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| Race in the Faceless Online World |
| The Spam Letters |
| Q & A with Proto-Spammer Laurence Canter |
| Is yEnc Bad for Usenet? |
| Left Brain, Right Brain, and Police Artists |
| The Glory of Bad Movies |
| Virtual Pieces at Art Peace |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| Read It, Register It, Release It, Repeat |
| "Journalism" of the Women's Mags |
| RPG Parody Comic Strip |
| True-Color Satellite Maps |
| The Simpsons Teach Math |
| The Gauss Magnetic Rifle |
| Pulse Jets and Go-Karts |
| Big Ass Science |
| Tow Boat Pics Pinpointed |
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BREAKING SURF
The Church of Scientology vs. Operation Clambake via Google
The Church of Scientology (CoS) is in the news again, this time using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) against Google, the popular search engine. CoS sent Google a complaint that the search engine was indexing and linking to a Web site that was infringing on the church's copyright. According to the DMCA, linking to a copyright infringer makes you legally liable. Based in the US and therefore subject to the DMCA, Google promptly removed the site, Operation Clambake, from its database to avoid liability. Of course, the CoS objected more to Operation Clambake's criticism than its content. Gee, who could have guessed that the DMCA, originally crafted to thwart MP3 and video distribution, might not instead be used to bludgeon critics into silence and to circumvent the US's guarantees of freedom of speech? Wondering why CoS doesn't simply cut to the chase and go after Operation Clambake directly? The site's in the Netherlands, untouchable by US law, so the CoS hopes to limit the number of folks who can find it by forcing the US-based major search engines to de-list it. After initially bowing to the pressure, Google has restored its link to the Operation Clambake homepage, allowing people to access the material with just a few clicks. Follow the links to learn more about the continuing info war.Operation Clambake: http://xenu.net/
CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-865936.html
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,51233,00.html
Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/yro/02/03/22/0141250.shtml?tid=153
The BBC report of previously unreleased pictures of the Soviet N1 moon rocket sent us off on a search of related sites. The N1 is interesting for all sorts of reasons, not least for its huge size and its equally huge and spectacular engineering failure. The Soviets launched four, and all four blew up, probably due to the complex 30-engine design. The pictures come from a Russian facility, the wonderfully named Strength Research Center (SRC). Rocketry.com hosts a two-parter called "The N1 Story", an engineering-oriented history of the rocket. Marcus Lindroos has written a great history of the Soviet manned moon program, which succumbed to politics, personal rivalry, and low budgets. Read it, NASA.
BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1883000/1883348.stm
SRC: http://www.tsniimash.ru/Vved/SRCEng/StatEng.htm#_Hlk507494781#_Hlk507494781
N1 Story Part 1: http://www.rocketry.com/mwade/articles/thepart1.htm
N1 Story Part 2: http://www.rocketry.com/mwade/articles/thepart2.htm
Lindroos: http://www.fas.org/spp/eprint/lindroos_moon1.htm
Larsen B Ice Shelf Photos and Info
The media has swarmed all over the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf, a floating ice mass on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula. Some 3,250 sq km of ice cleaved from the continent. While many have speculated that this is a sign of global warming, the scientific situation is not quite that clear - the collapse may be simply the result of local microclimatic conditions. This National Snow and Ice Data Center page has most of the source information used by the media in their reporting, including some cool photos. The media interest is vividly illustrated by the long list of links to stories about the ice shelf collapse at the bottom of the page.http://nsidc.org/iceshelves/larsenb2002/
Islamic World Poll Reporting Was Inaccurate
A recent Gallup poll of attitudes in Muslim countries after Sept. 11 was widely reported in the media, though apparently in a misleading manner. The poll made headlines by seeming to indicate that many Muslims did not believe Al Qaeda was behind the Sept. 11 attacks. The National Council on Public Polls (NCPP), an obscure but influential professional polling association, noted some serious problems in how Gallup distorted the poll results. Specifically, Gallup incorrectly reported aggregate results: "Kuwait, with less than 2 million Muslims, was treated the same as Indonesia, which has over 200 million Muslims." The Washington Post has a scathing critique of media reporting on the issue. CNN and USA Today have the original reports for your examination. It's a great example of why informed skepticism about media reporting is so important.NCPP: http://www.ncpp.org/islamic_world.htm
Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2730-2002Mar22.html
CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/02/26/gallup.muslims/index.html
USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/news/attack/2002/02/27/usat-poll.htm
The notion of "one company, one system" can work, so having all 82,000 AOL Time Warner staff use a single corporate e-mail system based on AOL software must have seemed like a no-brainer. "No-brainer" is right, but not in a good way. Business e-mail requirements don't match basic consumer needs - your typical AOL customer isn't going to stress the system as hard as a Time Warner cube-dweller. The company's directive to get everybody using the same tools was a flop. Staff suffered frequent crashes and found they couldn't send large attachments. Up to 2% of messages failed to find their way to the intended recipient. To make matters worse, employees with Blackberry wireless devices found that the AOL system isn't compatible with them. Problems were particularly acute at Time, where on one occasion a critical document had to be rushed by hand to an ad agency because the e-mail system couldn't handle it. Never send a boy to do a man's job. MSNBC tells us about it, somehow without bursting out in glee.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/727898.asp
E-Mail of the Governor: Public or Private?
Governor Mike Leavitt of Utah has learned a lesson from the experiences of the corporate world in the courts - he deletes his e-mail after three days, no matter what. Utah's press is furious and claims the governor is illegally destroying public records, and four press organizations have taken him to court. A few niggling issues have to be worked out here, but regardless, this lawsuit will help secure the place of e-mail in the records of public officials. For the public and historians, this will probably be a good thing. Wired has a short intro.http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,51195,00.html
A growing body of evidence indicates that legalizing marijuana would do more good than harm, which makes it doubly sad to learn from newly released Oval Office tapes that President Richard Nixon's personal viewpoint overrode the conclusions reached by a Presidential Commission he appointed 30 years ago. Although Nixon's National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse was loaded with hard-line anti-drug advocates, whom Nixon had handpicked for the job, after reviewing the evidence thoroughly the commission concluded that pot should be decriminalized. A furious Nixon refused to consider the evidence of marijuana's harmlessness, denounced the report, and petulantly declined to appoint the commission chair to a promised judgeship. Thirty years on, we're still wasting police time and swelling the prison population over a drug that was shown long ago to be fairly harmless. Kevin Zeese, president of Common Sense for Drug Policy, looks at the issue for Alternet.
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12666
US Web Radio's Imminent Demise
A new set of proposed regulations from the US Copyright Office would require onerous new fees for online broadcasters, as we reported in NSD 8.11. This is likely to put out of business many innovative webcasters. Salon looks at the plight of these small webcasters, who are not opposed in principle to paying royalties. They mostly object to how the royalty payments are structured, tied as they are to the size of the audience and not to the volume of webcast material. A large audience for a small - in the income sense - webcast station would bankrupt it under the proposed rules. It's a good overview of the situation.NSD 8.11: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v08/nsd.08.07.html#BS11
Salon: http://salon.com/tech/feature/2002/03/26/web_radio/index.html
1024-Bit RSA Cryptographic Keys Probably Vulnerable, Use Larger Ones
So says a BugTraq poster who examined recent advances in the technology and theory of factoring large numbers. The poster, Lucky Green, organized a discussion panel at a recent Financial Cryptography convention that looked at the security of 1024-bit keys. The panel concluded that a device to break such keys in a useful amount of time could be built for less than $1 billion, or even less if the attacker had access to a chip fabrication lab. This seemingly insurmountable sum actually falls well within the covert budget of most countries, and possibly even of sufficiently motivated private entities. What makes this development so alarming is that a plethora of common Web technologies use keys of that length: HTTPS; SSH; IPSec; S/MIME; PGP; etc. The bottom line, the poster suggests, is that when possible, users should switch to 2048-bit keys.http://online.securityfocus.com/archive/1/263924
The DIRT on Law Enforcement Spy Software
Details about software reportedly marketed to law enforcement for use in stealth bugging of suspects' computers have leaked out on the Web. The software, called DIRT, was developed by Codex Data Systems in New York. It turned up on an anonymous Web site in the Netherlands, and in due course on the Cryptome watchdog site. In addition to DIRT, netsurfers can peruse the manuals, financial information, and even customer invoices of the company, which reportedly peddled the software to foreign governments and US legal agencies. DIRT is basically a Trojan horse that works much like the better-known Back Orifice remote control and monitoring software. SecurityFocus has the story, Cryptome has the supporting materials.Cryptome: http://cryptome.org/dirt-feedback.htm
SecurityFocus: http://online.securityfocus.com/news/354
Emergency Communications Plan for the Internet
Emergency plans govern traffic priority in telephone systems during emergencies. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is beavering away at a similar scheme to manage Internet traffic during crises. The IETF's Internet Emergency Preparedness working group plans to come up with standards that deal with the requirements, a framework for meeting them, and ways to use Internet protocols to handle emergency communications. The US is particularly keen to move the Government Emergency Telecommunications Service, which now operates via voice lines, over to the Internet, allowing e-mail, messaging, shared screens, video, and audio to assist officials during emergencies. Apparently, there's not much rocket science to it; it's mainly a matter of organizing things properly and getting ISPs to program their servers properly. NetworkWorldFusion has the story, and the IETF site has an outline of the overall plan.IETF: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/ieprep-charter.html
NetworkWorldFusion: http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2002/0320ietf.html
IETF Bug-Reporting Proposal Withdrawn
We recently reported that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was looking at a proposal for how security bugs should be reported. Now comes news that the authors have withdrawn the proposal from the standards-setting body, saying this was not the right forum for this kind of process document. The proposed process was an important discussion point in the debate about how security vulnerabilities should be disclosed to satisfy the needs of both software vendors and sysadmins who use the software and must protect themselves. The Register has a good summary of the issues.http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/24482.html
Is There Really a New Economy?
Once upon a time, there was a vision about a new form of economy. The vision captured the imagination of many and lured them deep into the forest where revolutionary business models and processes glimmered seductively. Then the dotcom downfall monsters attacked. Now, with dazed survivors still staggering out of the trees muttering incoherently, it's popular to assume the vision was just a delusion. But was it only a dream, or is there something real gleaming in the woods? Two New Yorker writers held an e-mail debate about that very question. To oversimplify, Malcolm Gladwell, author of "The Tipping Point", thinks there really is something new and revolutionary brewing economically, while James Surowiecki, who writes the New Yorker's financial page, finds mainly older business techniques given new heft through the Internet, not so much a new thing as a tweaked thing. We're happy to say it's really more complicated and interesting than that. If this message exchange doesn't answer the question definitively, it at least gives an intriguing glimpse into the difficulties of seeing clearly during times of change.http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/?010423on_onlineonly02
New Survey of Information Policies and Practices of Commercial Web Sites
A brand new survey seems to indicate that commercial Web sites are getting better at protecting consumer privacy. The accounting firm Ernst & Young issued the report, which was commissioned by a foundation mostly sponsored by large high-tech companies and based on the methodology used by the Federal Trade Commission in a similar survey two years ago. The report concludes that Web sites are collecting less consumer information, fewer sites are using third-party cookies, the use of privacy policy documents has increased, and consumers have more choices in how their personal information is used. The full report is a largish PDF file.http://www.pff.org/publications/privacyonlinefinalael.pdf
Casualty of the Spam Wars: ORBZ Shuts Down, DSBL Replaces It
The Open Relay Blocking Zone (ORBZ) was a typical anti-spam, open-relay list that could be used by sysadmins to block e-mail from sites used by spammers. ORBZ assembled its list by testing mail servers to determine whether they were acting as an open relay. One such test would unfortunately crash older versions of Lotus Domino servers due to a bug in the server. When ORBZ tested the server of Battle Creek, Mich., the town's Lotus Domino e-mail service crashed, and in response the local authorities obtained a warrant to search ORBZ. In due course and after much critical media coverage, town administrators came to their senses and realized that ORBZ was not at fault and indeed performed a service by fighting spam and exposing the bug. But by then it was too late. Ian Gulliver, the creator of ORBZ, decided that the legal risks were too great and closed down the site. The good news is that Gulliver has helped establish a new distributed anti-spam service called the Distributed Boycott Sender List (DSBL) in ORBZ's place. DSBL won't actively test servers, but will rely on more passive means. ORBZ has the story and links to the articles.ORBZ: http://www.orbz.org/
DSBL: http://dsbl.org/
The Cost of Spam to Business, and to You
Spam means good eating for some folks, but for most of us, it just refers to inbox clotting. Since you're reading this, you've probably received your share of the latter, but imagine that you have a medium-sized company with around 45,000 e-mail inboxes to manage. Your moderate annoyance grows into a major problem for corporate IT people that affects the bottom line. It costs companies, today, about a dollar a pop to deal with spam. Spam count is expected to climb to an annual total of 1,400 per box by 2006, by some reliable estimates. Companies have to pass costs on to consumers, if they plan to stay in business, so if you've had your eye on that MP3 player, you might want to buy it now rather than wait. Corporations have tended to avoid filters and blocking software out of fear of losing potential or existing accounts. With the exponential increase in spam mail, many are re-thinking their approach. CNET has the story.http://news.com.com/2009-1023-864815.html
Nigeria Responds to Spamming Scammers
The Nigerian government has set up a Web site dedicated to fighting the money scam the country is famous for (we reported on it in last week's NSD). The site has examples of scam e-mails, and descriptions of other common cons in use in the country. Credit Nigerian officials for at least trying to do something about the situation, even if it's only to better publicize the problem.http://www.nigerianfraudwatch.org/
ONLINE CULTURE
Race in the Faceless Online World
Remember the old New Yorker cartoon: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."? Is it true that on the Internet, no one knows you're black? Do people assume that their online acquaintances share their racial background? Or is the dearth of online racial milestones a sign that it just doesn't matter? Henry Jenkins raises these issues in a lively column about race online. As he makes clear, not everyone is white online, but you'd hardly know from the ways we talk about race online or off.http://techreview.com/articles/jenkins0402.asp
Jonathan Land decided to reply to his spam. Yes, it's been done before - but never with quite such panache. Read a frustrated virgin frat boy's reply to a spam for an herbal Viagra substitute that - the spam, not the herbs - had an unintended effect on his sex life. Follow along as a staunch Buchanan supporter rips to shreds an offer using President Bush's name to peddle Cuban cigars from Florida, implying that sometimes a cigar really is a penis. How about the earnest inquiry from a sweat shop owner "under intense government scrutiny" who wants more info from a shouting Indian garment exporter? Land's spam reply letters are beyond hilarious, and certainly deserving of a larger audience - somebody give this guy a book publishing contract quick.
http://www.thespamletters.com/
Q & A with Proto-Spammer Laurence Canter
On Apr. 12, 1994, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, two immigration lawyers from Arizona, sent out what is widely acknowledged as the first example of spam. This week, CNET has posted a brief interview with Canter, wherein he discusses how he spammed Usenet and eventually managed to make over $100,000 from the effort. He notes, "For us, it was very effective. Would that be true today? Probably not as much so." The interview covers Canter's recollections of that historic spam and his attitude to spam today - he's quite unapologetic and not opposed to the idea of sending it. Fans of historical commentary will appreciate this.http://news.com.com/2008-1082-868483.html
THREAD WATCH
yEnc is a new method of encoding binary files on Usenet that notably produces smaller files than the ancient uuencode standard. Use of yEnc is rapidly growing in various Usenet binaries newsgroups but not everybody is happy with its spread. Jeremy Nixon eloquently critiqued how the standard came to be designed and deployed. Nixon argues that yEnc is flawed because it does not conform to MIME standards and in many ways re-invents creaky, old methods inappropriate to the modern Usenet. Nixon's critics say that Usenet is overdue for a more efficient standard and that trying to get anything through the standards approval organizations is much too slow - working code and rough consensus rules, according to them. The debate is important in both the philosophical and practical senses because it threatens to splinter the Usenet community between yEnc revolutionaries and defenders of uuencode and the standards process status quo. The debate rages on the news.software.nntp newsgroup.yEnc: http://www.yenc.org/
Nixon: http://www.exit109.com/~jeremy/news/yenc.html
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Left Brain, Right Brain, and Police Artists
The left brain interprets the world as symbols and language, the right, as space and shape. This online game/program/lesson allows you to see into the world of the police artist, who uses both sides of the brain to solve crime. You witness a misdemeanor, then use the online technology to create a composite sketch of the perpetrator. Although the site seems designed for school children, we got a real kick out of it. It's great for testing your observation skills.http://www.sanford-artedventures.com/play/crimedetection/
Ah! There are so many crappy movies to choose from! In the world of film, as in the world of nature, there is a food chain and there are many, many movies battling for supremacy. Most are forced to the bottom on the basis of dialogue alone - others have more startlingly bad qualities. "Prisoners of the Lost Universe" is one of those, and if you need confirmation, check out some of the reviewer's Things I Learned From This Movie: coax cable is perfect for rappelling; sliding through parallel dimensions is an aphrodisiac; vultures are known for their mimicry; wild horses come complete with saddles and sleeping rolls. Love them or hate them, as with nature, if these less-fulfilling movies didn't exist, then there'd be no sustenance for the kings of the Hollywood jungle.
http://www.badmovies.org/
Art Peace is a virtual gallery designed to showcase works by site creator Brad Smith. You click your way through corridors hung with graphics of paintings. The concept is easy to follow and cool in a 3-D-game kind of way. Each painting is accompanied by New Age-y text that mimics explanatory museum cards. For example: "The images here represent the fluidness of the unending catalysts of growth in the human experience." That kind of obfuscatory fluff detracts from the sense of discovery that online galleries depend on. A canvas called "Mortally Involved" is accompanied by the useless tagline, "What do these images mean?" When you've had enough of this nonsense, you might check out "The Gear" (a placeholder collage for a store under construction) or "The Magazine," a placeholder cover for a magazine that is to premiere this fall. Buy the paintings, if they're for sale. Forget the prose.
http://www.artpeace.com/
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.
 For more selections, check out the Netsurfer Library at http://www.netsurf.com/nsl/ |
China Dawn: The Story of a Technological and Business Revolution
Stud: Adventures in Breeding
The Nanny Diaries: A Novel
Fallen DragonRead It, Register It, Release It, Repeat
Read and release is the idea behind BookCrossing. If you read a good book and want to share it, register it at this friendly site, affix an identifying label to it, and then give it away or leave it somewhere. Whoever picks up the book reads the label that directs them back to the site where they can leave their own comments about the book you loved so much. read and release, rinse and repeat. You receive e-mails as your book moves around the world and new readers log on to the BookCrossing site. This exercise in the dissemination of knowledge might just make your library a little less hefty. Discussion at Plastic starts off comparing book sharing to file sharing and takes off from there.Book Crossing: http://www.bookcrossing.com/
Discussion: http://www.plastic.com/media/02/03/21/0128238.shtml
"Journalism" of the Women's Mags
Shocked to see another article about Sally, an advertising executive, and her sex life in one of those women's magazines? We've always suspected, even hoped, that these stories in magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Glamour are a bit of a fib. The Columbia Journalism Review reports on a cocktail-hour panel of women's magazine editors, who basically all admitted that there was no bit of a fib, merely great honkin' whoppers of fiction. Many articles in women's magazines, we learn, are designed to portray unrealistic women, circumstances, and, most of all, sex. Former Glamour fact-checker Amy Feitelberg admits that quotes were totally changeable. The "Names have been changed" disclaimer can really mean anything, including "Totally made up." Take everything you read with a pinch of salt. Essentially, if the readers don't want it, the magazines won't produce it. Sounds easy, doesn't it?http://www.cjr.org/year/02/2/featherstone.asp
Player Versus Player (PVP) is a cult comic that has developed a good following since its launch in 1998. The site sees better than 30,000 visitors coming to read each day's comic strip. The strip has mainly focused on role-playing games (RPGs) and the people who play them. The main characters of PVP work for a gaming magazine, and the presentation of their many stories has been described by some fans as being both funny and fearless. Take some time - sure, blow off work - and peruse the archives, where time will vanish into a fog of repeated clicks to keep reading.
http://www.pvponline.com/
SURFING SCIENCE
View Earth from space with the most amazing resolution you're likely to have seen in years - about one square kilometer per pixel. NASA has made available some truly awe-inspiring shots of the planet in living, unenhanced color, with close-ups of certain locations. The Great Barrier Reef is an array of color, and the detail of the desert in Saudi Arabia and Yemen can tempt you to see it as meticulous art. While some of the larger pictures are best seen using a fairly fast Net connection, the close-ups and JPEGs of the western and eastern hemispheres are worth a little wait over a dial-up line. Emotions strike you, much as you may experience while touring an art gallery. In particular, your heart will break when you see the detailed shot of the Deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest.http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarble/
Matt Groening created "The Simpsons", which has won a boatload of awards not just because it's funny, but because it's literate and satirical to many degrees. One of its literate aspects is the scientific bent of its writers. There are so many mathematical issues brought up in the cartoon that two quick-thinking professors were able to put together a talk that revolves around how episodes of "The Simpsons" use math. Andrew Nestler of Santa Monica College and Sarah Greenwald of Appalachian State University also catalogue all references to math in the show. If The Simpsons had been around when we were growing up, we might all be Einsteins.
Talk: http://www.mathsci.appstate.edu/~sjg/talks/simpsons/
Catalogue: http://homepage.smc.edu/nestler_andrew/SimpsonsMath.htm
That's the formal name; it sounds better than "magnetic railgun" or "magnets on rulers that shoot balls". The railgun is a very simple device that works in a way that will amaze anyone with even a whit (iota, in Greek) of scientific curiosity. Put a ball in groove at one end, roll it gently an inch or two, and WHAM, a similar ball shoots off the other end of the gun. The example shown on the Science Toys site isn't powerful enough to do harm or hurt, but bigger, lethal railguns are just a matter of scale. What keeps them from being semi-practical weapons is the difficulty of obtaining big, strong magnets. Science Toys of course will sell you the necessary small magnets and balls, and their time lapse slide show on the site makes the result, if not the physics, clear.
http://scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/magnets/gauss.html
You want action? We found action! How about a pulse-jet-powered go-kart? It runs on liquid propane; you get about four minutes' worth of power from a standard 20-pound tank, but in a go-kart running at 30 to 50 mph, that's probably as much time as your heart can stand. Find full details here. You can even order a kit (after he works through the backlog), if the vicarious thrill isn't enough for you. The pulse jet design seems surprisingly simple. Heck, if you're at all handy, we'd bet you could retrofit the thing to barbecue your lunch as you head down the road.
http://aardvark.co.nz/pjet/
Science and pornography meet at Big Ass Science - or do they? A simple, teasing home page calls the site "A primer in basic science with beautiful young bimbos cavorting along the pages." Our male reviewer was hooked from the start. So was Google's spider, as witness the head-of-the-class result of a Google search on "big ass" and "science". Alas, we must confess to misguided curiosity, for the Big Ass Science fight song is lame, probably conceived at a fraternity party where all the brothers were dateless and bored. The "Where are the naked girls?!?" link proved a major disappointment. Still, now that we've told you, many of you will likely check it out for yourselves to evaluate the accuracy of our limp assessment. By the time our reviewer hit the "Send in pictures of cavorting bimbos" e-mail link, he finally figured out this site is a joke and not at all the serious pursuit of knowledge we were led to believe it was. We're checking on the source of our informant's peyote, while begging one of our readers to actually create an Ig Nobel-worthy Big Ass Science site.
Big Ass Science: http://www.bigassscience.com/index.html
Ig Nobel: http://www.ignobel.com/
CORRECTIONS
Jim Mitchell, a loyal reader, suggested that we go to Snopes to check out the true source of the tugboat-under-the-bridge pics we featured in the last issue. We must admit, we were stumped as to why these pics of what looked like an American event were found on a Finnish server. Snopes tells us that the pics almost certainly depict a real event in 1979, at Rooster Bridge on the Tombigbee River near Demopolis, Ala.http://www.snopes2.com/spoons/photos/towboat.htm