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| Voices from the Hellmouth Resurrected |
| Claim Your Place on Earth |
| Tate Galleries, Real and Self-Mocking |
| Stanley's Personal Art Expo |
| Bomber Girl and Pin-Up Art |
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| E-Liturgical Readings |
| Great Moments in Penguin Science |
| It's a Dangerous World |
| The Open-Source Project of 1900: Flight |
| Eco Maps of Urban Areas |
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| New Version of Freenet |
| A Blast from the Past |
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BREAKING SURF
How the Presidential Election Really Works
Given the level of political awareness in the world, we're willing to bet that most Americans who vote for President this week have no clue that they are not directly electing a candidate. The real presidential election takes place when the members of the electoral college, chosen on the basis of the popular vote, cast their votes in December. How does the electoral college work? How did it come to be? Is it a good or bad thing for democracy and can we back it up with some solid math? It turns out that the mathematics of the electoral college ensure that the closer an election, the more a candidate needs your individual vote, and the more power you have. The system also makes it much harder for a small faction to take over the presidency. Even if you're sick of election coverage, take the time to read and understand this Feed article, which explains how the college works, who the electors are, how they feel about it, and the surprising advantages of a system which many have tried to change over the years. Other good resources include EC, the US Electoral College Web Zine, and a reprint of a 1996 article from Discover that EC has posted.Feed: http://www.feedmag.com/essay/es416_master.html
EC: http://www.avagara.com/e_c/
Reprint: http://www.avagara.com/e_c/reference/00012001.htm
Mideast Hacking and the Spillover Effect
The recent unrest in the Middle East has led to the now routine extension of conflict into cyberspace. While we'd expect hackers on either side to target each others' sites, this conflict is probably the first time online attacks have been aimed at third parties. Pro-Palestinian hackers tried to penetrate US telecom company Lucent just days after the FBI warned that the US sites could get sucked into the hacker battles. The real long-term question for such combatants is whether attacking third parties that do business with the enemy is an effective strategy. While at this point most of those attacks are little more than nuisances to sophisticated online entities, that can change. This series of articles covers the story to date.Attacks: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,39766,00.html
More Attacks: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-3374569.html
Lucent: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-3368676.html
FBI Warning: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-3359667.html
What We Learned from the Dotcom Fiasco
This Fortune cover story provides a thoughtful and thorough business analysis of the late, lamented Internet start-up boom. This series of articles details the numerous business lessons to be learned from the dotcom boom and bust. It also includes sections on the tarnished reputation of venture capitalists - calling them "fallen idols" - and fund managers who invested in the Net companies. You can also find a series of interviews with dotcom refugees, people who survived the whole frenzied business cycle - some prospering, some not. Anyone interested in the business of the Net needs to read this first-rate analysis. After you're done with the serious bits, head over to Modern Humorist for some related humorous relief.Fortune: http://www.fortune.com/fortune/2000/10/30/dot.html
Modern Humorist: http://www.modernhumorist.com/mh/0010/dotcom/
The headline writes itself.... The financial analysis site TheStreet.com went public last year to the tune of $109 million. Since then, its stock has slid from about $60 to below $5 with little prospect of future gains. This SF Gate article details the woes which have beset TheStreet's publishing business: writers who left for more traditional publications; competition; low ad revenue; and high costs. It is an absorbing business case study and a typical example of a dotcom going south. All is not gloom and doom at TheStreet, however, as it still has over $90 million in the bank and continues to pull in money from subscriptions. The challenge is to rein in costs and attract eyeballs. A good, in-depth article. 3104.DTL
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/11/02/BU33104.DTL
The initial story broke in the media last week detailing what could be a devastating security breach at Microsoft. While the company did not release details of the break-in, a spokesman admitted that their network was possibly cracked by a Trojan horse program and an employee's home machine. It's possible that some of Microsoft's core operating system and Office code residing on the internal network was changed by the crackers, but Microsoft says this was not the case. Given the international flavor of the break-in - sniffed passwords were e-mailed to Russia - Microsoft called in the FBI. On the other hand, at least one pundit - Robert X. Cringely - thinks the intruder is a Microsoft insider and that the company called in the feds to scare straight its employees.
CNet: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-201-3311366-0.html
MSNBC: http://www.msnbc.com/news/482011.asp
Cringely: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20001102.html
MathWorld Closed over Copyright Dispute
The MathWorld Web site was the "life work" of Eric Weisstein and an invaluable resource for seekers of mathematical knowledge on the Web. When we first reviewed the site, it boasted 8,974 entries, 153,958 cross-references, 3,639 figures, 62 animated graphics, and 917 Java applets. Somewhere along the way, Eric agreed to turn out a book for CRC Press based on the Web site. The book became a bestseller (on the math bestseller list...) and the Web site continued to prosper, absorbing numerous additions from the math community. Wolfram Research, publishers of Mathematica, the definitive math software, took an interest in the MathWorld site and agreed to host it. CRC saw dollars floating away on the cybersea and sued Eric and Wolfram for copyright infringement, alleging that the Web site infringed on its copyright as transferred by Eric in his author contract. As a result, a one-of-a-kind online mathematical resource has been shut down by court order, pending a trial. An excellent summary of the whole story and a lucid snapshot of copyright law can be found in the judicial order granting the preliminary injunction to shut down the site. Other documents about the case can be found at what's left of MathWorld.Mathworld: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/
Court Order: http://www.ilcd.uscourts.gov/00-2262.pdf
This technically lucid explanation of a little-known trick with cookies explains how Microsoft's MSN network tracks your comings and goings between its sites. Cookies were designed so that they would only surrender information to the particular Web sites that set them. Despite the privacy-friendly design, some clever cross-domain programming makes it possible to share information, such as a unique user identification, across domains. Thus, Microsoft can track your comings and goings across its many sites and many domains. This is not a new trick - it's been used by ad companies for some time - but this page clearly explains how this is done. The method also allows the technically adept to pass data from browser to a third domain with no notice whatsoever to the user. Finally, and here's the kicker, this behavior violates the "Trusted Zone" settings of Microsoft's own Internet Explorer.
http://www.pc-help.org/privacy/ms_guid.htm
For four days starting November 15, the Planet Project will poll the world. The poll will contain multiple questions on topics ranging from the thought-provoking to the entertaining, focused on your beliefs, hopes, fears, similarities and differences. You can choose to answer 20 questions in any or all of eight subject modules. If you answer the questions, you can compare your perspective with the gloabl community. While we're not so naive as to believe the whole world will be sampled accurately, the project is taking pains to reach a least a few people without Net access. Pollsters equipped with mobile computers and transmitters will penetrate some of the most remote corners of the globe, from the jungles of the Amazon and Papua New Guinea to severely low-tech urban areas. Rick Smolan, creator of the "Day in the Life" books and "24 Hours in Cyberspace", is directing the project, which leads us to believe it just might be more than a whim.
http://www.planetproject.com/
So there's like this online movie that gets a lot of press for its Hollywood quality special effects pulled off on a home computer system for almost no money, see? Millions download it. It's an OK movie and all, for what is essentially a joke with a lame punchline - but the special effects rock. And no wonder. The filmmakers happen to work for a digital effects company, and they happened to use their employer's million-dollar video editing suite to make the film. It's not quite the home-computer-conquers-all story it seemed to be. But don't lose heart. Roger Ebert interviewed the filmmakers and concludes that while the movie wasn't a home project, it could have been one. And he means that in a good way. Take a look.
Movie: http://www.405themovie.com/
Ebert: http://www.suntimes.com/output/eb-feature/lead01.html
We've always cheerfully admitted that we enjoy the occasional bit of baksheesh from publicity-seeking Web sites. So it was with some interest and a bit of avarice that we opened a huge box bearing the logo of Fruits.com which showed up in our snailmail. Lo and behold, the box contained a gigantic fruit basket loaded to the brim with exotic produce and decadent confections. Frankly, the exotic parcel - including not just one, but two pineapples and a foreboding pineapple carving tool, to boot - registered quite high on our list of all time great bribes. It ranks right up there with free copies of Quake and the middle finger rubber stamp kit. So it is with bloated delight that we give you Fruits.com, true masters of the delicate art of PR bribery.
http://www.fruits.com/
Talk about metajournalism. We're running this story about Wired running a story about a story that will appear in an upcoming issue of an academic journal that isn't even online. Why? Hey, who isn't interested in sex in space? The Wired article summarizes the various truths and fictions about astronauts and sex in space: alleged plans for a sex film on Mir; orbital adultery; porn in space; NASA training facilities used for, ahem, informal experiments; and NASA's politically difficult position on the issue. Wired's subject is an upcoming piece in a serious print journal called Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly. Wired based its article on an interview with the editor. Despite Wired's attempt to tease out the truth, when you come down to it, hard facts are difficult to sort from slippery rumors, at least one of which originated in a parody of a Shuttle experiment.
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,39977,00.html
Quest: http://www.spacebusiness.com/quest/
Parody: http://www.bayview.com/~hermit/funny/parody/space_sex.html
The CERN Large Electron Positron Collider is set to be dismantled for an upgrade. But in the waning days of its current existence scientists have been working feverishly to solidify what may be a truly profound discovery. The Collider's detectors have shown hints of the elusive Higgs boson particle, a bit which scientists believe gives matter its mass. Such a discovery would be a huge step forward in physics and understandably the CERN scientists are reluctant to shut down the collider before they bag the Higgs particle prize. The sticking point, of course, is money. It would cost huge amounts of cash to run the machine for another year, never mind paying off all those contractors who are standing by to tear it down. The LA Times has a lucid article that explains not only the effort to keep the collider running but also the Higgs particle and what its discovery means.
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/science/lat_higgs001103.htm
Readers following the saga of the FBI's Carnivore e-mail sniffing software will be interested in this illuminating article. The story details the evolution of the program and its predecessors. It seems that Carnivore is not the first Net eavesdropping program used by the government. The report is based on 600 pages of FBI documents obtained under the Freedom of Information act and reveals that Carnivore had at least two predecessors, one of which remains classified. The article also notes the FBI's effort to develop tools to bug Internet-based, voice-over-IP telephone calls.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/477749.asp
World's Top 500 Supercomputers
The aptly named TOP500 just released a list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world in advance of the SC2000 supercomputer science conference. A recent machine from IBM with 8,192 processors and a building to house them tops the list. The machine is part of the Department of Energy's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) program to model nuclear weapons explosions. IBM has really been pushing their supercomputing technology, and accounts for five of the top ten machines on the list. ASCI machines hold the first four positions on the list, which means that weapons design still drives supercomputing technology over 50 years after it developed in the cauldron of WWII. Read the Trends page for some more illuminating statistics. The SC2000 site has the huge number of technical papers being presented at the conference, great reading for the technically inclined.TOP500: http://www.top500.org/lists/2000/11/
SC2000: http://www.sc2000.org/
Latest Netcraft Web Server Survey
Netcraft has been collecting information about the marketshare of Web server software since 1995. This latest survey of 22,282,727 sites continues to show the dominance of Apache, with 59.67% market share. Microsoft is second with 20.17%, followed by iPlanet (the old Netscape server) at 6.92%. A relatively new addition to Netcraft's data base is information on site uptimes. So far the site with the longest uptime found by Netcraft is www.charite.de, which has not been rebooted in two-and-a-half years. The survey site offers lots of other interesting statistics, too.http://www.netcraft.com/survey/
This new Web site contains a searchable database of crime statistics on US college campuses. The colleges are required by law to collect this data. The page is a nice straightforward tool for researching the school you attend or which your kids plan on attending.
http://www.ope.ed.gov/security/
ONLINE CULTURE
The Evolution of Democracy in the Age of the Internet
By the time you get this item, probably after the US elections, the main thrust of the story may be moot. However there's a deeper, Net-related aspect still worth noting. In the waning days of the election campaign, a number of Web sites sprang up to advocate for the trading of votes for strategic reasons. Basically, Nader voters in swing states pledged their votes for Gore. Gore voters in secure Gore and Bush states in turn pledged their votes for Nader. In this way, supporters of the Democrats and Greens ensure that Bush loses to Gore while Nader retains his 5% of the vote, and the subsequent windfall of Federal matching funds for his Green Party in the next election. Predictably, the first reflex of government when faced with something so new was to question its legality. However, after the ACLU got involved on the side of free speech, government lawyers backed off. The larger issue illustrated by this story, and by the VoteAuction.com saga we've reported on in previous issues, is that when voters have access to frictionless communication with each other, the basic lynchpin of democracy, the vote, morphs into a very different beast than envisioned by past philosophers. Give it some thought.VoteSwap2000: http://www.voteswap2000.com/
NaderTrader: http://www.nadertrader.com/
ACLU: http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/nb/nb3.htm
You may not have heard of the Blitzkrieg anti-virus server protection, and even if you have, you probably don't understand it. Blitzkrieg, which first surfaced in 1998, is supposed to sit on a network, resting in a quantum physics state such that it appears to be just random noise as it protects its charges from hackers by taking out any offender's machine in an anticipatory strike. Analysts and skeptics would love to take a look at Blitzkrieg's "stealthy intelligent mobile agents", but its inventor, Larry Wood, has never presented any concrete evidence of their existence. It seems like Larry wouldn't be able to keep going with what seems to be a con, but Uri Geller had a nice long run with less impressive trickery. Into this story steps Rob Rosenberger, computer virus expert and skeptic extraordinaire, who plays James Randi to Larry's Uri. Rob has written a detailed report that picks apart the story, bone by bone. You can download it from his page at the URL below. Weirdly fascinating and fascinatingly weird.
Larry: http://www.fvg.com/
Rob: http://vmyths.com/rant.cfm?id=213&page=4
James: http://www.randi.org/
Voices from the Hellmouth Resurrected
In the aftermath of the Littleton, Colo. high school massacre, Slashdot ran a series of editorials by Jon Katz entitled "Voices from the Hellmouth" (see NSD 5.14). The articles hit a nerve and generated lively discussion threads that detailed the horrors of high school existence suffered particularly by the kind of self-identified geeks who read Slashdot. The overwhelming response had led Slashdot to decide to package the articles and threads in book form. That decision, however, has sparked an outcry on Slashdot over the appropriation of other people's words by a commercial project. Slashdot demurred and asked as many original thread posters as they could for permission to use their words. No one refused, making a mockery of the original outcry yet establishing proper procedure. Nevertheless, Slashdot has decided to wait on publishing a hard copy, and for now plans to put the edited work online. This is the first installment of that edited work, an important document of geek culture and an indictment of the educational system's tyranny of conformity. Essential reading.Voices: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/10/23/1521250&mode=thread
NSD 5.14: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/v05/nsd.05.14.html#TW1#TW1
Mapplanet.com is an ambitious idea. It divides the world into hexagons, which it naturally enough calls "squares". Registered users can claim any unoccupied square, and fill it with an icon and any information they want to add. The claims can contain links to other Web pages and can be searched on both content and keywords. The site's developers have seeded the base map with some basic city and town icons to help you find your way around. We love the theory and the tools and maps seem more than adequate, but the user-added content, so far, consists primarily of ad links or puerile comments. The site also is extremely unfriendly to all but users of recent versions of Windows, as many useful features only work in Windows. It could have been so nice. Maybe it will be one day.
http://www.mapplanet.com/
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Tate Galleries, Real and Self-Mocking
A prestigious British museum that has been in existence for more than 100 years, making fun of itself? It's either a refreshing change or a sign of the Apocalypse. The Web site of the Tate galleries is artfully put together, with a searchable database of 12,000 images in five languages, yet we find it odd that a museum which champions video doesn't offer any online. The other site, artist Graham Harwood's commissioned "Mongrel" Tate, offers versions of famed artworks with a heaping side-dish of social commentary - a J.M.W. Turner portrait of the Thames covered in mud, for example. Even after some judicious pre-launch changes dictated by the real Tate, the parody retains a sometimes funny look at art and a sometimes scathing diatribe on liberalism and elitism in which it calls museums places where "bodies, constantly under surveillance, could be rendered docile through exposure to Gainsborough, Turner and Hogarth, instead of the jailer's whip and bludgeon." Remember, it's not humor, it's art.Tate: http://www.tate.org.uk/
Mongrel Tate: http://www.tate.org.uk/webart/mongrel/home/default.htm
Stanley Tomshinsky is an Italian artist by way of New York and Paris. Moving from wire-frame sculptures and stabiles in the '60s, to canvas in the '70s and '80s, and to computer manipulated imagery in the '90s, Tomshinsky plays with materials and number relationships with surprising ease. His Web site is a retrospective of work in all media, with downloadable commentary. Most pleasing - and which, by the way, make great desktop wallpaper - are the Analogies acrylics that look like dream islands rising from a hypothetical sea. The chronological progression of canvas images to computer-drawn pieces is an interesting study in how art works and adapts to new forms.
http://www.galactica.it/on_the_way/
A pretty, half-naked girl with ordnance between her legs on the nose of a bomber seems to have enduring symbolic power in the annals of 20th century western combat. Bomber nose art has also taken the form of animal faces, cartoon characters, and other frightening monster-like images. The Bomber Girl site collects great examples of aviation and pin-up art from World War II through the Gulf War. You don't get much history of the genre or any reflections on its meaning and origins, but links to aviation clubs are chock full of detailed accounts of many military outfits. Aviators, historians, artists, and cheesecake lovers will get an eyeful.
http://www.bombergirl.com/
Pop culture heroes such as Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, and Muhammad Ali provide the inspiration for most of Rick Cowan's drawings, which have been exhibited at many respected galleries and garnered several awards along the way. Cowan himself is a musician and a filmmaker. His Web site is part of the growing international ElectronicCottage Gallery Web ring, which displays arts and crafts for sale by the creators themselves.
http://www.rickcowan.net/
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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Hacking Exposed, 2nd Edition
The Prometheus Deception
The Fountains of Youth
High Noon: The Inside Story of Scott McNealyhttp://www.dadmag.com/
The Catholic Daily E-Pistle e-mails subscribers daily liturgical readings, plus some additional features. One day you might get a short biography of a Christian martyr of late antiquity; on another, you'd get a pithy quote from a great Catholic writer such as Theresa of Avila or Thomas Aquinas. The Intention of the Day feature appears to petition prayer and compassionate meditation for difficult challenges and situations of public interest - without a political agenda that we could discern. Scriptural readings are taken from the New American Bible.
http://www.catholic-forum.com/e-pistle_subscribe.html
SURFING SCIENCE
Great Moments in Penguin Science
Do penguins really fall over backwards when they watch aircraft fly overhead? Granted, the image is goofy - as is the fact that some British flyboys will buzz crowds of penguins to see if they topple over - but if you squint hard enough, you'll actually see some scientific merit to the study noted in this BBC story. The scientists want to determine how aircraft traffic patterns affect penguin rookeries. The work should lead to reasonable guidelines for air traffic above South Georgia Island that would minimize impact on the local wildlife. Why do we even bother covering this story? Picture, if you will, thousands of penguins inexorably toppling backwards in perfect domino synchrony....http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1002000/1002958.stm
Talk about poisonous plants and animals, and you're sure to attract kids. Poisonous Plants and Animals has much to fascinate and educate grown-ups, too, what with great photographs and prose. Think danger. Use. Beauty. Fear. Think encyclopedia. Now, let us tire of writing coherent articles and instead just drop keywords to indicate the astonishing mirror that this site holds up to nature. Plants: mandrake, buttercup, foxglove, hemlock, poppy, potato, tobacco, coca. Animals: snakes, jellyfish, stingray, poison dart frogs, snakes, gila monster, snakes. Insects: ants, black widow, Spanish fly, tarantula, termites, wasps. In addition to background on each species, this site has a nice, short introduction to toxicology, trivia, a simple but elegant interactive flower puzzle, and a Citations and References page on which the site designers acknowledge the many sources of their well-chosen materials. Bet you didn't know scorpions can go 500 days without eating. Most never drink water. OK, maybe you did. But just in case, they're here.
http://library.thinkquest.org/C007974/
The Open-Source Project of 1900: Flight
In 1900, Octave Chanute asked the Wright brothers for details of their inventions for publication in a magazine article he was writing on the airplane. Wilbur Wright responded in detail, and with total openness. Chanute and Wright wrote back and forth for the next three or so years. Much of their fascinating correspondence survives. This site reproduces the text and also has images of relevant sketches and other documents. The interplay of thoughts and ideas is fascinating, as is Wilbur's openness and willingness to see his concepts used by anyone at all. This certainly predates Unix. The exchanges sometimes lean to the highly technical, but they remain literate and often witty. "This is a magnificent showing, provided that you do not plow the ground with your noses." Chanute to Wright, Nov. 29, 1900.http://hawaii.psychology.msstate.edu/invent/i/Wrights/library/Chanute_Wright_correspond/Chan-Wright-1900.html
What is the Green Map System? The Green Map site says it "is a globally connected, locally adaptable framework for community sustainability." If you can translate that into English, please write in. But don't be put off by the buzzwords and sociobabble here. Eco or green maps are specialized documents (not always traditional maps) that help people make best use of resources in an area. What resources each map covers is entirely the choice of the user/creators. They can be lists of public transit routes or of a regional library network. Typically, they give access to community resources that might otherwise not be found. Every local group develops such maps that meet their needs. As the number of locally created maps increases, they are gathered by larger local groups and made available to as many people as possible. The site has full instructions on how to join existing groups and how to start an eco map if there isn't one nearby.
http://www.greenmap.org/
Breast Health Network (BHN) endeavors to be a crossroads on the vast expanse of the Web. Unlike the hit-and-miss results of general search engines, BHN acts as a resource where people can search for and navigate to high-quality Web sites dedicated only to breast health and breast care. The free site comes from extensive referencing and research and includes a dedicated newswire covering the latest news on breast health and breast cancer issues. Each week, the Breast Health Network also selects an entry in their database for particular focus and a detailed description of what is offered by the site.
http://www.breasthealthnetwork.com/
SOFTWARE
Freenet version 0.3.4 has been unleashed. Freenet is a distributed information network tool, designed to distribute information efficiently and anonymously, thus thwarting the threat of censorship. By all accounts, this latest version is the most user-friendly yet, though you'll still need some smarts about installing Java on your machine. Works on Windows and Unix.http://freenetproject.org/
CORRECTIONS
Step into the Wayback Machine, Sherman, for today we are to visit Nov. 18, 1994 and the first non-beta issue of NSD, in which a writer described the mailing list of the Institute for Child Health Policy that promoted discussion of issues relevant to children with special health care needs. You can now join it by e-mailing mailto:cshcn-l-join@mchenet.ichp.edu .