Netsurfer Digest 08.14

The current conflict in the Middle East dominates the news. The Electronic Intifada is an attempt to chronicle the trials of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza during the most recent phase of conflict. It is disturbing to read, but recognize that the accounts are written not only to document experiences but to influence foreign perceptions of the conflict. An Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) page documents with a short bio the Israeli victims of terrorism and combat in the occupied territories. The Embassy of Israel FAQ gives the government's official position on the current offensive. Just as to-the-point is Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Apr. 8 speech to the Israeli parliament.
Electronic Intifada: http://www.electronicintifada.net/diaries/
MFA: http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?mfah0iky0
Embassy: http://www.israelemb.org/public_affairs/FAQ/currentFAQ.html
Sharon: http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=11188

911 Things to Hate about America

Mischievously titled "911 Things to Hate about America", this compilation is bound to have things that will make you go "Yes!" as well as others that will provoke anger and flying spittle. It's an eclectic collection of things funny, nasty, and baffling (we hope not just to us). The page layout isn't kind to users of scroll wheels as there are a few gaps and repeats in the text, but what can you expect from someone who has to count a list of 911? Speaking of persons responsible, this list comes from the eXile, a Russian-based e-zine (in English) with American contributors. The tomfoolery doesn't touch the really important questions: Are there really 911 items in the list? Does anyone really care? What sort of person would really hate all these things? We're also curious why our favorite thing to hate isn't here: people who make numbered lists.
http://www.exile.ru/137/feature.php

Heavenly Pictures of Earth

The folks at the European Space Agency (ESA) are busy putting up images from their latest big budget science toy, ENVISAT. The new environmental satellite, billed as the world's largest and most sophisticated, weighs 8,000 kg and occupies a polar orbit 800 km high. Launched by Ariane 5 rocket, the satellite is fitted with ten instruments to probe the Earth's water, air, ice, and land. MERIS, a medium-resolution imaging spectrometer, and ASAR, an advanced synthetic-aperture radar, are two of the most important. The images in the ESA press release are big and breathtaking. One particularly fascinating view shows the break-up of the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica. The accompanying explanations offer rewards for the curious and diligent, such as an animation of the Larsen B breakup. The ENVISAT site also describes each instrument, shows the kind of data products the satellite can produce, and has videos of the Ariane 5 rollout and launch.
ENVISAT: http://envisat.esa.int/
ESA: http://www.esa.int/export/esaCP/ESAQNGF18ZC_Protecting_0.html

Chandra Hints at New State of Matter

The Chandra X-Ray Observatory satellite has detected what may be evidence of stars composed purely of quarks. If confirmed, this would be evidence of a new ultra-dense state of matter, denser than that found in neutron stars. The scientists combined data from Chandra and the Hubble Space Telescope to measure the temperature of two ultra-dense stars and found that standard neutron star theory did not explain the observations. The Chandra Web site has the press release and pictures.
http://chandra.harvard.edu/press/02_releases/press_041002.html

Did Wallace Beery Help Kill the Three Stooges' Mentor?

This complicated tale reaches back to the smoky world of the 1930s, with its bands, broads, booze, and bad guys, but has resurfaced in a new biography of the Three Stooges. In 1937, the book claims, vaudevillian Ted Healy and screen star Wallace Beery, who didn't like each other at the best of times, got into an argument in a Los Angeles bar. The altercation moved outside where Beery, Pasquale DiCicco (his pal and a Lucky Luciano henchman), and a third man badly beat the hot-tempered Healy, who died the next day. Beery quickly left the country and nothing came of a police investigation into Healy's death. Years before, Healy had hired three pals - Shemp, Moe, and Curly Howard - to provide zany comic nonsense for his popular comedy show. After the brawl, Healy called Shemp and told him what had happened. DiCicco's cousin, Albert "Cubby" Broccoli (who later produced the first James Bond movies), witnessed the fight but gave an innocuous account to the cops. No doubt there was a cover-up; no charges were ever laid. We have a sneaking suspicion Broccoli was the third man on Healy. Everyone involved is dead so we'll probably never know for certain. The Chicago Tribune has the account. And the only reason we did the story was to link to the Three Stooges website. Nuyck! Nuyck! Nuyck!
Story: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-0204040003apr04.story
Three Stooges: http://www.threestooges.com/

The Voyeurism of Found Objects

Found objects - discarded things people find on sidewalks, at garage sales, or in the garbage - are moving onto the Net in growing numbers. It's as though a new genre of museum, run entirely by amateurs, is popping up like mushrooms in a pasture after a decent rain. Voyeurism is in vogue, both on the Net and sometimes in paper publications as well. Your trash can now become art, or at least a curio. It makes us long for the good old days, when you could be pretty sure that the people rooting through your trash were either reporters or folks bent upon identity theft. Wired has a story on this phenomenon, and while it won't set you at peace, it does provide lots of voyeuristic links.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,51307,00.html

Latest Annoying and Dangerous Advertising Practice: Pop-up Downloads

So you visit some noteworthy site, and up pops an advertising window which urges you to click OK. You do - foolish mortal! - and an application gets automatically installed on your computer. In some cases, depending on your security settings, the application can be installed on your hard drive without having you click anything. You've just become a victim of a "drive-by download". Surely this is a security nightmare, but it's also an apparently irresistible advertising strategy. CNET singles out Gator and L90, two companies that aggressively use this frankly dangerous advertising tactic. The article has more details, and names some Web sites that accept such questionable ads.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-877568.html

Controlling the Net: The Dangers of Single Point of Ownership

The inclusion of a peer-to-peer (P2P) network trojan in KaZaA file-sharing software may have created what can be called a "single point of ownership" for a large fraction of machines on the Net. That's the thesis of Nicholas Weaver, who postulates that by simply attacking and cracking Brilliant Digital's servers (they created the software, see NSD 8.13), a hacker could gain control of millions of the P2P clients downloaded by users who thought they were only getting a free file-trading application. The problem is not unique to Brilliant Digital - similar problems exist with services such as Microsoft's Windows update servers, Microsoft .NET servers, Real Networks servers, and similar centralized services. Weaver wrote an essay on the subject, while Slashdot has some informed technical and policy discussion of the issue.
Nicholas Weaver: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/0wn2.html
ND 8.13: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v08/nsd.08.13.html#BS1#BS1
Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/articles/02/04/07/1952214.shtml

Can a 126-Year-Old System Organize an Internet Archive?

The Net is a big place, way big. The Internet Archive, the source data for the Internet Wayback Machine and only a small slice of the online pie, houses on its hard drives more than five times the information that is stored at the Library of Congress. To catalogue all this is a never-ending quest, as more pages go online all the time. Cataloguing by URL is useless unless a researcher already knows the URL. How can we organize the information for easy retrieval? Is Dewey Decimal Classification System too unusable and slow to keep up with the flood of electronic information? Dewey worked just fine back in 1876, when information came into US libraries on foot, hoof, or ship. It just doesn't work today. Or does it? Word of Dewey's demise may be premature, as work is underway to incorporate it into existing, well established search engine indices. The tools are still being built. The story is still being told (by SF Gate, in particular).
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/local/

Mom Sues Sony after EverQuest Suicide

Addiction is a term that seems to encompass an ever-expanding universe of afflictions. Nowadays, we hear of porn addicts, gambling addicts, and the latest entry in the category, game addicts. Shawn Woolley, a 21-year-old, 12-hour-a-day EverQuest player, killed himself last November after a game session, and his mother plans to sue Sony Online Entertainment, which owns the game, to get it to reveal any information it may have on Woolley's EverQuest contacts and to force the company to put warning labels on the game box. More than 400,000 people play EverQuest, but Elizabeth Woolley claims that the game, like any other addiction, offers only three real-life outcomes: you die, you go insane, or you quit. She's rounded up support for this view, but it's somewhat unconvincing. Can we blame the death on a game? Or would Shawn Woolley, diagnosed with depression and schizoid personality disorder, have found some other trigger? As Sony puts it: "Pause Life. Play Games." - not "End Life". The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Wired have coverage.
EverQuest: http://everquest.station.sony.com/
Journal Sentinel: http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/mar02/31536.asp
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,51490,00.html

TRUSTe on the Ropes

The vaunted symbol of online trust, designed to assure consumers that a company is playing fair with their privacy policies, is a bust in the real world. This critical Wired article looks at the failings of the TRUSTe organization, which was set up to assure the public that commercial Web sites are adhering to their privacy policies. The article quotes eminent tech cheerleader Esther Dyson (yes, we do actually like her) as saying that the TRUSTe governing board "ended up being a little too corporate, and didn't have any moral courage" in allowing itself to slip from consumer advocate to corporate apologist. The article quotes the recent Yahoo marketing preferences debacle, as well as similar earlier privacy scandals at eBay and Real Networks to illustrate TRUSTe's failings. Dyson also makes the cogent observation that even though consumers say they want greater privacy, "offer them a discount on a book and they'll tell you everything."
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/exec/0,1370,51624,00.html
TRUSTe: http://truste.org/

Tech Publishing Heyday Gone Wrong - A Personal View

Hi-tech business magazines were a dime a dozen. Upside was one of the many that went under. In this story, David Bunnell gives his version of the magazine's demise as well as his personal perspective on tech publishing. Although many in the business lost jobs or fortunes, Bunnell lost his son (Upside's online guy) to a mixture of heroin, Valium, and alcohol. This merits a mention in the article, but no analysis. The San Francisco Chronicle takes a look.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/04/01/BU240369.DTL&type=tech

Authors Guild Unhappy with Amazon

In a letter to Amazon, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers express concern over Amazon's selling of used books right next to the brand new copies of the same work. The authors, of course, don't get any royalties for used books, and assume that a buyer will tend to opt to purchase a cheaper used book than a new one, and that authors are likely losing sales. Amazon counters that without readers, there would not be much demand for authors anyway, so anything that expands the pool of readers - who might want to try a cheaper book first - is a good thing. Here's the letter the Authors Guild sent to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, while Yahoo has the story with some numbers on used item sales from Amazon.
Guild: http://www.authorsguild.org/pramazon1200.html
Yahoo: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?u=/ap/20020409/ap_on_en_ot/amazon_authors_guild_3

Crypto Regulations Cast Long Shadow

The latest Netcraft Web Server survey has some interesting data on the number and nature of secure Web servers. A survey of secure server crypto key lengths shows that "US export regulations have had a discernable impact in slowing use of strong cryptography outside of the States." Netcraft quotes figures which show that, globally, 18% of secure servers on the Net use short and potentially vulnerable key lengths (less then 1024 bits). Strikingly, only 15% of American and 13% of Canadian servers use short keys, whereas the percentage of European short-key servers is twice as high - and in France, where crypto regulations were only recently relaxed, that figure is a shocking 41%. The full SSL Server Survey can be purchased for $1,740 from Netcraft.
http://www.netcraft.com/survey/

The US Legislative Pork Book

Compiled annually by an organization called Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), the Pig Book is a compendium of money appropriated by the US Congress and identified by CAGW as political pork. The CAGW thinks this is wasted taxpayer cash, and the Pig Book's release is carefully timed to appear just before the US tax deadline. There are some egregious examples of waste here ($273,000 for "combating Goth culture" - Chris Bond, R-Missouri), but most of the money seems to be traditional pork barrel politics: typical small-town projects designed to keep Congresscritters popular back home. Call it the financial friction of democracy. It's mildly diverting browsing for political junkies.
http://publications.cagw.org/PigBook2002/introduction.htm

Lara Croft Outfit to be Auctioned

Transvestites of the world take note. Eidos Interactive, publisher of Lara Croft's Tomb Raider franchise, is auctioning off Lara's outfit. The clothes were worn by model Nell McAndrew who played Lara at innumerable trade shows during the closing years of the 20th century (we just love saying that). You can get the sunglasses, rubber vest, leather gloves, "Military-style" shorts, backpack, twin leather holsters, replica pistols, and thick woolen calf-length socks. Is this a fetishist's wet dream or what? Now you can really get into Lara's pants.... The auction will kick off on eBay UK on Apr. 26 and proceeds will be donated to a UNICEF children's charity. You can find details and photos in the press release.
http://www.eidosinteractive.co.uk/laracroftauction/index.html

THREAD WATCH

Nasties That Nauseate Nurses

What makes nurses gag? What are trach loogies? Do you really want to know? If you want to discover what procedures and bodily functions nauseate nurses, check out this thread at the Allnurses.com Web site. We hope your imagination isn't too vivid.
http://allnurses.com/forums/showthread.php?s=25f02b4ad9489c76666e856ed7885bad&threadid=2717&perpage=20&display=&pagenumber=1

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Hypothetical New World Trade Centers

If you missed the exhibit at the Max Protetch Gallery in New York City, you can visit Architectural Record online to see vestiges of an exhibit featuring design proposals for a structure in tribute to the World Trade Center. Sixty-one ideas are included online, some of which are inhabitable and some of which are purely academic exercises. Some of the designs are so abstract, they're hard to visualize as part of the New York City skyline, a task that probably would have been easier with the original exhibit which included models as well as drawings.
http://www.archrecord.com/WTC/newWTC.ASP

BOOKS & E-ZINES

Netsurfer Recommendations

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.

Digital Beauties
Julius Wiedemann
TASCHEN America Llc; ISBN: 3822816280

There is a thriving community of artists - mostly male, one imagines - who have dedicated their ray-tracing software to creating images of the perfect digital female. This book is a large collection of such art in large, glossy photo format. The works range from chaste to erotic, sublime to deeply disturbing. You can't beat this striking and state-of-the-art collection of images of beautiful (of course), synthetic girls as a coffee table book, nor as a textbook for aspiring modelers of the human form. Nagel springs to mind.

The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld
Herbert Asbury, Jorge Luis Borges (Foreword)
Thunder's Mouth Press; ISBN: 1560252758

This long out-of-print cult favorite has been republished in anticipation of an upcoming Martin Scorcese film. It is an anecdotal account of the criminal gang culture in early 20th-century New York. It chronicles vice, crime, squalor, and corruption so vividly, it's hard to put down. The book not only tells the criminal story but also traces an important time in the frequently bloody and corrupt history of the New York Metropolitan police force. This great pulp history will probably soon be a best seller, and is a fine antidote to the sanitized history we all learned at school

Nightmare at 20,000 Feet: Horror Stories
Richard Matheson, Stephen King (Introduction)
St. Martin's Press; ISBN: 0312878273

There are few more influential horror writers in the field than Richard Matheson. Many of the contemporary crop of horror writers have grown up in his shadow, a shadow of a body of work that includes movies and television ("Twilight Zone", "The Omega Man", "Duel", "The Incredible Shrinking Man", "Star Trek", and more). This collection of Matheson's stories spans half a century of writing, reflecting both his own development as a writer and the direction of horror writing in general. Give these classic works a try if you have trouble staying awake.

Dungeon Siege
Chris Taylor
Microsoft

Chris Taylor, the man behind the hit real-time strategy game Total Annihilation, clearly did a lot of research before designing this first-rate role-playing dungeon crawl. He stripped away many of the annoying micromanagement features found in other similar games and created the close to perfect slash, hack, and spellcast time-waster - yes, that's a compliment. The game has absolutely terrific graphics, huge landscapes, is easy to play, hard to walk away from, and doesn't ask that you master pages of obscure back story and user interfaces. We predict another huge win for Microsoft's first-rate game division. Now, if only they could make operating systems as addictive....

For more selections, check out the Netsurfer Library at http://www.netsurf.com/nsl/

Shatner's Blog

Trekkies and Shatner trivia fans will want to bookmark this, as the content is updated regularly. As well it should be - this is Bill's Space, after all. Content as of Apr. 10 is Shatner's musing over his relationship with Leonard Nimoy, but archives of past Bill's Space posts include footage of Bill and Joan Collins at the recent Pasadena Grand Slam, which ranks as one of the ultimate Trek conventions. Video clips are available in Quicktime or RealPlayer format; WMP users will have to bite the phaser here.
http://williamshatner.com/billspace/index.asp

The Barn Journal

Architectural landmarks of the North American farmland, barns continue to appear in movies and TV (to wit, Clark Kent's observatory in "Smallville") even as their numbers dwindle in reality. What is it about barn appeal? You might find an answer at the Barn Journal, which focuses mostly on barns in the American east and Midwest. Historical profiles such as Featured Barns and Barn Stories cover individual barns. Biographies of barn workers and preservationists provide background. The many photos of well kept structures remind us of those graying, dilapidated heaps of beams and walls we've seen in the middle of nowhere. A recent Barn Ad ad stays within the spirit of the site: "For Sale: Circa 1823 40' x 60' and circa 1870 45' x 80' German bank barns with hewn frames. Professional movers will document and relocate to your site." Want to convert a barn to a house or buy used lumber? There are barn sales in 20 states and four Canadian provinces. There are also many Barn Resources links that include Web sites of organizations and contractors.
http://www.thebarnjournal.org/

The UsedWigs Take on Life

The Onion-esque satire of UsedWigs will exercise your brain by defending its concept of truth over fiction. The authors at the site dub their funny stories "completely worthless news and distractions". The movie reviews by Cap'n Cranky are qualified by the warning that the review may have been written prior to actually seeing the film. Ignoring that proviso, however, the reviews are generally honest and helpful if you're interested in the opinion of someone titled "Cap'n" before going to the cinema. Regular interviews top it off, with celebrities - OK, the celebrity offering unedited responses to questions both silly and serious. The barrage of news in the media today can lead you to crave something less packaged or processed. UsedWigs is pleasantly fresh and creative.
http://www.usedwigs.com/

Alternative Versions of "Lord of the Rings"

Each generation discovers the work of J.R.R. Tolkien and travels the many paths of Middle Earth. But what if you could substitute different authors and let them populate their versions of Middle Earth with Tolkien's cast of characters and plot? A few years ago this idea was explored by a couple of folks in England, producing an unpredictable collection of alternate short works - a few paragraphs at most. Oscar Wilde's version, in all seriousness, has Bilbo Baggins using the word "perfidious". Ian Fleming tries to make Aragorn as dashing as Sean Connery - though the casting of Viggo Mortensen wouldn't be too far a leap, given a shave and some cologne. Use your own creativity and think of someone else whom you feel could have written a version of one of the Tolkien books. Of particular curiosity: how would Stephen King or Anne Rice tell the tale?
http://www.flin.demon.co.uk/althist/auth.htm

SURFING SCIENCE

Benford on Hawking

Recently, physicist and science fiction author Gregory Benford had dinner with his old friend, physicist and science fact author Stephen Hawking. The conversation ranged far and wide, but had a decidedly philosophical bent. They talked about imaginary time, the ultimate unified theory, Marilyn Monroe, baby universes, their books, rational faith, and other such big issues. At the end of Benford's stay, Hawking sent Benford a transcript of the conversation, recorded on his laptop speaking machine. Benford wrote this fine piece based on that transcript.
http://www.reason.com/0204/fe.gb.leaping.shtml

The Human Embryo

In the early 20th century, Franklin Mall, a professor of anatomy at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, set about creating a collection of human embryos to document the different stages of human development. With funding from the Carnegie Institution, he sought to create the embryological equivalent of astronomy's Mt. Wilson Observatory. Today, his dream has been realized at the Multi-Dimensional Human Embryo, an interactive digital atlas of human fetal development funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The site is free and open to the public with detailed video images and animation as well as extensive documentation. The images are fascinating and will capture your imagination. The site will also undoubtedly enter the abortion debate in which its effects might prove quite interesting.
http://embryo.soad.umich.edu/index.html

Skull Exhibit

Like all bone, until death, the skull is living tissue in equilibrium with the breathing body it belongs to. After death, a skull can tell experts much about the health and history of the animal it belonged to. That's one reason why the California Academy of Sciences has collected so many of them over the years and has now put up this neat Web site that features the gaping empty eye sockets and grinning jaws of many different animals. The skulls intrigue us - there's definitely something mysterious and compelling about the hard stuff that lies beneath the skin and muscles of the head. There's just enough information here to interest us without overwhelming detail and depth. The final hall in the exhibit provides a wonderful contrast to the straight-forward science of the previous sections, featuring sometimes intriguing, sometimes shocking art works involving skulls or skull-like shapes.
http://www.calacademy.org/exhibits/skulls/

Prehistoric Australia

Your average platypus is already a weird animal, but add the fact that baby platypuses start out with teeth but lose them as they grow, and that adult platypuses use horny pads inside their mouths to break up their food - well, they're just way up there with Cher as one of the wonders of the world. Here's another potentially life-saving tip (hey, you never know when platypus trivia can save your skin) if you ever find yourself lost in Australia 15 million years ago: if you have to run away from a ridge-headed crocodile, keep in mind that they can probably climb trees. And as you run, remember to give thanks that you'd visited Australia's Lost Kingdoms. It's probably in your best interests to learn about the kooky and spooky faunal heritage of this most isolated continent because, as we all know, "Jurassic Park" and "The Time Machine" are just around the corner....
http://www.lostkingdoms.com/

NASA Research into Advanced Concepts

You may be surprised by what NASA has up its sleeve - or hopes to have if research findings lead to intended applications. This NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts page lists dozens of space-travel studies in life sciences, robotics, and other fields that go on in laboratories or in the minds of visionaries while we go about our less spectacular daily lives. The principal investigators are affiliated with leading institutions and aerospace companies. Some of the studies sound arcane, such as "Methodology for the Study of Autonomous VTOL Scalable Logistics Architecture". Others seem inspired by popular science fiction, including "The Space Elevator" and "Exploration of Jovian Atmosphere Using Nuclear Ramjet Flyer". They're all part of NASA's ambitious strategic plan to, in part, "solve mysteries of the universe, explore the solar system, discover planets around other stars, search for life beyond Earth; from origins to destiny, chart the evolution of the universe and understand its galaxies, stars, planets, and life." While you're stuck in traffic on your way to work, NASA considers strategies such as "Formation Flying with Shepherd Satellites" and "Controlling the Global Weather". If buzzphrases like "asteroid detection" and "planetary colonization" get you going, drop in for a peek at how your tax dollars may be spent in the future.
http://www.niac.usra.edu/studies/

Frequent Flier Miles for Space, Almost

Hang on to your frequent-flier miles! Why waste them all on trips to Hawaii when they can take you (almost) into space? According to a report at Space.com, US Airways and Space Adventures (the company that helped US businessman Dennis Tito cavort inside the International Space Station last April) are partners in an historic, out-of-this-world promotion: "Fly 10 million miles on US Airways - the equivalent of circling the planet some 250 times - and you can take a free half-hour suborbital lob into space aboard a reusable rocket expected to be available by 2005." Wow! For only roughly 25,000 hours of flight time you get 30 minutes up, up, and away with an estimated retail value of $98,000. Afraid you might get fried by cosmic radiation during your 250 flights around Earth? Wear lead-lined suits on those qualifying legs! You can redeem 30,000 miles (and pay $650) or 200,000 miles (and pay $2,000) for less glamorous adventures, but why settle for less? Hurry, hurry, hurry, before other airlines join the bandwagon and you're just another tourist in the heavens.
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/space_miles_020311.html

SOFTWARE

Apache 2.0 Released

An important moment in Net history occurred this week with the release of the next major revision of the Apache Web server. The March 2002 Netcraft survey found that 54% of Web servers on the Internet use Apache. The latest release has been actively tested on the Apache site itself since December 2000 and is quite stable. Some of the more notable enhancements include a new thread model to significantly enhance scalability, filtered I/O, and support for IPv6. It's mostly stuff which will be of interest to large enterprises with a need to deploy industrial strength Web servers.
httpd.apache.org/

Why GNU Software Radio Is Important

Traditionally, if you wanted to listen to a radio signal you needed hardware to demodulate the signal and send it to the speakers. These days, you still need some hardware, but the hardware no longer needs to be an actual radio. Simply hook up an analogue to digital converter (ADC) to an antenna and use this free GNU Radio software to demodulate the signal. Today's personal computers are powerful enough to do all the hard work that used to be done in analogue radio circuits. Admittedly, this is a pricey way to listen to a radio station, so why is this important? Well, in theory you can receive any electromagnetic broadcast with this setup, and feed it directly into your computer without any intervening device - specifically, without any broadcast copy-protection device, such as a HDTV receiver. If intellectual property rights interests have their way, this type of software becomes illegal and logically leads to the outlawing of all computers, all antennas, and - taking it to a logical extreme - all long pieces of wire.
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/gnuradio.html

Microsoft Releases Important Security Patch for Web Server

This cumulative patch fixes ten security vulnerabilities with the Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) Web server. The worst of those can allow attackers to run any code they want on an unpatched machine. The patches span Windows NT, 2000, and XP and IIS versions 4.0, 5.0, and 5.1. This important patch should be installed on all machines which run the Microsoft Web server ASAP. Do it either manually or via Windows Update. The security advisory has more details.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/security/bulletin/ms02-018.asp

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CREDITS

Publisher: Arthur Bebak Editor: Lawrence Nyveen Contributing Editor: Production Manager: Bill Woodcock Copy Editor: Elvi Dalgaard Netsurfer Communications, Inc. President: Arthur Bebak Vice President: S.M. Lieu	Writers and Netsurfers: Regan Avery Steven Bobker Kirsty Brooks Judith David Michael Aaron Dennis Jay Haight Brendan Kehoe Michael Luke Elizabeth Rollins Kenneth Schulze Teresa Zelkas
NETSURFER DIGEST © 2002 Netsurfer Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. NETSURFER DIGEST is a trademark of Netsurfer Communications, Inc.