|
Home Subscriptions Netsurfer Science E-Zine Netsurfer Education E-Zine Netsurfer Books E-Zine |
| TheBurglar.com |
| Cyber-Capitalism vs. the Neolithic |
| Spam Blacklist Organization MAPS Sued Again |
| You, Too, Can Be a Photointelligence Analyst |
| Snuffing out the Sims |
| Film Review Site with Ambition |
| Anybody Got a Spare Fermion Exciter? |
| Is It Real or Is It Legend? |
| The Origins of Words and Their Changing Usage |
| The Journal of Young Scientists |
| Science and Reference for Kids |
| PHP 4.03 Released |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
BREAKING SURF
Every year, tension mounts among contenders for the world's most prestigious awards, awarded in memory of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel. The winners of this year's prizes - literature, physics, chemistry, economics, physiology or medicine, and peace - have now been announced. Go to the Nobel Web site to find out not only who won but why, as the site and links do a great job of explaining just why the various selection committees voted the way they did. Wow your friends! Impress strangers with your knowledge! The site provides good background on the winners and discoveries, and you can look at both news releases and webcasts of the announcement of most awards. Links to the Nobel lectures are promised as well. Penetrating a little deeper, you'll discover links to further reading and advanced information in PDF format. This is a well-organized one-stop shop for Nobel things.http://www.nobel.se/announcement/2000/index.html
Every year, tension mounts among contenders for the world's least harmful awards, awarded for achievements that "cannot or should not be reproduced". The winners of this year's prizes - psychology, literature, biology, physics, chemistry, economics, medicine, computer science, peace - have now been announced. Go to the IgNobel Web site to find out not only who won but why, as the site and links do a great job of explaining just why the various selection committees voted the way they did. Wow your friends! Impress strangers with your knowledge! The site provides good background on the winners and discoveries, and you can look at both news articles and webcasts of the awards. Links to the IgNobel lectures are unfortunately lacking. Penetrating a little deeper, you'll discover links to further reading and advanced information in HTML format. This is a well-organized one-stop shop for IgNobel things.
http://www.improb.com/ig/ig-top.html
Yet another network for the trading of files on the Net has sprung up. The startup Mojo Nation seeks to address one of the major problems with trading networks such as Gnutella. Most people don't reciprocate trade, but only download files. Thus, network costs and responsibilities fall disproportionately on those who do offer files. In the Mojo vision, traders earn currency called - you guessed it - mojo, that essentially buys downloads. The more you offer, the more you can download. The system, designed by former Yahoo employee Jim McCoy, is in the beta testing stage. Salon has an in-depth article about the site and an interview with McCoy. Recent coverage from Salon and Slashdot has apparently overloaded some of Mojo Nation's servers; take that into account when you test their software.
Story: http://www.salon.com/tech/view/2000/10/09/mojo_nation/index.html
Mojo Nation: http://www.mojonation.net/
Draft International Treaty on Cybercrime
The Council of Europe has just released the second revision of a proposed international treaty on cybercrime. David Banisar of SecurityFocus has a blistering review of the proposed treaty and notes that none of the extensive feedback based on the original draft made it into this version. The proposed treaty - Banisar calls it "a monstrosity" - reveals a rabidly authoritarian world view in which anyone who runs a computer network would be forced to install Carnivore-like eavesdropping facilities for the convenience of the government. Nasty stuff indeed, and deserving of wide circulation as an example of where the legal winds are blowing.Treaty: http://conventions.coe.int/treaty/EN/projets/projets.htm
David: http://www.securityfocus.com/templates/article.html?id=98
Rarely stopping and never taking his skis off, on October 7, Slovenian Davo Karnicar became the first man to ski Mount Everest. It took his team four days to reach the summit and it took Davo five hours to ski there at 29,028 feet to base camp at 17,000 feet. The Extreme Ski Everest site that covered the achievement hosts movies of Davos adventure, pictures, interviews, and Everest lore. Davo's first attempt in 1996 failed and cost him two fingers to frostbite. This time, he dodged breaking ice and the frozen body of an unidentified climber to emerge unscathed. Davo, a ski instructor, has already skied Mont Blanc and Annapurna in the Himalayas.
Extreme Ski Everest: http://www.everest.simobil.si/
Davo: http://www.slo-sport.org/vs/DKarnicar_e.html
US Picks New Encryption Standard
Rijndael (pronounced Rine-doll) is meant to replace the aging DES encryption standard. The Rijndael standard evolved out of a three-year encryption competition which saw an international cryptographic community effort to attack a variety of possible algorithms. Rijndael wound up the winner with a good balance of security and low computational cost. You can expect a lot of commercial users to adopt this new standard, particularly in the financial sector. Details about the algorithm are available on the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) home page.Rijndael: http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/g00-176.htm
AES: http://csrc.nist.gov/encryption/aes/
Salon has re-launched MP3Lit.com, acquired earlier this year, as Salon Audio, where you'll find everything audio that Salon has to offer. The noisy stuff includes weekly audio columns, book and DVD reviews, a program called "The Word", readings from hundreds of authors, interviews, and more. Indeed, it would be a challenge not to find something interesting here, so eclectic and creative is the subject matter. So, tune in with RealAudio or an MP3 player and listen up. If you're not sure just how to listen to audio files and are too embarrassed to ask, a link way down at the bottom of the page leads to a helpful how-to. Of course, you get typical, frank, uninhibited Salon stuff here, folks, so if you dont fancy the occasional #!$%, or if it grates more on the ear than on the eye, you might just choose to mosey on elsewhere.
http://www.salon.com/audio/index.html
The Cassini spacecraft, on its long, clever, celestial mechanical journey through space, will make its closest approach to Jupiter at 10.03:38.6 GMT December 30, 2000. It's already snapping pictures as part of this millennium flyby of the giant planet, a couple of which are now available here (the latest color picture is a beauty) with more to be added as NASA receives and processes them. The older Galileo spacecraft is already snooping about the area, but Cassini, launched October 15, 1997, is headed much farther, to an orbital rendezvous with Saturn. Watch the journey unfold here. If it's not reasonable to expect a replay of the stunning wonders that the Voyager spacecraft revealed about the solar system, there are bound to be new details and some surprises in store for this mission. Educators might be interested in the opportunity for lesson plans related to the flyby - see the Education link for details.
Cassini: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/jupiterflyby/
The NASA Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE), a solar research satellite, has been sending back fantastic images of our star. TRACE produces high spatial and temporal resolution images of coronal loops on the surface of the sun and has captured arches of super-hot gas in images of unprecedented clarity. NASA has posted the images, along with movies, animations, and complete mission information for TRACE. The movies are especially impressive.
http://vestige.lmsal.com/TRACE/
Dunno if you caught that Hillary Clinton/Rick Lazio debate Oct. 8 (we were too busy cleaning our toes that night). In a debate to help decide which candidate will occupy a New York seat in the Senate, the moderator relayed a question from a viewer that asked the two how they feel about federal bill 602-P, which allows the US Congress to levy a five-cent surcharge on all e-mail messages. Now, you and I know that bill's an urban legend, but apparently the three of them on TV did not. Even each campaign's spin doctors, ready to pounce on every nuance of their opponent with an e-mail campaign as the debate went on, failed to point out that 602-P doesn't exist. The New York Times has more details, which it'll trade for registration.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/09/technology/09SPAM.html
NewsML: New XML Standard for Markup of News Stories
NewsML v1.0 has been officially approved by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC). NewsML is an XML-based standard for all aspects of multimedia news creation, storage, and delivery. Everything a recipient might need to know about the content of the provided news can be included in NewsML's structure. This is of interest to webmasters who must deal with generating or receiving news feeds. A number of high-profile news organizations have declared their intention to start using this standard to send out news.Press release: http://www.iptc.org/IPTCNewsMLPR.htm
NewsML: http://www.iptc.org/NMLIntro.htm
IPTC: http://www.iptc.org/
CERT has adopted a new policy about disclosing security problems. In the past, the widely followed security alert organization has generally not disclosed security problems until fixes have been made available. Under the new policy, CERT will disclose problems 45 days after it hears of a security hole whether the hole has been fixed or not. Security experts are divided philosophically on how to approach disclosure. One camp feels that disclosing details of security holes simply encourages widespread attacks. Another camp feels that early disclosure is the best way to force vendors to issue rapid fixes. In this case, CERT seems to be taking middle ground, allowing vendors some time to fix their software before sounding the alarm. CERT's policy change may be moot, since most security exploits are frequently openly discussed in forums such as SecurityFocus as soon as they are found.
CERT: http://www.cert.org/faq/vuldisclosurepolicy.html
SecurityFocus: http://www.securityfocus.com/
Now that the investment world has returned to traditional concepts like assets and value, what's the mood of Silicon Valley, the epicenter of the technological goldrush? According to the Economist, post-correction Silicon Valley is faster, still venture-capital rich, expensive, and under intense pressure from its burgeoning wealth. A reasonably accurate portrait of our own Netsurfer back yard.
http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=387664
ONLINE CULTURE
One of the promises politicians make of the Internet is that it brings people together. Indeed it does, though sometimes in a weird, monkey's paw kind of way. In one case, TheBurglar.com brings together victims of robbery with the people who have their property. A user can register as a victim or as the euphemistically alluring "finder/buyer". The anonymous "finders" register for free, while the victims pay $5.95 for the privilege of looking for their stuff. Insurance companies can browse listings of missing property by specific geographic areas. There's one eensy-weensy fly in the ointment - the service deals with the exchange of stolen goods, and so may be illegal. The Register has some background on the site, which has recently expanded from the US and Denmark into the UK.TheBurglar: http://theburglar.com/default_frame.htm
Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/1/13875.html
Monkey's paw: http://www.gate.net/~madonia/monkeypa.htm
Cyber-Capitalism vs. the Neolithic
The primitive Yanomami tribe of the Amazon is the victim of cybersquatting and they're not happy about it. A Florida woman has offered to sell Yanomami.com to the tribe for $25,000. The .org, .net and .br (Brasil) versions of the Yanomami domain names are also held by unaffiliated organizations. A non-profit group which supports the tribe has been contacting the domain name holders to get them to donate the domains to the tribe. If nothing else, this story illustrates just how deeply awareness of the Internet has penetrated to even the most primitive cultures on our planet.http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,39354,00.html
Spam Blacklist Organization MAPS Sued Again
This is the third lawsuit to be brought against the Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS) recently. MAPS is a blacklist of domains which generate spam. Numerous ISPs and other organizations block mail from domains on the MAPS list, so it is a big deal. Over the last several months, lawsuits and threats of lawsuits have been flung at the organization. A Merc story details the latest. MAPS claims it is no more than a consumer review that simply renders an opinion about the spamming domains, an opinion fully protected by the First Amendment. The suing companies generally try to claim defamation in these lawsuits, and a trial would go a long way to resolving the legal status of MAPS. An important legal battle worth watching.MAPS: http://www.mail-abuse.org/
Merc: http://www.mercurycenter.com/svtech/news/indepth/docs/maps101300.htm
THREAD WATCH
You, Too, Can Be a Photointelligence Analyst
The ol' Thread Watch section has been moribund lately, but we found two great Usenet threads recently. This first one uses a Terraserver picture in lieu of a bona fide reconnaissance photo - it's an overview of USAF Plant 42 (Palmdale Airport, Calif.), which at the time of the snapshot (1994) hosted several USAF machines. The thread asked readers to take a look and try to pick out all the aircraft on a TerraServer map, which zooms to one-meter resolution. You'll be able to find SR-71s, B-1 bombers, and even a B-2 or two, among others. Look in rec.aviation.military and search for "Photointelligence". Or use Deja. Or do it yourself at the map linked below.http://terraserver.microsoft.com/image.asp?S=13&T=1&X=250&Y=2394&Z=11&W=2
Remember norns? That original concept - of nurturing virtual beings - seems to have been assimilated Borg-style by Maxis in their game, The Sims. Really, who talks about norns anymore? In NSD 4.22, we mentioned those who wished to play cruel gods, torturing their norns for the heck of it. Not surprisingly, despite a new game, people still feel the need to treat their pet people - uh, aren't they called dolls? - like Job, or worse. A recent thread in comp.sys.mac.games.strategic hosts a discussion of those who want to off their Sims. You really ought to read it for the comedy, even if you have no interest in playing house. By the way, the only two reliable ways to snuff a Sim are to put it in a cell without food or to remove the ladders from the steep-walled pool while it's swimming.
The Sims: http://thesims.ea.com/index.phtml
NSD 4.22: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/v04/nsd.04.22.html#OC1#OC1
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Film Review Site with Ambition
Movie reviews help you decide which movies to see and which to avoid. While many review sites capitalize on celebrity status or literary excellence, CinemaReview.com emphasizes service: interactivity, based on weekly exit polls at movie theaters; and customization for informed decision making. For example, movies receive ratings by moviegoer age and sex. You can browse predefined movie lists or build custom searches. Custom searches ask you to choose between three levels of detail of elements such as profanity, drugs and alcohol, and comedy. You probably won't get this much detail from your local newspaper or TV station. CinemaReview.com offers other rarities such as production notes, multiple pull-down search options, and references to movies' receptions at film festivals. The site wants "to become a major player in the future 'video on demand' service" and plans to distribute a print publication at theaters and to video renters. Ambitious, but we're impressed by what is here already.http://www.cinemareview.com/
Anybody Got a Spare Fermion Exciter?
From the hypothesis that you never know when you'll need a good Gravitron Detector springs the company Complete Fabrications, serving all your space-time continuum manipulation needs. This marvelous tongue-in-cheek site purports to offer ritual objects that assist scientists in their pursuit of quantum physics. Be sure to mouse over all eight, since each has a variety of views available. For a taste of the humor, the Quantum Flask has the following disclaimer: "Opening this device will release high energy quanta, which when freed from containment will decay into lower energy particles with an attendant release of radiation." Don't you just hate it when that happens?http://www.peconic.net/members/mjaffe/default.htm
BOOKS & E-ZINES
|
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.
|
The Salon.Com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors
Programming Windows Security
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earthhttp://www.bbspot.com/
Great Expectations Met at This Dickens Site
Want to talk to Charles Dickens about social reform? You can, sort of. You can ask an expert on the famous writer, or explore Dickens's London with an interactive map. Speaking of Victorian London, Dickens biographer Peter Ackroyd said, "If a late 20th-century person were suddenly to find himself in a tavern or house of the period, he would be literally sick - sick with the smells, sick with the food, sick with the atmosphere around him." (Thank god for vanilla air freshener.) From the gruesomeness of the city ("Until the second half of the 19th century London residents were still drinking water from the very same portions of the Thames that the sewers were discharging into") to his journalism and writing career, all of Dickens's cultural influences and influential achievements can be found at this site. Check out Chuck.http://www.fidnet.com/~dap1955/dickens/index.html
We were so thrilled about the butt-squeezing exercise that we thought we'd share it with everyone. This book says "practicing bowel movement 6 times and constricting the anus 100 times daily enables a 70 years old man make ** three times in succession without drawing out and to grow 20 years younger with a beautiful light in his abdomen." We enjoyed the erratic censorship as well as author Hiroyuki Nishigaki's enthusiasm for his cures. "How to Goodbye Depression" is his second book should provide anyone with interest in the subject all they need to know about whether his book will address the particular problem they have.
http://hometown.aol.com/nishigaki3/index.htm
E-Zine from the Longest Undefended Border in the World
The Log Cabin Chronicles don't have anything to do with those gay Republicans, but everything to do with living outside the confines of the Big City, any Big City. Reaching out from the wilds of southern Quebec, John Mahoney and Jane Goyette present, among other things, the tale of "Bill Gardyne and His Knives", the pleasures of grits and bird-spotting, and the three-year-old ongoing serial called "Hell's Elongated Bells". Along their five-year Internet journey they've attracted writers like Peter Black, David Square, and Karen Eryou, who write about everything from obscure laws in Quebec to fresh asparagus. Like a country cousin of Dave Egger's McSweeney's, the writing is sharp and just sometimes-off-center enough to keep you interested.http://www.tomifobia.com/
If you're not into computer security, you should be. The pundits refer to Al Gore's invention as the Information Superhighway and if you don't think computer security is important to you, you're road pizza waiting to happen. Counterpane's founders quickly came to the conclusion that there is no cure for idiocy. In any corporate setting, users will invariably find ways to circumvent security. So they moved to a risk-management strategy involving real-time monitoring and rapid response. "The minds of cops and criminals are similar," says one founder. "You can't teach that mentality." True enough. And who better to safeguard your systems than one with an eye on how to break into them? Here's the e-zine.
http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram.html
The Online Club for the Avid Reader
By joining ClubReading, not only will you have access to the latest reviews of books by readers but you can also join discussions about books online and set up your own reading list that others can browse and use themselves. We joined and read reviews of latest releases and discovered that the latest in a favorite series is a fizzer (poor editing) and that not everyone loves Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" as much as some of us do. Well shucks, we know it's toxic - that's part of the joke.... Anyway, a worthwhile venture that needs some tweaks in terms of layout.http://www.clubreading.com/
SURFING SCIENCE
The Web is the bane of the gullible. It's so easy to create and spread convincing tales that are totally untrue that the Web is soon going to be shut down by their sheer mass (not really, but we swear by hyperbole). The W3C, the real Web authority, has even said so (hmm, maybe it's not so hyperbolic). We know because we got an e-mail warning us of exactly that and asking us to pass the warning on to 25 friends (ah, definitely true then). About.Com is a gathering of informed opinion and fact sorted by subject and tied together. Their Urban Legends section is filled with well-researched and written tales of net hoaxes and true urban legends (e.g., the baby crocs in NYC sewers, not to mention bill 602-P). The site search engine makes searching easy and effective, and the extensive links to further information provide a wonderful opportunity to waste lots of time. The only drawback is the site doesn't always have the latest and greatest. For example, the first potato server isn't listed yet.http://urbanlegends.about.com/science/urbanlegends/
The Origins of Words and Their Changing Usage
English. Ya gotta love it. What other language would tolerate words like synecdoche and metonymy, especially when they mean almost the same thing? Where else could the tongue trippingly trip over a perfectly good word like hebesphenomegacorona (an irregular solid figure with 21 faces), but find "lagniappe" in the name of a restaurant? Go visit the World Wide Words site if you're a crossword puzzle fan, a follower of William Safire, or you really need to know the difference between hoo-ha and brouhaha and the derivation of "Fat lady sings, it ain't over till". Word histories and curiosities galore, along with a weekly newsletter. We'll meet you after for a facemail session and a game of dwile flonking.http://www.worldwidewords.org/
The Journal of Young Scientists
The Journal of Young Scientists (JoYS) is an ambitious undertaking - an online 'zine aimed at the 15 to 25-year-old crowd with the intent of making science mainstream. The editors believe that science is not something you study in a sterile white lab coat in pursuit of an occupation; it's a lifestyle. They intend to make this a worldwide movement, with correspondents from Togo, the Czech Republic, and Zambia, just to name a few. JoYS's first big deviation from "normal" Web pages is the horizontally scrolling layout, but with a readership skewed to early adopters, we don't believe it'll be a problem. We wish the table of contents were clickable, and we're not entirely sure why the site is password protected. With articles about genetically engineered produce and one entitled "How to Land on Mars in Six Steps, Just in Case the Autonomous Onboard Software Fails You - Print This Page and Keep It with You at All Times", it's easy to see why this could be a catchy little concept.http://joysnet.com/
Science and Reference for Kids
We went straight to Major Disasters and Accidents, behind the World link, and discovered that since 1976, there have been 13 destructive major oil spills. We cruised through for some homework help, settled gravely in the Math section and snuck into Fresh Baked Fractions before romping around with Fraction Jackson, the resident puppy, and making our way through a few quizzes on the way (all the time noting how beer has killed our brain cells).http://www.factmonster.com/
SOFTWARE
The new version of the popular Web programming tool includes security-oriented fixes and enhancements, other new features, and bug fixes. The authors strongly urge users to upgrade to this release. Details, as usual, on the Web site.http://www.php.net/downloads.php