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BREAKING SURF
The presidents of Cold War/post-Cold War rivals North Korea and South Korea sat down this week and came up with a general agreement on principals for cooperation and reconciliation. Brief and general though the agreement may be, it marks an important turning point in the relations between these two bitterly opposed states. Just how important can be gleaned from a special report prepared by CNN that discusses the lead-up to the current talks and provides extensive background about the two Koreas, past and present. The situation is all the more remarkable since not too long ago the US estimated that this was one of the most dangerous spots on the globe, with war only an eye blink away.Agreement: http://partners.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/061400korea-summit-text.html
CNN: http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2000/korea/
Pre-Release Software Info Leak Leads to Legal Action
When software or corporate secrets leak onto the Net, it's not unusual to see legal threats fly. It is unusual, however, to see a company follow through and actually sue a Web site for discussing its pre-release software. Adobe has taken Macintosh News Network, publishers of the AppleInsider (AI) Web site, to court. Adobe's lawsuit holds that AI published an article that contained trade secrets - the features of a version of Photoshop still in development - which makes them liable for damages under US law. AI claims it just passed on information publicly available on the Web. The legal decision will turn on whether AI's publishers knew it was repeating trade secrets - it'll lose if they did. Interestingly, AI had posted a June 13 "inside look" at the not-yet-released Microsoft Word 2001, but the text has been replaced with the tantalizing "Article Remove 9PM EST By the Demand of Microsoft Corp, Inc" (sic). Don't miss the AI page's new title slogan.Story: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200-2077834.html
Adobe: http://www.adobe.com/
AI: http://www.appleinsider.com/
Executive Compensation in Silicon Valley
Nothing like a bit of financial voyeurism. SiliconValley.com studied various public documents and came up with a list of who made what in 1999, all the way from Apple's Steve Jobs ($1 in salary) to Lewis Platt, CEO of Hewlett-Packard ($1,000,000 in salary, a $910,000 bonus, and tons of options). You won't find mention of Steve's new jet, though, a reward from a grateful Board of Directors. An eyeball estimate indicates that an average executive, VP level and above, gets a salary in the mid-$200,000 range, usually with generous options. Other companies go the big options route. Yahoo execs generally earn less than $200,000 in salary, but take home options worth millions of dollars. Now you'll know what to ask for when they offer you the chairmanship.http://www.mercurycenter.com/svtech/companies/bossmakes/charts/chart99.htm
Spending Money on TV Ads - No Customers, but Maybe Investors
A boatload of dotcoms spent millions of dollars to buy advertising time on this year's Superbowl TV broadcast. The results? Well, not much in the way of new users. In fact, from a user acquisition standpoint, the proposition was a spectacular and expensive failure. On the other hand, according to this CNet story, a number of Net companies scored venture funding simply by raising their visibility with the spots. Salute the new Net business model: raise $3 million in seed capital; blow it all on one Superbowl commercial that attracts the interest of venture capitalists; raise more capital; and wash, rinse, repeat, until you go bankrupt. SourceTV lists all this year's Superbowl commercials, while Superbowl-Ads.com has more media coverage of the topic then anyone can possibly digest.Story: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-2077741.html
SourceTV: http://www.sourcetv.com/superbowl2000.html
Superbowl-Ads.com: http://www.superbowl-ads.com/
Jack Valenti's DeCSS Deposition
Lawyers for 2600 magazine recently grilled Jack Valenti, president and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), as part of the MPAA's lawsuit over 2600's distribution of the DeCSS DVD decoding program. You can find the transcript of the deposition at Cryptonome and some background on the case from Wired magazine. Valenti adopted the standard strategy in such cases and claimed ignorance in response to many of the questions. Meanwhile, 2600 offers numerous legal documents from the case, along with their usual assortment of hacker news and views.2600: http://www.2600.com/
Valenti: http://www.mpaa.org/jack/jack/index.htm
Deposition: http://cryptome.org/mpaa-v-2600-jvd.htm
Background: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,36995,00.html
The company formed by the just approved merger of telecom giants GTE and Bell Atlantic will be called Verizon. The hacker magazine 2600, knowing how well these things tend to work out, decided to bite the corporate hand and register the domain name verizonsucks.com. That corporate hand turned out to be quicker than 2600's eye - Bell Atlantic, acting on behalf of Verizon, had already registered that name as a defensive move. That didn't stop 2600, though, which forged ahead and registered verizonreallysucks.com. Sure enough, Bell Atlantic sent a letter which accused 2600 of violating the Anticybersquatting Act and trademark infringement. The magazine claims Bell Atlantic's waving of the Anticybersquatting Act is absurd since the act was meant to protect against holding domains for ransom, not against expressing an opinion. This article has a copy of the legal threat and an offer from 2600 to take over and defend any domain names you may have which big business is threatening.
http://www.2600.com/news/2000/0508.html
The imminent arrival of Father's Day inspired us to look around for related Web sites. We found Aristotle, a neat site with cool Father Knows Best-era graphics. It has a nifty selection of fatherly online gift sites, links to other notable father sites on the Web, a Shockwave Flash trivia game ("Who was the father of history?", "Where did neckties originate?"), and an online postcard link.
http://www.aristotle.net/fathersday/
ONLINE CULTURE
Courtney Love's Thoughtful Rant About Music Distribution
Courtney Love, frontwoman for the band Hole, actress of no mean talent, and Kurt Cobain's ex, was invited to speak at the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference held in New York in mid-May. What she said has been slowly infiltrating the Net's cultural consciousness and causing heart attacks among record company executives. Courtney is majorly pissed off, a condition of considerable spectacle in a woman of her outspoken intelligence. Specifically, she's pissed off at record companies who hold artists in practical professional bondage - sharecropping them, to use her phrase. In this long and generally thoughtful rant, Love takes on the record companies, Napster, and the online music culture, with some surprising conclusions. In effect, she calls for the overthrow of record labels as they exist now, a call made all the more striking coming from a successful beneficiary of their existence. As a call for revolution from the top of the music, this ranks as a must read for anyone even remotely interested in the music scene, online and off.http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/index.html
Sysadmins, Rampant on a Field of Crackers
We bring you two tales of real-life sysadmins dealing with intruders invading their systems. The cleansing journeys they both undertook are equally long, each in its own way. Consider these stories slice-of-life accounts of a particularly difficult aspect of sysadmins' lives. The first and shorter account, "Have Root, Will Hack: 80 Agonizing Hours in the Life of an Information Systems Security Officer", gives us a fairly brief log of several days in the life of an information systems security officer. It makes a perfect warm-up for the multi-chaptered "Cracked!", a long and detailed account of how the sysadmin of a free ISP dealt with an intruder in their system. This story contains a number of cautionary lessons, some of which have little to do with computers. Both provide a glimpse into the normally invisible underbelly of the Net and the people who care for it.80 Hours: http://www.securityfocus.com/focus/ih/articles/haveroot.html
Cracked!: http://rootprompt.org/article.php3?article=403
How the Internet Works, in 12 Minutes, 40 Seconds
Ever seen how the Internet works? Endless streams of packets cross mazes of hubs, routers, and switches, through firewalls, into microprocessors and out to other points of transfer. Even with explicit illustrations, this dynamic process can be difficult to visualize. Hence, Warriors of the Net, an imaginative, educational, promotional, award-winning MPEG animation by Ericsson Medialab. Made in 1999, this big movie celebrates Net mechanics with a mechanical motif. It's a bandwidth-busting masterpiece of 3-D modeling blended with voiceover, an original choral soundtrack, flameouts, light tunnels, and other eerie multimedia effects. When we first watched the 55-second trailer - "He's fast. He's strong. He's TCP/IP.... And he's got your address." - we guessed this dramatization would stir the hearts of network gurus. Geeks may like it (even though it's intended for a lay audience) and so may you. This extraordinary production is available for free in a 96-MB or 150-MB version. Get thee to a network connection!http://www.warriorsofthe.net/
Network gurus and other pros who work with information technology will find buzzwords dear to their hearts - and their jobs - on the home page of NetworkingNews.org: network security, operating systems, Web applications, etc. In these and other categories, the site offers topical news and background. The "Find useful stuff on the Web" page features links that look like command lines (e.g., "#root>locate\learn_about_yourself"). Nice bit of customization, if it rings bells. Other areas like Network Gaming News, Alter Windows, and Admin Downloads will command attention when administrators and power users have free time to surf or are under the gun to get up to speed. The FTP Search is likely to save butts. Other search facilities, an archive of freeware, and a message board round out the offerings. It's easy to find stuff here.
http://www.networkingnews.org/
NetWorldMap Project Progress Report
In NSD 5.22, we introduced you to the NetWorldMap Project, which means to map IP addresses to geography. That undertaking has now started offering a service to the public. After a simple registration, you can have the NetWorldMap Geographic Location Resolution Server (GLRS) automatically tabulate your Web site's traffic by place of origin, and have it present the information in a variety of forms. Sort by date, city, region, or even country. How many people visited your site from Ireland is interesting, but even more so perhaps would be knowing how many came from each region of the country, from specific cities, and then how many came to your site from Dublin each week in June. Demographics have found a new medium, with your Net presence now part of the complex equation that represents the world's many interests.Project: http://www.networldmap.com/default.htm
GLRS: http://glrs.geoup.com/default.htm
The Secrets of Searching the Web
Recently, we noted that the fabulous Search IQ site ranked Google the easiest search engine to use (NSD 5.15). And making life easier ain't easy, as you will read in "The Anatomy of a Search Engine", a paper presented by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page of the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. The treatise describes in detail the architecture of Google's large-scale system, which relies heavily on reading hypertext structure. While commercial search engine technology remains something of a black art, this paper shines the high beams on its beloved Google (Stanford scientists built the prototype) for the benefit of anyone who can appreciate a bitchin' page rank equation: PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + .... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn)). Wow.Search IQ: http://www.zdnet.com/searchiq/
Paper: http://www7.scu.edu.au/programme/fullpapers/1921/com1921.htm
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Frame 37 is the brainchild of Grae and CherylAnne, two well-traveled photographers in southern Oregon whose online portfolio emphasizes composition and color. Their subjects are universal: sky, forest, animals, flowers, cities, villages, waterfalls, rivers, mountains. Their cropping is masterful. Many photographers will likely envy them their fortuitous timing. Many of these JPEGs capture perfect moments at dusk or dawn. Two of our favorites are "Mt. Shasta, Ca" - a skyscape of gorgeous serenity - and "Ashland, Or" - a superb rainbow - in the Sky 1 collection. Other favorites: "Sunset" and "Heavens Fire" in Sky 2, "Paris" in Cities 2, "Patras, Greece" in Portraits 1, "Buttermere, Cumbria" in Villages 1, "Phoenix, Or" in Villages 2, and "Meteora, Greece" in Mountains 1. Frame 37 is far less pretentious - and for many viewers with a fast connection, it will be much more satisfying - than a visit to a brick-and-mortar gallery. We found the site design and easy navigation exemplary. Purists may object that some photos in this elegant gallery appear to have been edited to dramatize or idealize. What of it? Subject matters.http://www.frame37.f2s.com/
Digital Totem Poles and Other Stuff
Rick Doble is a digital artist who has invested his work with a great deal of thought. His digital totem pole exhibit is a series of 10 high-quality abstractions. The images and patterns are derived from the manmade and natural world. Rick lists the major artists and artifacts that influenced his work. This is serious stuff, and very moving. The site has several other online galleries of Rick's digital art, all worth visiting. Don't skip the Third Annual Snowflake Exhibit. You can also browse Rick's written philosophical musings on digital art and the nature of art in the 21st century. If you think of art as more than just pretty pictures, this is truly a stand-out site.http://www.rickdoble.net/
If you ignore the clear evidence that this site is a tour de force of digital art and an extremely valuable compendium of state-of-the-art techniques, categorizing can be very difficult. Is it brochure-ware? Yes, it is. It's an extended ad for Xerox's Tektronix brand printers. Promoting printers is why this site exists. All other ads should be as useful and beautiful as this one. Is it an e-zine? It seems to be, but there's no information on past or future issues. It's structured like a high-quality e-zine and should be one. This issue highlights the spectacularly good digital artwork of three artists along with four technique oriented articles useful to anyone wishing to improve a Web site.
http://www.creativesight.com/
Selling Art, and Tours of the Artists
Art isn't only found in museums or magazines. Indeed, you can explore, learn about, and, yes, even buy art at a number of places both in the real and virtual worlds. One stands out among the many: UCanBuyArt.com blossomed so quickly that its offerings grew at a breakneck pace; the number of represented artists grew from 2 to 80. Peruse more than $1,000,000 worth of original art in media as diverse as painting, dolls, and woodworking. To bridge the gap between the technical and physical realms, UCanBuyArt has arranged a series of tours that will shepherd travelers through Nova Scotia to meet many of the artists in person. The five-day tours will run all summer and cost $550 (US dollars), which includes accommodation. Neat idea, and relatively inexpensive.http://www.ucanbuyart.com/
Come, Rate Movies, and Go Like a Firefly in the Night
The Web is too young for us to start reminiscing about it, right? Over the years, we've visited a number of movie recommendation sites, including one called Firefly run by a little company called Andromedia. That site, like the others, had an eerie ability to read your mind by comparing your likes and dislikes to the likes and dislikes of others, using what's called a collaborative filtering engine. Now, Firefly's gone, as is Andromedia, swallowed up last year by Macromedia - which now offers a similar service called Movie Critic. Macromedia's site, however, might soon be facing some steep competition from a young upstart, RatingZone, that promises to suggest accurately not only movies, but also books and musical preferences. With typical disregard for its elders, young whippersnapper RatingZone requires visitors to have a 4.0 or higher browser. Try them both out. Watch the Amazing Kreskin (well, this one doesn't cheat) at work in your own computer.Movie Critic: http://www.moviecritic.com/
RatingZone: http://www.ratingzone.com/
BOOKS & E-ZINES
On their info page, the editors of Juked admit they aren't sure what "juked" means. We don't mean they lack focus or insight, just that mainstream media won't easily categorize this webzine, staffed mostly by young, male, adult West Coast postgraduates but pretty well written here and there for volunteers with a passion for small fonts and limited or little evident affection for the Queen's English. (Have we juked anyone yet?) Teens and 20-somethings may identify with the site right away when they see the "Bored" link (bulletin board - get it?) at the top of the page. We thought it a bit risky. (Hang with boredom? Cool. Can't wait.) Anecdotes and short essays, confessions, recollections, gripes, poems, sexual fantasies, and other first-person oddities populate the place. All in all, it's a well-crafted invitation to titillation. If you chat a lot and get bored with chat or just crave a bit of wistfulness, sauce, or raunch, you might want to get Juked.http://www.juked.com/
Bored with Farting and Burping Contests? Try Spleaf
What could be more hilarious than sex with animals? Why, a small male sex organ, of course! Males who have recently experienced boredom with farts and burping may enjoy precocious high school student Peter Curtiss's tasteless humor indulgence, Spleaf. Curtiss modestly hopes that teenagers with unconventional senses of humor get a good laugh by reading something that they're darned unlikely to see anywhere in the civilized world. Netsurfer does not recommend inhaling if you have a delicate constitution.http://www.spleaf.net/
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The Sagas of the Icelanders
Professional PHP Programming
Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary UnderbellySURFING SCIENCE
The Dirt Brothers Dig for Love, not Money
The Dirt Brothers are amateur archeologists with a passion and ethical awareness seldom seen even among professionals pulling a paycheck. Their non-profit organization encourages fellow avocationalists to methodically excavate privately owned sites to recover artifacts - sometimes dating from thousands of years ago - which would otherwise be destroyed by bulldozers and cement trucks. The Dirt Brothers site hosts a gallery of thousands of such artifacts; one arrowhead predates the Egyptian pyramids. It also offers practical and scholarly help, plus tips for those trying to organize archeological digs on private development sites.http://www.dirtbrothers.org/
Despite high-resolution images of the Cydonia Mensae region of Mars that show not a face, but a mountain that kinda resembles a face if the light strikes it just right, some people maintain that the effect is an unnatural artifact and proof of intelligent life on Mars. We had a site suggested to us that we felt could help us look for signs of "intelligent" life on Earth. You know what we mean - randomly carved natural "faces" that mean - well, nothing (although that's not necessarily the photographer's perspective). We saw some faces and we couldn't tease out others. Some of them were really beautiful, others more resembled the amazing melting man. We're seeing spots from too much deep staring at monitors. We can conclude that if you're into this sort of thing, you're going to bloody love it.
http://www3.ns.sympatico.ca/holly.swinamer/
CancerSmart Lectures and Chats
Once a word rarely spoken in public, cancer is becoming almost a synonym in medical and health circles for community. To enhance its patient-care services and lengthen its outreach, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center maintains a public-information site called CancerSmart Lectures and Chats. You can register online for lectures to be held at the Center, but if you can't attend in New York, recorded lectures are available for free in RealAudio format. (To find them, use the "Read more" pull-down menu at the bottom of the home page.) Topics of recent lectures include prostate, gynecological, and lung cancers. Kudos to the Center for posting transcripts of online chats, as well. Recent chats have covered breast and gynecological cancers in black women, ovarian cancer, leukemia in adults, colorectal and lung cancer, and clinical trials. You might call this a goodwill site. It may not generate much revenue for the Center, but many will find it useful because education is part of treatment, coping, and recovery.http://www.mskcc.org/patients_n_public/outreach_and_education/cancersmart_lectures_and_chats/index.html
The Computer Museum History Center, located in Mountain View, Calif., has an online arm dedicated to bringing the museum's considerable resources back to the digital world it was built to worship. A browsable and searchable timeline explores computer history from 1945 to 1990. Although the Center's emphasis is on post-WWII electronic computing, they have no qualms about diving backwards to provide often much-needed context for subsequent events. Their artifact database is unfortunately not browsable, but the exhibit on the evolution of the microprocessor is a fascinating experience. Visit the site and fondly remember the non-existent click of the keys on your first Atari 400.
http://www.computerhistory.org/
CORRECTIONS
Chip Rowe, writer, NSD fan, and Playboy Editor, has moved his site... again. We first uncovered him in NSD 1.37, then posted his URL move in 2.32, and this just may make him the first three-timer in NSD.http://chiprowe.com/