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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 05, Issue 11 Wednesday, April 07, 1999 |
NETSURFER LINKS
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BREAKING SURF FBI to Kwyjibo: "Why, You Little...!" Federal and New Jersey officials have arrested David L. Smith and charged him with creating and releasing the Melissa virus, but not before Scott Steinmetz underwent an embarrassing and perplexing 15 minutes of infamy. A hacker used Steinmetz's AOL account to post Melissa on Usenet and after researchers discovered which e-mail address it was, ZDNet reported it. A torrent of e-mail followed, swamping Steinmetz, who protested his innocence and, shocked by the lack of security, vowed to dump his AOL account. Police authorities and AOL traced the hack of Steinmetz's account through phone lines to Smith's New Jersey apartment and arrested Smith, whose exact role remains unclear. Suspicions also fall on the Codebreakers and Source of Kaos Web sites. By the way, the real Melissa, the virus's namesake, turns out to be a topless dancer in Florida.Steinmetz: http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,34435,00.html Arrest: http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,34579,00.html Two key figures have recently departed Netscape's open-source Mozilla project in the wake of AOL's acquisition of the company. Jamie Zawinski, one of Netscape's first 20 employees and a Mozilla project founder and promoter, left on the anniversary of the project's creation. A few days later, John Giannandrea, creator of Smart Browsing, also left in what may be the beginning of a mass exodus of Netscape veterans from AOL - along with a few hundred others AOL laid off. Jamie has written a post-mortem of his involvement in the Mozilla project, which lives on. Highly recommended reading for anyone interested in the dynamics of the open-source movement. http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html Hotmail to Be Fixed for NSD, Editor Gloats Laura Norman, Hotmail product manager at Microsoft, wrote us an e-mail explaining why NSD shows up blank in Hotmail accounts: "This was an unintentional side effect of some changes that we made on the site last fall to improve security. We've made some additional modifications that will be released to the site later this month that will enable Netsurfer Digest to render in Hotmail." So, how many of you can say Microsoft apologized to you?http://www.hotmail.com/ Salon Redesigns, Switches to Linux, Becomes Salon.com Salon Magazine has undergone a graphic redesign and has finally managed to lay claim to the domain and name Salon.com. As part of the minor upheaval, it also abandoned Windows NT to use a Linux server. The press release explains why. In addition, Salon.com offers two new sections. People focuses on celebs and their industries, and Health & Sex looks at - well, health and sex. At last glance, Salon.com had bought the "unique and world-famous" Well.Salon: http://www.salon.com/index.html Server press: http://www.salon.com/press/releases/1999/4-5a.html Well press: http://www.salon.com/press/releases/1999/4-7.html Netsurfer Selling Venture.com Domain Surprise! Netsurfer Communications owns the venture.com domain name. We've been bouncing around ideas on what kind of project to start with this desirable parcel of cyber real estate for a while, but nothing quite gelled until now. In an act of entrepreneurial irony, we're going to sell the domain name in order to fund some venture projects we want to develop. Pretty cool idea, don't you think? So, spread the word. We're looking for serious offers from serious players - five figures probably won't cut it given the amount of interest this domain name has generated in the past. Send your offer to mailto:netsurfers@netsurf.com and we'll get back to you ASAP.Both the latest Netscape Communicator (4.51) and Microsoft Internet Explorer (5.0) contain new privacy bugs. Georgi Guninski demonstrates the Netscape bugs, which read URLs from other windows and information from your hard drive. Turn off JavaScript to prevent that. SysOpt.com shows how Explorer can reveal the contents of your clipboard to hackers. The page explains how to tweak the security settings on your browser to avoid the problem. At heart, both bugs arise from the ability of Web sites to run programs within your browser, something you should be wary of allowing. Guninski: http://www.nat.bg/~joro/netscape.html SysOpt: http://www.sysopt.com/ie5flaw.html One of the big features of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5.0 (IE5) is the Internet Explorer Administrator Kit (IEAK), which allows registered users to heavily modify the appearance and content of the browser. TUCOWS (The Ultimate Collection Of Winsock Software) used the IEAK to insert its own logos and brand identity into the IE5 it offered for download. TUCOWS explained the appearance of corporate logos, a TUCOWS start page and additional TUCOWS content as an attempt "to create a better browser, from a download and content perspective." After receiving "tons of user feedback", TUCOWS posted instructions for removing their customizations. A debranding site, inspired by the TUCOWS incident, provides users with a kit to completely de-customize IE5. True customization cuts both ways. TUCOWS: http://www.tucows.com/newsitem2.html Debranding: http://mh106.infi.net/~veratech/debrand.html Capitalism Run Amok: Free Software from Beyond.com As affiliates of Beyond.com, we get periodic updates about promotions. One has us scratching our heads. In this deal, you buy software and get a rebate from the manufacturer for the sale price - essentially getting the goods for free. This applies to some major packages like Encarta Encyclopedia 99, Corel Print House Magic, Norton AntiVirus, and more. You pay shipping, and you have to wait to get your money after sending in the coupons, but it still seems too good to be true - who makes money here? Beyond.com can't have much of a mark-up, if any, and the manufacturer pays out cash. Maybe the shipping company gets a cut, and we get our measly 5% commission if you buy through our link, but ultimately, how can this pyramid stand? Philosophy aside, we'd be stupid not to bring this to your attention. Just make sure to read the fine print on the rebates before you buy as some have restrictions.http://www.beyond.com/AF31458/bestsellers.html Amazon Bids for Auction Business Taking a page from Microsoft's "embrace and extend" global domination handbook, Amazon (note the Auctions tab) has bid to wrest some of your auction dollars from eBay. Boasting eight million registered Amazonians, this place covers the waterfront from coins to computers. You must use your credit card online, and Amazon has zero tolerance for those who don't follow the rules. Amazon's $250 guarantee against fraud exceeds eBay's insurance by $50 and first-time buyers get a $10 gift certificate. Can it be much longer before we see Amazon or eBay hosting stock auctions?Amazon Auction: http://www.amazon.com eBay: http://www.ebay.com/ Some Yugoslavs have apparently taken time out from outdoor concerts, bomb avoidance, and ethnic cleansing to hack NATO's Web site and jam its e-mail system, but NATO's site soldiers on apparently unaffected. The simple, efficient site offers a Kosovo section with press releases, videos of air strikes, transcripts of briefings, and other stuff. To remind you that NATO delivers more than air strikes, the site has information on this year's 50th anniversary activities and archived docs. Attack: http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,34508,00.html NATO: http://www.nato.int/ SURFING SITES The Discourse of the New Marketplace The preamble of the Cluetrain Manifesto (CM) reads: "We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings - and our reach exceeds our grasp. Deal with it." This message, and the 95 Theses that follow, aim squarely at the coquettish corporate world and companies who continue to squander their online communication opportunities. The CM feels that inevitably, naturally, the relationship between consumers and employees of the companies that serve them will evolve as the two factions - gasp! - talk to each other. The CM tells corporations to encourage this discussion, to remove stale market positioning claims and hackneyed mission statements and instead foster discourse - in short, get out of the way or be squeezed out.http://www.cluetrain.com/ One night in 1978, after a few pints at the pub and a discussion about UFOs, Doug Bower and his friend Dave Chorley made the first crop circle, using a four-foot metal bar used to secure the back door of Doug's art studio. Since then, crop circles have become a favorite spiritual art form, a medium whose critics unusually believe some transcendent message can be derived from wheat flattened by a board. The Circlemakers site provides more responsible commentary. Check out Top of the Crop, photos of last year's most impressive creations. Included are instructions on how to make your own crop circles. Farmers' reactions to having their fields turned into UFO landing pads not included. http://www.eyewire.com/eyeopeners/cropsecrets.html Active Matrix's Hideaway wants to teach non-experts about computer security and hacking. Visitors will find background and updates on flaws, bugs, overflows, vulnerabilities, and other network and system problems exploited by those who might have studied the "How Can I Become a Hacker?" tutorial. Hideaway uses many sources, including newsgroups and the Web, to provide definitions and descriptions, links to programmers' resources, products (it has a shopping cart for CDs and books), and points of view. Corporations hire some hackers for protection against others. By the same token, a compendium of security information like Hideaway is likely to help both defenders and attackers. You might do your system administrators a favor by pointing them here, if they haven't scoured it already. http://www.hideaway.net/ They know who you are, they know what you buy, and your computer has more cookies than a Keebler factory. You know all this, and it should scare you, but really, it makes you feel kind of... wanted. Try this: in Maryland, a banker accessed medical records to find people diagnosed with cancer so the bank could call in their loans. The American Civil Liberties Union is moving ahead with its Defend Your Data Campaign. Their site gives you ways to see exactly what information is available about you for free, and how much it costs for someone to dig deeper. It also gives advice on how to be as invisible as possible. Even if you aren't particularly concerned, go learn how many ore cars the data miners have already filled with your life. http://www.aclu.org/privacy/ What's the difference between greeting the Queen and greeting the President? You only have to get on one knee to greet the Queen. If you didn't think that was funny, drop by Jester 2.0 to find jokes you'll like. Jester 2.0 uses collaborative filtering to recommend jokes based on your ratings of a set of sample jokes. To start, you get 15 jokes to rate. Jester matches your choices with a database of responses and tailors jokes to your sense of humor. It works great, but even if you don't like any jokes, you'll be helping the Alpha Lab at UC Berkeley. The researchers there built the site to experiment with technology known as collaborative filtering. http://shadow.ieor.berkeley.edu/humor/ The Dangers of Being an Early Adopter Judy Sammel's "Get a Cable Modem... Go to Jail" shows the frightening consequences when the "the customer is always right" and the "I don't know, I just work here" mindsets collide. If you have or are thinking about getting a cable modem, read Judy's account of Comcast's proceedings against her and how long it took to stop wheels of justice even after all involved agreed she'd done nothing wrong.http://members.home.net/sammel/cablemodem.htm Liberate an ant farm, stop swatting flies, and close down that roach motel. The official Web site of the Insect Rights Activists (IRA) wants you to do your part. This Web site parodies extreme animal rights activists. To support insects, the site suggests starting a bug garden, not cleaning your house, not driving, and eating bats (because many bats, of course, eat bugs). The rhetoric may entertain you but the IRA's suggestion that you boycott products grown with pesticide ironically parallels the calls of organic food supporters, many of whom belong to the very constituency the IRA tries to make fun of. http://www.throughwire.com/ This global lost and found serves as one big virtual bulletin board where anyone who's wired can pin a notice. Animals are by far the most frequently lost and found items, probably because they tend to wander off on their own far more frequently than, say, keys or kitchen accessories. Oddly, far more ferrets are found than lost, which either furthers the theory of spontaneous generation, shows that owners just don't want to find them, or proves that wild ferrets are real easy to catch. One special lady from Seattle lost her pants. We'd like to let her know that if she's been traveling lately, the man who lost his wedding ring in Newport Beach, Calif. might be able to give her a lead. Oh and, to the woman in Bethlehem, Penn., who lost one shoe: we're pretty sure we found it by the side of the road last week. http://www.internetlostandfound.com/ If you positively need to get faxes but don't have a fax machine (and fax software/modems scare you), eFax.com will provide you with a fax number and e-mail you your faxes. They receive the faxes, convert them into image files, and e-mail the files to you, all for free. The only two negatives, and they are slight, are the ads that eFax will foist on you and the fact that your fax number might not be local, meaning that a correspondent on the other side of town will probably have to pay a long distance charge to fax you. Also, you can't send faxes through the service - many local outlets will do that for you, although not for free. http://www.efax.com/ WayBack has done it again. It's produced a phenomenal product in Gold Rush, a PBS Online site that tells the story that started with that first discovery at Sutter's mill. Fire up a decent browser (the site uses JavaScript rollovers and multiple frames to enhance the learning experience) and take your kid to the time of the '49ers. From what we can tell, the site aims at 6th or 7th graders, but most anybody would have fun here. The feature stories ask pertinent questions like "What happened to the people who were in California before the gold rush began?" and adds to the answers a suggested reading list for kids. The site archives old products, but Gold Rush will be replaced with a feature on flight at the end of the month. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/amex/kids/ Life in the Eighth Air Force, WWII Marshall Stelzriede's Wartime Story is his account of his life in 338 Squadron, 96th Heavy Bomber Group, Eighth Air Force during World War II, but what started out as a simple dumping of a diary online has expanded to a comprehensive look at the bomber war from a participant's close perspective. Here is everything from a night at the pub to watching friends fall in flames over Schweinfurt.http://www.loop.com/~tstel/marshw.htm Demonstrating how Web creativity mines its relentless way from niche to niche, leaving no opportunity unexplored, Ememories provides free access to PicForums that hold your uploaded pictures and text so you can share them with whoever you choose. Remember those family vacation slide shows? Now, inflict your stuff on the entire world! Ememories gets to put advertising messages on all screens featuring your material in return for the free service. It supplies a text search engine as well. Although the site looks fairly empty right now, have a look at the 20th century hoaxes PicForum while it fills up. http://ememories.com/ Entering the job market? Check out Jobs That Suck/Don't Suck, an unofficial, crass job guide that lets off steam with point, example, and scatological graphics. The Jobs That Suck page - with the criteria for suck being poor pay, poor working conditions, and embarrassment when asked "what you do for a living" - lists mall Santa Claus, ice cream driver, and mortician among others. Only three careers don't suck, apparently: radio disk jockey; airline pilot; and model, two of the qualifications for which are "desired to be photographed" and "alive and breathing". The humor here relies on recognition value, not sophistication or wit, but you may find it strikes a sympathetic chord. http://www.worksnotfun.com/ All Dog Yard Cleanup, the self-styled "best dog waste removal service in the San Francisco Bay Area", makes no bones about their business: regularly cleaning up after the regular pet. In fact, the Web site includes photographs of satisfied customers, including Bandit and Nica, two San Jose dogs who appear to be - we swear - grinning with contempt. The six-year-old company also offers franchise opportunities for the aspiring professional. A franchise allows the industrious entrepreneur to immediately enter the dog-doo removal market with everything one could need, from protected franchise territory to support software. The only thing All Dog Yard Cleanup lacks is reading material for the customers. Jobs that suck, indeed! http://www.alldogyardcleanup.com/ ONLINE TRAVEL If you like traditional photo landscapes, spend some time at the online gallery of Mark Boyle, a photographer from Perth, Australia. His eye for natural beauty is superbly complemented by the foresight and elegance of his Web design. We can easily imagine travel agents, environmentalists, shut-ins, and postcard collectors going bonkers here - and other photographers turning green - at sight of the magnificent Australian vistas glorified by his lens. Our reviewer's favorite is Camels at Sunset-Broome, a gorgeous shot of a short caravan crossing a beach. We also found Yagloo Road and Sunrise-Morawa sensational. Boyle may shoot weddings and design Web sites for a living, but his first love appears to be land, sea, and sky. Australians should lobby to have him declared a protected national resource.http://www.iinet.net.au/mboyle/ PBS's Nova Online Adventure has put together Mysteries of the Nile, a site which provides QuickTime VR images of Egypt. Several sites wait just a download away, including Sphinx close-ups, the Great Pyramid, and Luxor. Simply click, wait, and rotate yourself silly. The high quality images give a good sense of the scale of the architecture. There's something cool in zooming in to pick out a mural detail or closing in on some hieroglyphics high up on a wall. Don't miss the Tomb of Rekhmire. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/egypt/explore/ Fishing village Rosses Point, Ireland has a site like a yarn told by a local who's lanced every inch of coastline with his walking stick. Graphics put the smell of salt in the air, links bring the Spanish Armada crashing against Irish shores, and texts deliberate over the life and literature of native son William Butler Yeats. A boatload of other information here will also bring you closer to Tara. This lovely non-commercial site will enthuse tourists who prefer enchantment to entrapment. http://www.rossespoint.com/ In 1922 (and since), the world followed Leopold Bloom around Dublin for a day, and 77 years later, the ingenious creators of Dublink are frolicking in the footsteps of the greatest of all modern writers. This ain't literature, kids, it's fun. Find out about what to do in Dublin by seeing it through the eyes of local characters, real and fictional: a DJ, a local soap opera star, a cabbie. Instead of just printing lists of what's hip, Dublink shows you what different people enjoy in their home city. There's the usual entertainment and dining stuff, plus secret places to steal a furtive kiss, pubs for singles, pubs for gays, pubs for whatever. Spend some time where the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit. Cheers to a city that knows it's unlike anywhere else in the world. http://www.dublink.ie/ San Francisco has been rewarded with a Web site commensurate with its great style. Post Hoc mixes all the SF essentials - restaurants, entertainment, custom-made corset shops, bar bands that emulate the Grateful Dead, overpriced rooms for rent, and job listings - for those who dream of moving to the city by the Bay, where the Mayor performs same sex weddings. If you write a good enough question for Mayor Willie Brown, Post Hoc might include it in its Letters to the Mayor column. Post Hoc is like a multimedia update of the distinctive Pink Section of the Old San Francisco Chronicle, only more fun. http://www.posthoc.com/ FLOTSAM & JETSAM TCP/IP Devices of Every Description Now that TCP/IP networks are part of the infrastructure and mainstream culture, digital devices are poised to hit the market. Will so-called smart houses outsmart your dumb old domicile? AllNetDevices has the latest TCP/IP devices news and analysis.http://www.allnetdevices.com/ This page is one of the best directories of webcams we've seen. The cams range from a view of the Alps to a frequently updated newsroom shot of the Egyptian Daily News - there's even a cam on the site proprietor. Each listing has a description, refresh time, and rating. http://start.at/the.web/ Sign up for free storage space at iFloppy.net, which is essentially a Web gateway to a FTP server. Upload or download files through your browser. This neat service can help you share, backup, and transfer files - especially if you have no idea what FTP is. http://www.ifloppy.net/ Even if you've got the perfect Web site, your ISP can cause you heartache. The Findahost site aims to play matchmaker. Enter basic information about what you want to do with your site, how many hits you anticipate and such stuff, and they'll link you with a list of the best ISP hosts for your needs. http://www.findahost.com/ "The World Is Not Enough", the next Bond flick, opens in November. For a fascinating in-depth look at the making of the film, stroll along to this unofficial but well informed site. Check out the great photos - they'll leave you stirred, if not shaken.... http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~bond19/index.htm All of the Fun, None of the Darts All you pubsurfing Brits will like this database of pubs and brewers in the UK. Continental folks can visit a virtual bar from which you can send your mates a virtual pint - or a virtual cola for the designated surfer in the bunch.http://www.pubworld.co.uk/ SOFTWARE Bloat. Think of any major Microsoft product and the word bloat will leap into the mind. An app called 98lite lets you customize your installation of Windows 98 to shave a hefty 38 MB off the footprint. All the junk, such as welcome sequences, listed ISPs, and fat movie files can be individually deselected from the install. You can even take off Internet Explorer - so much for integration.... Active Desktop and Connection Wizard, which few people really want, can be left on the CD and not your hard disk. This app makes a Windows 98 installation the customizable experience it always should have been.http://www.98lite.net/ Apple's QuickTime is one of the more popular online video solutions vying for developer and user attention. This port gives Java applications the ability to play QuickTime movies, edit and create movies, capture audio and video, and perform animations. A Software Development Kit comes with examples and docs, sample applets, and a variety of higher level documentation about QuickTime and related classes. http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtjava/ |
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