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BREAKING SURF
You say ICANN, I say YouCANN - Let's Call the Whole Thing off
ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) isn't the only entity that provides your computer with information on how to get to a specific Web site - it just happens to be the biggest. Alternate root systems have been slowly growing over the past couple of years, using top-level domains (TLDs) like .biz, .chick, and .god. If you haven't configured your computer to track down those alternate strings, you get a DNS error or page not found when trying to access such sites. Now, ICANN has approved .biz for mainstream use and supporters of the alternate root systems aren't happy. No one is really sure how to resolve the issue. Wired has a slightly less confusing article, and YouCANN tells you how to use a nameserver that will let you access the underground TLDs.Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,40301,00.html
YouCANN: http://www.youcann.org/
Enigmatic Cloak and Dagger in the Sunday Times
Who's your favorite thriller author? If the Sunday Times jumps immediately to mind, then perhaps this isn't your cup of tea. But we don't read the Times all that much (at least, we haven't until now). For us, the tale of the theft of an Enigma machine from Bletchley Park, and the subterfuge used to recover the three vital rotors from the machine - well, it was simply too much. We had to follow the trail. Placing codewords in the personal columns of the Times, burying a video at a graveyard in central England, secret Internet pages, police actions - wow! This is a fascinating story of intrigue and deception; would that it continued, but the problem has been solved. Still very well worth checking out. The game was afoot, and one suspiciously reminiscent of dear Sherlock, at that.http://www.sunday-times.co.uk:80/news/pages/sti/2000/11/19/stinwenws02039.html
The Poe Challenge Solved, and a Yarn Well Told
In 1839, Edgar Allan Poe, noted proto-goth and crypto fan, published a cryptographic challenge in a magazine series. He took on and solved about 100 cryptographs sent in by readers. In 1840, a Mr. W. B. Tayler sent Poe a pair of cryptographs for which Poe never published a solution. Indeed, some suspect that Tayler and Poe were one and the same and that the author was having a bit of fun with his readers. The first of Tayler's cryptograms was solved in 1992 and Gil Broza of Toronto recently mastered the second. The solution page not only reveals how the cryptogram was solved but also looks into the motivation behind them and the still open question of who actually created them. Cool story.Challenge: http://www.bokler.com/eapoe.html
Solution: http://www.bokler.com/eapoe_challengesolution.html
If you subscribe to AOL, you don't have to worry, but if you're a freelance user of AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) you're vulnerable to having your username stolen. There is a restless sea of folk out there probing for product vulnerabilities and all too ready to hack and exploit them, and this is just another annoying example. The two AOL user sites that broke this news say pirates steal the usernames using a technique that's been known for many weeks. Alas, experience has shown that, in general, software companies and service providers do a poor job of providing tamper-proof products and services. Although it's fairly easy to secure this vulnerability - the MSNBC link tells you how - surely a server fix on AOL's part would be more efficient than requiring millions of individual users to fix their AIM registration name. MSNBC gives you the news plus the fix, while SecurityFocus provides a little more detail about the vulnerability and how it can be exploited.
MSNBC: http://www.msnbc.com/news/497064.asp
SecurityFocus: http://www.securityfocus.com/frames/?content=/templates/article.html?id=119
CIA Completes Chat Room Investigation
The CIA has taken disciplinary action against employees for maintaining and hiding from management a secret chat room in the organization's servers. The seven-month investigation looked into activities that began in the mid 1980s and involved 160 employees. The agency fired four employees, suspended ten, sent letters of reprimand to 18, and revoked the security clearances of nine contractors. At least 79 more employees have received warning letters. This has been the largest internal investigation in CIA history, which strikes us as odd. The Washington Post reports.Story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7159-2000Nov30.html
CIA: http://www.cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/press_release/pr11302000.html
Yahoo has added encryption capabilities to its free Web-based e-mail in partnership with a company called Zixit. You can access the service by clicking on the unobtrusive ZixMail icon near the bottom of the left margin of their Web e-mail interface. The mail is routed through Zixit's SecureDelivery.com service. The facility works, but there are limitations. Both you and the person who gets your e-mail must ensure secure links while reading the e-mail or encryption is pretty useless. Despite any limits, Yahoo is still the only major e-mail portal offering this service. This Yahoo news item has more details.
http://news.yahoo.com/h/cn/20001129/tc/yahoo_delivers_encrypted_email_1.html
Usually, companies that seek subpoenas to unmask anonymous online critics receive them almost automatically - but not this time. In a decision hailed by civil liberties groups, New Jersey Supreme Court Judge Kenneth C. MacKenzie recently turned down Dendrite International's request to force Yahoo to divulge the names of four people who had been anonymously posting online messages critical of the company's accounting practices. The judge told Dendrite to instead post notices at the same online message board to advise the anonymous posters of the company's legal action. Two of the message posters hired lawyers to contest any subpoena. The judge sided with the posters, finding that Dendrite had failed to show that it had been harmed by the messages. Privacy advocates are rejoicing at the precedent that seems to limit the routine legal unmasking of company critics who wish to keep their identity secret.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2659940,00.html
Hitler's Book: Yahoo in Trouble Again in Europe
First, Yahoo got slapped by a French judge, who ruled that Yahoo must block residents of France from accessing any Nazi memorabilia on Yahoo auctions, even ones hosted in the US (see NSD 6.40). Now, Germany is going after Yahoo Deutschland, an independent corporate affiliate of Yahoo. It is illegal to sell unedited copies of Hitler's "Mein Kampf" in Germany, and that is exactly what Yahoo Deutschland stands accused of - over the Internet. While Yahoo Deutschland is technically a German company and thus unambiguously under the jurisdiction of German law, this cautionary tale still bears on the complexities of cross-border business in intellectual property. Do note that it is not entirely illegal to sell "Mein Kampf" in Germany. The book can be sold provided it is edited to include explanations which place it in context of its history. Wired has the German story.Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,40430,00.html
NSD: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/nsd.06.40.html#BS2#BS2
One of the hot selling items this holiday season is TiVo, essentially a hopped up digital VCR. It's a slick little box with a processor (running Linux) and a hard drive. Every once in a while it calls out through a phone line to download a database of TV shows, then lets you do all sorts of creative VCR-like things, such as automatically recording all episodes of your favorite show or freeze-framing live TV - all with an interface that's much easier to use than a VCR. Naturally enough, the geeks of the world love the box and have started hacking it. First came extra hard drives to increase the recording capacity. Now some hackers have added an Ethernet interface so you can hook it up to a big network storage drive for a mega huge and mega cool video jukebox. Not for the faint of heart, the additions involve soldering and the risk of electrocution. But then, for many of us, old episodes of Gilligan's Island are worth it. CNet has the story.
TiVo: http://www.tivo.com/
CNET: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1278-210-3730437-1.html
Gilligan: http://bobdenver.com/index.html
PlayStation2 Technical Details
Sure it's selling like hotcakes, but how good is Sony's PS2? Is it really the ne plus ultra of gaming that Sony claims? Ah, well, you know us - always up to the challenge of answering toughies, or at least of leading you to the really clever folks that can. Alan Dang's the man in this case, with his lengthy, illustrated PlayStation2 Technical Overview, that lets you poke around under the hood and get your hands greasy with the dirty details. It's all here: the Emotion Engine; the Graphics Synthesizer; and more. Bottom line? Like all things technical, the PS2 trades off performance in order to deliver a cost-effective product in a competitive environment. Although it seems to have considerable potential on paper, in practice the machine may be more limited than Sony claims. Whether the trade-offs will soon prove limiting depends in part on the ability of designers to develop games that take advantage of the machine's strengths. Meanwhile, for a fascinating glimpse under the black plastic - well, you know what to do.http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardware/ps2tech/
Research on Kids, the Web, and Parents
Kids may be kids the world over, but parents aren't quite the same everywhere. So concludes market research company Ipsos-Reid in "The Face of the Web: Youth", a 16-country research study of over 10,000 Internet users aged 12-24. Seems that European parents, more relaxed about what their children look at than American parents, are much less likely to use filtering software. Of course, parents restrict the surfing of children aged 12-17 more than those 18-24, with access control most prevalent in the UK and the US. Europeans are more concerned about how long their kids spend online than Americans, not unexpected considering online time in Europe generally costs more and is charged per unit of time. The link takes you directly to a short summary of the results, and you can click on Media Release for a slightly longer PDF version of the study results.http://www.angusreid.com/media/content/displaypr.cfm?id_to_view=1117
Yahoo Pages Climbing Google Rankings
Eric Rumsey runs a fairly nice online directory (Hardin MD) of Internet health sources. For the last few months he's been running searches on Google to check his directory against the search engine results. After compiling all the data he noticed an interesting thing - Yahoo web pages have been steadily climbing in the results returned by Google over the past few months. Given that Google and Yahoo entered an alliance in June the natural question was whether Google was giving Yahoo pages priority in its rankings. Well, the data does not quite point to this since the raise in Yahoo page rankings began well before that. But what could account for the increased rankings? One possible explanation is that as the Google index grows it better reflects the link popularity of Yahoo pages - Google rankings are directly related to how many links are made to a page. Whatever the real reason this is an interesting little study which delves into the evolving nature of one of the most popular search engines. Worth reading.Study: http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/hardin/md/notes7.html
Hardin MD: http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/hardin/md/index.html
Google: http://www.google.com/
Financial analysts have lately begun to raise a collective eyebrow at Internet companies whose revenue comes mostly from advertising. Specifically, Yahoo and Doubleclick are in the doghouse. This CNET article points out an important story that has gone underreported in the media: the tanking online advertising market. Ad revenue in this specific arena peaked in 2000's first quarter and plummeted in the latter half of the year. Analysts attribute the trend not only to the failure of numerous dotcoms, but also to a cutback in online advertising from more traditional spenders. We find this story dear to our own hearts since our publications depend on advertising for revenue and we've experienced the reduction in ad spending first hand. While the long term outlook for online advertising is generally good, still this makes us wonder how many of you would actually pay to subscribe to NSD.... Say $20 a year?
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-3951678.html
EU Adopts Complicated Regulations for Online Commerce
In attempting to protect consumers who purchase goods and services online, the European Union Council of Ministers has approved a contentious regulation called Brussels I, which allows disputes over online civil and commercial transactions to be heard in the complainant's home country, regardless of the location of the offender's Web site. The EU intends to bolster consumer confidence in Web shopping, but critics charge that online retailers will now have to deal with 15 separate markets rather than one unified trading block. They point out that small to mid-sized retailers who cannot afford to have a legal presence in each country will suffer. Other critics point out that only lawyers will benefit from Brussels I, as Europe is already contemplating at least two other initiatives that deal with e-commerce dispute resolution, the Rome Convention and the Hague Conventionhttp://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,20526,00.html
RIAA Looks to Collect Royalties
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has established an agency to collect royalty payments from online radio stations and webcasters. It's called the SoundExchange. Despite support from a number of professional organizations, not everyone is happy with the new set-up. Even though the SoundExchange would have to adhere to the conventions outlined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, musician rights groups fear that the RIAA (backed primarily by Sony, EMI, Warner, BMG, and Universal) will not fairly reward artists. Add to the mix a number of other agencies already collecting royalty payments and independent artists who'd prefer to collect their own and the picture goes from complicated to confusing. Wired has details.Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,40359,00.html
SoundExchange: http://www.soundexchange.com/
When Pets.com closed its doors this month, the company did so in a fine style in keeping with its passionate pro-animal ethics. It seems that salmon runs in Alaska collapsed this season, a situation so grave that the Governor declared a state disaster. Thousands of sled dogs used by villagers for everyday tasks like hauling wood, checking traps, and travel were in danger of starving this winter. When Pets.com heard about the problem, it donated 21 tons of dog food to affected Alaskan villages. Various transport companies shipped the food at no charge. Other companies have since also donated food, and even the US Postal Service agreed to ship some of the stuff at rates cheaper then regular mail. Kudos to Pets.com for a pretty classy way to expire. Incidentally, the Pets.com URL has been purchased by PETsMART.com, which offers $10 off if you buy $25 worth of pet supplies accessible through the Web page.
Story: http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,40453,00.html
Pets.com: http://pets.com/
Latest Netsurfer Books and Netsurfer Science
If you've not been keeping up we have new issues of our other Netsurfer publications out. Check out the latest Netsurfer Books and Science issues for intellectual thrills galore.Books: http://www.netsurf.com/nsb/backiss.html
Science: http://www.netsurf.com/nss/backiss.html
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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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How to Cook Everything (with CD-ROM)
How to Write A .com Business Plan: The Internet Entrepreneur's Guide to Everything You Need to Know About Business Plans and Financing Options
Understanding the Linux KernelONLINE CULTURE
Leechnet: Napster of Porn No More
It was only a matter of time before somebody thought of dedicating a Napster-like service to porn. Probably the only reason it's taken so long for Leechnet to come of age was that there are so many other ways to get free porn on the Net. Why go to the bother of installing special software? Nevertheless, there's something to the idea because Leechnet is apparently the victim of its own success. The site - which never officially left beta - decided to "temporarily" shut down after being overwhelmed with traffic due to worldwide media attention. The message on the site says the owners want to sell the idea and technology to a suitable buyer in the adult industry. Wired has the story.Leechnet: http://www.leechnet.com/
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,40443,00.html
Grass Roots Wireless Networking
A good feature in Salon discusses the spontaneous rise of grass roots efforts to set up urban wireless networks. This free-network movement is hooking up city areas with widely available, low-cost, wireless Ethernet equipment. If you're in range of one of these antennas, you can take your laptop and a wireless network card and roam free at high speed. The technical limitations are still daunting and make the networks not always very useful, but the really interesting aspect of the story is the ethos of the free-whatever movement. People are doing this kind of development out of both the desire to tinker with technology and frustration with expensive and cumbersome big-corporate wireless "solutions". A big part of what makes this possible is also the low and lowering cost of the technology. Much as with the early experimental ISPs, there are likely fortunes to be made from this trend. Remember your Net history?http://salon.com/tech/feature/2000/12/01/wireless_ethernet/index.html
SURFING SITES
Monty Python and the Lego Grail
The unbeatable Black Knight challenges Arthur eagerly, gleefully ignoring the fact that his arm is now lying on the ground next to him. A three-headed guard suspiciously boasting the Shell Oil logo on his - uh, their chest screws up trying to keep Brave Sir Robin from passing, instead focusing solely on a good cup of tea. Crafted with the single most captivating toy/tool ever invented, this Lego-modeled version of stills from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" will equally captivate you. The Knights Who Say Ni and Tim the Enchanter are recreated with clever placement of their Lego players. Not to be upstaged, the vorpal rabbit also appears, in order to disprove any rumors that he's the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes on. Or so Tim the Enchanter is known to advise you, but what does he know? Rabbits aren't rodents....http://www.geocities.co.jp/Hollywood/9060/holye.html
Cute, Fluffy, Addictive Diversion/Subversion
Imagine a Web site that averages over four hours a visit, according to its press release. Hard to believe? Before you sign up to advertise, you should probably know that most of these visitors don't have a lot of disposable income... but their parents might. Yes, in a society where childhood passes in 30-minute, television-defined increments, NeoPets has figured out how to get kids to sit in front of another screen. At the site, visitors can adopt a critter, feed it, and play with it to make it happy - like an online tamagotchi. The site employs all sorts of schemes to get users to sign up for e-mail newsletters with sponsors, from selecting several checkboxes by default during registration to providing extra points to buy the pet toys after visiting a sponsor's site. The pet our reviewer adopted was a good little capitalist, responding, "This is great... buy me more toys!'" and "All the other pets have more toys than me."http://www.neopets.com/
OK, so Star Wars is big. And we've been to SF conventions and understand the excitement, but geez, there's some real private-investigation-style espionage going on in underground SF circles and they're not talking about crop circles. Here's everything you ever wanted to know about the Star Wars series, including merchandising, latest news, and some big, big spoilers. In fact, if you don't want to see the next film (and let's face it, "The Phantom Menace" wasn't exactly classy) then pop in here for a fix, and breathe easy knowing you're still hip to the Star Wars groove and too hip to pay money for what seems like frothy soap opera moved by the decisions of merchandising henchmen. Learn how the fans are deciding what the next action figures will be (Ellors Madak, if you want to know) and the latest gossip surrounding this incredibly secret second/fifth installment.
http://www.prequel-spoilers.com/
To some, the online phrase "web of lies" might seem redundant, and that's just the point at Dave's Web of Lies, where truth is merely a matter of opinion and they pass the savings on to you. Contributors include common wastrels along with celebrities - well, one celebrity, actor/author/aluminum siding salesman Stephen Fry, who posits that "Welshmen are allergic to pajamas" and apparently has nothing better to do. Other lies include "Pope John Paul II was formerly the lead singer of a Polish death-metal band" - which, frankly, we've always suspected. The searchable lie archive is said to contain more than 3,400 lies, but since we haven't the stamina to actually count, for all we know that may be a lie too. As the disclaimer says, "we cannot guarantee that our lies are not, in fact, true." Or the opposite.
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~hancockd/lies.htm
Trivial facts can keep us happy for hours. It lightens the load of all those danged heavy, sticky, old facts that make life so dull sometimes (tax has to be paid, you'll get a hangover if you drink too much bourbon, etc.). Here, you can lift those weary spirits with some weird things, indeed, such as one person's well backed-up suspicion that Stephen King is actually a writer called Bentley Little, or that the main street in "Back to the Future" is the same one in "Gremlins", or that the astronauts investigating the ship in "Alien" are wearing hockey gloves. We could go on but really, less is more.
http://www.triviastic.com/
Urban legends are not simply an American phenomenon. The Urban Legends Research Centre (note the spelling) is based in Australia. This complete site isn't much different from its American cousins, although its style and tone are more restrained than the average sensationalist urban legend site. The site specializes in urban legends and ghost legends. There's also decent coverage of urban beliefs and folklore in general. A Research Request form lets you check out that really great story you overheard privately so you don't make a fool of yourself in public. Urban and ghost legend coverage is quite complete and quite up-to-date. Finding the information you are looking for is easy, since the site is well designed and has excellent search and navigation tools. Yes, they even have the legend of the Florida 2000 Presidential vote.
http://www.ulrc.com.au/
Flushing out Toilets Down Under
At NSD, we like to follow up on hot topics in earlier issues. Plunging right in, we've flushed out the Web sites behind last issue's report on Australian toilets. One basis for that article is a site run the Disabilities Institute and Resource Center of South Australia (DIRCSA, motto: "When you've got to go you've got to go!"). There's a complete list of public conveniences and useful lists of resources for people with all kinds of disabilities in southern Australia and Tasmania. The Toilet Page concentrates on a broader range of issues. It reviews Australian public toilets in complete and tasteful detail, has links to other toilet-related pages (there are a lot of them, no surprise to many of you), and offers a fascinating discussion of what a good public toilet should be. Don't miss the feedback section. There are lots of interesting blokes in Australia.DIRCSA: http://www.dircsa.org.au/pub/www/toindex.htm
Toilet Page: http://optimo.com.au/nathanj/toilet/index.html
BadAds is a serious organization dedicated to fighting bad ads wherever they're found. The site isn't a collection of bad ads, but a set of articles about bad ads: why they're bad and what you can do about them. There are excellent links that can help you avoid bad ads on the Internet and equally excellent advice on the logic games traditional media play on you in ads. This site will make you a better consumer and thus a better-off (financially and healthwise) person. There are also plenty of informational links if you want to get involved in fighting the bad ads that permeate our society.
http://www.BadAds.org/
A rabbi is, literally, a wise man (or woman, as is sometimes the case here). The Ask a Rabbi site entertains questions about just about anything at all (although most have at least partially Judaic origin), and has one of its nine rabbis answer the question. As you might expect, most of the answers quote various Judaic authorities. The rabbis range from orthodox to one who says he's non-denominational (whatever that means). You can review every published reply each rabbi has ever had posted before picking the rabbi you feel will offer you the best guidance. This is not so much religion by committee as Dear Abby with a Jewish twist. Much of the advice is nondenominational and as good and as useful as your favorite advice columnist.
http://www.askarabbi.com/
Politicians Plus Cash: Official Facts and Ugly Details
Everyone knows that getting elected to a major political office is expensive. The numbers are astounding. The Opensecrets.org Web site makes all the legally required financial information about US politicians readily available. Want to see the latest financial disclosure statement filed by your Congressional Representative or Senator? Or how much Bush and Gore got, and from whom? No problem; it's all a few clicks away. You can also browse excellent articles on electoral financing and the obscenity of the process. The amounts people "give" to candidates for office nearly reach beyond comprehension. However, it's all spelled out in the Web site too clearly to be doubted. The only question not clearly answered is where does it all go? Outright payments to voters are, alas, not the rule anymore. Still, you can only think how nice life could be if all those "donations" were spread around.http://www.opensecrets.org/
Recording the History of Record
"News that becomes history." Hmmm, doesn't it all? Delving into the place, we never got our question answered, but it didn't bother us much. This site offers an amazing assortment of links to newspapers throughout the USA and around the world. Nice links to radio as well, but most of the stations seem to play music - hardly "listening to the news that becomes history." Some of the best links can be found under the Researching History heading. For anyone with even a passing interest in history, here's a place to camp for a bit. We loved the links on castles, but there's plenty more here. In sum, this site starts with a laudable premise, and it has a great collection of links, but it seems to have overextended itself, at present. A bit more selectivity would help a great deal, particularly in the radio area. No matter how you stretch it, there's nothing of particular historical significance in rock, classic rock, or pop music. With some fine-tuning, this could be a great resource.http://members.tripod.com/~HistoryMediaReview/index-html
E-Mail Subscription Privacy Mask
There's a neat trick you can play on the companies that manage your magazine and newsletter subscriptions. When you fill out the subscription form for Bathroom Rebuilding Monthly, instead of your full name you could use a different first name - say, "BRM O'Shea". Thus if that company happens to sell your address for others to pester you, you'll know who is ultimately responsible for that junk mail. Sneakemail models a similar concept in the digital realm. You generate a disposable e-mail address, which will (quietly) point at your real address. When you give that Sneakemail address to a Web form or some other online business, you avoid the risk of having your real e-mail address abused or bought and sold. Instead, this pseudo-address works as an extra guard, protecting you against unwanted solicitations. Messages will still reach you, but in a way that you maintain; toss the address away once trash starts to appear, and start afresh with a new Sneakemail address.http://sneakemail.com/
Searching for the Right Search Engine
The random bit of information you seek will undoubtedly be tucked away in a corner of the Net, usually near where your missing socks are all gathered trying to figure out how to break outta da joint. Not to help matters, there are always a few too many different ways to try to find that information: search engines; content queries; search engines; word matching; and search engines. At Lookoff, you can search for the right search engine. It offers advice in a portal-style organization of subjects, and therein the truly valuable choices are marked accordingly. In the process of using Lookoff, people can teach themselves how to use more than one carefully chosen search engine to fully qualify their final results.http://www.lookoff.com/
Taryn Green and Tutorialfind want to help you learn, and in a reasonable amount of time. They've put together a free search engine focusing on tutorials of all kinds. There's plenty about computers and engineering to be found, but look around a little. If you're trying to restore an old home, you can learn how to patch up walls properly, or replace a broken tile. As the number of tutorials continues to increase - you can suggest new ones easily - the challenge would then be how to again wade through the information. Each collection can be narrowed down to a particular type and then sorted by date of entry into the system or number of visits. These features combined help to streamline your search to effectively dig up the right lesson. Even more, if what you want isn't listed, you can ask Taryn to help find one - for free.
http://www.tutorialfind.com/
DevelopersNetwork.com attempts to consolidate advice for Web programmers. Most of the site is made up of informative articles, ranging from state of the art analyses of the technology to actual coding walk-throughs on topics such as ASP, SQL, and XML. There are sections on site design and graphics for folks who aren't code heads, as well. The Ask Einstein feature unfortunately caused a Javascript error in our reviewer's browser, which doesn't bode well for the theory of relativity. Along the way, they may try to sell you some Web hosting packages, but you don't have to pay attention to them if you don't want to. Just don't tell them we told you that.
http://www.developersnetwork.com/
ONLINE TRAVEL
Author, Adventurer, Photographer, Canadian
Bruce Kirkby is an accomplished writer and photographer and his site reflects his interest in travel and culture. You can buy his book, "Sand Dance: By Camel across Arabia's Great Southern Desert", and read his many articles about his travels as well as information about his next adventures. Stay tuned as next year he will lead a team that will try to cross Tibet's remote Chang Tang plateau in 70 days.http://www.brucekirkby.com/
Travel Portal for the Southeastern States
TripSmarter.com might, just might, be the future of online travel guides. By bringing together several existing but separate elements, they do an admirable job of presenting destinations in the Southeast US in words, pictures, streaming video, and live cams. On the positive side, there is lots of information the unfamiliar traveler can use, like maps, hotel and restaurant guides, even sections on local laws and taxi info. The down side is that, at least for now, the guides are limited to just six towns, three in Florida. But if those six are on your list, you can never have too much information, and the organized resources on TripSmarter are worth the trip.http://www.tripsmarter.com/
Although it claims its full site hasn't launched yet, MyEsavers.com provides a singularly useful feature. Members who enter their starting point and destination can find, on a single page, a number of airline, bus, car, cruise, hotel, and train discounts which might apply to their trip. The only problem with what they call their OnePage Glimpse results is that by providing the vendor, source, origin, destination, rate, expiration, frequent flyer details, and terms of agreement in a single line of a table sometimes they end up so abbreviated that they're no longer useful. Other than that, this looks like a good spot for online travelers to add to their repertoire of tools.
http://www.myesavers.com/
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
It's an almanac with a bit of a twist. It starts with the date, the percentage of the year that has elapsed, and more. You get daily historical events and links to other stuff: jokes, health tips, weather forecasts. Nicely done, with no pretensions. It fills a small, useful niche well, and shows potential.http://aristoday.com/
The Golden Pixel Award is won through nomination and voting by surfers. It touts itself as a place where "Web professionals can see what sites are most favorite by the average websurfer." We'll add "...who feel the need to cast online votes". The first awards will be given at the end of December.
http://www.goldenpixelaward.com/
SeekAmerica Meta Search Engine
A search for "Florida holiday" too often brings you pictures of a sale on gerbil feed. Search for the pages you want, not what a 15-line meta tag list in someone's HTML might make you find. SeekAmerica helps you find pages that actually contain what you're looking for. Imagine that.http://www.seekamerica.com/
SOFTWARE
This new version features better hardware support, even more security, integrated crypto with OpenSSH 2.3.0, SSL support, and tons of bug fixes. OpenBSD is known for the quality of its code audits, which make it probably the most secure consumer Unix system around. If you run secure sites, this is probably the OS that you want to use.http://www.openbsd.org/announce28.html