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BREAKING SURF
A European Parliament committee has released a draft of their report on the Echelon global surveillance network. The report is not overly alarmed by the system, downplaying network the extent and capabilities of the network. The report says the network is reliant on satellite and radio intercepts and not yet able to intercept a great deal of land line and fiber optic traffic. It's worth noting that the goal of the committee is to determine whether Echelon poses a risk to European citizen's privacy and whether it's being used for industrial espionage against European firms. This copy of the report on Cryptonome has links to the parliament version and also a history of revisions since the original draft was released on May 4.http://cryptome.org/echelon-ep.htm
Legal Attempt to Claim Ownership of Open Source Music Database
The CDDB database was an online database of CD song titles and artists, produced entirely by voluntary contributions from the online community. The database was populated either by direct entry of the information or automatically when you inserted a CD and ran CD burning software such as that made by Roxio. The database was maintained bye a company called Gracenote. Now Gracenote has decided to claim ownership on both the database and the software that runs it. They are suing Roxio claiming that the company - a subsidiary of Adaptec - is still using the now closed database despite a lapsed contract. The lawsuit has important implications for any community created open database and any companies which may be using the software. The case is well explained in this CNet article.http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-201-6008182-0.html
IBM Giving Guest Linux Accounts on Mainframes
IBM has this neat piece of serious hardware called the zSeries mainframe, What's cool about the big box is that it's capable of running Linux in as a virtual machine. That is, it can host over 1000 users to whom it looks like they have their own virtual Linux box. The machine has 10 processors and 32 gigabytes of memory and 2.1 terabytes of storage. In order to encourage developers to work on applications in this environment IBM is giving away free accounts. As you can imagine the demand has been huge, so there is a backlog of requests, but it's clearly a great opportunity for Linux fans.http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/os/linux/lcds/
Study on the Extent of World-Wide Distributed Denial of Service Attacks
Everybody knows that there is quite a bit of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) activity going on, but until now there has been a distinct lack of data about the exact extent of such activity. This new research project used a brand new method called backscatter analysis to come up with the first credible estimates of DDoS attack rates. Backscatter refers to some of the network traffic debris left by a DDoS attack. Such attacks generate a variety of pockets which bounce around the network and which can be analyzed to not only produce an estimate of the number of attacks but also give some information about the exact type of DDoS attack. The study found 12,000 attacks against more than 5,000 distinct targets during a two week sample period, and also provided data on the duration and focus of attacks, and on their technical nature. A very elegant piece of detective work which should be studied by all network administrators.Study: http://www.caida.org/outreach/papers/backscatter/
Wagering on Your Online Game Skills
A new company called Zoogi is offering a wagering service for one-on-one online games. The basic idea is that you give them some money which you can then wager on any one-on-one game on the Net, whether it's a friendly chess game on Yahoo or a Quake frag fest. After the game the players report who won and the winner gets credited at Zoogi where the cash can be redeemed. Great in theory but a piece in Wired makes a very important point that the service is almost pathologically vulnerable to cheating. Online game cheating is already a problem in the non-cash games, but one can only imagine the scamming which will go on with real money involved. Our advice: play with honest friends.Zoogi: http://www.zoogi.com/
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,43974,00.html
Bob Dylan 60th: Live Performances
May 24 marked the 60th birthday of Bob Dylan, arguably one of the most influential modern musicians and poets. What better way to mark the occasion then to listen to the man's work? No, we're not advocating pirating his music in some underground Napster clone. Fortunately his official website has an amazing treasure trove of live concert performances freely available for your listening pleasure. There are over 50 numbers here available in RealAudio format. This is quintessential Dylan, performing his own work from throughout his career as well as several numbers written by others. It's quite a treat and well worth playing as a background to your online day.http://bobdylan.com/performances/
eBay has launched a new web site that offers people "a fixed-price, online marketplace to buy and sell high quality, new, overstocked, remaindered and used products at discounted prices". Think of it as one of those discount warehouse stores where you can get off-price items. The site has major areas for books, music, movies, video games, computers, electronics, sporting goods, and trading cards. This is not an auction site; everything has a fixed - 'though discounted - price. You can buy, sell, and become an affiliate. All for a price, of course, but still, if anybody can make it work it's the consistently profitable eBay.
http://www.half.com/
Surf the Web for Summer Reading Contest
Nine book-oriented websites have banded together to sponsor a reading contest. The prizes are modest - up to $300 in gift certificates and some books - but it's a neat excuse to take you on a tour of some very popular and worthwhile book sites. The contest consists of visiting the sites, finding the "contest word" at each site, then stringing all the words into a coherent sentence. The contest runs until June 30.http://www.bookreporter.com/summerreading/
What's the optimum ping time to online game servers? Grenville Armitage wanted to answer that question and he took an empirical approach to the problem. He analyzed the logs from two of his own Quake servers and determined that, with some caveats, if ping times to the server go above about 150 milliseconds people tend to seek a faster connection. The study is of interest to anybody actually running a game server and also to game designers. Here are some data on the latency you have to design for. Good technical write-up.
http://members.home.net/garmitage/things/quake3-latency-051701.html
Preventing Cheating in Distributed Computing
One of the pervasive problems in distributed computing is how to prevent cheating. Some nodes may wish to claim the benefits of the distributed activity without contributing their fair share. Philippe Golle, a computer science PhD student has done extensive work on the problem and has co-authored several research papers on the subject. His website has the papers that look not only at the problem of cheating but also at how to give people incentives for sharing their computing resources. These papers are of interest to anybody following the rapidly evolving P2P field.http://crypto.stanford.edu/~pgolle/
Will the Real Mr. Lee Please Stand Up?
Dreaming big is fine but creating a Web of lies to help achieve it isn't. That's the moral of Feed's story about Dennis Lee, of Singapore, who built a false pedigree for himself. Exaggerating his Internet and programming skills, publishing plagiarized articles under his own name, adding his name to the advisory boards of Internet companies, and awarding himself a bogus MIT/ATT Innovator 2000 award were all part of his big deceit. As a result of his bogus credentials, Dennis ended up as CTO of a Singapore start up and was kept busy with invitations to speak at important technical meetings. The end came swiftly, however, when a Singapore journalist heard from some of his friends and checked into his background. Who's the sucker here: the man who fooled the world briefly or those who fell for the flim flam? In the end there's nothing really new in people pretending to be better than they are, putting up impressive window dressing to hide a shabbier reality. The Internet just allows a little more reach for their lies and pretenses.http://www.feedmag.com/templates/default.php3?a_id=1715
In the deserts of Nevada, satellite thieves have routinely stolen television signals transmitted by satellite, gaining access to the latest episodes of shows sometimes days before their official broadcast. Now, however, the same big dish folk are using the Internet to make the purloined programs more widely available. CNET tells us that recent illicit releases include the last episode of Star Trek: Voyager and the season finales of Frasier and The Simpsons. It's not quite a repeat of the Napster music file situation, however, because the programs, being big, are much less easy to swap. Still the potential to spoil broadcasters' marketing buzz around program surprises is there. Big Brother, in the form of the National Association of Broadcasters, says it's watching the TVRippers closely. Saying it's OK to do this because the programs are free to consumers, as some TVRippers do, displays complete ignorance of the nature of copyright and we suspect won't save anyone from lawyers driving 4x4s.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-6030033.html
How do you market security services to network geeks reared on Space Invaders? Let them download a free game and enjoy themselves while it reinforces the need for your services. That's the neat strategy of Verado: The IT Security Game. Download a 10MB executable and go to work on the bad guys - a spammer, a hacker, a cross-eyed Viking, a data thief, a mad scientist, and a ping-crazed attacker. Gotta watch out for those cross-eyed Vikings. Defend your network with a shredder, antivirus CDs, a flamethrower, a log file, and several other menu items with more promise than protection. Our reviewer couldn't get past the first level (spam), which only proves that he's no kid. Lose, and you're reminded that Verado has solutions to protect you for real. Weird promotion, but kind of cool. The sound effects are probably subdued enough to protect you from a vigilant boss.
http://www.verado.com/forms/get_verado_game_1.shtml
In what looks like a new twist on virus software a new worm searches for specific content files on the victim's computer in pursuit of a social agenda. The worm searches for files which contain child porn - it finds them by matching image file names. When it finds such files the worm sends off email to government agencies before spreading itself far and wide. As far as we can tell this is the first instance of a virus which targets specific socially unacceptable content, as opposed to pursuing the usual technical disruption agenda of most viruses. The obvious question: Will the RIAA release a worm which hunts for illicit music files next? Wired has the story, Symantec the technical details.
Story: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,44112,00.html
Worm: http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/vbs.noped.a@mm.html@mm.html
ONLINE CULTURE
Good, Bad and Ugly: Online Games Mirror Offline World
Ever wondered how humans behave collectively in an online gaming world? It's not always a pretty picture the New Yorker tells us in its intriguing glimpse into the paradoxical world of online gaming, concentrating on the granddaddy of multi-player, online role playing games, Ultima Online. The consequences of widespread shabby game behavior on the island of Britannia, such as hoarding resources, luring new players to their death, or currency counterfeiting, have forced the game operators to intervene, sometimes drastically, to prevent the imaginary online world from collapsing. It's not quite what the game operators and programmers imagined originally. Perhaps a more thorough study of human history might have helped? New competition, most notably EverQuest, has benefited from some of the early lessons learned and avoided some of the nastier trends. Makes you wonder about people though. Striking story.Story: http://www.newyorker.com/FACT/?010528fa_FACT
Ultima Online site: http://www.uo.com/
Ultima Online visitors: http://www.uo.com/visitor/
On the Internet, No One Knows You're a Fraud
You may have heard by now about the Kaycee Nicole incident - effervescent 19-year-old girl relays her epic fight against cancer via weblog ("blog"), readers are shocked to tears when they find out that she has passed away, then readers are even more shocked to learn that she didn't ever exist. Kaycee turned out to be a fictional character, brought to life by Kelli Swenson and to death by Kelli's mom, Debbie Swenson, who you could say always relied on the kindness of strangers. A new syndrome, perhaps: Munchausen by server? Remember Randall van der Woning, the "Big White Guy" we had a laugh with in NSD 6.03? He was one of those strangers; he hosted blogspace for what he thought was a sympathetic young girl. In the aftermath, his site is being hit with more requests than his provider has bandwidth, and at the end of May he had to temporarily suspend his site - and he's not the only one. This whole episode, however, points out that it's not just the people who forward the Neiman Marcus cookie recipe who get duped online; it's the innovative, edgy, clever types, too. We guess they're human, after all. CIAC has a page on such hoaxes.Hoax FAQ: http://rootnode.org/article.php?sid=26
Randall: http://vanderwoning.com/mess.shtml
CIAC: http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/HBSympathy.shtml
Character Building from the Web
Reporters, marketers, teachers, students, and others in need of broad Web statistics might benefit from periodic visits to the Web Characterization Project, conducted by the research arm of Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), a global nonprofit library cooperative based in Dublin, Ohio. OCLC performs statistical analysis on a sample of the public Web. Although this is done on an annual basis, resultant data "may be revised or updated at any time" as new analyses are completed. Recently, we learned that in 2000 there were 7,399,000 public Web sites and that 2.3% of those were adult sites. From 1998 to 1999, the total number of Web sites increased 71%; from 1999 to 2000, it increased 52%. If you need such data to plug into a spreadsheet or report, just remember that (a) a statistician might require more data and more detail (for example, there's no explanation of the difference between the number of websites and the number of unique websites and (b) there are a heck of a lot of private websites.http://wcp.oclc.org/
It's sort of sad that Boxerjam has left the AOL platform, like so many other content providers who have dropped by the wayside. Fortunately, most of them are still available via the Web, but the ease of access for AOL users must have been a huge blow to their numbers. Boxerjam has been around since either 1994 or 1995, depending on which part of its site you read, and it's been an AOL Games Channel staple the whole time. Strike A Match, Out of Order - these were the games you played while you were trying to avoid what you should have been doing. All the old favorites, plus some new hits like Hollywood Showdown are available on the website. You have to register to play, but it's free. In the registration process, you get the bonus ability to sign up to be spammed by 16 different retailers (well, technically it's not spam if you sign up for it), so remember to just say no unless you're into that sort of thing.
http://www.boxerjam.com/
Born With a Domain Name In Their Mouths
Sign of the times: local Silicon Valley Sequoia Hospital in association with domain name company Namezero.com has launched a program to make personalized domain names and email addresses available to newborn infants. CNet has the very brief story.Story: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-6032035.html
Namezero: http://www.namezero.com/
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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.
Going Inside: A Tour Round a Single Moment of Consciousness
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Windows 2000 Power Toolkit
Etiquette for Outlaws
The Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession, and the Everlasting DeadARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
And now for something entirely different: an auto manufacturer gets into the film business, and does it with an accelerated burst out of the gate. BMW has a couple of cool, professionally done short films available for viewing at this site. If you have a broadband connection, you can view them as streams. But wait! There's more! You can download the BMW film player - and you may want to do this even if you have broadband. It allows you to play enhanced QuickTime films with added content, at as much as 2.5 times the display window you'd get in a normal stream - sort of a DVD player without the player. On the other hand, this isn't really a freebie: you need at least 100 MB of hard disk space and 96 MB RAM on a Mac or Windows machine to deal with this, and the recommendation for maximum pleasure is 800 MB of hard drive space and 128 MB RAM or more. Is it worth it? Take a look and decide for yourself, but we think so. We loved Ang Lee's director commentary on his little BMW film, not to mention John Frankenheimer's glee at wrecking cars in his. With more film segments due out, we bookmarked it.http://bmwfilms.com/
There are plenty of ways to spend your movie dollars, and when you want movie reviews, you want movie reviews, not other stuff too. (At least, that's how many of us feel.) Hence, Movie Review Query Engine, a modest-looking site with instant utility and enormous range. What an index behind its database! Magazines, newspapers, film sites, a Usenet group - the "List of indexed media sources" alone is impressive. It could hardly be easier to find movie reviews with a mouse. Up front, you search by name or, in a pulldown list, by groupings such as recent releases in the U.S., top 10 at the U.S. box office, AFI's 100 greatest American movies, and most reviewed titles. Yes, there seems to be an American bias in these preselections. That's Hollywood for you. (A separate list links to reviews of films shown at this year's Cannes Film Festival. Most of those reviews, too, are in English.) We believe the statement below the list of media sources that "you might find review references for the aforementioned sources served by the Movie Review Query Engine a few days before they appear in the Internet Movie Database." Outstanding. Bookmark it.
http://www.mrqe.com/
Lovers of highbrow performing arts who feel left out of the Napster brouhaha or feel ignored by the Web altogether might enjoy Online Classics, which features streaming audio and video broadcasts of opera, classical music, ballet, and theatrical performances around the world. It's fairly easy to search by event, genre, or composer. Jump right into downloads and read background notes for the non-cognoscenti. Windows Media Player is required, and, as you might guess, the faster your connection and processor, the smoother the performance. We listened to Bach's "St. Mathew Passion", which offered fairly good sound at the lowest download speed on an ISDN line. The video stream was a little flaky but then, alas, webcasts often are. Still, you might enjoy performances here as background music, or pick up some trivia for your next date or interview with a Berlioz enthusiast, or crank up the volume and make your neighbors think you're a sophisticated audiophile.
http://www.onlineclassics.com/
BOOKS & E-ZINES
It's the end of the semester. You lug the stack of books you bought for several hundred dollars back to the campus bookstore and are overjoyed when they take them off your hands for the price of two large pizzas. The transaction is the final sign that thermodynamics or micro-economics is no longer part of your life and so you're happy just to get the books out of your sight. What if you didn't have to lug them anywhere to sell them? Many sites will let you offload those books online. Some of the better sites we found where students were selling to other students were BookSwap, whose advanced search capabilities will tell you what class the book was used for and let you search by institute of higher learning, and StuBEx.com, which prefills the message to the seller so that you waste fewer of those brain cells. Listing your books is free at both sites. StuBEx also includes calculators in the mix; BookSwap has a notification feature.BookSwap: http://www.bookswap.com/
StuBEx.com: http://www.stubex.com/
NewZoid generates headlines for the purpose of little more than making you think and laugh, two rather sterling qualities, but, like most jokes, you need to take the time to ponder their meanings. Basically, the site takes real headlines, slices and dices them, then puts the pieces together in random fashion. Take a look and judge for yourself, or create your own headlines about a parallel universe. The site claims that "no one ever receives the same group of headlines twice. With sufficient endurance a person can theoretically see hundreds of thousands of NewZoid headlines in a day." But do you want to?
http://www.newzoid.com/
ReadTheWest.com is a free online monthly magazine about the American West. Transform your home with a little shopping for Western decor, clothing, and put on a little cowboy music. Monthly feature articles share tales of the past along with current events. Even learn about the importance of spring horse cleaning before you peruse the weekly Rodeo News column for all the latest. Chat areas and message forums let people join a community of folks with similar interests, ranging from rodeos to western films, Patti Dickinson to cowboy collectibles. Top off your visit with a skim over cowboy poetry that continues to ``dream about Frontier Days''.
http://www.ReadTheWest.com/
SURFING SCIENCE
If you plan to be anywhere on Comet Tempel 1 in July 2005, better put on your hard hat because that's when NASA will aim a 770 lb. (350 kg) copper mass impactor at its surface. The mission to deliver the impactor and photograph and analyze the results is a pretty spectacular example of destructive testing aimed at uncovering deep material for examination. Other than the sheer fun of seeing something go splat, the four scientific objectives of the mission are to see how the crater forms, determine its depth and diameter, figure out what the interior of the crater and the ejecta are made of, and observe changes in outgassing from the comet as a result of the impact. NASA has built an impressive website to explain the mission and to keep us informed as work advances toward the planned launch in 2004. Once the mission is underway the site will provide details of its final phases as the spacecraft nears its destination and show pictures from cameras on board both flyby satellite and impactor. The site also offers copious info about the comet itself and neat animations in QuickTime or RealVideo of the mission's final phases.http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/
The distribution of information around the Web is a rather dramatic process. The most valuable places, some feel, are those locations that collect together much of that disparate detail into a cohesive whole. The Natural Food Hub works to explain as much as possible about natural foods and where you can find them. Directories of resources in a variety of countries lead you to a few dealers of fruit, nuts, oils, seafood, meat, and vegetables; in London and other cities there are evening deliveries, to help with a hard day at work. Or, learn to grow your own foods properly. Guides at the Hub explain how to buy and prepare it, and maintain good care of the natural resources. Next time you interview for the "Survivor" franchise, brag about everything you learned from the Natural Dieting Hub, including how to hunt and gather.
http://naturalhub.com/
Before the Internet and its daily hoax, the Piltdown Hoax was THE hoax. For roughly 40 years the Piltdown Man was considered real. He was part of history, in textbooks and serious articles. Sure, there were a few skeptics, but the Piltdown Man really existed. Then suddenly he wasnąt real. He was an elaborate prank. Today, people try to figure out who the perps were, not where exactly the Piltdown Man belongs in the evolutionary chain. It's all here, in very readable, accessible detail. There's only one not so small problem: the titles and credits. Talk about ugly and talk about slow, slow loading. Be patient and the rest of site is worth the slog to get in.
http://www.clarku.edu/~piltdown/
SOFTWARE
Windows MediaPlayer Security Fixes
Microsoft has released security fixes for its audio and video player. The problem could allow hackers to run any code they want on your machine. The security advisory has details for the technically inclined. Media Player 6.4 users should install a patch which has been posted on its security website. Users of Media Player 7 should install the latest Windows Media Player 7.1, which is available at Microsoft's media website.7.1: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/en/default.asp
Bulletin: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS01-029.asp
Swarcast: Speeding File Downloads by Distributing the Bandwidth
This new method of downloading files takes advantage of numerous peer machines to help distribute the bandwidth load of downloading files. Normally, if a zillion people decide to grab a file from a site the web server becomes overloaded and nobody is happy. The webmaster has a bogged down machine and the downloaders can't get the file. In this method, bits of the file are distributed among many machines. A piece of software on the machine requesting the file is then able to grab pieces of the file from all those participating machines and then reassemble it. The details are somewhat technical and explained at the site. You can download this beta software and give it a try. Certainly webmasters should be familiar with the technology.http://www.swarmcast.com/gate/index.jsp
COMMUNITY SUPPORT
Maintained by a group of volunteers from Pakistan, India, and other countries, Bytes For All works to be a source of aid for all of south Asia and beyond. Earthquakes and other disasters routinely wreak havoc in the lives of the people who live in this region. But, for some of the poorer nations receiving assistance is the exception rather than the rule. In their special issue on disaster mitigation, Bytes For All appeals to the world to help disseminate information in times of disaster. A variety of articles and site descriptions cover topics like disaster management, preparedness, community participation in post-disaster reconstruction, you name it. This is the Internet at its very best: connecting resources and areas in need in a way that would have been far more difficult 30 years ago.http://www.bytesforall.org/