your standard naughty scamp hiding as a MS Word macro. Well, maybe it's not so standard - it does seem a tad more aggressive than usual. It affects MS Word 97 or Word 2000, reading MS Outlook e-mail address books and propagating itself to those addresses. The simple way to avoid it is to just not open MS Word docs you receive through the Net (we don't - they go right in the trash). The hard way is to use Microsoft's patch after a mandatory update to Office 97 Service Release 2. Read the CERT advisory for details, and 106 points to anyone who knows what a "kwyjibo" is. Smart Reseller (SR) explores the effect on IT departments.CERT: http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-99-04-Melissa-Macro-Virus.html
MS fix: http://www.microsoft.com/security/bulletins/ms99-002.asp
SR: http://www.zdnet.com/sr/stories/news/0,4538,2233103,00.html
A new virus masquerading as an Excel macro copies Melissa's activity, with an additional multi-ping feature. CNN has the story. Remember, kids - just say no to attachments. Trash them as they show up.
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9903/29/melissa.copycat.idg/
Even Later News: Melissa Creator UnMACed
In NSD 5.08, we briefly discussed Microsoft's placement of specific Global Unique Identifiers (GUIDs) in documents produced by its software which finger the creator of any given document. Two software engineers have used this little feature to track down the unique Media Access Control (MAC) address of the Ethernet card of the creator of the MS Word document that contains the Melissa macro virus, thus identifying him. Rather elegant, we think, but not without questions. Would a warrant be required before such evidence was allowed in court? Did Melissa's creator spoof a MAC address? If not, has he already gone out and replaced his Ethernet card? ZDNN has the news.http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2233931,00.html
Yugoslavia has ejected most of the international newsmedia from Kosovo and watchers must consider the sporadic local radio and TV reports somewhat suspect. The Net, however, has tried to fill the void. Anonymizer has created a filter to protect the identities of those filing dispatches and updates from the region. A Kosovo Reports section at eGroups holds supposed first-person accounts of the situation, and another section contains international news reports. If blatant bias is your cup of tea, try Borba, a political daily founded by the Yugoslav government, or Beograd.com. Radio B92 is an independent Yugoslavian voice, shut down by the government but free on the Web. Wired reports on the country's Internet infrastructure, with this great quote: "As a result of recent NATO attacks on Yugoslavia, Eunet Yugoslavia is unable to provide its customers with payment services and customer support," says an notice on the site." And you thought busy signals were bad....
Anonymizer: http://info.anonymizer.com/kosovo.shtml
Kosovo Reports: http://www.egroups.com/list/kosovo-reports/
eGroups' News: http://www.egroups.com/list/decani/
Borba: http://www.borba.co.yu/daily.html
Beograd: http://www.beograd.com/
B92: http://b92eng.opennet.org/
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/18767.html
Online Shopping: The Viagra Story
The Silicon Alley Daily wanted to find out how easily you can buy Viagra online. The vigilant investigators found one online pharmacy which didn't exactly require a prescription. The pills proved valid, but the identities of the online pharmacy and of its online prescribing doctor prove elusive despite valiant efforts to uncover the truth. In a fascinating follow-up, the Daily revealed that their vigorous journalism has prodded the Arizona Board of Pharmacy to investigate and the mysterious cyber drugstore has vowed to sue. Watch for more.Story: http://www.siliconalleydaily.com/issues/sar03231999.html#Headline180
Follow up: http://www.siliconalleydaily.com/issues/sar03251999.html#Headline194
Network Solutions "Consolidates" Registration Services
Network Solutions Inc. (NSI), which handles the registry of high level domains .com, .net and .org, has closed the InterNIC Web site and folded it into its corporate service site. InterNIC was a bare-bones interface for registering and managing domain names, while NSI provides a number of Internet related services, not the least of which is a domain registry service geared to newbies. The new registry site has a friendlier and branded look about it. Not everyone likes that InterNIC now looks less like a public service than a corporation. NSI did not consult the Commerce Department on the change, as its contract with the US Government requires. NSI also cut Telnet access to InterNIC's Whois database, frustrating registries that automatically check names in the database. CNet has the story.CNet: http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,34090,00.html
You Say Cracker, We Say Hacker - Let's Shut the Web Site Down
Kipling, a manufacturer and vendor of shoes, apparel, and accessories, has learned the hard way the difference between a hacker and a cracker. Hackers enter sites/computers for the learning potential, while crackers have more malicious intent. Kipling devised a contest to give hacker-themed backpacks to anyone who could break a login and username security script on their Web site. Despite several attempts, the script withstood all hacking until a social hack finally uncovered the codes. Shortly thereafter, the site was cracked - possibly by hackers/crackers unamused by a Kipling vice-president's remarks - and now displays an apology and reconstruction notice, complete with a large red X across the page.Kipling: http://www.kipling.com/
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/18675.html
Time Inc., which owns one of the world's largest collections of catalogued images, provides access to a hundred years of superb photojournalism - searchable, browsable, and gawkable for free. Browse as a guest or register for free (some might find the process intrusive) and get access to the entire collection, advanced search tools, and the opportunity to license particular pictures. The stunning collection includes famous and not-so-famous pictures from People, Time, Life, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and Entertainment Weekly.
http://www.thepicturecollection.com/
April 1, Canada's Northwest Territories will divide in two: the eastern portion, comprising 1.9 million square kilometers of northern land, will become Nunavut, which means "our land" in Inuktitut. If you can't get to Iqualuit, the capital, in person, visit electronically via the Nunavut site, which calls itself the information gateway to Nunavut. Practice your Inuktitut, explore, or participate virtually in the massive celebrations. The Council for Canadian Unity provides useful information and links to Nunavut organizations, government structure and background. For added interest, read or download the voluminous text of the land claims agreement that preceded establishment of the new territory.
Nunavut: http://www.nunavut.com/home.html
Unity: http://www.ccu-cuc.ca/en/library/nunavut.html
Agreement: http://www.inac.gc.ca/pubs/nunavut/index.html
The Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT
The March 1999 issue of the MIT Faculty Newsletter contained a study of women faculty in science and the effect of contemporary gender discrimination. In 1994, three tenured women faculty in the School of Science undertook through surveys to determine whether gender had made a difference in their career paths and options. Their polling turned out easier than expected, as then there were only 15 tenured women faculty members, compared with 194 men - figures that had remained essentially unchanged for 20 years. The diligent report offers in-depth analysis as to the causes of gender inequality in the areas of salary, advancement opportunity, and peer recognition as well as potential solutions. The report pessimistically expects the lack of women and minorities in the hiring pipeline to continue.http://web.mit.edu/fnl/women/Fnlwomen.htm
We know you can't wait for this. Gripes, Macs, and a bellyful of humor. We laughed, we cried, we emptied our mailbox.
http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/letters/letter.05.10.html
ONLINE CULTURE
Eric Raymond: Take My Job, Please!
Eric Raymond wants to quit. He's tired of the road, hates airline food, and testosterone-poisoned adolescents have hurt his feelings. But he wants his job to live on. For those not in the loop, Eric can best be described as the poster boy for free software: "public advocate for the hacker tribe, speaker-to-journalists, evangelist/interface to the corporate world." He believes in his job passionately - keeping alive the flame of free/open software - but he's just burned out. Read his plea for a replacement and see if you qualify to carry the torch. Alternatively, this being the Internet, read the spoof of his plea and see if you qualify to kill squirrels.Eric: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/take-my-job-please.html
Spoof: http://blevins.simplenet.com/take-my-job-please.html
Lifestyles of the Rich and Net-connected
Edge believes great minds think differently. If you ever wanted "to arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they have been asking themselves", then these essays and discussions will escort you on a wonderful exploration of tech society and culture. Articles like "Special Relativity: why can't you go faster than light?", discussions on topics such as the most important invention in the last 2,000 years, and Bill Gates's contemplations can't help but teach you something here.http://www.edge.org/
If you know what a BBS is and remember when floppy disks were actually floppy, you might just appreciate this Web site. Collector Jason Scott has aggregated a veritable museum of text files with topics ranging from phreaking to food to sex. Text files, a.k.a. "T-files", were once the currency of early online aficionados. Jason has admirably chronicled the infancy of information technology, when the nation's computer networks were a tool of populist empowerment and not limitless commercialization, and, in the words of the proprietor, when "information became the juice people used to build themselves up, tear others down, or share with everyone to bring the whole social group up a few notches." Although the faint of heart will want to steer clear of some content, most will appreciate the well organized site and the fascinating files.
http://www.textfiles.com/
THREAD WATCH
The world has seen plenty of military activity since the Internet blossomed, but until now, Net discussion has been pretty much confined to debaters on only one side. Sure, much online debate took place on the Iraq attacks, but posters were almost entirely confined to coalition or neutral countries. Few Usenet posts came from Iraq, proper. NATO's current actions in Yugoslavia have broken the mold. Yugoslavia is wired, and posts from .yu and .ru domains have flooded Usenet with alternative, on-the-scene, or close-by viewpoints. Of particular interest - or annoyance - is the grade-school level argument over who shot down who how. Find all the banter you need in the following newsgroups. rec.aviation.military soc.culture.yugoslaviaARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Saul Bass - You've Seen a Lot of His Work
It all started with a dismembered body - the poster for Preminger's "Anatomy of a Murder". With that image, graphic designer Saul Bass transformed the way studios presented movies to the public. No more would a poster display a static scene from the film, or actors' faces. Movie advertisement became an art beyond the movie itself. Bass would later create opening sequences for "Psycho" and "Vertigo" that might have upstaged the rest of the films had anyone other than Alfred Hitchcock been at the helm. In later years, Bass designed corporate IDs like AT&T's Deathstar logo. This Bass homage site shows the maturation of Flash and RealPlayer technology: the plug-ins no longer call attention to themselves as technical tricks, but instead present moving graphics and film segments in an intuitive and entertaining way. Bass would have had new worlds to conquer.http://www.subnet.co.uk/brendan/saulbass/
Paul Simpson has atypical motivation for bringing his musical talents to the Net - he's not seeking fame or fortune, although neither would hurt. Instead, Horizontal Paul (his own moniker), a bed-bound paraplegic, hopes to use his music to finance a trip from his native Britain to the Jackson Memorial Medical Center in Miami, Fla. for rehabilitation. Paul's site includes a diary chronicling his progress, ways interested parties can contribute, and a number of RealAudio samples from the tenacious troubadour that range from pop to instrumentals. Paul has stirred some media interest - not least because he does seem to have legitimate musical skill - and we hope he garners the support needed to bring his inspiring project to fruition.
http://www.innotts.co.uk/~rur/music.html
Salon e-zine is offering a 12-week series of noir comic-book tales. If you're in the mood for a mystery, check out "Murder at the Hey Hey Club", in which our fearless heroine Nora Smudge investigates the untimely death of a Silicon Valley bigwig. Or perhaps you'll prefer "Lady Blue", historical fiction that includes monocled men in Munich. Cool graphics.
http://www.salonmagazine.com/comics/dark/
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 our affiliates Amazon.com and Beyond.com, and send a few pennies our way as well.
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Music: The Best of Anime: Original Soundtracks
Mr. Mike: The Life and Work of Michael O'Donoghue
Pride and Joy: The Lives and Passions of Women Without Children
South Park, the Gamehttp://www.fastcompany.com/online/23/atwork.html
Salon - seemingly suffering paroxysms of expansion - has also just launched an online serial comedy "about life, work, love and war in Silicon Valley". The two installments out at press time seemed to consist of conspicuously brief text pieces documenting a series of typical Valley cliches. If there is comedy here, one is hard pressed to find it, but then we actually live the pathetically nerdy life portrayed here. As always, we invite you to judge for yourself.
http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/follies/about/about.html
Babel, a multilingual, multicultural e-zine of arts and ideas, offers an unusual welcome: "Babel invites you to get nekkid and boogie to the universal beat - stone on stone in an endless rhythm to the heavens." You won't have to disrobe or strike flint to find amazing variety here. Tabel of Contents links to a potpourri of articles, columns, film, and music reviews. Contents include a pictorial account of Burning Man, the story of a Swiss entrepreneur in Las Vegas, and a comparative look at the deaths of Jerry Garcia and Kurt Cobain. We also found much to ponder in Sections, one portion of which, "Our Man in Havana", included first-person reports from Moscow, South Korea, Jerusalem, and other destinations. Babel plans to grow and seeks translators in many languages.
http://www.towerofbabel.com/
State policy innovation may sound dry, and a site written by journalists for journalists who cover the subject even drier, but Stateline.org makes an excellent base for anyone who needs to research background or news about any state in the Union. The ambitious but straightforward text-based news and research project comes from the University of Richmond, with funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts. So far, the site mainly covers healthcare, welfare reform, taxes and budgets, education, and utility deregulation. Navigation and searching are a breeze, with an almanac-like summary of each state, links to relevant sites, news, and an event calendar. Reporters on capital punishment, auto insurance, household income, unemployment, Medicare, or other public beats can use a password-protected area for protection of sources.
http://www.stateline.org/
SURFING SCIENCE
Remember Mars? After March madness, the Balkans, train wrecks, Oscars, and other media fixations, it's still out there, pristine but for probe wreckage. Waiting. For us. Accordingly, the Mars Society has created Mars News, a "NewsWire for the New Frontier". This fine example of a news site focuses on the many ramifications of Mars: NASA missions, planetology, technology, discovery, the search for extraterrestrial life. For ease of tracking, separate pages handle the various ongoing and planned missions. Nice. Even if you experience some sluggish responses from the server, as we did, persistence will bring rewards.http://www.marsnews.com/
Speaking of the Red Planet, the Mars Orbiter mission has hit its stride, sending new images back in welcome quantity. Check out the spectacular global mosaic of the two hemispheres of Mars put together from images acquired to date. Particularly amusing are the "Happy Face" crater and "Hot Dog and Butterfly" structure.
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/msss/camera/images/index.html
Chances are, you've spent 12 years of your life listening to math teachers warn "You're going to use this every day in real life" as you stared at the board in incomprehension. While we still haven't often used quadratic equations to make change and the tangents of our bank accounts go uncalculated, Math in Daily Life proves you do use math every day. The site shows how you're using math without even realizing it in everyday tasks such as calculating the odds on the lottery and tacking down carpet. You can even see how compound interest affects the growth of money, in case you're paying off your local loan shark/bank. Is there a difference?.
http://www.learner.org/exhibits/dailymath/
An interesting, if morbid, concept lies behind HealthCareReportCards.com - it rates local hospitals by seeing how many folks die while in or after leaving them. The site ranks all US hospitals which have treated 30 or more patients with certain procedures over a three-year period. The fewer folks over the age of 65 on Medicare who don't make it out the front doors, the lower the ranking. The mortality rating presently covers cardiac, orthopedic, and pulmonary specialties, plus the neurosciences and vascular surgery. Obstetrical and oncological data should be available later this year.
http://www.healthcarereportcard.com/
Whether you have a new baby and want to start off on the right foot (nutritionally speaking, that is) or a slightly older little one who's at that watch-me-spit-on-your-clean-clothes stage, the KidsHealth nutrition pages at the American Medical Association's Web site have some help for you. The highly informative articles should interest you whether your child is eight days old, eight months old, eight years old, or even 18 - but keep in mind that food spitting at the latter age is more than likely induced by college dorm peer pressure and probably can't be cured by parental involvement.
http://www.ama-assn.org/insight/h_focus/nemours/nutritio/index.htm
Oh, those Germans. For the Aspirin's 100th birthday, Bayer hired 30 mountaineers to drape its building in Werk Leverkusen with 22,500 square meters of fabric in the image of a giant Aspirin box. It was no simple endeavor, either, as pre and post-draping videos show. According to Bayer, 40,000 people showed up to watch the festivities. The whole concept just drips with post-modernist irony. Just think what Pfizer could do for the 100th birthday of Viagra.
http://www.bayer.de/aspirin-live/index_en.html
SOFTWARE
Linux Kernel Versions 2.2.5 and 2.2.5ac1 Released
Talk about fast moving targets. Kernel 2.2.5 was released on Monday morning and by afternoon, we had version 2.2.5ac1. Well, there's more to it then that, but it's fashionable to be suitably impressed by the speed of open source development. These two links give information about both kernels, mostly of interest to bleeding edge Linux hackers.2.2.5: http://linuxtoday.com/stories/4468.html
2.2.5ac1: http://linuxtoday.com/stories/4469_flat.html
CORRECTIONS
We covered the Canadian Museum of Civilization's exhibitions of the Haida and Tsimshian cultures in NSD 5.08, but we only provided the URL for the Tsimshian pages. Here's where the Haida hide:http://www.civilization.ca/membrs/fph/haida/haindexe.html
In NSD 5.06, we reviewed the Punc and Mark emoticon comic strip, but it has since found a new Web home at the following URL.
http://byteus.com/pm/index.html