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BREAKING SURF
Aarrr! - Napster Shut Down, Mateys
A judge has ordered Napster to remove all copyrighted music from its service, effectively shutting down the service pending a full-blown trial. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has sued Napster and, perceiving that the RIAA has a significant chance of prevailing in its suit, the judge cracked down on Napster. Predictably, a great hue and cry has arisen from the scurvy masses on the Napster message boards, and the cannonballs of fame are crossing the bows of other file-trading services like Gnutella, Scour, and Freenet. An RIIA boycott site is also up and sailing. CNet has extensive ongoing coverage of the whole story. Napster has, of course, appealed.Napster: http://www.napster.com/
Gnutella: http://www.gnutellanews.com/
Scour: http://www.scour.com/
Freenet: http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
Boycott: http://boycott-riaa.com/
CNet: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-201-2354521-0.html
Thirty-one years in service and the Concorde is still the only supersonic airliner in the skies (we can and will ignore the ill-fated Tu-144). The fleet now encompasses only 13 craft with the recent crash in France. The accident prompted us to look around for information on this amazing plane, which must be seen to understand just how truly different it is. David Trebosc's page has everything you wanted to know about the Concorde, including its history, its technology, and even the experiences of passengers. A link on the home page takes you to all the pictures and video on the crash you could need.
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/8952/e_index.htm
Stephen King is again exploring the limits of commercial literary online publishing. His last online fiction, the short "Riding the Bullet", was by all accounts a reasonable hit. However, that work came in an encrypted format, and hackers who balked at the $2.50 fee cracked the encryption and released the naked story on the wild Net. King has decided to try a different tack. This time, he released the first installment of his new story, "The Plant", without encryption, while asking readers to pay $1 per installment on the honor system. He says, "Pay and the story rolls. Steal and the story folds." If 75% of the people downloading the story pay up, he'll keep writing installments. Will it work? Amazon.com reports that after nine hours online, 41,000 people had downloaded the story, and 32,000 - about 78% - had paid for it. As King puts it, "My friends, we have a chance to become Big Publishing's worst nightmare."
The Plant: http://www.stephenking.com/download.html
Riding the Bullet: http://www.simonsays.com/book/default_book.cfm?isbn=0743204670
Macworld Expo: Where's the Beef?
Last week's Macworld Expo, held in New York City, had lots of Apple announcements and new products, a real old-time Mac fervor, big crowds, and hot new third-party hardware and software. It looks like FireWire is finally becoming mainstream, despite the current slow Apple (and even worse Windows) drivers. A hot-swappable 75GB FireWire hard drive was yours for only $899. Apple even got the pricing of its new computers about right (after only 15 years) with a $799 iMac - and introduced new colors! Unfortunately, our Netsurfer on the spot felt something was just missing. The new Macs introduced no new technology. They had redesigned cases, or were faster, or cheaper, or some combination. The technology breakthroughs that brought Apple back were not there. Even the incredibly quick dual-processor G4 is really only a gimmick until OS X goes into wide release (early 2001). Still, Apple puts on a show worth the trip.http://www.macworldexpo.com/photoalbum.html
You learned in high school chemistry, or maybe on MacGyver, that you can make a battery out of almost anything. Firm veggies are particularly good, if not that powerful. The potato-powered Web server hoax we fell for in NSD 6.18 now appears to be the butt of its own joke. Fred White has vindicated all who fell for it by building Spud, a legitimate potato-powered Web server. See the schematics. Build your own with about five pounds of potatoes (we recommend Yukon Gold) and a few components most geeks have lying around. Or just visit the working SpudServer. Log on to Spud and see what really, really slow Web servers feel like. If there's a future in low-powered servers, you'd better buy your potato futures now.
Hoax: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/nsd.06.19.html#BS11#BS11
Spud: http://world.std.com/~fwhite/spud
NASA announced its next mission to Mars, to be launched in 2003. The mission will feature a surface rover which will roll across the planet in January, 2004. Like the 1997 Pathfinder, the new rover will land using inflatable airbags. It will roam up to 100 yards per day and will carry sophisticated instruments geared to detecting water and studying the geology of the planet. NASA is still evaluating the possibility of sending a second Mars rover at the same time. Here's the press release with more on the rover's capabilities.
ftp://ftp.hq.nasa.gov/pub/pao/pressrel/2000/00-119.txt
Where Are They? SETI and the Number of Alien Civilizations
Scientific American has posted an article from a recent issue which gives a first-class overview of the results from years of Search For Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) programs. True, nobody's found any aliens just yet, but useful conclusions can still be drawn from the searches. Completed searches can be used to place some limits on the possibility of intelligent alien life among the stars. The article implies that intelligence is rare (tell us about it...), yet carefully quotes William Whewell who in 1863 said of extraterrestrial life, "The discussions in which we are engaged belong to the very boundary regions of science, to the frontier where knowledge... ends and ignorance begins." So it is to this day. A good non-technical overview of a fascinating subject.Article: http://www.sciam.com/2000/0700issue/0700crawford.html
Whewell: http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/7/0,5716,78797+1+76762,00.html
Security of Linux Distributions
Kurt Seifried, a security analyst, wrote the "Linux Administrators Security Guide". He decided to look at some statistics of security bugs and security bulletins issued by the several popular Linux distributions. The result, this article, lays out the numbers collected over several years. With so many dimensions to this issue, we feel it's better just to point you to the article than to attempt to summarize the results in one paragraph. Read it and decide for yourself what's important. Scroll to the bottom for the policy Kurt recommends to all the distributions for handling security-related matters. Of interest to all Linux sysadmins.http://www.securityportal.com/cover/coverstory20000724.html
Those of you following the saga of Echelon, the electronic surveillance network run by Western governments, should read this article by Duncan Campbell. Campbell is the author of a report to the European Parliament about the capabilities of the network, a report which brought the intelligence gathering system to widespread public attention for the first time. In this article, Duncan gives an overview of Echelon and tries to "clear up the confusion, to say what Echelon is (and isn't), where it came from and what it does. Echelon, or systems like it, will be with us a long time to come." Consider this a fine digest of the lengthy and technical report to the Parliament.
http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/te/6929/1.html
IMUnified: Coalition for Unified Instant Messaging Format
This industry consortium is dedicated to producing a unified standard for internet messaging. Right now, the instant messaging market basically consists of AOL and everybody else. This consortium is the everybody else - AT&T, Excite@Home, iCAST, MSN, Odigo, Phone.com, Prodigy, Tribal Voice, and Yahoo. AOL has been famously unwilling to let any other company's product network with their AIM messaging software - most notably Microsoft's MSN Instant Messenger - so the rest of the industry apparently decided to retaliate with this coalition. Don't hold your breath, though. This kind of consortium usually churns out only a few press releases, and if one ever does come up with some sort of standard, it's usually an arcane piece of committee-designed bureaucratic bloat.http://www.imunified.org/
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It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life
Cisco CCNA Exam #640-507 Certification Guide (With CD-ROM)
Under the Skin
Sex and the City - The Complete First SeasonONLINE CULTURE
CyberSource and Your Credit Rating
An informative article at Wired discusses the mechanics of online credit card verification and its potential for both abuse and harm to your online credit rating. CyberSource analyzes credit card data from about 2,000 online merchants and generates credit risk ratings of shoppers based on their submitted credit card info. Online merchants can then decide whether or not to honor a given shopper's credit card. This sounds advantageous for all involved - less shopper fraud means lower prices - but what if your information becomes corrupted in the CyberSource database? You won't be able to shop not just at one site, but at numerous major e-commerce sites. Worse, unlike the way offline credit companies are obligated, no laws force online merchants to disclose why they denied your transaction. The whole industry is so new that there are no effective safeguards against the corruption or abuse of the CyberSource database. Wired's article is required reading for informed e-consumers.Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,37642,00.html
CyberSource: http://www.cybersource.com/
SURFING SITES
At some point we've all looked at the latest fad in Web sites and thought to ourselves, "That'll never last." If you're often right, you could gain the adulation of fellow netizens by registering at this profanely named site, a play on the popular e-commerce magazine Fast Company. The site runs a dead pool for online companies which may shuffle off this digital coil. Pick the company that's going to capsize next, and earn points. The setup takes into account that dotcom deaths are rarely delivered with a single stroke, so points are awarded based on degrees of demise, including layoffs, buyouts, and all that jive. The coup de grace gets the most points, but with everyone betting on companies that languish mortally wounded, you get few points for those. Get your Napster now.http://www.fuckedcompany.com/
New York Food, New York Attitude
Jim Leff, a NYC-based food and restaurant critic, provides Chowhound.com's driving energy. The site is heavily New York City in tone and bias. Jim is not exactly a traditional critic. He seeks both normal foody places and places with good food where New York foodies wouldn't be caught dead. His opinions are expressed with a healthy dollop of true New York attitude (the site made one of us homesick). He's not short on praise where praise is deserved and not short on scorn where that has been earned. You don't often see reviews as earthy and engaging as these. The threaded discussion forums cover mostly New York and California, although nothing food-related is off limits. You can also enjoy streaming radio broadcasts and other useful features like the Downhill Alerts. The Chowhound only needs to lose that dog of an opening page.http://www.chowhound.com/
Fire up the Muzak and Let's Watch Some Corn Grow!
If you're like some of us, you get sick and tired of always being expected to celebrate diversity. What's with that, anyway? We're the really ordinary types, and nobody ever celebrates the ordinary. Time we got a fair shake, then. Guys, here's your place - no women allowed (they're too exciting). It's the Dull Men's Club, where you can take a test or two to evaluate your overall dullness. It has links to descriptions of baggage carousels at various airports (but no streaming video; that would be too exciting). You can search for typos. And you must check out the FAQ (preferably with a steaming cup of warm 1% milk - not skim, that's too exciting).http://www.dullmen.com/
Shamefaced, we laughed, guffawing hollowly at the foolish tech support customers who in their madcap computer antics stuffed things up in a diverting and earnest manner. But we remember those gloomy days of tech confusion, those grim late nights with an unresponsive computer, hanging on the line to tech support for hours the night before deadline. We remember calling the tech support guy who denied our eight-year-old ISP account a "great pillock", and we squirm whenever we hear the grim sound of a hard drive sizzling into a coma. Whatever side of the many and varied stories you empathize with, this site is addictive. We ended up searching through the vast files of stories for a story where we could suddenly laugh indulgently, pitying the poor bumbling computer newbie when really we had much better things to do, like clean our keyboard with detergent.
http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/
Your Body, Your Mind, Your New Books
We found the name alone intriguing. And while the site includes a modicum of sex-oriented material in the form of surveys, the main issue seems to be body/mind connectivity. In this vein, it offers an interesting array of games, puzzles, and over a dozen personality tests to start you off. Want to see how you stack up in your communication or coping skills? They've got some short tests to help you find out - with a bookshelf link in the event that you find yourself wanting in some area. Of course, you won't use that much, but it's there if you need it. The IQ workout and other brain exercisers are worth a visit. Think of it as a stretching exercise for your brain.http://www.queendom.com/
The first paragraph of RateYourself says it all: "the only site focused solely on the World's most important person: YOU!" As if living on the Internet wasn't self-absorbing enough, the site provides a virtual navel you can gaze further into. Psychologists and human resources experts have designed daily surveys ("Male: How Romantic Are You?") and "self-probing" personality, career and relationship tests. The career quiz turns up results ranging from "You occupy a much sought after, but rarely achieved position in life", to "It's time to think seriously about changing jobs". And if you get "You are on your way to Splitsville" in the Love and Sex quiz, maybe its time to hit that shut-down button.
http://www.rateyourself.com/
Quick, name your favorite harmonica player. No, your Uncle Sid doesn't count, but Dan O'Connell might, after you visit the Harmonica Style site. Dan does a creditable job of playing several different harps in a few different styles, and his example might inspire the fledgling harmonicat to explore new ground (head over to Harmonica Lessons.com if you get the itch), but the MP3s and RealAudio clips serve as more of a showcase for O'Connell than a comprehensive overview of what is possible with a Hohner. Next stop, the accordion! Er, wait - that was NSD 5.40....
Harmonica Style: http://www.harmonicastyle.com
Harmonica Lessons: http://www.harmonicalessons.com/
Parlo Teaches the World to Talk
In an Anglo-centric cyberworld, Parlo takes on the task of teaching foreign language in a "virtual immersion environment" (continuing stories in French, Spanish, or English - yes, they teach English too). It teaches languages with both traditional vocabulary and pronunciation classes (including Realaudio clips) and a sort of cultural exposure via e-zine, chatrooms, and links to online radio stations. Most lessons are free, but high-level business language courses will cost you. Parlo's front page has Flash and faces, the minimum requirement for Web sites these days, but it also has a clean, easy to access style and language, and lots of it.http://www.parlo.com/
Buzz Notes has set out to make surfing a bit easier. The site claims to customize search results based on your preferences. How does it know your preferences? It asks you some demographic questions. If you liked all the same Web sites as all the other folks with your age and gender, this would be a brilliant initial setup. But in case you don't, the engine learns. With an ever-enigmatic reference to "proprietary software", Buzz Notes figures out what you like by asking you to rate Web sites via a frame interface as you go, thus enabling it to send you more relevant information every time you interact with it. We're saying all of this theoretically, since it didn't seem to get smarter while we surfed, but we only played with it for a couple of days. Dang that short attention span.
http://www.buzznotes.com/
Three young students from Richmond Hill, N.Y. have created a Web site called Art Rights and Wrongs to help kids (and grown-ups who should know better) understand the importance of getting permission to use copyrighted material online. The site's lively discussion rigorously examines all issues of all areas of copyright and looks at the appreciation of the value of one's own rights. Although attending a school that lags in the adoption of Internet technology, the students know enough to emphasize that useful and thorough content beats flashy bells and whistles.
http://library.thinkquest.org/J001570/
The Thought for Today Quotation Archive
We immediately bookmarked this extraordinarily vast collection of quotes, secure in the knowledge that we would one day have to write a birthday card to someone we knew barely at all and therefore could just whack in a highbrow yet quietly amusing quote from one of these thorough collections. As well as invaluable links to 14 other collections which you can often search by subject, author or word, this site shows you how to find just what you're looking for, with a gallant approach to making your search easier. And you can feel secure in the knowledge that if you want a quote from an American president (and don't we all now and then?), they've got that too.http://webpages.ainet.com/gosner/quotationsarch/
Content aggregators are hot because they're useful and often more focused than portals and directories. One fine example, Xrefer, cross-references encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauruses, and books of quotations. Content providers include Bloomsbury, Macmillan, Market House, Oxford University Press, and Penguin. There seems to be a British influence, as you might gather from the results of a search on "lawyer". The reference engine expands your search terms when you submit a query - search on a topic, and you get results from one source with links to related topics at other sources. You can use an asterisk as a wildcard - a big advantage. Many entries are prefaced by, or linked to, quotations by cultural figures. Lovers of crossword puzzles may go nuts here. Teachers, librarians, editors, and barristers will also find much of interest.
http://www.xrefer.com/
Stumble across more than one awful Web site, and you know planning site construction is essential. AllAboutYourOwnWebsite.com provides commonsensical, plain-English overviews of design, requirements analysis, domain name and host selection, development, promotion, and management. Much of the content resides on linked sites, but the Arizona consultants who maintain this site have nicely organized it to help you evaluate options and compare choices. For example, a table of WYSIWYG editors lists the cost of each and links to reviews. For most, the best time to visit will be during site gestation. We like the focus on type of site, such as "Personal, Family and Special Occasion", "Hobbyist and Special Interest," and "Small Business". A page covers the advantages and disadvantages of database backends and multimedia enhancement with examples and guidelines. A pulldown menu links to additional references such as Web software and tools, color charts, and legal concerns (contracts, copyrights, patents trademarks, court forms). Those who have never started a Web site and even those who have can benefit from the resources available.
http://www.allaboutyourownwebsite.com/
Cool Web Analysis Tools for the Rest of Us
What's really going on when you type that URL into your browser? Rex Swain has put together a site that can show you. Who knew, for example, that connecting to Amazon.com actually shoots you through three pages (setting cookies all the way) before you're finally presented with the user interface screen? There's more. You can find out what's being used on the server (Apache 1.3.4, anyone?) of your choice. The site's not bulletproof - it times out after ten seconds, so we had to try some page tests several times before they took and yielded data. One other thing: Rex's probes don't function on secured servers. We can live with that; it's a great tool, and provided free of charge.http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html
ONLINE TRAVEL
Forget Survivor. You want real life drama? Put a laptop and some digital cameras in the camp of the team attempting to climb K2's North Ridge. That's what MountainZone.com has done. Follow the team's progress along the treacherous route and hear about their daily toils in the best part of the site, Dispatches. In it, the eloquent climbers wax philosophical on the intrusion of other people into the silent life on the mountain via their laptops and phones. Perhaps the humbling lethal combination of the mountain and the simple water molecule creates this sort of cathartic journalism. We don't really care what brings it about; it's all good. In the process, the mountain's death toll sort of puts eating rats into perspective.http://www.mountainzone.com/climbing/2000/k2/index.html
Venice has been called the most beautiful city in the world. Among its canals, outlying islands, and museums, it contains more art and history per square foot than practically anywhere else on Earth. In Venice Today looks at this city through the eyes of a native, with a charmingly unpolished photo tour from water taxi level and a guide to several of the city's more famous museums. Unfortunately, the most compelling page, Curiousity, is sparse, but you can explore Dolce Vita and find out which pub serves the best single malt whisky. A site worth checking back with once everything is operational, and a city worth visiting.
http://www.invenicetoday.com/
We know you already have the McClure, Penn. Bean Soup Festival in your PalmPilot, but if you'd gone to the Hidden America site, you could have planned ahead for Uff-Da Day in Rutland, N.D. instead of just hearing about it from your friends. Sections of this Web site include a wonderful list of unusual festivals and events across the country, regional roadside food, and inns that haven't made it to most of the guide books yet. Once you get hooked on a particular back road, you can book tickets, car rentals, and hotels through the Tour Center, or buy a fresh lobster, a mug from the International Bowling Museum, and a CD of cowboy music from their Village Shops section. By the way, there's still time to register for next year's Polar Ice Cap Golf Tournament in Grand Haven, Mich.
http://hiddenamerica.com/
With the 2000 Olympics just a triple jump away, all eyes are turning to Australia. If you miss the Games, you can plan a trip later with help from Auinfo and its collection of excellent and irresistible interactive maps. You'll need to be accurate with your mouse cursor to navigate the plethora of pop-up menus embedded in the map of each state and major city. You can find information by way of the onsite search, but the explosive maps - bound to exasperate some - are clearly the way for the coordinated to go if you like to explore online or have a particular destination in mind. You won't find encyclopedic detail here; this travel site is a brochure, to be sure, but more engaging than most on the Web. Auinfo will help you discover places that you'll either want to research further or add right away to your itinerary.
http://www.auinfo.com/
If cast iron balcony railings make you wistfully sniff for the scent of cafe au lait on the warm breeze or the phrase "French Quarter" doesn't bring to mind images of the latest issue from the US Mint, the Web site for the Historic New Orleans Collection just may interest you. The site caters to scholars. It keeps them up to date on local exhibitions and events via the calendar and tells them how to access the manuscripts held by the Williams Research Center. However, even those of us who are amateurs can enjoy many of the features. For instance, a QuickTime VR panorama lets visitors look around the courtyard of the 18th century Merieult House. It's like a quick trip to New Orleans - minus the hurricane, both meteorological and alcoholical.
http://www.hnoc.org/
All You Ever Wanted to Know About Shevington Vale
Shevington Vale comprises a group of villages in rural Lancashire in northwest England. The site is intended mostly for the locals, with up-to-date maps, public transport schedules, and community calendars. Locals, too, will probably have the most to gain from the chat areas and local discussion forums. Each village offers its own set of resources. The extensive myths and legends page and the photo gallery give outsiders a good feel for this almost too quaint and charming region. The comprehensive news resources include local village news, UK business news, UK political news, UK medical news, Irish news, Euro 2000 news, soccer news, cricket news, and, of course, the mandatory-on-the-Web offbeat news. If you live in a region that can boast a Web site so extensively useful, count yourself lucky.http://www.shevingtonvale.co.uk/
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
Turn Your Phone Number into E-Mail
This is pretty good for free e-mail. Once you sign up, anyone knowing your phone number has a working e-mail address for you. You're encouraged to autoforward your phonenumber@phone.net address to your most often read e-mail address. This idea's a winner.http://www.phone.net/
Turn Your License Plate into E-Mail
Your license plate number becomes your username at this free e-mail site. If everyone used this service, you could e-mail folks you run into on the road. There are a lot of ifs here, and so-so service, but it's a cute idea, and who knows....http://www.bumpertag.com/
Bored with static Web pages? Drop by this listing of chat events, live webcasts (concerts, lectures, you name it), and video streaming sites. Updated almost around the clock, the listing of events can placate any addict's need to watch and chat about webcasts galore.
http://www.live-at.com/
Imitation Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery?
At Caricature Play Net, you can slap around political leaders or use their online star flipbook to guess who the donated the sperm for Jodie Foster's kid. Most of these require Javascript, Java, or Flash to work, so visit after you've had your browser tuned up.http://www.caricatureplay.net/
SOFTWARE
A new major revision of the other open source Linux has been released. Significant changes include security enhancements, significantly better IPv6 support, and a raft of user program enhancement, the most notable of which is support for USB. Download, install, and play.FreeBSD: http://www.freebsd.org/
Release Notes: ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/4.1-RELEASE/RELNOTES.TXT