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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 05, Issue 21 Wednesday, July 14, 1999 |
NETSURFER LINKS
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BREAKING SURF Back Orifice 2000: Hacker Comedy Is Not Pretty A group of uber-hackers going by the name of Cult of the Dead Cow have released a follow-up to Back Orifice, its popular stealthy Windows control software. Back Orifice 2000 (BO2K) is designed to be installed - usually by nefarious means such as a Trojan horse program - on a target Windows machine and allows the perpetrator near total control over the hapless computer. The July 10 release of BO2K at Def Con 7 (a hacker convention) prompted quick countermeasures from most major security software sites which apparently engaged in a mad stampede to get copies. Ironically - or not, hacker humor being what it is - the BO2K CD-ROMs distributed at Def Con were apparently infected with a virus. CNet has an informative article on the convention. The official BO2K site at press time still lacked the files, but does manage to mutter about US crypto export regulations. The Cult site has a press release with more detail.Cult: http://www.cultdeadcow.com/news/ BO2K: http://www.bo2k.com/ Def Con: http://www.defcon.org/ CNet: http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,39017,00.html
Third Voice Hit With Security Problems, Says it Fixed Them Third Voice, a service that lets you post comments on Web pages for anyone to read with a plug-in, has been hit with serious security problems. Users could be tricked into viewing fake Web pages and have Javascript programs boot up in their browsers even though Third Voice had tried to filter out such executable content. Netfishers (the site will soon move) has technical details about one such exploit. Within days of finding the problem, Third Voice said it patched its servers to block such hanky-panky. Their press release offers lots of vague corporate-speak but no details. We predict many more cracking attempts against Third Voice - it's just the kind of highly visible, high-use target crackers love.Netfishers (now): http://www.kattare.com/~vellad/tv.htm Netfishers (soon): http://www.netfishers.com/ Third Voice press: http://www.thirdvoice.com/about/7-9-99release.htm If you use your computer to facilitate your life in crime, there's one virus you'll want to watch out for. Called DIRT, it allows a user to secretly monitor your computer and online activities, record your keystrokes, and download your files the next time you log on. Unlike a conventional virus, however, DIRT can lead to police breaking down your door late at night and yelling the local equivalent of "Freeze, your under arrest!" DIRT, you see, is a law enforcement weapon designed to monitor and lead to the arrest of terrorists, drug traffickers, and other criminals. PC World Online has the story, and the expected Civil Liberties objections. http://www.pcworld.com/shared/printable_articles/0,1440,11614,00.html Join Effort to Document How to Secure Linux Machines The SANS institute is calling for participants in a project which would document how to set up a secure Linux system. The project seems to be a precursor to a book, and if you participate they promise to send you the finished product. Send an e-mail to mailto:autosans@sans.org with the subject line "Secure Linux" and you'll get back an outline of the proposed book and details on how you can contribute. The outline looks complete and well thought out, and indeed the whole project seems worthwhile.http://www.sans.org/ The transition of DNS management from the private to the public sector has not had completely smooth sailing so far. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has come under fire for holding closed board meetings and for planning to levy a $1 a year domain user fee. ICANN has responded to criticism from the US Commerce Department and the House Commerce Committee with a lengthy letter, to be found online complete with numerous self-referential hyperlinks and liberal sprinkling of acronyms. The letter goes into serious detail and should quell some of the criticism of closed-door decision making. ICANN: http://www.icann.org/ Letter: http://www.icann.org/correspondence/bliley-response-08july99.htm Commerce: http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/domainname/6_5_98dns.htm Harvard Pulls PacketStorm's Plug Must the contents of a site reflect the tastes, ethics, and viewpoints of the host organization? What if they contain personal attacks? Harvard University seems to have had no reservations over pulling the plug on Ken Williams's PacketStorm site, despite its apparent usefulness to security people. A polite letter from John Vranesevich, founder of AntiOnline, an information security site, pointed out what he calls sick and malicious PacketStorm content aimed at him and his family. Ken's upset about the loss of his material, although Harvard says he'll get it back. And John's upset about the ferocious and - he reminds everybody - illegal hack attacks and telephone threats he and his company have since received. Maybe the Net needs some old-fashioned tin-star sheriffs to talk some sense into people.ZDNet: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2287456,00.html AntiOnline: http://www.antionline.com/archives/editorials/packetstorm.html PacketStorm support: http://www.securityfocus.com/templates/archive.pike?list=1&date=1999-07-01&msg=m3yah0x6ye.fsf@soma.andreas.org Salon Documents Life of Hooker Just as we were going to press we got a note from newly post-IPO Salon which made us rethink the nature of post-modern shareholder return strategies. Salon announced a new fictional serial: "Nancy Chan: Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl". The series, written by Tracy Quan, "looks at the life and loves of Nancy Chan, a turn-of-the-millennium hooker. Quan is a call girl working in Manhattan, a freelance writer and frequent contributor to Salon". The series will appear every Monday and Thursday for six months. The series appears in their Health section, but what would Dr. Koop think?Chan: http://www.salon.com/health/sex/urge/1999/07/12/nancy1/index.html Koop: http://www.drkoop.com/ Absolut Vodka, which has all those neat ads that portray the world in vodka bottles, now wants to give big bucks away in its Absolut Angel contest. All you have to do is come up with an idea to "push the boundaries of contemporary creative expression" and convince Absolut's review board of your worthiness. The reviewers are looking for "creativity, passion, and a business concept that marries technology and art" and they want it by September 15, 1999. If you've got the right stuff, they'll give you $50,000 to bring your idea to life. The Board will choose six semi-finalists from the unwashed hordes and bring them to New York for a shoot-out to select the three winners. No word on whether you have to drink the stuff to participate, although it may help the creative muse. http://www.absolutangel.com/ Bowing to Net pressure, Yahoo renounced its claim to the right to use GeoCities content as it wished. Yahoo's new terms of service states that "Yahoo does not claim ownership of the Content you place on your Yahoo GeoCities Site.... You grant Yahoo the... license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the Content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your Yahoo GeoCities Site on Yahoo's Internet properties." All concerned parties are now happy and the homesteader boycott is over. Terms: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/geoterms.html Boycott: http://come.to/boycottyahoo/ SURFING SITES Yep, it blows our socks off. Some will love this new Web search engine for its proof of the power of FreeBSD and Linux. Many more will love it for its sheer speed. Want 400,000+ hits in a second? Relevant hits, a lot of which other search engines miss? You got it, thanks to a partnership between Dell Computer, which provides the site's lightning-fast servers, and Norway's FAST, which claims that its goal is to catalogue the entire Web. What's the secret? According to FAST's chief technology officer, it has "a search engine architecture that scales linearly both in data volume and traffic; high capacity spidering combined with ultra-fast indexing algorithms to assure fresh, up-to-date content; highly efficient search engine kernel software that utilizes every ounce of PC server performance; and large arrays of standard-based servers, storage systems, and interconnects to achieve a low cost." Whatever. This is the fastest Web search engine we've found. Hasta la vista, AltaVista.http://www.alltheweb.com/
Deaths of the Patriarch Tyrants Benito Mussolini died in shame, his battered corpse dangled upside down beside his lover in a public square. Josef Stalin was treated to a massive ceremonial funeral attended by thousands of mourners. Hitler and his mistress Eva Braun married on April 30, 1945 before poisoning themselves, after which their assistants burned their bodies. A Cornell University Web site, Death of the Father, invites faculty, students, and researchers from around the world to explore the socio-political fallout that followed the deaths of six 20th-century patriarchs: Benito Mussolini (1945), Adolf Hitler (1945), Emperor Hirohito (1989), Nicolae Ceausescu (1989), Josef Stalin (1953), and Josip Broz Tito (1980). The academically solid site includes multimedia, maps, time-lines, and archival images. A must-see.http://cidc.library.cornell.edu/DOF/ Cast out thy fear, the Trinity Divinity School site is not populated by Bible thumpers or those who would foist their omniscience on others. Instead, prepare for fairly high level information, discussion and reference resources for those emotionally and intellectually equipped for learned, sincere theological discourse. The history and on-going evolution of normative Christianity provide the focus here; you won't find much on heterodox Christianity, but links take you to good sites on other religions and philosophies - from Shinto to Tao to Heidegger. People who are utterly bewildered by the Bible may find some illuminating historical and cultural context here. http://www.tiu.edu/churchhistory/index.html Wild West Women Who Did Not Take Their Clothes off for Will Smith At least, if they did, it's not documented in the Women of the West Museum, the online arm of a tangible museum with the avowed purpose "to discover and explore the continuing role of women in the development of the American West". The exhibits are wonderful, fun, educational tools - a combination hard to come by. One thing bugged us, however: there's a great disparity between the savvy, modem-conscious layout and the changeable items which are plugged into its framework. When we reviewed the site, it forced a 504 by 587-pixel image (276k) into a 72 by 73-pixel space. Ironically, on the page the image links to, you have to reload the same image (only this time forced into 138 by 148 pixels) because they made the mistake of renaming it. This feature changes every week, so your mileage may vary. It's still a great site, even for curmudgeons.http://www.wowmuseum.org/ The Vienna issue of the Artbin e-zine is a list of links to sites dealing with specific aspects of the art, philosophy, and music of Vienna in 1900. Some of the sites are in German (like the interesting one on public toilets in Vienna), and the links can go through AltaVista's translator, giving you weirdly machined English that needs to be puzzled out. The site also includes a navel-gazing essay on the creation of such metasites, their care and feeding, and some of the problems of running them. For example, Adolf Hitler lived in Vienna at this time, and his memories of the time form a chapter of his "Mein Kampf" but due to copyright issues in Austria, the site editor has been forced to link to a white supremacist site for the chapter. Check out the creative ferment of this era, and the distorted ways in which our era can reflect it. http://art-bin.com/ Comics from Russia - Thank Goodness They Can Still Laugh Things may be rough in Russia, but that doesn't mean cartoonists there ever stop doodling. This site includes a number of interesting artists working in the field today, and promises to expand. The drawings are unusually artistic, with a refreshingly skewed perspective - no surprise given the society in which the drawings are made. Check out Elephants and Mammoths and the weird Hagar the Horrible rip-off. The ads are in Russian, as are words that are illustrated, but the captions have been adequately translated.http://www.comics.ru/e/ I'm Ready for My Close-Up, Mr. Eastman Kodak's Picture Playground Online is a great way to spend your lunch hour. You upload a photo from your hard drive, point to one on the Web, or grab one from your roll of film (if you're a PhotoNet customer) and then run one of the online photo modifications on it: Cartoon Maker, You Animal You, Neon Lights, etc. Some involve just basically running different filters on the image, while others such as You Animal You and FlowerPower are a bit more complicated and a lot more fun. Since you can then choose to download a full size copy of your modified picture, it's a good resource for those without a complex graphics program (say, PhotoShop). Once you're done, you can send it as an e-postcard to an online friend or order one of those photo mugs or photo mouse pads, among other items, that only a grandparent could love.http://www.kodak.com/go/play/ Cute But High Maintenance Chinese Water Dragons As the century wanes, ordinary pets like dogs, cats, and gerbils are being replaced with exotics from far climes, like pot-bellied pigs and iguanas. If you want to be on the bleeding edge of petdom, consider a Chinese water dragon, a beautiful jungle-dwelling lizard. But before you get one, check out Tricia's Chinese Water Dragon Page, which will tell you everything you need to know about the care and feeding of these creatures, and includes extensive anecdotes about the author's own five dragons. It's easy to go wrong, as the pages on mouth rot and peri-articular pseudogout will reveal. Feeding the carnivorous beasts live rodents can lead to bites and infections, while feeding them fireflies you've caught can poison them. Tricia will make sure you know the score.http://www.icomm.ca/dragon/ A Heckuva Lot of Millennial Balloons Imagine 60 million balloons released all at once across the globe. That's the aim of Millions of Balloons, a Web site that exhorts us to celebrate the year 2000 by attaching a preaddressed note to a balloon and letting it free. While the act itself will be symbolic of global action, whoever finds your balloon is also supposed to become your new friend. All recovered messages will be sent to a central office and the messages entered in the a "big book of the world citizens' Wishes to Humanity". Concerned about a latex ecological disaster? The organizers have gotten the balloon makers for the Nagano Olympic Games to make balloons out of either biodegradable latex or paper, depending on the country. Even the card material and envelope for the message is biodegradable. The plan might not even present any hazard to air traffic because, if all our Y2K fears come true, the balloons will be the only things in the air.http://www.ballons-par-millions.com/ That weird quarter's not funny money, it's one of 50 new coins the US Mint has begun to issue as part of a series that will commemorate each of the 50 states over the next ten years. While some states have already picked a design, many haven't yet. At this site you can download the specs, make up your own design for a state's new coin, and submit it to your governor, who'll pick the best five submissions for the Treasury Department's final decision. One hint: stay away from topless women. In 1916, Lady Liberty was memorialized with one breast showing, but anti-breast activists had it banned immediately. The site shows the five cool new designs that will be put into circulation this year. http://www.usmint.gov/50states/ Don't take this test with anybody looking over your shoulder unless you have a solid, eclectic knowledge base. The Economist has provided a 15-question quiz about world politics, current affairs, business, finance, and science. It automatically scores your performance and you don't even have to register to find out how little you know. Of course, all the questions are from previous issues of The Economist, so if you'd been keeping up on your reading.... http://www.economist.com/quiz/ Ahh, how we loved this site, and not just because there's at least one College Bowl vet on our staff. It provided us with hour's worth of trivial tidbits that you can use to enliven any social occasion. Just imagine the concentration you'll invoke as you lean back against the bar with a glass of vino and pontificate on how Argentineans eat more meat than any other nationals in the world. Or beef up your vocabulary with the Word of the day ("histrionic" means overly dramatic), find out what happened on Today in History, or take a gander at Quote Central or the Random Factoid. Endless fun for people with curiosity but without the drive to pick up New Scientist or a dictionary. http://www.uselessknowledge.com/index.shtml Environmental Optimism Busters In case you thought everything was going just too danged well, there's the Environmental News Archive to set you straight. While its incessant drumbeat of doom might put some off, its biases are right up front, and once those are acknowledged (a headline like "Fireworks Shower Toxic Chemicals" for the American July 4 celebration, for example) it is a useful compendium of breaking environmental news. There are several articles, for example, about the environmental side effects of the NATO bombardment of Serbia, including toxic spills from copper mines. Their archive is searchable, so you can be up on all the news available about a given environmental problem in a short time. Just be ready to search around to see if anyone has a less apocalyptic perspective, before you decide to zip yourself into a plastic bag and stay there.http://www.tigerherbs.com/eclectica/earthcrash/earthcrash.html Love that Search Engine Quest for Love Finding True Love lays down guidelines for what site author Richard Andrew Miles Outerbridge considers an easy way to find your heart's romantic desire. You'll need a Web site, an e-mail address, and a bit of cleverness. Richard proposes that you include five "essential keywords" in a metatag (hidden text that browsers won't display) on your Web page. Websurfers seeking partners should use a search engine to find pages with those keywords that represent what they're looking for. Bingo! A match. Maybe. To prevent abuse by spammers and tricksters, he suggests you rearrange your e-mail address on the page so that potential respondents can make sense of it but spambots won't. Will this scheme work? Who knows, but it's got to be cheaper than a dating service.http://maelstrom.seos.uvic.ca/people/ramo/scribbles/truelove.htm It's funny how, when given a chance to anonymously inform acquaintances with whom you are secretly smitten, you feel like a mad, bad lovin' machine. We submitted an unholy list of much pitied victims to subject to this techno wooing. This site, eCrush, takes your list and sends to the objects of your affection e-mails saying that some anonymous (not necessarily desperate and sad) person has a crush on them. If a target reciprocates with an e-mail that lists all who he/she has a crush on, and you're on it, then it's cocktails in the lounge for the two of you. http://www.ecrush.com/ ONLINE TRAVEL Montreal for Families and Others This family site will enlighten anyone who wants to know more about Montreal, even single people without vermin. You'll find history, maps, and calendars, but most useful is a comprehensive list and short description of every kind of attraction from the big ones (such as the Biosphere or rue St-Denis) to seasonal attractions (the Jazz festival and Just for Laughs) to the cloistered jewels such as the Museum of the Gray Nuns. Most helpful to families is the simple rating system, which gives thumbs up or thumbs down reactions from parents and kids ranging from ages 5-13.http://pages.infinit.net/mftg/ Backpackers, amateur photographers, and wilderness buffs will find good vibes at Virtual Backpacking, a personal site by outdoor enthusiast J.T. Fallows. His modest page presents enticingly brief descriptions of remote and peaceful vistas in the Cabinet Mountains in Montana. The real attractions here are his color photos, which celebrate his love of hiking and exploration. Photos in the lower half of his page may take a while to load. Those who know what he's getting at, though, may not be in a hurry to leave unless they're in a hurry to reach high ground themselves. http://www.ior.com/~jfallows/ Readers with an active interest in Asia will find plenty to do at FastAsia, a snappy Singapore-based portal that seems to offer something for everyone: news, entertainment, and various online communities of shared cultural or personal interests, among other stuff. Like its less focused elders, FastAsia is busy. It packs colorful graphics, multimedia options (including Asian videos, sitcoms, police dramas, and movie trailers), a search engine, downloads, and a lot of links onto its home page. With so many choices up front, some might call the top of this site cluttered. We call it convenient. Is this how your TV screen might look soon? http://www.fastasia.com/ FLOTSAM & JETSAM What are your worst office nightmares? Want to share stories about the supervisor from hell or dilemmas at the watercooler? This site has a database of jokes, an office worker's weekly diary, and the Exe Files, with Windows programs to download and things to play that just might relieve your occupational tedium.http://www.p45.net/ William Goldman's sage advice that in Hollywood, nobody knows anything, only goes so far. Steven Maeda and Scott Sommer are experienced Hollywood screenwriters with great tips. And jokes. If you've registered it with the Writer's Guild, they'll critique your script for a piddly $300. http://www.screenwritersoasis.com/ This site covers everything from the Florida Film Festival to "American Pie" ("a guilty pleasure at its best, and an outrage at its worst"). With a huge archive of reviews, some good links, and articles about peripheral stuff, this has everything for the avid fan or casual moviegoer. http://www.moviereviews.org/ Bad Movie Night banks on the theory that it's more fun to watch a horrible movie and have an intellectual conversation about it afterwards than to watch a so-so movie and wind up with nothing to say. http://www.hit-n-run.com/ SOFTWARE Sold to the Man with the Vanity Domain One of the killer apps on the Internet right now is the online auction, and companies are jumping on the bandwagon to provide eager users with items to make online bidding simpler. One such service is the tracker, which alerts you when an item that matches your criteria has come online. Some auction sites offer a version of this themselves, but iTrack offers greater flexibility and power than those. For instance, eBay's Personal Shopper can only run three reports at any time. They are sent to you once a day, and expire after three months. With the full pay-to-play iTrack, you can search for up to 20 items at half a dozen online auction sites and have reports delivered twice a day. Users of iTrack's free service can only search three patterns once a day, and you get ads with your reports.http://www.iTrack.com/
CORRECTIONS We discovered a couple of glitches in our mailing process, so some of you may not have received the last couple of issues. Some of those who did receive the issues reported a long "To:" field with many subscriber names - obviously a privacy problem. We think we've solved both problems - at least our testing comes up clean - but it's difficult to chase down every idiosyncrasy on a huge list like ours without doing an actual mailing. Bottom line: if you got this issue without problems, great - that's what we expect. If you see anything odd or failed to get this issue then do let us know - we do appreciate your help and try to 'fess up to any problems as soon as possible. Meanwhile, anyone who missed a couple of issues can find them on our back issues pages. Thanks and sorry if we messed up your day.http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/backiss.html Due entirely to editorial incompetence, we posted an incorrect link to Steve Wozniak's comments on "The Pirates of Silicon Valley" last issue. Here's the right one. http://www.woz.org/woz/presponses/commets.html The folks at Kaya Optics have modified their Web page scheme and the URL we provided for "Fun with Infrared" (NSD 5.19) has soured. Try this one. http://www.kaya-optics.com/ |
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