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| Snide Geeks Don't Want No Tweaks |
| The Motives of Crackers |
| The Pixelon Con |
| For Serious Site Designers and Web Masters Only |
| Online Battle of the Indie Bands |
| Take a MediaTrip |
| The Sci Fi Channel's Online Adjunct |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| Ulysses for Dummies |
| A Nice Collection of E-Books |
| Rob Neyer |
| Ayn Rand |
| Bugs of the Wetware World |
| Kismet the Robot |
| Make Your Own Quasiperiodic Tilings |
| You Eat That? You Think It's Safe? |
| Jamestown |
| Web Apps |
| Dr. Tongue's Scary House of Broken Links |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
BREAKING SURF
The upcoming Fourth of July weekend in the US gives Americans an excuse to do what militarily mighty nations do best - blow things up. The whole country is going to engage in an explosive frenzy - of the friendly fireworks kind. Pyrotechnics Guild International (PGI), a nonprofit organization, lets amateur and professional fireworks enthusiasts network and dream up better ways to safely make pretty explosions. If you're curious how it's done, check out the rec.pyrotechnics FAQ. Though somewhat dated, it is still quite informative. The TV science show Nova has a cool site about fireworks linked through their "Kaboom!" episode. Finally, for your amusement we also bring you the pyro purity test, which conveniently also tests your "Weirdness Factor".PGI: http://www.pgi.org/
FAQ: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/pyrotechnics-faq/
Nova: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/kaboom/
Purity Test: http://www.armory.com/tests/pyro.html
Secret Dangers of Hidden Features
The New York Times (NYT) scored a journalistic coup when it obtained a copy of a secret CIA report on the 1953 agency-orchestrated coup in Iran. The NYT posted the document in PDF format after blacking out the names of Iranians who helped to plot the coup. However, the method used to obscure the names was not particularly effective - the obfuscators edited the file in Photoshop and added a layer which obscured the text. John Young, poking along on the Web with an old 133Mhz computer, discovered that he could easily read the ostensibly obscured names. When he downloaded and viewed the file, he could read the displayed unedited text for some time before the second, black-out layer covered the document. As soon as it found out about it, the Times yanked the document and fixed the mistake, but by then John had already revealed his method to the Net. Furthermore, John is posting the unedited report on his Cryptome Web site and is catching flak for potentially endangering the lives of those coup conspirators. SecurityFocus has more details.NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/041600iran-cia-index.html
Cryptome: http://cryptome.org/cia-iran-all.htm
SecurityFocus: http://www.securityfocus.com/templates/article.html?id=51
Publius: Censorship Resistant Publishing System
John Gilmore's immortal quote has it that "The Net treats censorship as damage and routes around it." A number of recent software projects seek to do the same, and Publius may well be the most robust and well thought out of the lot. Publius takes its name from the pseudonym of the authors of "The Federalist Papers" (Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison), who found it useful to anonymously express their support of the US Constitution. Like several other systems, Publius relies on distributing documents across numerous servers in such a way that even the server owners don't know what documents they host. There's a lot of high-level crypto math here, but in essence a Perl program of a mere 1,500 lines does all the hard work. Users can read and publish documents anonymously from their own browser. A fairly technical and thorough paper (in PDF) explains the theory behind the project and surveys the competing anonymous publishing systems. The authors are currently looking for volunteers to test the servers.Publius: http://cs1.cs.nyu.edu/waldman/publius/
Paper: http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~waldman/publius/publius.pdf
Federalist Papers: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/const/fed/abt_fedpapers.html
Yep, just what it sounds like. Upload a picture of yourself and minutes later try re-making your look with eyeshadow, hair styles, and makeup. If you don't have a picture handy you can choose a model who looks similar to you and play to your heart's content. The site, having signed a deal with Women.com, aims squarely at women but we think it's missing the obvious by not catering to the privately vain male crowd. Though we feel confident that some segment of the male population will love playing with the feminine makeover options, the site really should have released a male makeover option right off the bat. For that matter, is chimp makeover far behind? Hamster? Whale? The mind boggles at the possibilities. The lovely and talented CNet has more.
Studio: http://www.makeoverstudio.com/
CNet: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-2167743.html
Survivor Boosts CBS Web Site Ratings
CBS executives in charge of the top-rated television show Survivor certainly won't be eating Malaysian field rats anytime soon. The show's wild popularity has even spilled over to the Web. Web surfers have spent 36% more time at the CBS Web site since the show started, and 40% of network site's visitors arrive for the Survivor section alone. The site, a slick example of out-and-out media exploitation, comes complete with ads for the tale of the survivors in book form. Salon has a full complement of witty, cutting articles about the show. We expect nothing less.CBS: http://www.cbs.com/network/tvshows/mini/survivor/
Salon: http://www.salon.com/directory/topics/survivor/index.html
Elian's back in Cuba now, in an anticlimactic end to a protracted emotional and legal affair, but you can wallow in the history of the boy's stay in the US at Slate's Elian Gonzalez cartoon compendium. Here, each click of the big yellow arrow at the bottom of each page brings up the next two or three cartoons in chronological order. If you'd never read or heard a word about this story, you'd learn a lot just by looking at it through the pens and pencils of these cartoonists. The works cover a wide range of perspectives and provide a fascinating glimpse into the shifting winds of opinion, but in general point out the human absurdity of many of our actions and disputes, and put the little guy first. This is a cool site for stimulating arguments with your friends or family about the best one, or your favorite. Poignant, acid, skewering, just plain funny, sad - they're all here in this feast of cartoons spawned by the brief visit of a little boy.
http://cagle.slate.msn.com/news/elian/
Citing as fact that it is impossible to establish and enforce one community standard in the borderless world of the Internet, a US federal appeals court unanimously struck down the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) as unconstitutional. COPA would have made it a federal crime to communicate material considered harmful to minors. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) successfully argued that defining age, defining geography, and defining harmful with respect to the Internet is nearly impossible without becoming overbroad in scope. The act, as proposed, would have applied to sites as diverse as child pornography and gynecology discussion boards. As links, we present the ACLU's triumphant press release and the text of the court's decision, although the latter link was not working at press time.
ACLU: http://www.aclu.org/news/2000/n062200b.html
Decision: http://pacer.ca3.uscourts.gov:8080/C:/InetPub/ftproot/Opinions/991324.TXT
The Internet Law Journal has gathered domain name disputes, MP3 lawsuits, privacy issues, and indeed all the good legal stuff from the Web. The articles we sampled struck us as well written and link you freely to the places they mention. They provide perspectives on the issues, without taking sides or getting all emotionally overwrought. Breaking Headlines (we guess they didn't dare call it Breaking Surf) has the latest on net taxation, DVD encryption, cookies, and lots more. The site offers a link to a reference desk, which would be handy, but for now the section is in the Web-cliched state of "still under construction". The featured articles, serious in tone, have references, mostly handy online ones. You'll probably want to turn to this as new hot and heavy controversies erupt in that boiling cesspool of creativity and entrepreneurship that we all enjoy so much.
http://www.tilj.com/
ONLINE CULTURE
Snide Geeks Don't Want No Tweaks
New York Times writer Michiko Kakutani and celebrity geek Eric Raymond are waging an amusing snit war. Michiko took a look at geek slang in Eric's "The New Hacker's Dictionary" and on numerous online slang sites. Based on her examination, she asserts that "geek-speak conjures up a chilly, utilitarian world in which people are equated with machines and social Darwinism rules." Eric jumped into the fray in a "Don't tweak the geeks!" Salon article and castigates Kakutani for her "wrongheaded" characterization of him and his ilk. Sparks fly, and great fun is had by all watchers of geek culture. Diverting.Michiko: http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/06/biztech/articles/27note.html
Eric: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/28/kakutani/index.html
Dictionary: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262680920/netsurferdigest
Just what motivates the people who break into systems for fun? That's the question asked by the folks of the Honeynet project in this article, a part of the SecurityFocus "Know Your Enemy" series. The project set up a machine specifically to be compromised by crackers. Sure enough, they hooked their fly and for a period of two weeks monitored the intruder's conversations with an illicit IRC bot set up on the compromised system. The result is this revealing article. All the information was forwarded to the FBI and CERT, and over 370 notifications were sent to sysadmins whose systems the project believed were compromised. Fascinating reading.
http://www.securityfocus.com/focus/ids/articles/kye/motives.html
An engrossing article in the Standard recounts the tale of one David Stanley, a charismatic small-time con man from the south who went into business on the Internet and managed to squander a large fortune in venture capital. The tale beautifully contains all the ingredients to be found clinging to the underbelly of the late, lamented Internet boom time, when anybody could get funded based on nothing more than a press release. Which is exactly what got Stanley about $30 million in VC money. The hook reeled in VCs too hungry and rapacious for their own good and resulted in a wild ride with a non-existent product, lavish launch parties in Vegas, cult-like work environments, and ultimately a dramatic police raid on the company and the con man in charge. Truly a classic tabloid tale of the Internet boom.
http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,16317,00.html
For Serious Site Designers and Web Masters Only
Don't go here unless you're serious about Web design. If you use the Web mostly to display photos of the family, this is not the place for you. On the other hand, if the words "corporate design" and "e-commerce" find their way into every other e-mail you send, you've just struck paydirt. Intelliforum hosts a collection of informative articles relating to Web site design theory and practice. It also offers a free program that analyzes your Web site and suggests keyword improvements to raise your site's rankings with many of the popular search engines. Despite its name, Intelliforum isn't particularly open to discussion, so far as we can see; it's more of a didactic exercise, a matter of read and learn. However, the site owner has apparently been doing Web work with consistent success for several years. If you see the Web as a tool more than as a toy, you'll find some good material to be mined here.http://www.intelliforum.com/
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Online Battle of the Indie Bands
We can remember when you started a band to get chicks. Now you do it to cut an MP3, e-mail it to The-Battle.com, and let the public decide how you fare against all comers. The-Battle.com's slogan is, "Your 15 minutes of fame is now", and those slices of fame have been waved by bands ranging from Pink Floyd sound-alikes to punk/ska bands. The site also offers message boards and merchandise (theirs, not yours), and the winners might find themselves recorded on compilation CDs. At one point, the site hosted the MP3s that bands submitted; now it refers visitors to each band's own Web site to hear what the hoopla is all about.http://www.the-battle.com/
MediaTrip claims to be "What you've been missing," so we expected to see a site filled with unpaired socks and pocket change wedged between the sofa cushions. Alas, what we found was a conglomeration of music videos, short films, music, and animation, which was - well, better than the spare sock we were expecting. The front screen is filled with options: music; interviews; and the best part, online films and serials. Don't miss "George Lucas In Love", a touching, clever short film just shy of nine minutes and well worth the download. Be forewarned, however, that you may be asked a handful of demographic questions before you get to the actual downloading part. You'll want RealPlayer 7 or above, Windows Media Player, and the Shockwave 8 and Flash 4 player to experience the site fully. Considering the Feature of the Day when we visited was a cartoon called "Lil' Pimp", we'll venture to say that not everything at the site is intended for all audiences.
http://www.mediatrip.com/
The Sci Fi Channel's Online Adjunct
Did you know that Linda Henning, who plays Quinn's mother in what could be the final episode of Sliders, was Betty Jo in Petticoat Junction? Or that the sixth season of Tales from the Crypt will star Brad Pitt, Tim Roth and Kirk Douglas among many others? Sci Fi.com, in addition to being a value-added Web site for the Sci Fi Channel, also puts out Science Fiction Weekly (see the Sci Fi Today links), an e-zine with short fiction, gossip, and reviews - much like the rest of the site - with the addition of original and classic fiction by such writers as Pat Cadigan, Kim Newman, Kevin Anderson and Brian Herbert, Anne McCaffrey, Robert Silverberg, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. We brushed up on the latest gossip on the "X-Men" and "Lord of the Rings" movies (Ian McKellen sure gets around) as well as catching the latest on SF television, video, and cinema releases.http://www.scifi.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 affiliate Amazon.com, and send a few pennies our way as well.
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Diablo 2
The Very Best of Cat Stevens
The McFarland Baseball Quotations Dictionaryhttp://www.bway.net/~hunger/ulysses.html
Featuring a Java reading applet, Classic Bookshelf presents texts that you can customize by font size and color to suit your tastes. The site offers readers access to a large collection of public domain e-texts. Authors include Dickens, Twain, and Wilde, among others - use the Site Map link at the top to get a complete list. We read the first few pages of "Emma" by Jane Austen and found it not bad at all - the layout, that is. We love the story. The default font, as big as a knucklebone, seems to indicate that the Classic Bookshelf designers had the somewhat visually impaired as target market, but as we noted, you can fiddle around with it all.
http://www.classicbookshelf.com/Reader/index.htm
ESPN.com baseball columnist Rob Neyer modestly calls himself "a fan with too much free time". In fact, he's a fan with a great sense of the hidden game, a sharp pen, and a properly cynical approach - as well as a daily column, a Web site, and a new book. Like many good sports columnists, Rob is self-deprecating, but he needn't be. He has a long memory (or great research connections, or both), plenty of statistics at hand, and deep respect for - if not love of - tradition. Rob's mellow, prosaic approach may not appeal to fans addicted to hype and photographic flash. The days of Grantland Rice and Ring Lardner are gone, and he knows that, but baseball fans could do a lot worse than to steep themselves in the wide-ranging musings of Rob Neyer. Or buy his book, "Baseball Dynasties", a look at the strongest clubs in the game at their peaks.
Rob: http://www.robneyer.com/
Book: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393320081/netsurferdigest
Who was Ayn Rand? Great patriot? Great philosopher? Great philanderer? Many have read her books, including "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead", and know she created the philosophy of Objectivism but few have been able to penetrate the unique life of the author herself. We popped into the interview she did with Playboy and flipped through our own worn copies of her works to remember what the fuss was (and still is) about. "The Objectivist ethics, in essence, hold that man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself." Its vision has impact both socially and philosophically and her reasoning and pursuit of understanding made her one of the unique social philosophers of her time.
http://www.ionet.net/~jellenc/ayn_rand.html
SURFING SCIENCE
When we saw the first insect drawing, this site just jumped off the screen at us. It's what clean, well organized Web sites should look like. Forgetting for a moment the implications of what we're about to say, this site was obviously put together by someone who's really into bugs. And why not? The planet is literally crawling with them. There's enough diversity in the bug world for the Smithsonian Institution to have 30 million of them in its collection. Each of the 14 insect orders is represented with a literal translation to English of its name and a rogues' gallery of photos (with links to larger photos if the first shot of a dung beetle, for instance, isn't enough to satisfy you.) And, if you want to get a little buggy with your photography too, there's a complete primer on what equipment to use and how to use it.http://www.insects.org/
Put simply, a team at MIT designed Kismet the robot to interact with humans. Kismet, a mechanical head with sensors and exaggerated features of its own - it looks like a Terminator furby - can respond to stimuli, such as rapid movement, with pre-defined facial expressions. The page goes into incredible detail about how the robot is supposed to emulate human infant behaviors, how the robot has evolved over time, and how the complex hardware and software setup allows interaction to occur. There are also a few video clips showing some sample interaction with the robot, which are entertaining if nothing else.
http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/kismet/kismet.html
Make Your Own Quasiperiodic Tilings
The opening page of this site links to the QuasiTiler 3.0 program right up top, "above the fold" as they say in newspaper biz. If you're not familiar with the mechanics of Penrose tilings and the geometry of higher-dimensional spaces, you might want to read the elaborate explanations of how to project a five-dimensional object on a two-dimensional plane (like trying to follow an infinite Escher painting to its end, which of course it doesn't have). Or avoid the potential brain-bruise, hit that link, and just play with the pretty pictures. QuasiTiler creates an HTML generated image that looks a lot like Granny's quilts at first glance, but once you play with the variables, lovely stained glass kaleidoscope patterns with deceptively complex forms emerge. It's a time-waster and educational all at once.http://www.geom.umn.edu/apps/quasitiler/about.html
You Eat That? You Think It's Safe?
Food safety is serious stuff; make the wrong choice and you (and maybe anyone who ate your salmon mousse) die. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has built a thorough and user-friendly Web site that covers all aspects of food safety. Links to all relevant government publications and the best non-government publications and sites round out the pages. Special sections include one for children on proper hygiene and how to recognize obviously dangerous food products. The documents and links range from the dry and droll to the wonderful. Be sure to check the FDA's own "Bad Bug Book" of food-borne pathogenic microorganisms and natural toxins. Use the superb internal search to find it.http://www.foodsafety.gov/
Anyone who's visited the historic site can vouch that Jamestown, Va. is a pretty amazing place. The Jamestown Rediscovery archeological project is making some of that wonder accessible via the Internet. As the site of the first permanent English colony in America, the settlement is a gold mine for investigators, who have uncovered over 160,000 artifacts dating to the first half of the 17th century. Excavations have turned up everything from Delftware to tenter hooks, so if you visit you'll know what you're talking about when you say you're on them. See the signet ring of the man whose account of a shipwreck is reputed to have inspired Shakespeare's final play, "The Tempest". The Web site is a great learning experience for the entire family. Tell the kids Captain John Smith and Pocahontas lived there to get their attention.
http://www.apva.org/
SOFTWARE
Free or inexpensive, Web apps help you work, play, live, or learn. Think of them as utilities or programs on distant servers that run in your browser. Apps.com has a nice introductory help applet you can't miss when you hit the home page of this large, excellent portal. Utilitarians may be in seventh heaven here. Call this site a bookmark service, an organizer, a consolidator - at Apps.com, you're bound to find something pretty quickly that you'll want to use over and over, especially if you've already used some of the popular apps linked to these directory pages. The categories will entice you to register so that you can build your own collection for access wherever you can get on the Web. Neat. It's a real time sponge - and that makes it even neater.http://www.apps.com/
CORRECTIONS
Dr. Tongue's Scary House of Broken Links
Our Halloween 1999 issue (NSD 5.35) had a link to the Witching Hours, a serious history of witches and their craft. The site has whisked off to a new URL, on a broom no doubt.http://www.bigfoot.com/~ShanMonster/