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BREAKING SURF
To be honest, we're glued to CNN. We go room to room, clicking the channel on TV sets and calling up the Web page on monitors. We're not going to give an opinion on the debate over vote recounts in Florida and elsewhere, but we will point you to a couple of top-notch statistical analysis sites that try to take an objective perspective. The best analysis we've seen, "Voting Irregularities in Palm Beach County", comes from a coalition of political scientists and concludes that the Palm Beach County voting pattern supports the contention that people mistakenly voted Reform instead of Democrat. This being a political topic, it has quickly fertilized many new Web sites, some funny, some hurtful. The best of the new crop comes from an old source, the Onion. Our own opinions on this matter will be limited to wondering how a significant segment of Florida's 97,000 Nader voters (say, more or less 1,000 of them) can deal with this.Analysis: http://elections.fas.harvard.edu/
Onion: http://www.theonion.com/
Is Vote-Auction satire? A crass attempt to buy and sell votes? Twisted humor? Whichever, lawyer bait it certainly also is, and five state attorneys-general are gunning for it, with more champing at the bit. "But wait," cries Harvey Grossman of the American Civil Liberties Union. "We're just exercising free speech here, folks, let's not get in a lather." Austrian investor Hans Bernhard, who took over Vote-Auction from its American creator, is threatening to sue the Geneva-based Internet Council of Registrars for shutting down his site November 1, a shutdown apparently motivated by fear of circling US legal vultures. Bernhard calls the site digital legal art, showing he certainly hasn't lost his sense of humor. Humor always was a dangerous thing, likely to turn on the humorist at any moment, especially when the powerful feel their hide pricked. Bernhard points out that the real people buying and selling votes run for office.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,40092,00.html
Netscape 6 Officially Released
AOL has finally released this long awaited version of the Netscape browser that's based on open source code. The beta versions, riddled with rather serious bugs, have not been kindly received and recent criticism of the software has claimed it's not as compliant with standards as it ought to be. Nevertheless, Netscape remains the only clear competition to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. This release is available for PC, Mac, and Linux. You can take a tour and download the software with these links. Give it a try, but don't delete your older versions just yet.Tour: http://www.netscape.com/browsers/6/
Download: http://home.netscape.com/download/
A new tab on Amazon's Books page leads to a brand new store for the online retail giant. The E-Books store has about 1,000 titles, all of them in Microsoft Reader format. No doubt curious hackers are working hard on cracking the program's encryption, at least in part to punish Microsoft for not providing the software for Linux platforms. To introduce readers to Microsoft Reader, Amazon is offering selected free book downloads, mostly old classics with lapsed copyright available for years as freeware text from Project Gutenberg. However, those willing to shell out a few bucks can choose from a much larger selection of recent works. Cool trivia: Project Gutenberg has a copy of all the chromosome ATGC sequences from the Human Genome Project.
Amazon E-Books: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/497642/
Project Gutenberg: http://promo.net/pg/
Yahoo Launches Short Film Search Engine
Not resting on its laurels, Yahoo has launched a short-film search engine. The company is collecting content information from a number of online movie sites, including AtomFilms, FilmFilm, Hypnotic, Icebox, and Ifilm. The search engine won't be limited to well known Web sites - a link lets you submit information about your own short movies. The home page has links to several featured films which rotate periodically, and the inevitable e-commerce link where you can buy movies on video or DVD. You can also browse the films by category. No, there is no "adult" section.http://movies.yahoo.com/shorts/
Complicated, obtuse, arcane: not the US presidential election but the rules and regulations covering webcasting in the US. Multiple billing agencies, intricate play restrictions, and expensive copyrights to purchase are some of the hoops as documented on the DNA Lounge site. While the technology is fairly straightforward, webcasting looks to be anything but simple from a legal perspective. The page also has a good collection of links to relevant information sources. What's the DNA Lounge? Well, a retired-by-30 dotcom millionaire needs to do something with his money, and Jamie Zawinski (Netscape employee number 20) is using his to refurbish a San Francisco nightclub.
Webcasting: http://www.dnalounge.com/webcasting.html
Jamie: http://www.jwz.org/
San Francisco-based Quova has been busily scanning some 4.2 billion IP addresses into a vast Internet map. Later this year, it'll offer its GeoPoint service to advertisers who wish to target their online messages by location of Internet users. Other companies, including Digital Island, Digital Envoy, and DoubleClick, already offer similar locator technology. While none of these companies intends to link users with individual addresses (so far), geotracking raises several concerns. Is making it easy to find out where people live a good thing or is it inherently dangerous? Is it really in consumers' best interests to let companies know where they live and how they shop? Locator technology might even allow regulators and censors in a given country to erect national fences that block access to the wide-open global Internet pasture. In their quest for commercial success, innovators such as Quova might be putting more than the bottom line at risk. CNET reviews the issues.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-3424168.html
International Cybercrime Treaty Revised, or Not?
The Council of Europe (CoE), an international human rights group, has redrafted its proposal for the world's first cybercrime treaty in response to a groundswell of international opposition. The CoE had not even posted the treaty online until the document had gone through 21 versions and a maze of bureaucracy. Once critics got hold of the text, they lashed out at it as being a slap in the face of human rights and a blueprint for granting police state powers to governments. So far, the revisions seem to be limited to an effort to clarify passages, to turn lawyer-speak into common language. That bodes ill for advocates who want to change the nature of the treaty. Reuters has more.Reuters: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20001113/wr/internet_treaty_dc_1.html
CoE: http://www.coe.int/
An Analysis of ICANN's Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy
The study with the above title also goes by the less informative but more tabloidal "Rough Justice". In it, Milton Mueller, professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, takes on ICANN's Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDNDRP). The procedures outlined in the policy are meant to help resolve disputes over domain name ownership. Unfortunately, as this study proves, it's not that simple. The study looked at 2,166 proceedings involving 3,938 domain names that have been resolved under the policy. A third of all cases end with default victories as one party not showing up, and 98% of the time that's the defendant. Challengers can submit cases to any of a few dispute resolution service providers, effectively shopping for the friendliest venue. The study suggests solutions for the problems with the current system, such as allowing registrars, not challengers, to choose the venue. It's a good study of a major piece of Net governance.Study: http://dcc.syr.edu/roughjustice.htm
UDNDRP: http://www.icann.org/udrp/udrp-policy-24oct99.htm
Following its brazen challenge to hackers, SDMI, a consortium of companies trying to develop secure digital technology for music, has fudged the results to proclaim that not all of the watermarks systems under scrutiny were hacked after all. Sure watermarks have been removed, but the sound quality isnt up to snuff in two of three cases, it claims. It all sounds terribly vague. Indeed, according to this report by Janelle Brown in Salon, SDMI's claims aren't terribly convincing and many in the industry are skeptical that anyone has yet developed a system secure enough to settle the nerves of copyright nervous nellies. Hackers, techies, lawyers, and PR folk can relax; there's lots of work still. And if you haven't been paying attention to this story, but want further reading, Salon has links to earlier stages of the story.
http://www.salon.com/tech/log/2000/11/08/sdmi_tests/index.html
Evidence is starting to surface and confessions have been forthcoming about a much loathed online practice: spamming. ISPs have usually taken the high road, threatening to end service to any suspected spammers. Now, some ISPs are reluctantly admitting to signing contracts with spammers that, in effect, allow them to ply their trade. PSINet has admitted to signing an addendum, or pink contract, with a spamming outfit that allows them to operate outside PSINet's standard no-spam policy. Cajunnet, the spam company in question, plans to pump out up to 20 million unsolicited e-mails a day. In a related story, AT&T has also been caught with its spam showing as a contract that firm signed with another spam outfit came to light. CNET has more.
PSINet: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-3417237.html
AT&T: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-3369773.html
Non-Roman Text Domain Name Registration Begins
You can now register a domain name that uses a non-Roman alphabet. Japanese, Chinese, and Korean alphabets are the first languages to break the Roman alphbet/Arabic numeral hegemony. Domain names, followed by top-level domains (.com, .net, etc.), appear as native language characters. The potential market is huge, but this is just a test-bed project for now. As multilingual standards have yet to be established by the the Internet Engineering Task Force, changes to the rules and regulations are likely. Verisign has posted the tecnical details.Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,40091,00.html
Verisign: http://verisign-grs.com/multilingual/techinfo.html
ONLINE CULTURE
Access to School Web Log Files
An important court decision in New Hampshire turns school Web log files into public documents. A plaintiff suing local school districts wanted to see what the students and staff were viewing on the Web. The court ruled that the logs could be released to the plaintiff based on local freedom of information (FOI) laws. The court rather sensibly noted that the log files must first be purged of any personal identifiers, such as log-ins and passwords. In the court's opinion, this easily accomplished scrubbing of private information made it possible to make the log files public under the FOI laws. Newsbytes has a good summary, while the New York Times (NYT) has an extensive article about the case and its implications.Newsbytes: http://www.newsbytes.com/news/00/157754.html
NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/10/technology/10CYBERLAW.html
If this story proves anything, it's that people will go to great lengths to gossip - even when they know they're being watched. The Washington Post reports that CIA employees participated in a covert internal chat room - in fact, probably a bulletin board - which ran undetected for many years on the CIA computing network. The group selectively invited members to participate, and excluded upper-level management. The group succeeded despite the fact that all managers at the CIA run keystroke monitoring programs on their employees' machines. That such a private network could run for so long undetected, even in such a controlled environment as the CIA systems, spells trouble for any party that wants to control the spread of information on the Net.
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64444-2000Nov11.html
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The Darwin Awards: Evolution in Action
The Ladies of Rylstone Calendar 2001: January-December 2001
Jane Austen: The Complete Novels
GladiatorSURFING SITES
A visit to Florence will have an impact on you, whether from the exemplary food or the seemingly boundless supply of art. Among the art, you can view examples of the work of Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci learned how to work with oils there, a skill which came to great fruition in his later years. A new site, Leonardo da Vinci: The Man and the Inventor, will let you learn both about the man and his imagination. More than 300 examples of his work go beyond just single images. "Adoration of the Magi", one of his works on display at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, comes not only as a main image but with detailed close-ups and an excellent accompanying text that gives you insight into its creation. Attention to detail, along with interesting stories both about the art and the artist, will give the art enthusiast and the passing visitor alike a wondrous insight into one of history's most creative minds.http://www.loadstar.prometeus.net/leonardo/
If you're familiar with "vaastu shilpa shastra" or "jyotish", you'll find a comforting home at the Mystic India site. If you've somehow vaguely heard of yoga or the Kama Sutra and you want to learn more, this is a good place to expand your knowledge into unusual and time-honored avenues. Looking at everything from architecture to sex, the site claims to "bring back the lost ancient sciences... with modern scientific reasoning support." The mystic Indian way puts a layer of beauty and reason on top of the chaos of life, acknowledging both, and the product is at the very least artistic. The various pages are nicely put together, even if they do tend to get jargon-heavy at times, but even with the dense language, the section telling the story of enlightenment called the Gita is pure poetry and worth the visit by itself.
http://www.mysticindia.com/
A visit to Ohwejagehka: Ha`degaenage is a trip into the song traditions of the Iroquois of Ontario and Wisconsin, aboriginal social customs that are in danger of being lost. Despite a dwindling number of native speakers - there are less than 300 fluent speakers remaining, and almost all of those are older than 60 - the ancient languages of the Six Nations have found a home on the Internet, and more power to them. Pages feature RealAudio recordings of songs like the Duck Dance, the Old Moccasin Dance, and Sharpened Stick, and instructions for dance step styles, along with a brief pronunciation guide for some commonplace words. Fans of "world music" should sample this North American world while they seek out the exotic.
http://www.ohwejagehka.com/
We try to keep up with the news. We sit in front of the TV every night and we try to pay attention. We really do. But it can be so boring, especially on those non-news days that seem all too frequent. And the newscasters are so blah. NakedNews.com has the solution, at least for some viewers. Complete news is available around the clock, viewable with either RealVideo or the Windows Media Player. Select your personal newsreader and listen to clips covering your choice of national news, international news, sports, weather, or business. The quality of the news reports equals that of the typical portal. Your female newsreader starts out fully clothed... a situation that rapidly changes.
http://www.nakednews.com/
In case you've forgotten, there is a plan in place, one we covered in NSD 3.33, but one that has a new URL and a whole new facade. We're talking about the plan by a couple of well-endowed cartoon Canadian generals to take over the world. If you're male, 14 to 15, you might want to download the images of the generals in their suggestive poses for your wallpaper. Probably the most interesting part of this site is its forum. The site is full of self-deprecating and passively aggressive humor and Canadians we've talked with seem to think the place is hysterically funny, much more so than Americans. Perhaps the folks in the States are a bit more staid. They have other, more serious issues with which to concern themselves, like why seven-year-olds can figure out how to use a "butterfly ballot" while adults in Palm Beach County are clueless.
http://www.standonguard.com/
Can he do it? In a year? Portland resident Jeffrey Michael Ottem is trying to make a $1 million in a year. His site, How I Tried To Make a Million Dollars in One Year, tracks his ongoing quest. He started with $465 on June 11, 2000: "Every crazy idea, every hatched plan, every get rich quick scheme I can think of will pass these pages." Day 2: "Marketing strategy? I'm a poet. What do I know about marketing strategy? I'll learn." And so it goes. Ottem has a Web design business, and on this site, he asks site visitors for donations. He ponders lotteries and game shows but spends a lot of time taking walks, reading, writing about lost love and karma and Zen, and sending out his resume. His version of the American dream seems an exercise in frustration. Day 73: "I said fuck about a thousand times today." This poor guy has little or no chance of reaching his goal in a lifetime, never mind a year. That's why someone in Hollywood is probably glued to his site, getting a rags-to-riches script ready for Disney or CBS. Our suggested title: "Revenge of the Diarist."
http://hometown.aol.com/nothngfool/onemilliondollars/million.html
There's something unique about the British sensibility that allows Brits to honor the past while embracing the future. Look at the Millennium Dome - well, maybe that's not a good example. This site, however, is. Gathering a group of business forecasters, scientists, and "futurologists" (how do you get that job?), 21stcentury.co.uk (get a better name, people) offers the greatest and soon-to-be latest breakthroughs in cars, technology, fashion (if wearable computers can be called fashion), and society with dry succinctness. Brief bios fill in the uninitiated on who's hot in the new era - brush up on your Freud and Picasso, they're big again - and where else can you hear about personal robots and the Honda Spocket at the same time? It's Popular Electronics for Generation Z.
http://www.21stcentury.co.uk/
Mindless Drivel and Twisted Thoughts
If you've been following the US elections, you've probably noticed that it's been a sort of free association thing this time around: Bush wins! No, Gore! No, Bush! No, now we have to do recounts! We won't know for weeks! This site does a much better job of free association than the national media has. Probably because it's apolitical. This guy just does his own rants, and they're generally way more interesting than the US political process. Ever wondered why you sometimes wake up with creases all over your face? He's got a theory, and it doesn't involve wrinkled pillows. Sleep masks: who uses them and why? Unless you're humor-impaired, this is worth a visit.http://pages.prodigy.net/jschla/index.htm
OK, so the Kitchen Design site shills for a cabinet manufacturer and Home Depot. That doesn't mean that remodeling a kitchen isn't a pain in the butt. Before you mock, walk a mile in our chipped Formica, splintered countertop, mismeasured-by-one-lousy-inch shoes. It takes a lot of measuring to use the kitchen planner, and a whole lot of pages, so you might think it would be easier to just slap something up... and you'd be wrong. Face it, carpenter wannabes, you need help, and here it is. The finished project gives full dimensions (and model numbers of Mill's Pride cabinets) that you can take to your favorite Home Depot for ordering. There's also a closet design section in case you get really ambitious. Gratuitous product placement at no charge.
http://www.millspride.com/mills/kitchendesign/index.htm
ONLINE TRAVEL
National Parks of the American Southwest
National Parks of the Southwest might be the best personal travel guide we've yet seen. Thumbnail photos on its portal-like home page grabbed us right away. The superb photo galleries are noteworthy achievements, with about 1,500 landscapes and nature photos, many of which would make great postcards (such as "Picture of Sedona Sunrise"), and many of which are credited to site creator Justin Gould of Bath, England. Maps abound. Some are GIFs, others PDFs, and some are interactive. Want detail? In sector D2 of the Guadalupe Mountains National Park Interactive Grid Map (in New Mexico Maps), we found a highway intersection marked "Gate locked at night". All in all, this is a wonderful resource for motorists, bikers, hikers, campers, and wilderness lovers, and a terrific example for graphic designers. Gould has included guides to national parks in the Canadian Rockies, England, and Wales. He also has posted 216 images for desktop wallpaper, free for personal use. Outstanding!http://www.swparks.com/
Aaron Paulson, former English teacher in Korea, one-time writer for Salon's doomed Wanderlust section, and ex-pat Canadian, writes about his travails teaching English to people who speak languages he doesn't understand in countries he doesn't know. Too bad his site, Exit Booted, doesn't have more original on-site material, but the links do lead to his own writings elsewhere. The "pictures" link leads nowhere at all. Still, Paulson writes well about his experiences in Korea and his current status as a gaijin ("foreign devil") in Japan, and his essay about the curiously Japanese recreation of mountain stream hiking - in the stream - is evocative enough to make you realize how miserable and thrilling an endeavor it really must be.
http://www.exitbooted.com/
Some urban signs acquire landmark status. Others we remember for personal reasons. The Minneapolis Sign Project is a slideshow of 12 color photographs of outdoor signs in, yes, Minneapolis that lean toward middle Americana: a "Better Health through Better Plumbing" banner on a warehouse wall; a "Grain Belt Beer" billboard; a "Prepare to Meet Thy God" church invitation; and other signs familiar to Minneapolis photographer and writer Jason Kottke. His modest but well designed personal album indicates an awareness that out-of-towners are likely to recognize the gritty universality, and occasional pathos or mystery, of brick, rust, rock, neon, and manmade skyline.
http://web.0sil8.com/
A Study of Online Airfare Prices
If you live in one of this survey's 10 selected US cities and you wish to fly to another of those 10 cities or an additional four cities, this site might help you easily find the lowest fare. Then again, it might not. Be sure to check the airline's own sites for site-only specials. This discount airfare site uses eight major travel search engines. If you're leaving from a city not used in the survey or heading for a city not covered, you're still not out of luck. You could buy the complete survey, which will likely cover your trip, for only $2450. Right. The value here is the methodology. Study it. Enough detail is provided so that you can, with some effort, actually find the best price for any city pair.http://travel.simplyquick.com/discount-airfares/survey1000.html
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
If you think your vote really counts, visit the Dynamic Polls site. They currently offer over 10,000 ongoing polls on a wide range of subjects. After you vote, you get instant feedback and graphic results. There's potential here, but voter turnout needs to increase.http://www.dynamicpolls.com/
Truth in Stuff, for Young Males
"TruthInStuff.com however, is merely the irritable mental gestures of a group of bored idealists with a new web design program." That pretty much says it all. The overriding impression is that of college-agers, mostly male, in search of identity and place. Good place to stop by for a dose of old-fashioned angst.http://www.truthinstuff.com/
Whether you're in beautiful Ireland, or just wish you lived there, you can stay up-to-date on the latest Irish Boxing News online. Not to be too focused, the new site locally run in Ireland also pays attention to major boxing happenings around the world.
http://www.irishboxingnews.com/
New Search Engine Features New Features
The pearl you seek, that pearl and your pearl alone, is quietly buried beneath the vast sands of the Internet. Other guides will speak of locations by the thousands, of pearls and peas and swirls, but none are like that pearl, your pearl alone. Only qbSearch can lead you to your pearl in the sand.http://qbsearch.com/
Around the world, many free Internet Service Providers (ISPs) let you avoid excessive expense while traveling through cyberspace. FreeIspSearch works as a go-between for planning suitable Internet connectivity when you journey away from home.
http://www.freeispsearch.com/
SOFTWARE
Numerous Web sites these days power their operations with open-source infrastructure software. For serious database applications, the open source world splits in a friendly rivalry between PostgreSQL and MySQL, with MySQL enjoying an edge in popularity. The rivalry pushes a happy arms race as each programming team works to make its database software better. So which database is "better"? Leaving aside any task-specific definition of "better", this article will help you make an informed decision. The piece follows up an earlier review of the two databases written by Tim Perdue, who administers the database back-end that powers the popular SourceForge Web site. Tim freshens his review with the latest revisions of each database. Good reading for database admins who seek the latest info on serious open-source database applications.Review: http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim20001112.php3
PostgreSQL: http://www.postgresql.org/
MySQL: http://www.mysql.com/
Finding the Latest Greatest Mac Stuff
If you're the kind of person who actually uses version 1.0 of new software, you need to know when updates are issued as soon as possible. Waiting for updates to find you means unnecessary crashes and even data loss. It's not by accident that the current version tables in magazines and on the Web are among the most used and popular areas. Automating the checking procedure and then actually updating your software is vital regular maintenance. Knowing the current version number is nice; actually getting and using it is much nicer. This program requires more work on your part than the for-pay update notification and delivery services, but it also can access the widest range of update report sites, and, of course, it's free. What more do you want?http://vse-online.com/update-finder/index.html