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BREAKING SURF
Yahoo News, an increasingly relevant source, stands at the news epicenter of the recent Turkish earthquake, which measured 7.4 on the Richter scale and killed thousands. It hosts information about international aid efforts, news stories, pictures, and background material on quakes and Turkey. It makes grimly fascinating reading, lightened only by the way such natural disasters rally humanity, as experts and aid pour in from around the globe. You can read stories of miraculous rescues, as well as anger over shoddily constructed apartment buildings. The United States Geological Survey has a National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC) with copious earthquake coverage, including numerous charts detailing the frequencies, intensities, locations of earthquakes, and an explanation of how shock waves propagate around the globe. Their bulletin page presents technical details and maps of the Turkish quake.Yahoo: http://fullcoverage.yahoo.com/fc/World/Turkey/
NEIC: http://wwwneic.cr.usgs.gov/neis/general/handouts/general_seismicity.html
Bulletin: http://wwwneic.cr.usgs.gov/neis/bulletin/990817000138.HTML
Real-Life Cyber-Thriller: The Internet Auditing Project
An international group of uberhackers calling themselves SSR claim to have carried out a massive security scan of computers on the Net. This beautifully written account of the endeavor reads like a page-turning bestseller. Their software, called BASS and available for download, scanned machines and looked for common security holes, generally well known, widely available exploits. The group claims to have scanned over 36 million (!) hosts - including sensitive military, government, and private networks - and to have found over 450,000 computers that can be easily broken into: "We were stunned to find just how many networks you would expect to be ultra secure were wide open to attack. Banks, billion-dollar commerce sites, computer security companies, even nuclear weapon research centers, goddamit!" Amazingly, SSR in turn fell victim to some other hacker's cyber-attack, one that penetrated and modified an extremely secure box in only eight seconds. Add in numerous counter-probes and legal threats, and you end up with entertaining and highly recommended reading.http://www.securityfocus.com/templates/forum_message.html?forum=2&head=32&id=32
Microsoft Releases Music Format, Format Security Promptly Cracked
Microsoft has just released the digital Windows Media Audio (WMA) format and tool set, featuring high quality sound at higher compression rates then MP3 or RealVideo. It "gives artists, record labels and studios the ability to control and manage the distribution and use of digital audio and video content." Well, not anymore. About a day after release, hackers cracked the security encodings and distributed online a program, called unfuck.exe, to strip all restrictions on downloaded WMA media. In what may well be the line of the year, Microsoft's chief technology officer said, "We don't see this as a flaw." Wired and MP3.com offer more analysis. At press time, we couldn't reach a site reputed to have a copy of unfuck.exe, Dimension Music, presumably due to heavy traffic. By the way, be careful about Trojan horse viruses if you go hunting for the program.WMA: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/1999/Aug99/WM4Lnchpr.htm
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/21325.html
MP3: http://www.mp3.com/news/316.html
Dimension Music: http://www.dmusic.com/
Microsoft Messenger Exposes User Passwords
Microsoft has suffered a major setback in its war with AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). A simple sequence of actions will expose your Hotmail/MSN Messenger password to anybody with access to your computer - say, your curious kids. Beta.news tells you how to do it. Clearly, Microsoft will have a hard time breaking into the instant messenger market if users perceive its product to be insecure. AOL has in the past already scored propaganda points by pointing out that MS Messenger demands passwords when trying to connect to AIM users; now we're waiting for AOL to publish a smug yet entertaining press release responding to this latest Messenger flaw. Meanwhile, Microsoft is expected to post a fix shortly after our publishing deadline. In related news, Microsoft says it will post the specs for the Messenger communication protocol by the end of the month.http://betanews.com/article.php3?sid=story37b9fc87ead8f
Alan Turing's Treatise on Enigma
During WWII, mathematician Alan Turing worked on decoding Germany's Enigma crypto systems. Cracking that code is widely acknowledged as one of the great technological feats of this century and as one that helped win the war. That feat reverberates to this day. The computer you are reading this on descends directly from Turing's work, and the military alliance that solved the Enigma project tries to control the spread of global cryptography today. Against this background, the unearthing of historical documents that shed light on the Enigma project arouses great interest. "Turing's Treatise on the Enigma", declassified in 1996 and just recently transcribed online, was hand-written by Turing while Britain fought for her survival in the early years of the war and is believed to be a guide for those starting Enigma decryption work. Read Andrew Hodges' first rate analysis of the document for its good background and excellent references.Treatise: http://home.cern.ch/~frode/crypto/Turing/index.html
Analysis: http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/papers/profsbook.html
The Value of Free Software: Red Hat Wealth Monitor
How much is free software worth? More to the point, how much is any given free software author's contribution worth? The recent IPO of Linux distributor Red Hat Software provides an opportunity for some back-of-the-envelope calculations automated for your edification on the Red Hat Wealth Monitor page. The idea is simple. Every day the stock market assigns a specific worth to Red Hat. All you have to do is to estimate how much of what Red Hat sells is based on the contribution of free software authors and the number of those authors. Then you can come up with a daily number indicating the dollar worth of their contribution. At press time - assuming about 5,000 contributing authors to the Red Hat Linux distribution - the worth of the free software community comes to over $4 billion, or about $834,362 per author. You can download some HTML that will display the daily numbers on your Web page. Clever.http://prosthetic-monkey.com/RHWM/index.html
Bigger, Longer, and on the Web
Granted, it's not for all tastes, but most of us here at NSD HQ think the South Park movie is the funniest musical of all time. If you've seen it and want to relive it without spending any more cash, or if you're just too cheap to go in the first place, you can read the script online. An enterprising young copyright-ignorer has posted an almost complete transcription of the movie. Sweet. Need we warn you that the thing is laced with profanity?http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Balcony/3252/southpark/transcription.html
ONLINE CULTURE
Lots of Net florescences seed communities. Usenet groups have their regulars, online forums have their gangs, and online games have their devotees. For the first time - as near as we can tell - one of these communities has produced a book by and about its members. "WarBirds: The Story So Far" is no booklet - it's over 500 pages of interviews, history, and fun, all focusing on the premier online WWII flight sim, WarBirds. The work follows the sim from its early days as a private Air Warrior hack through its growth into the community of today. The impressive volume obviously stems from a great admiration of the game and the mutual admiration of the players - excuse us, pilots who fly it.WarBirds: http://www.imagicgames.com/imol/warbirds/
Book: http://www.nitro.co.za/wb-book/
Not that we expect politicians to pay any attention, but love beats lust, God easily outranks the devil, and good is about 18 times as common as evil. What's more, Linux is more popular than Windows - at least in AltaVista. These findings were obtained by using search terms and tallying the number of hits. Anyone except perhaps six Kansans could find all kinds of things wrong with the methodology, but that's not the point. This amusing look at comparative term frequencies proves absolutely nothing but read the article anyway and waste even more time with the posted follow-ups. Who knows - maybe you too will get the urge to do some pointless research and check out a few words of your own. Our own research provides good news for those of us in the scribbling trade - the pen is indeed mightier than the sword. We leave for others the task of rating other search engines for wholesomeness, or otherwise.
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/08/09/2142209.shtml
The Internet is packed with sites about how to write HTML, DHTML, JavaScript, and Perl. Myriad pages advise how to create graphics and navigation systems. Resources on how to create good, useful, original content are almost as scarce as good, useful, original content. The Web Wisdom site focuses on the meat of the matter - how do you create good value content? - plus an equally important point - how do you evaluate content presented to you? While the site is mainly a vehicle for marketing a book on the subject, the authors do provide a lot of strong, well-presented guidelines and checklists to make websurfing and Web building a much more profitable experience.
http://www2.widener.edu/Wolfgram-Memorial-Library/webeval.htm
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
When John V. Schmidt decided to teach himself Photoshop, he accidentally created a cult following on the Net. Schmidt asked folks to send in pictures of themselves so that he could convert them into Klingons for his Warriors of the Empire site. With the magic of mouseovers, you can see some before and after shots that show off his amazing skill. However, it's not these transformations that have made John's Warriors site popular. You see, John works on another tangent also: Warrior Women of the Empire and Warrior Men of the Empire. In these two collections, John has taken some mundane soft porn and converted it into the erotica of one of the hardest races in SF. We've never seen a bat'telh used in so many creative ways.http://www.hotink.com/warriors/
The State Hermitage Museum's Web site is quietly elegant, its understated simplicity beautifully framing the opulence of St. Petersburg's Hermitage itself. The site includes not only the history of the buildings and extensive collections, but also visitor information, a schedule of current and past exhibits, and a rundown of the educational outreach programs that the museum provides. Browse the collection via the highlights, which come with text to put the items in context, or via the Digital Collection button, which displays each item available in a high-res format for those into details. The second option is best for those on high-speed connections, but both provide a wonderful experience.
http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/html_En/index.html
Pat Elliot Shircore has used her Mac to fuse historical documents to produce wonderful abstract modern art. Hong Kong - 'Signed and Sealed' is an exhibition of calligraphic art which merges text from the Treaty of Nanking (which gave the British control of Hong Kong) and the Convention of Peking, signed 56 years later in 1898, which expanded the British territory. The pictures, although designed on the computer, were printed lithographically. As well as showing the pictures themselves, the site details the early colonial history of the former British province. There is a large but well focused collection of art and history links available as well. Students of calligraphy, Asian political history, and history of art will all find this site well worth a visit. To see the actual lithographs requires a trip to Hong Kong - but the content of this site may just inspire you. During August, the pictures are part of the first Edinburgh International Internet Festival.
http://www.artasialink.com/index.html
When physics becomes a fantasy art form, a vision of the future instead of a prosaic tool for the present, Einstein is almost certainly involved. Were you to call his theories dreams that changed our perception of time, you'd have little argument from us. DNA Productions plans to release a CD-ROM compilation of their broadcasts on Einstein, called Einstein's Dreams. The Web site is poetry in motion, an elegant, almost surreal taste of the man in words and simple graphics. Spend a few minutes visiting the site. After all, time is relative.
http://www.einsteinsdreams.com/
For cows as an art form, especially life-sized fiberglass kine emblazoned with stars and suns or painted bright purple, try Chicago. The place is full of 'em. The herd forms a huge exhibition, which runs until October, spread throughout the center of the city. A different Chicago artist painted each cow, and the works can be found in the strangest places, including the side of a building. For a complete virtual tour of this amazing idea, visit the site. Now, if they would only do frogs....
http://www.cowsonparade.net/
Graham Frank Johnson's Art Gallery is as close to a real art gallery as one is likely to find on the Internet, not that that makes it unique. Johnson works as a professional computer programmer but dabbles in art during his spare time - which is not to imply that his work is anything less than professional. We're covering his paintings because his oils and watercolors capture exactly the essence of England, including Cotswold Manor House, Derbyshire, Rockingham Castle, and the church door in Chesterfield. Love that church door. Like any gallery, the stuff's on sale.
http://www.grahamart.com/
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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Lenin's Embalmers
Customers.Com: How to Create a Profitable Business Strategy for the Internet and Beyond 
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) 
Y2K Test & Fix v1.14 for Win95/98/NT (FREE with rebate)http://www.worldnewyork.com/
Music and Entertainment News Digest
Check out the latest from Hollywood and the music industry in this well researched site, which manages to cover up-to-date gossip in a readable and easily accessed format. With concert listings, celebrity and product news, and box office reports, the pages offer more than you probably need to know about the cutting edge of entertainment.http://www.stormloader.com/news/
The Information Society Journal Online
Weary of banal dot-com wisdom? Long for a broader perspective on developments in our age of information? The Information Society Journal will not harangue you with half-baked projections. Look for scholarly articles addressing international legal, political, and cultural issues relating to changes in information production, ownership, and distribution. Former Rand Corporation staffers started this quarterly, published by the Center for Social Informatics at Indiana University, back in 1981. The Web site offers limited access to select articles.http://www.slis.indiana.edu/TIS/
SURFING SCIENCE
If Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion (M2P2) doesn't trip lightly off the tongue, at least the concept behind geophysicist Robert Winglee's brainchild is simple enough to grasp. The idea is to create a huge electromagnetic field around a spacecraft, fill it with ionized gas, and hitch a high-speed ride on the solar wind, "like a balloon" in Winglee's words. The pictures at the M2P2 site are pretty spectacular, though large, and illustrate how the device would work and show off the lab-scale prototype. A link leads to MPEG movies that show computer simulations of the device at work. Wired News has a story without pictures. An M2P2 equipped space craft could be launched in ten years if lab work and field tests (get it?) succeed, and would make useless lumps of debris of all space probes outside the planetary orbits.M2P2: http://www.geophys.washington.edu/Space/SpaceModel/M2P2/
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/21310.html
Whether you're in Florida or just fascinated by weather systems, this site has more information than you can shake a rain gauge at. Detailed radar and satellite maps combined with meteorological charts give a complete picture of the weather patterns that can so dramatically affect the weather on the peninsula. Although the sites a little light on explanations and map legends, amateurs and professionals alike will find plenty here. And there is an Amazon-linked books section containing the answers, one hopes, to all your questions. Get ready for hurricane season.
http://www.tropicsweather.com/
The fall migration of monarch butterflies is truly one of the most awesome feats in nature. Every year these tiny creatures travel thousands of miles to escape the cold winters of their summer range. The yearly migration sees those west of the Rockies fly to California, while their eastern brethren head for Mexico. The Monarch Watch site is a wonderful resource for information on various aspects of the Monarch, including biology, tips on raising monarchs, research projects, and a listserv on which observers who live along the routes report on the yearly migration.
http://www.monarchwatch.org/
CORRECTIONS
In NSD 5.13, we covered the National Security Study Group, which the US Department of Defense asked to consult the public and arrive at an outline of America's security needs in the next hundred years. The site's been down for retooling over the last few months, but it is now open for comments. Along with a new Web site design (coming soon!), the project will adopt a new name: the US Commission on National Security/21st Century.http://www.nssg.gov/
Marty Beckerman's humor column, which we reviewed in NSD 5.14, has moved to a new URL. We can safely say he's the funniest Alaskan we've ever written up.
http://www.humor-column.com/