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| The First Ever Web Cam to Be Retired |
| Life in a Dotcom Office |
| Sparse Site Leads to Odd Art |
| RIT's Photography Students Get an Online Gallery |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| A Furious, Curious Little Satirical E-Zine |
| NY Is Not the World, but the World Is Turning into NY |
| Duh News of duh Stupid |
| A 13th Century Monk 700 Years Ahead of His Time |
| NASA's Awesome Solar System Simulator |
| Volunteer to Count Craters |
| The Culture of Medicine |
| The Cells |
| Cold War |
| I Am Michael's Hernia |
| United Devices' Generic Distributed Computing |
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| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
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BREAKING SURF
Penetrating US e-commerce computer systems with apparent ease by exploiting known vulnerabilities in Windows NT, hackers mainly from Russia and Ukraine have systematically stolen more than a million credit card numbers from over 40 companies over the last year. Some thieves have demanded ransom money; others have probably sold numbers to organized crime syndicates. The problem is so serious, the FBI and the Secret Service have taken the unprecedented step of releasing information from ongoing investigations to spur sysadmins into tightening security. Most of the vulnerabilities have been known for some time and the patches that fix them have been around in some cases for years. Gotta love lazy serversitters.... Clearly, e-commerce cannot afford such a lackadaisical approach to system security. SANS has the tech details, CNet a newsy account, and Wired looks at Russia's hacking culture. The Center for Internet Security (CIS, ironically) has released software that tests system vulnerabilities and identifies files that indicate hacked systems. By the way, the stolen credit card numbers belong to all consumers, not just those who purchased goods online.SANS: http://www.sans.org/newlook/alerts/NTE-bank.htm
CNet: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-5069377.html
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,42346,00.html
CIS: http://www.cisecurity.org/patchwork.html
A hacker broke into Bibliofind, a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com, and browsed for four months, accessing customer records and credit card numbers. Bibliofind links buyers and sellers of rare and out-of-print books. The servers that host the site went offline while investigations took place. Company officials insist no false use of customer information has so far occurred but the Register contends otherwise and has a published statement from a merchant who suffered a spate of fraudulent credit card orders. The merchant contends that the only similarity among the orders is that they come from Eastern Europe and that the rightful cardholders were all Bibliofind customers. He also says Amazon threatened legal action against him for discussing the situation with victimized cardholders.
Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/8/17387.html
CNet: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-5031805.html
In another glaring example of sloppy system security, two hackers have published a program that allows users to obtain the usernames and passwords for all accounts, including administrators', on sites that use IBM's Net.Commerce (version 3.2) and WebSphere Commerce Suite (version 4.1) software. IBM has known about the problem since 1999 and published ways around it then, but not all users have diligently kept their systems adequately protected. In a quick look-see, CNet found about a dozen vulnerable sites, and the hackers themselves claim about 300 companies are wide open to attacks. Did we mention somewhere something about laziness?
CNet: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-5068115.html
ZDNet: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5079250,00.html
The Aimster file sharing system aims to ward off attacks from the music industry's legal vultures by having users agree not to share or use files they don't own and by employing encryption. The particularly clever encryption ploy shrouds everything that moves, including files and directories, in a copyrighted cloak that can't be cracked and monitored without running afoul of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, effectively legally thwarting any attempt by the entertainment industry - which trumpets the DMCA in cracking down on DeCSS - to monitor what's going on. The Aimster system is more akin to instant messaging than the wide-open peer-to-peer system Napster uses, and restricts an individual's filesharing to others on his buddy list. While the standard Aimster will only work on Windows, both Windows and Mac users can download the Aimster Pig Encoder plug-in for Napster, which alters song titles and artist names to circumvent Napsters new filters. Internet to the music industry: you can't keep creativity down.
Aimster: http://aimster.com/
CNet: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-201-5006958-0.html
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,42105,00.html
Seven lines of code is now all it takes to unscramble a copyright-protected DVD, thanks to an MIT student and an alumnus. They produced the code as part of a seminar on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which makes it illegal to circumvent encryption. The Motion Picture Association, a vigorously litigious collection of Hollywood studios that is already challenging the similar DeCSS code in court, can't possibly be happy over this little development. ZDNet has the bad news, and you can download the code, called "qrpff", at David Touretzky's Gallery of CSS Descramblers Web page.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2693768,00.html
Porn King Casts Doubt on DoubleClick Patent
DoubleClick, the online ad serving and monitoring company, has been dealt some bad news recently. Besides a steady decline in share value, its patent on delivering, targeting, and monitoring online advertising has been called into question. Prior art, in the language of the US Patent and Trademark Office, is information that predates the filing of a patent and that may call into question the uniqueness or validity of the patent. Brian Schuster, who runs the porn site Xpics and is, in all fairness, also a syndicated cartoonist, presented documents that show he had developed technology similar to DoubleClick's, prior to the awarding of their patent. This could mean an abrupt end to DoubleClick's attempted strangle hold on the ad serving market through patent enforcement and lawsuits. The information came to light through Bountyquest's - well, quest for prior art and the company awarded a $10,000 - well, bounty to Brian for it.http://www.bountyquest.com/winner/bschuster.htm
No One Yells "Yahoo!" on the Way down
The epicenter of the Internet revolution and the bastion of dotcom culture is in serious trouble. The high-flying Yahoo of the '90s - brash, insular and wildly successful - has taken a beating as the technology sector continues to dive in the markets. With the dotcom shakeout, Yahoo has lost much of its traditional revenue - the dotcom advertisers. Earnings are down, talented executives running foreign business units are jumping ship, and the company is having trouble filling key positions - including CEO now that Tim Koogle has stepped down, but not out. Below is a litany of coverage and analysis, from the sympathetic to the vindictive.ZDNet: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2694480,00.html
Merc: http://www0.mercurycenter.com/local/center/yahoo0308.htm
CNet: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-201-5057515-0.html
Wondering where that hydrogen scooter/wearable car/teleportation machine/hovercraft alternately called IT and Ginger is? We were promised in January an invention of such power and importance that it would change the world and revolutionize the way cities were planned. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had invested in it, and Jeff Bezos predicted it would make millions. Where is it? Inventor Dean Kamen, the man behind the machine, explains his position and circumstance to Brill's Content, the magazine that watches the media. Brill's tells a story of snowballing media hype, wishful thinking and poor judgment. We have no flying cars just yet, but the ideas are still flying pretty thick. Read the short article first and the feature second.
Short: http://www.brillscontent.com/2001may/notebook/boal.shtml
Feature: http://www.brillscontent.com/2001apr/features/it.shtml
Three men created over 40 user names on eBay, fraudulently bid up items in their own art auctions, and impersonated art dealers and the family members of artists to ring up a total of $450,000 US in bids. Then they were caught. The three have been charged with multiple counts of wire and mail fraud and one charge of laundering money. The FBI investigated after reading an article on one of the men in the New York Times (NYT) last spring. So... the NYT has the story. And pictures.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/09/technology/09AUCT.html?ex=985410000&en=7b4528a0ceb1b388&ei=5001&partner=yahoo
The Second Annual Tossers Awards, presented by Thugs on Film, is proffering a top prize of a portable DVD player with 10 movie DVDs to people who vote for award winners. Categories consist of best special effects in a leading role, tackle-titillating previews that outdo the movie itself, biggest evil bastard, and biggest piece of overblown Hollywood wank. The Flash animation loads kind of slowly for those with dial-up Net access, but is worth the wait for its amusing natter and accents. The only downer for some is that you have to be a US resident and present in the US when you enter to qualify for a prize. And hurry, hurry, hurry as the draw closes March 22. While you're at the site, stick around and watch some of the entertaining Mondo Mini Shows. The whole thing provides a nice antidote for that other awards show.
http://www.mondominishows.com/
ONLINE CULTURE
The First Ever Web Cam to Be Retired
A decade ago, computer scientists at the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory got fed up walking down several flights of stairs in search of a hot java (back when coffee was the only java) only to find the pot empty. To forestall fruitless forays, they trained a camcorder on the pot and wrote a program to relay the image to their workspace computer screens. Shortly afterwards, with the invention of the Web, they put the system on a Web page - the world's first webcam. While hardly arresting viewing, the coffeepot over the years has attracted some 2.4 million viewers. One of those responsible for the webcam said it was the most useful thing he'd ever done at the lab. Alas, later this year, the computer department will be moving to a new building where they won't need to check coffee remotely, so the webcam will shut down. If you want to catch one last nostalgic glimpse of the coffeepot before it vanishes forever, head for the link. The journey from pioneering application to history in a decade is significant somehow. The Times has the news and Slashdot the geek reaction.Webcam: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html
Times: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2-95186,00.html
Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/articles/01/03/07/1345210.shtml
The Washington Post has published two articles that complement each other like chicken and waffles (trust us). Both follow dotcom careers. In one, Kevin Naff tells his own story of signing up in January 2000 as employee number 17 in anticipation of long hours and great riches. He found, instead, an office full of slackers, no real business sense, and, eventually, a lay-off 12 months later. Kerry DeMatteis lived the same story, although compressed into a single day. At 8:45 am, Monday, Mar. 5, Kerry walked into Zethus as an employee for the first time, eager to learn. Eight hours later, the company's brain trust laid off Kerry and all other employees.
Chicken: http://members.aol.com/stranahan/roscoes.htm
Kevin: http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50039-2001Mar10.html
Kerry: http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52193-2001Mar10.html
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
As Web sites go, there's not a lot to this one. When you first drop in, it looks like a standard FTP selection page - intimidating as heck in its simplicity for the newbies on the block. It just doesn't have the look and feel that many have grown comfortable with. Get past the discomfort; there's lots to savor here. Click on "screenshots" for some unusual computer art. These Sims-style isometric perspective scenes depict infamous or fictional events. See how many of the undescribed images you can recognize. Jon Haddock, the artist, seems to have a penchant for the popular and grisly. His offerings in the "resin 99" folder focus on the Susan Smith killings, riots, and the like. Jon's extensive collection of modified porn especially intrigued us. The "ISPs" images are porn pics with the naked bodies removed. This artist has a strong grasp of the art and science of pixel manipulation and the results - generally just otherwise dull scenes of beds and carpets with an indentation or two - somehow strike the viewer's interest. If you're more into traditional media on canvas, a click on the parent directory link will give you a chance to view half a dozen creations by Jon's colleague Mark Takamichi Miller, whose creations we found enjoyable as well.http://www.whitelead.com/jrh/
RIT's Photography Students Get an Online Gallery
SpecialtyArts.Com has teamed up with Rochester Institute of Technology's School of Photographic Arts and Sciences to provide awards and, more importantly, a venue for the talents of its student photographers. Taking this year's awards are Michael Ford's Rabbit Series, which he explains as a study in fear, the still lifes of Hector Sanchez, which defy their very definition, and the emotionally charged family studies from David LaSpina, who eloquently relates his coming-to-terms with the death of his mother through the lens of a camera. Whether or not you're a fan of photography, the site is worth at least five minutes of your time to view the breadth of humanity they have captured.http://www.specialtyarts.com/spas2.htm
BOOKS & E-ZINES
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Items our staff likes and you might too. Click on the image or title to order at a hefty discount from our affiliate Amazon.com, and send a few pennies our way as well.
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The Surrendered Wife: A Practical Guide to Finding Intimacy, Passion, and
The Big U
Staff Meals from ChanterelleA Furious, Curious Little Satirical E-Zine
And now, a nice, slickly yawping e-zine haven of farcical and satirical attitude with a great name: Furiosity.com. The dorky potpourri of rants, raves, reviews, messages, letters, and links comes from "a select group of self-professed intellectual elites from Canada." Irreverence is everywhere - if sometimes imitative - as in the "Dale Earnhardt Still Dead" piece posted four days after the NASCAR racer's deadly crash in February, or the "Free Crap For You, Free Cash For Me" promotions. Some items have an Onion-like tongue-in-cheek quality, such as "California Power Crisis Finally Explained, Texas to Blame" and "Cheney Hauled to the Hospital Again, Bush Temporarily Left in Charge". If no current story grabs your fancy, some "Older Features" listed at the bottom of the home page may. (To wit: "Scientists Bet $500M On Whether Humans Can Linger Uselessly Until 150 Years Old.") Cheek here may offend some conservatives and give some liberals pause. Blame Canada. Or youth. Or both.http://furiosity.com/
NY Is Not the World, but the World Is Turning into NY
As if there weren't enough already, along comes another e-zine. "Thanks, but I'll pass," you're thinking. Think again. Eclectic doesn't adequately address the way World New York approaches the world, but it's the best we could come up with on short notice. When we dropped by for a recent visit, there was a great article describing how Saddam Hussein has won the propaganda war against the USA. Right next to that, another covered the development of outright rudeness in the formerly civilized Japanese. Hey, you name it: a brief treatise on dog hair in the home, a discussion of the relevance of obituaries, whatever - chances are, you'll find something to read here. Global warming? They got ya covered. We didn't notice any discussion of Canadians getting into the orange-growing business as yet, but that'll likely come out in a future edition.http://www.worldnewyork.org/
Duh: the World of the Stupid is predicated on the theory that optimists will gain a clearer perception of humanity if humorously prodded into paying better attention. In essence, the site finds and posts "incredibly dumb but true" news from finer news feeds everywhere, or rather, it once did, as the last update took place in late January. You'll find articles on things like making pre-worn jeans - not jeans worn by others but the jean industry's workers taking sandpaper to new jeans before they are offered to the public. Those in need of more subtle awakening to humanity's inherent idiocy will respond to the link about how, duh, suddenly after thousands of years of soap and water, man cannot live without anti-bacterial products even though they're decreasing natural resistance to bacteria. Sociopathic optimists may wish to conduct remedial research in the Duh Library, laden with titles such as "The Stupid History of the Human Race".
http://home.earthlink.net/~cgerena/duh.htm
SURFING SCIENCE
A 13th Century Monk 700 Years Ahead of His Time
It's strange enough that lyrics written by 13th century German Benedictine monk Udo of Aachen have been used in a ditty appearing in aftershave commercials and a sword and sorcery flick with Liam Neeson and Patrick Stewart. ("O Fortuna" from Carmina Burana, Old Spice, and "Excalibur", in case you're wondering). But now a retired professor of mathematics is convinced ol' Udo was not merely a minor poet, but a mathematician who first learned how to create what we now call Mandelbrot set fractals. The Mandelbrot set, was (re?)discovered in 1976 by IBM researcher Benoit Mandelbrot. But professor Bob Schipke has unearthed evidence that Udo spent nine years manually calculating the set, which he used to draw the familiar fractal that he then employed as an artistic Star of Bethlehem. The monk's progress appears to have been cut short by a theological dispute over whether numbers passing into infinity represented damnation to the devil, or deliverance to God. This article by Ray Girvan is one of the most fascinating pages we've seen in seven years of netsurfing. To top it all off, we think it's just spiffy that Udo the lyrical, mathematical German Benedictine monk had an assistant named "Thelonius".Udo: http://www.freezone.co.uk/rgirvan/udo.htm
Girvan: http://www.freezone.co.uk/rgirvan/
NASA's Awesome Solar System Simulator
Trekkies and other SF addicts will love this place, but that's no reason to avoid it. One thing we have to say about our neck of the galaxy - the scenery is breathtaking. Check out Io, Jupiter's moon, as seen from the Galileo spacecraft, or as seen from its neighbor, Europa. The level of detail can surprise you at times; we half expected to see a monolith warning us to stay away from Europa. Should you choose to visit, be forewarned: you will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. But after your first few looks, you won't be resisting anyway. You'll be anticipating. Kill that clock in your taskbar and free up a few bytes of RAM - you won't be paying attention to it anyway.http://space.jpl.nasa.gov/
We know the IRS lets you deduct the mileage on your car when you drive someplace to volunteer. Drive five miles to be a candy-striper at a hospital, and you can take a deduction for your charitable work. The IRS doesn't seem to provide any information about surfing for charity, but it seems only reasonable that you can deduct your computer. (Please consult a tax advisor before doing anything - anything - we say.) The premise of this site got us thinking about tax breaks (well, also that tax season is bearing down on us like a killer asteroid in near-earth orbit): volunteering to do crater marking. We're not talking popping zits, here - this is for NASA, and the subject is Mars. NASA started this little project about four months ago, and volunteers have already marked around 700,000 craters. Now, it looks like NASA's ready to start classifying and fine-tuning, and offers one training session for crater marking and another in crater classification. Pockmarked planetary faces are really very in, this year.
http://clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/
Any fan of "ER" knows controversy and suspicion lie at the heart of medicine. Is medical care a civil right? Why do some patients receive better treatment than others? Who gets the next available lung? Praxis Post e-zine treats the culture of medicine - conflict, personality, ethics, economics, politics, discovery, and trends - with a variety of timely and authoritative features written for both physicians and patients. Praxis Post authors are physicians, scientists, and journalists. A daily news digest and weekly commentary form the core of the site. Recent articles cover the state of the art in cardiology, an artist who sculpts with pills, and lexical advice ("When in doubt, anglicize"). Journal Scan covers recent medical literature; the Spin Doctor looks at medicine in the media. The archives, too, have plenty of meat. Overall, the tone is elevated and earnest, but you'll find intellectual humor as well. "Physician Reference" and "Patient Reference" link to PraxisMD, the subscription sister site. There's a lot more here than we have space to praise.
http://praxispost.com/
Goodness gracious, some of our innermost secrets are revealed at "CELLS alive!" This site is replete with animation and information about cellular biology. You'll find interactive maps of plant, animal, and bacterial cells, each with a short explanation of structural components and a list of keywords to paste into an inline AltaVista search. Students, especially, will find the alphabetical site index useful. Want to compare the size of human sperm to viruses or learn how dust mites make you itch? Check it out. If you prefer French, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish, you can translate the pages with links at the top of most pages. You can also buy a CD-ROM version of this site that has an hour of video clips.
http://www.cellsalive.com/index.htm
For how icky it makes you feel, you'd never guess how beautiful the cold virus is unless you're one of those scientific types and you in fact already do know. Us laypeople can find out with a quick visit to Common Cold, a site that looks suspiciously like it's from the same team that brings you "CELLS alive!" with the possible addition of a language fascist. A special section debunks myths, and although they admit that there's no scientific evidence to prove one should feed a cold, they provide some recipes on the site, just in case.
http://www.commoncold.org/
Invasion of the scrotum by a loop of intestine that has breached the abdominal wall makes for surprisingly good comedy. The Myhernia.com diary wisely stops short of promoting bust-a-gut laughter; rather, Michael explains in a witty first-person narrative how the docs patched him up good as new. The links are nothing to sneeze at, either. WebMD's medical drawings expose what's going on in there, and a Hernia Quiz dispels common misconceptions: lifting heavy weights does not cause a hernia, and in fact, if you're going to get one, there's not a darn thing you can do to stop it.
http://www.myhernia.com/
SOFTWARE
United Devices' Generic Distributed Computing
United Devices (UD) has put together a project that divides a large computing project into lots of small tasks, and then tosses those little pieces to a bunch of computers around the world. This set-up is distributed computing, the process used by SETIatHome and others. In fact, SETIatHome's director is chief technical officer of United Devices. Unlike SETIatHome, UD wants to harness your unused computer cycles as an asset, which it then will sell to its clients for nearly any use, ranging from molecular analysis to commercial drug development. What does the public get out of it? Besides the feel-good factor, members in the US, Canada, and UK can enroll in promotions to win cash, plane tickets, and gift certificates. You take part in the project by downloading and installing the UD Agent software, but only if you use Windows. UD promises Mac or Linux versions soon.http://www.ud.com/home.htm