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| Strong Crypto Proponent's Secret FBI Files |
| FBI Tries to Close Web Site with Fictional Y2K Riot Film |
| Light Water Tower |
| Bits 'n' Bites of Art |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| Crafty |
| Hit on the Head by One Too Many Neutrinos |
| Another AIDS Conspiracy Theory |
| Crinkle, Crinkle, Little Star |
| Follow that Rhino! |
| Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01 Released |
| Distributed Denial of Service Attack Tools |
| Five Days on the Net, One Week Later |
| The Newbies Site |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
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BREAKING SURF
Six More Extrasolar Planets Discovered
We happily bring you yet another announcement of planets orbiting other stars. Astronomers detected the new finds with the now tried-and-true method of observing the parent star's wobble. They used the Keck I telescope, easily the most advanced in the world at the moment, to find these latest planets. The Keck Web site has a press release with specific details about the stars and planets involved. Anyone keeping score will want to bookmark the SFSU planet search Web site, which provides news and a cool graph of the orbits and masses of all known extrasolar planets.Keck: http://www2.keck.hawaii.edu:3636/realpublic/gen_info/news/sixnewplanetsNOV99.html
SFSU: http://www.physics.sfsu.edu/~gmarcy/planetsearch/planetsearch.html
World Trade Organization Meeting Riots
Nothing inflames passions quite like international bureaucracy. The current meetings of the World Trade Organization (WTO) have for some odd reason attracted what seems like every radical on the planet. Sure, you can find fault with some of the WTO's policies, such as some of its less than eco-friendly rulings, but there's something to be said for a stable global free trade environment. Nevertheless, thanks to CNN and the speed of the Net, the WTO suddenly appears as an evil empire right up there with Microsoft and the Trilateral Commission. Whatever its faults, does the profoundly boring organization really deserve such vituperation, or is this just a good excuse to vent some radical steam? We'd love to find out, but at press time the WTO Web site was subject to an organized denial-of-service attack and quite inaccessible. Revolutionary mobs are about as fond of free speech as most governments. Yahoo has comprehensive links to media coverage.WTO: http://www.wto.org/
Yahoo: http://fullcoverage.yahoo.com/fc/Business/Trade/
Fortieth Anniversary of Antarctic Treaty
The document signed on December 1, 1959 is short and to the point. It reserves the cold continent for peaceful purposes only and makes provisions for the free exchange of scientific information among the signatory nations. Interestingly, while the signing powers agreed to wage peace and science in Antarctica, they carefully pointed out that nothing in the agreement should be construed as "a renunciation by any Contracting Party of previously asserted rights of or claims to territorial sovereignty in Antarctica." The text of the landmark treaty can be found online, as can subsequent treaties related to conservation of animals, minerals and the environment in general. For a more adventurous look at Antarctica, we recommend the Chilling Fields, an account of a cool - literally - recent science expedition to explore one of Antarctica's submerged lakes.Treaty: http://sedac.ciesin.org/pidb/texts/acrc/at.txt.html
Chilling Fields: http://www.discovery.com/exp/antarctica/dispatch1.html
The Eco Challenge adventure race tends to overshadow its older and tougher predecessors such as the Raid Gauloises, mostly by virtue of its great coverage by the Discovery Channel. This year's sleepless slog tackles the wilds of Patagonia for 12 days beginning December 1. The official Web site has an unnecessarily large 100-kB graphic on the welcome page, so skip it and head directly to the Discovery.com coverage that features reports from the field, course maps, and plenty of photos.
Eco Challenge: http://www.ecochallenge.com/
Discovery: http://www.discovery.com/indep/ecopatagonia/reports/report.html
Mars Polar Lander Descends December 3
If all goes well on the afternoon of December 3, the Mars Polar Lander will have descended to the surface of Mars to begin what everyone hopes will be a long and exciting science mission. The little probe is packed with experimental goodies, including a camera much like the one on Pathfinder, a scoop to feed several soil experiments, and a microphone whose recordings you'll be able to download from the Net. Some of the more exciting parts of the mission will occur during the descent, when the Polar Lander will release two ground penetrator probes that will impact the surface at high speed. The probe will also take photos of the ground as it descends, hopefully giving us a crude animation of what it's like to land on Mars. We're all a-tingled with excitement.http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/
Galileo Io Flyby: a Thanksgiving White-Knuckler
There's certainly no shortage of drama in space this month, unlike in certain movies based on Heinlein books that quite aptly featured gratuitous nudity. As the Polar Lander prepared to penetrate Mars, the Galileo spacecraft had a dangerous encounter with Jupiter's moon Io. The high radiation encountered during its November 25 close (300 km) encounter with Io forced the craft into safe mode, prompting a mad scramble among controllers to restart the probe and salvage the mission. The controllers succeeded, and Galileo completed over half the scheduled science. A brief account of the encounter can be read at the Io Flyby Web site. Full results will come in over the next few weeks.http://ioflyby.com/
Holiday Issue of Netsurfer Books
We're trying something a bit different with Netsurfer Books (NSB) this holiday season. We've put together a list of books which we think would make good gifts. We do this not out of sheer kindness, but in a shameless attempt to get you to buy them via the links in our e-zine, thus bringing us a holiday gift of a modest 5% commission. After we got started, we soon saw that all our choices would not fit into one issue, so we've split the bunch into three parts. This week we present the first installment, focusing on non-fiction books. Over the next two weeks, we'll publish a couple of more issues with our fiction picks and with various oddball stuff we could not easily categorize. In any event, if you're ready to shop for some diverting gifts, check out the current issue of NSB. If you don't want to miss the other issues in the series, make sure to subscribe using the link below.NSB: http://www.netsurf.com/nsb/nsb.01.12.html
Subscribe: http://www.netsurf.com/nsb/subscribe.html
ONLINE CULTURE
Strong Crypto Proponent's Secret FBI Files
In the early 1990s, William Simpson belonged to the Internet Engineering Task Force, a working group that was developing the PPP protocol now almost universally used to access the Net over dial-up lines. At the time, Simpson ardently supported the inclusion of strong cryptographic authentication in the protocol to provide better security and privacy - a battle which he ultimately lost. He learned that, because of his stance, the FBI had begun to investigate him. Six years later, William has won the battle to see his file, only to find it heavily censored by the FBI. The ZDNet article that discusses this case raises the specter of new blacklists and other government excesses resembling the mid-20th century Communist witch hunts of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. One particularly damning FBI passage notes that Simpson "fits the profile of a gadfly who challenges authority and laws that may impinge on his activities," presumably enough of a reason for law enforcement to investigate anybody. We've included a link to the scanned-in FBI files.ZDNet: http://www.zdnet.com/zdtv/cybercrime/chaostheory/story/0,3700,2398590,00.html
Files: http://potifos.com/was/
FBI Tries to Close Web Site with Fictional Y2K Riot Film
Mike Zieper put together a fictional bit of Y2K film and put it online at his CrowdedTheater site. The video supposedly depicts the paramilitary briefing of a group that plans to incite a race riot on New Year's Eve. It's fiction, but the FBI, taking no chances, looked into it based on a tip. The agents decided that the video was so subversive that the Web site had to come down. Without a warrant, they pressured Mike's Net provider to take down the site with the threat of cutting off the small ISP's upstream Net feed. Mark Wieger, owner of the ISP, folded, sensing the imminent ruin of his business. Mark soon figured out that the FBI was bluffing and had no right to do what they threatened. He put the site back up, but not before free speech advocates mercilessly - and unjustly - flamed him for caving in. Two smelly lessons: representatives of your government will lie to you and try to outflank the law, and online libertarians are too willing to join a lynch mob. Start with the Village Voice piece, and read about the aftermath in Wired.CrowdedTheater: http://crowdedtheater.com/
Village Voice: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9947/boal.shtml
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,32772,00.html
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Experience the vision of Marianna Haninger as she reshapes a Seattle landmark with digital technology in her exhibit, Lux Aqua Pura. She has placed two separate installations inside the water tower in Capital Hill's Volunteer Park. Mounted underneath one set of stairs are two hundred miniature speakers which echo the laughter of children up and down the stairwell. On the other set of stairs she projects a digital waterfall - recalling the glory days of the turn of the century water tower - through which visitors walk. The physical exhibit just closed but it lives on in an online walkthrough, which requires QuickTime.http://www.luxaquapura.org/
For images with impact and a dreamy, surreal but beautiful view of the artistic mind, try the Meli-Melo Artists Alliance, based in Hong Kong with feelers around the world. An unexpected combination of architecture, poetry, and paint here combine into a delicious collection of color and shape. From the samples on their Web site, their new studio and gallery in Hong Kong would be well worth a visit.
http://sites.netscape.net/melimelohk/idx.htm
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Timeline
Have a Nice Day: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks
So Many Roads (1965-1995) [BOX SET]
Microsoft Encarta 2000 Encyclopedia, Free with RebateBOOKS & E-ZINES
Any crafter, whether hobbyist or professional, will benefit from the monthly newsletter at Heartland Treasures. From their archives, it looks like they've only been at this a few months, and we're sure they'd love the experienced input from those in our NSD ranks who are into crafts. Their simple, quick-loading pages have a sense of familiarity to them often lacking on the Internet. Each issue contains a few features, like a highlight on specific crafters and what has contributed to their success, a review of shops in the midwest, a bulletin board section with old fashioned advice and queries, or - our favorite - a concise rundown of a handful of craft-related sites which offer free tips, advice, and material.http://www.heartlandtreasures.com/
SURFING SCIENCE
Hit on the Head by One Too Many Neutrinos
What if gravity were actually not an attractive force at all, but merely an artifact of momentum transfer from neutrino flux? Once upon a time, lunatic screeds from physics paranoids were easy to spot, being in maniacally tiny handwriting on endless reams of paper. Now, with Web site software, the outward appearance has changed, but the monomaniacal impulse has not. Descartes, for example, fiddled with a vortex theory before Newton came up with gravitation, but the vortex inadequately explained the all the phenomena associated with gravity. Neutrinos have similar shortcomings. But if you are afflicted with a belief that neutrinos are behind everything, check this site out.http://gravity.ontheinter.net/
Another AIDS Conspiracy Theory
AIDS attracts conspiracy theorists in a way that malaria, say, does not, despite the fact that malaria kills vastly more people than AIDS every year. This site is massive, and vague, because it never really gets down to brass tacks about who is behind it all, and why. All it does is raise some portentous-sounding questions about whether HIV really causes the syndrome known as AIDS, and fills in pages with large-font quotations by various scientists that cast doubt on one part or another of the general epidemiological consensus on AIDS spread, without really telling us much of anything. Still, worth a look for the uninformed.http://www.virusmyth.com/
Ever wondered what a star sounds like? The Schaller Observatory is dedicated to listening to stellar sounds, filtering the background noises and the audio pollution of earth, and studying the results. A highly knowledgeable amateur astronomer has built a site collecting the information, facts and figures for anyone interested, plus a couple of recordings of stellar noise to download. Whilst most of the data is incomprehensible to the layman, the heart of the search will appeal to most of us - a yearning to hear the galactic equivalent of "is anybody out there?" coming through the cosmos.
http://users.tc3net.com/mmruze/index.htm
Steve Jenness tracks the locations of rhinos in Namibia for a conservation project called Rhinowatch. He uses sophisticated topographic mapping software supplied by his employer, Maptech, to mark the locations of specific rhinos. He tells us of the differences between white and black rhinos, since members of both species intermingle in Namibia, and gives us a detailed account of his sojourns there. This is life in the trenches of the conservation of endangered species.
http://www.maptech.com/rhino.html
SOFTWARE
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01 Released
Microsoft has just released an update to the Internet Explorer Web browser. It's 17 MB of bug and security fix goodness. As usual, we recommend that you upgrade to the latest and greatest lest the bad guys catch you with your metaphorical security britches down.http://www.microsoft.com/windows/Ie/default.htm
Distributed Denial of Service Attack Tools
CERT, the computer security alert organization, gives us further evidence of the evolving ecology of crack and counter-crack. This round goes to the crackers, who have created clever software tools that automatically launch and control denial-of-service attacks from many hosts at once. The crackers gain control of unsuspecting computers then distribute the software to those machines. They then instruct the software to launch coordinated attacks against a target computer. All this makes it difficult to find the true source of the attack. Of interest to sysadmins and security gurus everywhere. To crackers as well, no doubt.http://www.cert.org/incident_notes/IN-99-07.html
CORRECTIONS
Five Days on the Net, One Week Later
Last issue, we covered the tale of Robert Cribb, who spent five days living online. The URL of this little escapade has changed, as follows.http://www.thestar.com/back_issues/ED19991122/news/991122NEW01d_CI-WIRED22.html
This site, which we covered under the banner of "The Internet for Cocktail Parties" in our last issue, has a new URL too.
http://www.arriveat.com/Newbies/