|
Home Subscriptions Netsurfer Science E-Zine Netsurfer Education E-Zine Netsurfer Books E-Zine |
| Tornado Tours |
| Travelers Informing Travelers |
| A Personal Portugal |
| Disco, Disco Cow |
| Mindstorms Plus Eight Ball Plus Webcam Equals Online Prophecy |
| Model Railroading for Real People |
| The Widget Search Engine |
| Movie Gossip |
| Saving, with a Grain of Salt |
| Dsniff and Potential Attacks against SSH and SSL |
| FedEx, Charleston, and Greensboro |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
BREAKING SURF
A big volcano acts up less then 40 miles from the world's second-most populated urban community. Can you spell imminent disaster? Popocatepetl, the volcano which threatens Mexico City, has a history of activity, most of which you can find out about on the USGS Web page devoted to it. For more current news and updated pictures, head for CENAPRED, a Mexican page reporting on the mountain. The latter is mostly in Spanish although it has a few English notes. If you want more, try a translation service like AltaVista's Babelfish.USGS: http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/Mexico/Popocatepetl/framework.html
CENAPRED: http://132.248.115.6/mvolcan.html
Babelfish: http://babelfish.altavista.com/translate.dyn
The Year in Pictures from MSNBC
MSNBC picture editors combed through 750,000 images to put together a set of 25 that they think represent the past year. It's an eclectic set to be sure, ranging from poignant images from the Balkans to spectacular natural imagery, to some kids painting their toenails. What the latter has to do with the past year is anybody's guess. Mostly it's some nice eye candy, available in low and high bandwidth versions. The site also has a video segment with the past year's key events.http://www.msnbc.com/modules/ps/yip_2000/splash.asp
The Debut of Handspring's VisorPhone Module
If gadget freaks anticipate any single piece of hardware this holiday season, it has to be this. Handspring makes Visor clones of the ubiquitous Palm PDA that are in all important aspects identical to the original but importantly include a hardware slot that lets you plug in all sorts of little modules. Geeks have eagerly awaited a cell phone module, which tightly mates a cell phone with the Palm operating system in a frenzy of gadget lust. Enter an phone number/address book only once and it will show up on your computer, PDA, and cell phone. The software which supports the cell phone module offers all sorts of nifty phone feature bonuses. It's by far the best little gadget of the year. Good luck finding one.http://www.handspring.com/products/visorphone/
Set up Your Own MP3 Streaming Service with Linux
Ignore for a minute the problems of complying with the byzantine regulations regarding online broadcasting and intellectual property. Assume that you just want to set up your own online radio station using an inexpensive computer and a bunch of MP3s. These instructions will tell you how to set up an MP3 audio streaming service on Linux. Anybody who wants to run an online radio station can follow these instructions and have at least the technical beginnings of a broadcast service. The instructions are part of a larger site that's worth exploring for its wide variety of Linux and open source topics. Good techie bookmark.http://www.linuxlookup.com/html/guides/streaming-mp3.html
Down from the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom
This is the story of Infocom, once famous as a mighty computer game publisher, notably for it's line of Zork text adventure games. The authors did an impressive amount of research to find out why Infocom eventually failed, locating and interviewing scores of old employees. In broad strokes, after dominating the PC game business, Infocom went after the non-game market and was swamped with the expense of launching a product that went nowhere with consumers. The real story is not quite so simple, and the authors note that spectacular failure such as Infocom's seldom has a simple explanation. It's a great story, but it's only available as a 10 MB PDF file. Modem users should plan their download time accordingly.ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/infocom/info/infocom-paper.pdf
Disk Drives with Copy Protection Standard?
This provocative article from the Register discusses ongoing efforts by content producers to protect their product by persuading, or legally forcing, hard drive manufacturers to incorporate copy protection features in their products. So far, this appears to be just a bad idea - it's not clear that any consumers would actually opt to buy such drives. The article also notes that the copy protection technology is protected by a patent, which makes it potentially legally proof against reverse engineering under current US law. This is essential reading for followers of the current intellectual property wars.http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/15620.html
NSA Releases Security Enhanced Linux
The US National Security Agency (NSA) is known far and wide for its reluctance to reveal anything about itself or its involvement with computer security. This Web page about an NSA project in operating system security goes against the grain. NSA broke its habitual silence in order to release a special security enhanced version of the Linux operating system: "Linux was chosen...to demonstrate that this (security) functionality can be successful in a mainstream operating system and, at the same time, contribute to the security of a widely used system. Additionally, the integration of these security research results into Linux may encourage additional operating system security research that may lead to additional improvement in system security." In other words, they want a secure OS as much as the rest of the online community. The security enhanced release includes source code, so Trojan horses are unlikely.http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/
A cracker who broke into the databases of Egghead.com, an online software retailer, may have retrieved customer credit card files. Nobody knows quite how many of the 3.7 million credit card accounts on file may have been at risk, let alone if any were actually stolen. Security analysts have speculated that the cracker may have broken in through one of several known Microsoft Web server vulnerabilities. The story, whatever it's actual outcome, emerges at an awkward time for online retailers anxious to soothe consumer fears during the crucial holiday buying season. To be fair, diligent consumers really don't have much to fear. Credit card companies have begun to accept that stolen numbers are the same as stolen cards, and cardholders are probably only responsible for the first $50. ZDNet has the story which at press time was still developing.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2668562,00.html
XHTML Basic Approved as a Standard
The World Wide Web consortium has just approved the standard for XHTML basic, a subset of XHTML designed for clients that do not support the full set of XHTML features. Examples include Web clients such as mobile phones, PDAs, pagers, and set-top boxes. The full text of the new standard can be found here.http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xhtml-basic-20001219/
Feed, one of the more ambitious online e-zines, has a new look. Print magazines redesign look and feel whenever they feel they must try to breathe new life into a publication. For some reason, when you redesign, circulation tends to go up. It's not clear if this is why Feed is changing, but even if you don't care about the look, Feed's content has always been engaging and ambitious. If you're not a regular reader, it's worth a fresh visit.
http://feedmag.com/
|
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 Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings Boxed Set
The Annotated Wizard of Oz: A Centennial Edition
Quicken TurboTax (Tax Year 2000)Claire and Brad, Sitting in a Tree, S-U-C-K-I-N-G
At first, reasonable people and even some news organizations thought this silly story was a hoax. However, it appears legit - most of it, anyway. It started with Bradley Chait e-mailing a dirty joke about oral sex to lover Claire Swires, who replied with an enthusiastic endorsement of the usual outcome of the aforementioned act. Bradley, in a fit of ungentlemanly yet thoroughly male behavior forwarded Claire's e-mail to his friends and within days the story had circled the world. The story ends happily for all concerned. The law firm will not fire Bradley, Claire sold her story to the tabloids and may get a job with Playboy TV, and spammers are widely invoking Claire's name - without her permission, one assumes - to sell amateur sex sites. A true online culture phenomenon no matter how you taste it. The skeptical Register broke the story, Wired has a follow-up, and a Claire Swires site has pictures of the couple and the e-mail in question.Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/15404.html
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,40699,00.html
Swires: http://www.newsitem.co.uk/
SURFING SITES
WalMart Receipts as a Window on the Soul
Experts say they can find out a lot about a person from their trash. You can find out a lot about Derek Dahlsad of Fargo, N.D. from the four years of WalMart receipts he posted online. In early December, someone in the household seemed to be ill (he bought tissues and cough drops on December 6). Who else lives with him? Well, one little girl recently graduated from Dri-Bottoms to Garanimals, and a cat and some fish seem to take up space. Visitors can infer the break-up of Derek's marriage from a sudden absence of nail-related products beginning early 1999. Derek is an over-caffeinated guy (Mountain Dew) who swears by Formula 409 and gardens quite a bit. The Add A Comment feature, which runs alongside each receipt, has fostered quite a little community of commentary. Most of the receipts originate at the Dilworth, Minn. store, where Matt Krieg took over managerial duties from Ryan Hoage in mid-June 1999, but Derek occasionally shops at Darryl Marchetta's Fargo store. For fun, go check out the September 6, 1998 receipt.http://lightning.prohosting.com/~receipts/index.shtml
Eye of the Storm is, in one respect, just a Web site advertisement for a book from Simon and Schuster. It is also a deeply touching, chilling, and heartfelt depiction of a soldier's life during the Civil War as told by the watercolors and diary of Union Private Knox Sneden. From New York, through battles in Virginia and the horrors of Andersonville, to his final rest in 1918, Sneden's journal provides an unvarnished look at the tedium and tragedy that accompanies war. His watercolor sketches are wonderful panoramic views of the campgrounds, mills, and battlefields he lived in, painted with both broad strokes and intimate details. Several Flash movies show the sketches in historical sequence with explanatory narration. All in all, a portrayal of Ken Burns caliber.
http://www.journale.com/eyeofthestorm/index.html
Lifting the Lid on Urban Toilets
One of the true urban survival skills is knowledge of local public toilets hidden within the concrete jungle. Urban warriors can brush up on this important area of knowledge at this Web site. Though the design could improve some, you can't argue with the content. The site contains numerous reviews of toilet facilities in various cities, mostly submitted by readers. When you have to go, foreknowledge of this kind of information proves indispensable. The site is expanding to cover more cities, so feel free to contribute some content.http://www.besttoilets.com/
A History of Photographic Tech
In view of the importance of image, BoxCameras.com will interest not only photographers and historians but also impart perspective to advertisers, retailers, journalists, and anyone else who looks at photos. Maintained by a private collector, this site covers the history of photography from several angles. "Camera Collection Home" displays and describes antiques - big old sturdy pinhole boxes - from the past two centuries. Even the Encore camera from the 1940s struck us as archaic and safelike. "Advertisements Home" is a wonderful miscellany in the vein of old Sears catalogs; it's a mini-retrospective on typography and illustration, with come-ons quaint and clever. "George Eastman Archive Home" looks at the memorabilia of the King of Kameras. "Darkroom/Accessories Home" shows that all too soon much exciting new technology is good for little but museum cabinets. Today's equivalent might be your TV, computer, or robot.http://www.boxcameras.com/
Get Yer Swords and Armor Here!
Neither for the faint of heart nor the thin of wallet, this site offers one-stop shopping for the medievally-minded. Featuring loads of links to craftsmen, artisans, book and manuscript sellers, and more, the array of materials available is dazzling. Looking for a print of Roman soldiers? Point and click, aficionado. Or purchase a hand-made, heavyweight chain mail jerkin for around $550. You wouldn't sally forth without armor for your trusty mount, would you? We didn't think so. Pick up a set for $3,250, and what the heck - while you're at it, you can replace your bucket of rust with shiny new battle-ready armor for yourself as well. Yours for an additional $3,900. And if replicas aren't quite up to snuff for you, they offer links to the real things. How about an antique Italian sword, circa 1656? A mere $3,600 can bring that precious baby home. You can read, for considerably less cash, if you wish: "The Viking Art of War" is one of several inexpensive items featured in the bookstore - click on the book and you travel to Amazon.com; they'll shlep it out to you for $16, and you won't even have to break a sweat.http://www.historicalweapons.com/
Was That an Amphibole or an Equivocation?
Huh? If you're as mystified as our reviewer about the recent examples of "logical" reasoning in US Supreme Court opinions, Stephen's Guide to the Logical Fallacies will explain, clearly and concisely, how the Justices reached their published opinions. The heart of this Web site is a list of common fallacies explained in clear English. If that's still too difficult for the average Washington politician to grasp, clear examples can help even Senators-elect and Presidents-elect to understand. The site has an "Under Construction" notice on its first page, and virtually nothing beyond the list of fallacies works but fortunately that's enough to make this sight a must-visit. One warning: After visiting this site you won't be able to distinguish between hanging and pregnant chad more efficiently, but you'll know why you can't.http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/
Time was, kids would zip out your door blurting acknowledgement to any question asked - anything to make it to their friend's house more quickly. These days, kids zip through doors not necessarily to play tag in the back yard but to come inside and get online with the family computer. Contrary to the harmful tales you often find spotlighted in the media, the Net in fact offers a number of useful, enjoyable, and enriching Web sites that can most certainly enrich children. Big Blue Graphics is exactly one. The attention to detail and artistic presentation leap out. Medieval elves play their flutes. Dragons fly by a window that frames the creation of a princess's dress. Visitors can try to solve the Dragon's Puzzle. The potential fun for kids of nearly any age seems boundless. We'll save our strongest compliments for the art that makes it even more appealing to the younger set. The only negative to the site is its reliance upon using the Flash 4 plug-in for its beautiful presentation. The installation of Flash 4 may not be easy for everyone.
http://www.bigblue.com.au/
The English Garden Demystified
The traditional English garden looks, when done perfectly, totally natural and unplanned. Nothing could be further from the truth, and artful naturalness is very difficult to achieve. Spidergarden is an award-winning British landscape design firm. Its Web site shows examples of their current work and offers five custom designs, based on your wish list, for a reasonable fee (if our reviewer's wife ever sees this site he's out the fee). The online examples are attractive and seem to fall within the capability of the typical devoted home gardener. The site also offers free advice, an excellent tip section, a message board, and design competitions with Spidergarden services and products (like an intriguing misting machine) as prizes.http://www.spidergarden.com/
You've just bought a house that comes with some - shall we say, issues. Over the months that follow, you learning how to fill holes and sand walls, wire plugs and seal toilets, replace windows and varnish floors. The list seems boundless. Helpful friends cite movies about endless house restoration projects with hints of sarcasm in their voices, but you can't hear them because the hardware store's cash register has deafened you. It'll be your home when you're done, though, and you'll feel good about it soon. Really. DIY (which we assume stands for Do It Yourself), a spin-off from a popular television show, harvested various helpful how-tos from the program's episodes. The result is a relatively solid range of tips and explanations on how to take on each new problem you notice. Take on each fix-up job separately, use guides like DIY to flesh out your understanding of the problem, and know that the end result will be a home of your own creation, crafted from your imagination and own hard work.
http://diynet.com/
Always for Bridesmaids and Not for Brides
The phone rings and on the line is that message every woman secretly loves and dreads - no, not "It's time for your mammogram", but "Will you be in my wedding?" Let Penelope the Perpetual Bridesmaid help you avoid crisis by guiding you through the ins and outs of the female wedding attendant dilemma. The site contains advice on how to throw a successful bridal shower or bachelorette party and, more importantly, how to pull off that frothy mint julep of a dress the bride picked out for you. The Horror Stories will convince you that no matter how horrible that strapless, wired bra contraption feels, it is extremely necessary. The City of the Month feature looks promising, although it's only been to New York so far. This site will help all bridesmaids in need, allowing them happiness on that blessed day rather than thoughts of violence.http://www.bridesmaidaid.com/
Come Meet the Center of the Universe
In a world stricken with a crisis of self-esteem, how refreshing - if that's the word - to meet Jonathan Hayward. In his meta tag description of his page, he calls it "original and fascinating", sort of like a bad personal ad. He points out that his organ music has been mistaken for Bach, his writing for C.S. Lewis. His school math skills appear to have been amazing. Perhaps he still wears his high school class ring - he's living in the past. Still, if you can fit past the huge ego that might steadfastly block your enjoyment of the site, it's not all bad. He's got some wonderful Christian koans, thought-provoking musings, and a role-playing game developed from scratch which, in his own words, is "an exploration into the nature of goodness and virtue." That has the potential to be something unique.http://www.imsa.edu/~jhayward/
A potential disaster for rogues, scoundrels, and villains around the world, RepCheck's searchable database will record any submitted information about anyone and deliver it to you at the touch of a button. Services include: RepAlert, which notifies you of any changes to a specified person's records; RepSearch, which lets you locate professionals with strong reputations; and RepMatch, which helps you get together with others of your own sterling reputation (or perhaps create a gang of cads and bad girls to roam the streets in marauding hoards). We'll be watching to see how this develops, as we suspect the use of credit cards to validate user IDs and of course the outrageous opportunity for some out-of-hand bitching may cause problems.
http://www.repcheck.com/
The Design-Your-Own Portal Portal
Interesting. The site creators come from New York, but they spell "favourite" with a "u". Hey, if they come from N'Yawk, they oughtta talk like N'Yawkus. What's up wid dat? That quibble aside, though, Moveo.com offers a cool concept, and nearly 2,500 users agree. The concept? Design your own portal. Make it your home page. Then when you fire up the ol' browser, you're not looking at what Excite or Yahoo or MSN thinks is important, you're looking at what you think is important. Empowering, in a script-kiddy kind of way. And fast. You can probably set up a portal in five or ten minutes. After you sign up, you name your portal, then decide which category you want it to reside in. (You can choose several categories and sub-categories.) You do get to decide what links you include in your portal, and the service is both fast and free. Could you do the same thing on your own? Why not? Most ISP accounts allow the holder some Web space. You could design one, set it as your home page, and go from there. But it does take more time, and here, Moveo.com lays out the tools for you. It's also free, which is a good price.http://moveo.com/
Despammed.com offers you the ability to communicate publicly on the Net without the constant fear of exposing your e-mail address to spam hunter/gatherers. Take advantage of its free offer and you don't have to see a flurry of ads appearing in your mailbox calling out for you to buy more printer toner cartridges, to visit sexxxy sites, or whatever. DeSpammed.com examines the headers of each e-mail message and identifies suspected spam. If any mail slips through that shouldn't have, the maintainers of the service will try to make sure it won't happen again. As the business of unsolicited advertising on the Web matures, we should see some changes to help control the rampant flow of advertising. Until then, using something like Despammed.com is a powerful guard for your mailbox. But don't blame us if NSD stops showing up.
http://www.despammed.com/
Tuna Free Dolphin Meat mostly talks about denizens of the sea, like the Elephant Fish (which often masquerades as a Hippopotamus Fish), and various letters to and answers from a Mr. A. Dolphin, who carries on a crusade to release frozen fish fingers back to the wild. Yes, sounds a bit fishy to us too. File under "cute" instead of "hilarious", but there's nothing wrong with cute. Any delphinid that responds to a letter saying, "You suck" with "if you knew anything at all about 'dolphs you would know we do not suck - we blow" can't be all bad.
http://www.tunafree.com.au/
ONLINE CULTURE
ONLINE TRAVEL
This will blow your socks off, if you get lucky. Fork over some cash to Tempest Tours and their guides will take you chasing tornadoes and other violent weather phenomena. This isn't your father's travel tour. If tornadoes are up your alley, you'll love it. Most of the expeditions take place in Tornado Alley, roughly located between the Rockies and the Mississippi. You start in either Colorado and Oklahoma and wind up where the wind blows you, hopefully not literally. Your fees cover lodging in various motels, assuming that they haven't already been blown to bits. While Tempest Tours claims the cuisine in Tornado Alley ranks second to none, you pay for it yourself. Just keep in mind that Midwest oysters may not come from the sea. The basic packages run around $2,400, not counting the oysters. It's cheaper than moving to a trailer park and waiting for the inevitable.http://www.tempesttours.com/
IgoUgo's community travel portal relies mostly on content submitted by traveling writers and photographers. Every time you visit, it highlights random contributors whose travel journals have earned them "guide" status and who rate the content for other readers. Many contributors do get around. Brian, for example, covers New York, Jakarta, Berlin, and Tampa in his journals; Jim covers New York, Bruges, Las Vegas, St. Lucia, Amsterdam, Hawaii, and other destinations in his. Contributors earn points they can redeem for rewards: vacations; merchandise; car rentals; and so forth. Registration lets you contact guides and fellow readers and gives you the skinny on "special deals from the IgoUgo staff" - sounds like ads to us. The photo gallery promises more than it delivers, with fine photos but apparently only one per destination. All in all, we found more breadth than depth, but IgoUgo, more personalized than many travel sites, may hold potential for travelers with an urge to tell or show it like it is.
http://www.igougo.com/
Aside from a lengthy and unnecessarily expositional front page that tells in minute detail what the site will show ("from North to South and from East to West"), Discover Portugal is actually a charming and rather ideosyncratic showcase of "that little country that is situated to the left of Spain". With more than 400 pictures, sample itineraries, guides to restaurants and shopping, and step-by-step day trips, it's like having your own tour guide in Lisbon. Portugal is one of those places that people hear about but seldom visit. The detailed travel planner and listings of flights might be just the thing to whet your wandering appetite, whether you end up journeying to the Shrine of Fatima or taking a quick flight to the beautiful Azores.
http://www.discoverportugal2day.com/
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
SBM (single bovine male) seeks human video producer for good times, maybe more. Enjoys mooing in the mountains, Swedish boxed milk, and playing the Milko Music Machine. Musical interests run from metal and hip-hop to disco. Those without Shockwave need not apply. We spent a day here.http://www.fjallfil.com/index_eng.html
Mindstorms Plus Eight Ball Plus Webcam Equals Online Prophecy
You've got to like a site built on Lego Mindstorms. With the help of a Mindstorms kit, Jim Studt has put a tangible "Magic 8 Ball" online. When you ask a question, a real Magic 8 Ball, not some CGI code, divines the answer. It works, too: it kept telling us "Outlook Not So Good".http://8ball.federated.com/
Model Railroading for Real People
Most model railroad sites aim at the esoteric modeler or wealthy collectors. You buy stuff there. The All Gauge Page welcomes people who don't model year-round and who don't have large budgets. There's a wealth of practical advice in all scales, even templates for simple but attractive paper structures.http://thortrains.hypermart.net/
Anyone who has ever bought industrial parts for a company or estimated a job for a contractor has used the Thomas Register of American Manufacturers, a 33-volume monster without equal. This tool has come online. Searchable and accessible, the online version is far superior to the paper version and perfectly illustrates the advantages of the Net.
http://www.thomasregister.com/
A clever searchable database makes this site useful for any movie fan. While we'd like to go on about how good the rest of the site was, we've spent way too much time checking out up-coming movie trailers and have a lot of work to catch up on. Have a look, if just to see the "Tomb Raider" teaser. We wonder how much that domain name cost.
http://www.movies.com/
Saving Secrets, run by GLG Marketing, provides members a free bi-weekly "Money Saving Tips" newsletter and monthly tips on topics such as teaching kids the value of money or shopping smarter for groceries. Be forewarned that some of the tips resemble the sort of mail that you normally instantly delete from your mailbox.
http://www.savingsecrets.com/
SOFTWARE
Dsniff and Potential Attacks against SSH and SSL
The dsniff toolkit is a collection of utilities that let you do all sorts of nifty sniffing and network traffic intercepting, even over supposedly secure connections. The tools can help hackers exploit several well known holes in the almost universal SSL and SSH protocols which protect virtually all sensitive Web and remote interactive session traffic on the Net. While not all the components in the toolkit are new, having the lot available in one convenient package will undoubtedly make it easier for hackers and crackers to exploit existing network vulnerabilities. The article on SecurityPortal has more details which should be of great interest to sysadmins and security professionals. Both the hackers and security pros will of course want a copy of the toolkit itself.Article: http://www.securityportal.com/cover/coverstory20001218.html
dsniff: http://www.monkey.org/~dugsong/dsniff/
CORRECTIONS
FedEx, Charleston, and Greensboro
We made some booboos, received mail, then lost said mail behind a virtual file cabinet. In NSD 6.40, we covered a boycott of Federal Express organized in Charleston, S.C., which is extremely odd, as the actual boycott is being run by residents of Greensboro, N.C. Oops.