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BREAKING SURF
Microsoft Suffering DNS Server Woes
In a story developing at press time, Microsoft is suffering a serious outage affecting its DNS servers. Given the size of the company and the many large Web sites it hosts - MSN, MSNBC, Encarta, and others - the media is following this closely. As we write this, no one has yet pinpointed whether the problem stems from internal Microsoft DNS issues or from external assaults, although initial reports from Microsoft and others seem to indicate that the problem is strictly an internal one. Wired has reasonably comprehensive coverage at press time.http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,41387,00.html
What will the world be like in 15 years? No one has a crystal ball, but the US National Intelligence Council has tapped the skills of experts inside and outside government to put together the next best thing in this fascinating forecast. Not surprisingly, the report generally assumes incremental change rather than abrupt discontinuities in trends and the flow of events. The survey identifies seven major driving trends, and holds each up to the light for thorough inspection. One theme that seems to tower over all others is a predicted widening gulf between nations that govern themselves well and those in which political incompetence, lawlessness, and fanaticism reign. This division will be a major source of conflict, the report predicts. Other prognostications include waning US global influence but a strengthening of Canada's status as the US's pre-eminent economic partner. There are a lot of words here but no rose colored glasses, just the best, unvarnished sense of what's likely to be.
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/globaltrends2015/index.html
As President Bill Clinton left office this weekend, tons of historical documents, Presidential records, personal and donated papers, and all sorts of memorabilia went with him. This material didn't go to his new digs in New York but rather to the National Archive and Records Administration (NARA) for sorting, processing, and archiving. For the first time, the NARA will go digital and allow access to information online. Typically, information seekers had to make requests by regular mail, then wait for a response. Now, all four versions of the Clinton Presidential Web site can be searched and explored. Further, every governmental department and agency was directed to produce Web snapshots and submit the results to the NARA by Inauguration Day. Eventually, these site snapshots will be available online to provide an archive of what the Web presence of the administration looked like.
http://www.clinton.nara.gov/
This reasonably technical article reveals exactly what goes on behind the scenes at the SETI@home project. It talks about the problems of detecting interstellar signals, how you have to search the data to cover all the possible variations in signals, and how SETI@home processes it all. If you're interested in the science and algorithms behind the largest distributed computing project on the planet, you'll want to read this. Some of the statistics are boggling: "As of 23 October 2000, 2,438,045 volunteers had run the SETI@home program. Of those, 519,725 were actively running the program and had returned a result in the previous two weeks. These volunteers had donated a total of 437,000 years of CPU times for a total 4.3 x 10^20 flop. Currently, the average processing rate of computers running SETI@home is 15.7 Tflops."
Article: http://computer.org/cise/articles/seti.htm
SETI@home: http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/
Last year, the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) content control consortium published an open letter to hackers asking them to try and break its proposed watermarking and any-copy features. While rumors that the system has been broken have flown around, nobody had published the full details until now. A French group has broken the SDMI system in a number of ways. This site has details.
http://www.julienstern.org/sdmi/index.php3
Spam Wars: UUNET Subsidiary Crashed by Spam
UUNET has been taking a lot of flak lately as the source of large amounts of spam. In a case of delicious irony, the mail servers of Pipex, a British ISP subsidiary of UUNET, were brought down by an excess of spam. Spam tracking site Spamhaus estimates that UUNET delivers 30 billion pieces of spam per year, more than all other sources combined. UUNET itself doesn't generate the spam, its client ISPs and other users spit out the e-mail ads. But UUNET is apparently failing to enforce anti-spam rules, making it the target of ill will in the sysadmin community. In defence, UUNET points out that it carries the traffic of major ISPs such as MSN, AOL, and Earthlink and that it has little control over what goes over its wires. Spamhaus has some good stats.UUNET: http://www.uu.net/
Spamhaus: http://www.spamhaus.org/
Story: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,41239,00.html
ISPs Exasperated by UK Law Enforcement
The UK is becoming a difficult place for legitimate ISPs to do business in the wake of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. The act allows law enforcement to access suspected criminals' e-mail accounts and to make other egregious and onerous requests. Some non-Web savvy law enforcement agencies have demanded that ISPs log a permanent record of all traffic coming across their servers, provide lists of all users in a certain postal code, provide access to accounts held on foreign servers, and - the classic - explain what a Hotmail account is. ISPs contend that answering blatantly ignorant questions and fulfilling extravagant data requests is both exasperating and expensive. Wired has more.http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,41288,00.html
FreeDrive Eliminates Public Storage
Free online storage provider FreeDrive has decided to close its publicly available Web storage areas. The private, password-protected space remains available. Abuse of the public areas to trade illegally obtained software and content has forced FreeDrive to act. The abuse apparently caught the attention of the Department of Justice and an unnamed "maker of office automation software", who contacted FreeDrive about the problem. After consulting with attorneys, FreeDrive decided to shut down the public spaces. The private storage space still lets members share with friends. This is another chapter in the story initiated by Napster, in which large businesses protect their intellectual property by pressuring the systems that facilitate the free, unregulated exchange of data over the Net to close. CNet has the story.FreeDrive: http://www.freedrive.com/
CNet: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-201-4565328-0.html
Friend-of-the-Court Brief in DeCSS Case Argues Code Is Speech
Cryptonome has posted a copy of a recently filed friend-of-the-court brief in the appeal of the DeCSS DVD-copying code case. The brief, prepared by a stellar cast of computer academics, argues that computer code is indistinguishable from free speech and is thus deserving of full First Amendment protection in the US. The appeal seeks to overturn a lower court decision that found that DeCSS can't be published under the DMCA copyright act. It's good reading from both legal and philosophical perspectives.http://cryptome.org/mpaa-v-2600-bac.htm
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) isn't impressed with how the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) went about selecting seven new top-level domain suffixes (.aero, .biz, etc.) and has written the US Department of Commerce, urging it to review the process when ICANN forwards the names to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration for approval. The letter accuses ICANN of creating an artificial domain name scarcity, adopting of arbitrary rules for choosing names, and timidity in its approach to the matter, all of which, the letter suggests, will encourage further conflict over domain names and even threaten freedom of expression. The ACLU argues that the matter represents an important policy choice and stresses the need for a process that involves reliable information, proper public participation, and transparent and accountable decision-making. Sounds reasonable to us. The letter is worth reading and you may even want to think about making your voice heard on this important matter as well.
http://www.aclu.org/congress/l011601a.html
Antivirus Company Panda in Trouble with Virus Hunters
Panda Software committed what antivirus circles consider a major sin over a minor event. It released information about a new but extremely limited worm to the public without first notifying antivirus researchers and providing a sample of the offending code. Antivirus companies share information in informal networks such as the Rapid Exchange of Virus Samples (REVS) before they release such information to the public. In this case, Panda says this was just human error: the Panda person responsible for notifying the antivirus community was sick. In the past, antivirus companies have hoarded information, an action the many members of the antivirus community generally receive poorly. In this case, such action has led to to harsh words aimed at Panda and the company's suspension from REVS. It provides an interesting glimpse into the little publicized antivirus community.REVS: http://www.wildlist.org/revs.htm
Story: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,41333,00.html
Luck and space flight don't go together. That's the lesson NASA has re-learned in the 15 years since the Challenger space shuttle exploded shortly after liftoff. NASA now contends it vigilantly guards against "go fever" with safety procedures that include x-rayed cables and hand testing over 6,000 wire connections. CNN has a good and oddly dramatic article about the renewed commitment to safety.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/01/18/downlinks.40/index.html
The newswires report that the Montreal-area teen who called himself Mafiaboy has pleaded guilty. Mafiaboy was accused of maliciously hacking Yahoo and other large sites in one of the first widespread systematic distributed denial of service attacks. MSNBC has the story.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/518173.asp
NSD, and presumably six billion other people, disappointed reader Jim Widner for ignoring the beginning of the "true millennium", although he admits that he's aware that "it's already been done." But, he goes on, something such as the link below would ably soothe the ire of fanatics like himself, who feel driven to get the word out! (Exclamation point per the original.)
http://www.timeanddate.com/counters/mil2000.html
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Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
The Truth About Dogs
Jazz - A Film by Ken Burns
Microsoft Project 2000 Step by StepONLINE CULTURE
John Gilmore: Why Copy Protection Is Wrong
Ron Rivest - the R in RSA encryption - asked John Gilmore, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a simple question: "If the customer is willing to buy extra, or special, hardware to allow him to view protected content, what is wrong with that?" John, never shy about expressing his views, replied with a long essay on why copy protection is wrong in principle. He primarily argues that our ability to copy data, even data we own and have every right to copy, is being eroded by back-room deals between large content providers and hardware and software manufacturers. He warns of a day when you will not be able to buy a hard drive that will let you copy your data without the permission of some large corporate entity. No, this is not science fiction since there is already a technical spec on the table that will do just that. John supplies an eloquent essay on an important freedom of information topic.Essay: http://cryptome.org/jg-wwwcp.htm
Spec: http://www.dvdcca.org/4centity/tech/index.html
Self-Organizing Web Content Sites
The New York Times (NYT) has a good story on what it calls self-organizing sites, sites that automatically organize their content based on feedback from the user community. The archetype of this kind of self-organization is Slashdot, whose members get to moderate any post up or down based on the post's interest factor. What emerges organically out of this kind of moderation system is a site with content of interest to the community and mostly free of flames, spam, and noise. The article has a good non-technical overview of some of the moderation systems used by various sites.NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/18/technology/18SELF.html
Slashdot: http://www.slashdot.org/
SURFING SITES
The Net Indexed by Personality, Not Subject
Here's a slightly different concept: netsurfing based on personality profiles, rather than content. Select from among the many erratically updated profiles, and see if you can hook up with a surfer whose tastes and personality resemble your own. The main section offers about two dozen contributors. Two other sections cater to kids and adults, as in adult content, but these contain exactly one contributor each. Among the couple of dozen reviewers on the original page, we found a few who recommended genuinely interesting material. It took some digging, but hey - that's our job and we're insomniacs anyway. If, after you've done your own digging, you still haven't found a personality that matches yours, it's not a problem. The site lets you sign up your own personality - i.e. you - as a new profile. You'll need to gather some links that you like, write a short review of each, and post them there. You could even win a prize.http://backwash.com/
Community-Driven Web Review Site
With around 30 alphabetically-listed sections, there'd seem to be a lot of potential here. At present, that's mostly what there is. Click on the Education or Kids categories, for example, and you get a standard message asking you to help them out by sending in a review. Same for the Science category, and others. Overall, this site isn't ready for prime time, but at least it's not a bandwidth hog. The layout is easy and comprehensive, it just needs more content - and it's depending on you to provide it. As business models go, this one's on shaky ground. Whether it survives or not depends on the participation it can muster.http://www.internetconnection1.com/
So this guy, Ben, has decided that as long as he knew how to write CGI scripts, he'd set up an all-in-one search engine called Phaster. As much as we despise the word "portal", no other term applies as well to this one-stop page for Web searching, MP3 seeking, FTP gathering, and reference info. Whether it's an ailment you need to research via HealthLink, travel information you need at Digital City, or a movie start time you gotta have before heading off to the local cinema, direct connections to search pages means one - or several - fewer steps you have to take to phind stuph. The site comes in two flavors: no phrills and phancy.
No phrills: http://www.phaster.com/
Phancy: http://www.phaster.net/
Effective writing cannot be wrung from a mind which has not first learned to read critically. Linguist Dan Kurland adds that you can forget about thinking critically before mastering those two preliminary disciplines. Kurland's critical reading site, an accessible yet comprehensive resource for nearly anyone, provides an overview of the skills which lead to discerning, insightful understanding and articulation. Because critical thinking courses are becoming increasingly popular at American colleges, students may find Kurland's work, enriched by more than three decades of teaching and publishing, especially helpful.
http://www.criticalreading.com/
"Three on a Meathook" and Other Schlock Movie Masterpieces
Now that director Ed Wood has been reverentially subsumed into Hollywood history, schlock jocks may be trolling for a successor, a campy new object of gleeful disdain, a prolific producer of pathetically appealing pulp. This director must have a cheap-and-dirty, exploitive body of work; horror is preferable, but blaxploitation also qualifies (particularly if the director is white). He must have suffered for his cinematic vision, and he must have forced audiences to suffer with him. He must have badly used perfectly fine actors such as Pam Grier and Leslie Nielsen. And he must be dead. Ladies and gentlemen, may we introduce our nominee for the Ed Wood Would-be Award, a man who bequeathed us such classics as "Grizzly", "Asylum of Satan", and "Three on a Meathook", the incomparable William Girdler.http://www.williamgirdler.com/
Not So Seriously Disturbed Humor
We knew at first glance that we'd found kindred spirits. Below the obnoxious banner ad for a "Nurf Road Rage Bat" (sic) to use on so-called drivers who cut you off in traffic, there's a paragraph noting that the site's creators aren't into bizarre cults. They thoughtfully provide a link to a number of cults, however, including Chicken of Hope, Cross-stitchers for Satan, and Disciples of Fox. The site also features chilling, illustrated bedtime stories, more weird banner ad parodies, and a fabricated quotes page. The disturbed survey likely offers more insight into the authors' vagaries than into the minds of any survey takers, but that aside, it is rare to encounter a site so cheerfully selfless. Its efforts to render the Web a safer and more interesting place (in the Get the Net! section) include a page devoted to emoticon definitions that helps newbies get up to speed, and the page entitled Life's Instruction Manual brought more than one chuckle burbling forth. And of course, you can subscribe to their newsletter, delivered weekly in HTML or text format.http://www.seriouslydisturbedhumor.com/
Is this MegaSloth Extinct? We Hope Not
MegaSloth. It's a state of mind, a lifestyle choice, a prehistoric animal better known as Megatherium, and the pages of one Patrick Bailey, who has taken up the cry of "Lazy and Proud" as his birthright. As he says, "Laziness... should be considered like a birthmark or red hair, beyond anyone's control." For a lazy guy he writes a heck of a lot of stuff, including a kid's book and a five-page treatise on "15 ways to make your attitude real", which is sincere and heartfelt but less funny than his front page, which is quite funny indeed. But, as is the bane of lazy creative types everywhere, Patrick seems to have stopped after one try, in this case a single issue.http://worldstar.com/~pbailey/
You can have only two possible reactions towards those little wheeled devices that have been foisted on us by walking-challenged teenagers. You love them or you hate them. Allow us to present the haters with Kerb, which in turn presents Micro Scooter Death, a site that implores us to throw bricks at the heads of Razor addicts everywhere. In fact, it's a Flash diversion allowing exactly that; a brick-throwing, new-millennium-paperboy game complete with decapitation and thrash soundtrack. Truth be known, it's a slightly sick demo of what UK ad agency Kerb, which counts Pepsi, Disney, and EMI as clients, considers "youth marketing" - and we bet a few of them ride scooters in the halls of their corporate offices.
http://www.scooterdeath.com/
Oochie.com seems to have picked up a business model from the apparently now-defunct Attractiveness.com, dusted it off, and presented it as its own. The site shows you what people look like when they're trying to look attractive. You can vote on whether or not you think they succeeded. It's the Gong Show of pulchritude and you're a judge. The most popular photo types appear to be the fisheye of the webcam which makes one's entire face look convex, the yearbook photo which most normal people want to burn in embarrassment, and the ever-popular "I'm not centered in this picture because my significant other was in the original and I cut him or her out of my life both figuratively and literally". Women's scores seem to be inversely proportionate to the amount of clothes they're wearing. Imagine that.
http://www.oochie.com/
How Do You Say Rude in Spanish?
"What better way to tell Chicago Ted you're going to kill him than through your anonymous Web-based fatchicksinpartyhats.com e-mail address?" If that come-on doesn't get your attention, we'd guess it's time to check your pulse. We did; ours are fine, and we moved on. This site purports to be the product of a 16-year-old Mexican comedian. For all we know, that may be the case. It seems a pretty safe bet that he's in the early to mid-teen years, in any case. We spent a lot of time poking around in here, so you won't have to, unless you want to. If you appreciate adolescent, mocking humor, run right here. If you don't, run in the opposite direction.http://fatchicksinpartyhats.com/index.html
Non-Microsoft Microsoft How-Tos
Owning a computer for anything more than e-mail and Solitaire is like the weather: everybody complains but nobody does anything about it. Those of us who are, for better or worse, dependent on Microsoft for our livelihoods already know a little too much about Bill's products, always a dangerous thing. Computer Training 2000, on the other hand, lets you learn a lot about them and, more importantly, when it's better to let somebody else find out the answer. The site provides free (yes, free!) online support for Windows, Internet Explorer, and most of the Office tools, along with tutorials for Word and PowerPoint and a really great how-to section for FrontPage, the program you love to hate. It adds up to a valuable asset for the low-power user who hates to read manuals.http://www.computertim.com/
ONLINE TRAVEL
This month, three hardy New Zealanders set out to kayak 1,200 km along the Antarctic Peninsula. Sure, it's summer there now - but that just makes extremely hazardous what would otherwise be impossible. To succeed in the six-week adventure, the kayakers will have to overcome snow, ice, aggressive leopard seals, hurricane force winds, and extreme cold. No wonder it's never been done before. The group hopes to do it and leave no trace, passing benignly through the environment. The adventurers carry only VHF radios for communication via nearby ships. The site lets you track the progress of the hardy trio on a map and frequently reports how they are doing. It also provides some background. This isn't exactly the sort of thing that most people have in mind when they think of messing about in boats, but it's great excitement for the vicarious armchair adventurer.http://www.adventurephilosophy.com/index.htm
You work hard for your vacation or extended business trip. So plan for it. TripAdvisor, a database-driven site, mines the Web and presents tons of tips as search results for travelers with foresight. Sure, you could find many of these materials - guidebook entries, magazine and newspaper articles, hotel sites - at major search engines, but TripAdvisor has more focus. It also has scope. In addition to articles, it harvests message boards, personal home pages, travelogues, and rating sites. Got your own opinion? Submit your own review through the online form. The interactive map of the US on the home page is another friendly touch. Pleasant surprises may abound when you use the directory-style links - such as Guidebooks, Recommended Reading, or Things to Do - or the omnipresent search box. This is quick, easy, and useful. A major find.!
http://www.tripadvisor.com/
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
Insert Monica Lewinsky Intern Joke Here
Want to try your hand at a career but perhaps not jump in head first? An internship is just the thing, and Internweb can help you find one. It features a searchable internship database, plus a special section of virtual internships you can try out from the privacy of your own home.http://www.internweb.com/
Is This Knot a Sound Weigh Two Rite?
"Roger's Reference: A Complete Homonym/Homophone Dictionary" saves thyme and helps insure ewe don't air wile selecting that illusive write whirred. Take a peak at the free sample. The entire dictionary can bee downloaded for $19.00.http://www.rogersreference.com/
CORRECTIONS
Jim Scott took great glee in pointing out that in last issue ("Liability for Entering Web Sites under Assumed Names"), we wrote that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled "that impersonating a party who does not have permission to log into a site opens you up to legal liability." He correctly points out that we should have written "that impersonating a person who does have permission to log into a site". He also said we have the best newsletter out there, so he's obviously not a snot-nosed kid out to point out grammar mistakes. We just wonder why the other 149,999 readers didn't catch this.The Fellowship of the Ring, December, and Summer
Also in last issue, we issued a correction for saying that "The Fellowship of the Ring" would be out next summer, and altered that arrival to December 19, 2001. Doh! The original article was written by our Australian correspondent, and of course December 19 is summer down under. That's the cause of my confusion in the first place. Hey! Wait a sec! It ain't summer! Please allow us to state perfectly correctly that the movie will come out next spring.