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BREAKING SURF
The number one sport globally, bar none, is soccer or football. And the number one soccer venue, bar none, is the World Cup, held every four years. At this year's World Cup, co-hosted by South Korea and Japan, 32 national teams, divided into 8 groups of 4, will compete in a month-long sports frenzy that ends with the final on June 30. Whole countries will grind to a halt while their national teams play and billions of TV viewers will tune in to see the matches. For informed commentary, results, and background, the BBC's World Cup Web site is unbeatable. The site has a separate page for each team, and provides daily e-mail and a PDA service. ESPN provides a heavy US slant to the coverage (Team USA faces long odds), while the official FIFA site will service you in seven languages.BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport3/worldcup2002/default.stm
ESPN: http://worldcup.espnsoccernet.com/index
FIFA: http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com/
Carnivore Snagged Bin Laden-Related E-Mail, Agent Threw It Away
In early 2000 the FBI e-mail surveillance system then known as Carnivore intercepted e-mail belonging to an unidentified target of an investigation. However, Carnivore also picked up e-mail from individuals who were not part of the investigation. In what is a heartening story to privacy advocates, an FBI agent conscientiously deleted the entire e-mail haul because interception of unauthorized traffic violates US wiretap law. An internal FBI memo states that the "FBI technical person was apparently so upset that he destroyed all the E-Mail take, including the take on [the authorized target]." The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) obtained the information about this incident with a Freedom of Information Act request, but only after the intervention of a federal judge. EPIC has an extensive set of documents on Carnivore and a press release specifically related to this story.http://www.epic.org/privacy/carnivore/
For a long time, Echelon was rumored to be a global snoop tool employed by the National Security Agency to keep tabs on electronic data. No surprise, the rumors turned out to be true. Recently, the Danish paper Ekstra Bladet interviewed one of the lead architects of Echelon's successor, Echelon II, a next-generation snoop considered by many to be the top intelligence program in history. The interview with Bruce McIndoe is not particularly informative - you know how tight-lipped these intelligence guys can be. Oddly, this English translation of the Danish article calls Echelon II Echelon's "big brother", which might make sense from a literary standpoint but "big brother" generally means an older sibling - but enough of this tangent.... McIndoe notes that the Echelon II users do not ignore the laws of any countries - until a court says it's OK. It appears that all bets are off, after the NSA gets a favorable court order. Once unleashed, Echelon employs both word and voice recognition, as well as automatic translation. These features let it sift through data streams that could never be ably monitored by humans. For some time, the NSA and allied services were the only groups to use Echelon technology, but McIndoe has taken it into the private sector. Before long, it seems, the only way to neutralize the technology will be to pre-empt it. And the only way to pre-empt it will be to keep no secrets.
http://cryptome.org/echelon2-arch.htm
The Achilles heel of computer security systems isn't hardware or software, it's the wetware that uses easily cracked passwords, ZDNet tells us. Computer users -the wetware in question - routinely use easy to remember terms such as the names of pets, common words from the dictionary, or three or four characters as passwords. When security experts check company systems, they find time after time that a high fraction of the passwords in use are easily cracked. People are just plain bad at making up random terms and are even worse at remembering them. As well, users often don't take passwords seriously, and, as one amazing anecdote reveals, will even give them to strangers in a subway station. That's too bad because an eight-character, truly random password is very hard to crack - and hard to remember. This article suggests mnemonic abbreviations with character substitutions. User education is a challenging task, however, which is why companies are increasingly turning to two-factor or even three-factor security systems that require multiple keys, such as a card and a password. You'd better go back and change those "fido" and "password" passwords.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-920092.html
Pranksters who use Unicode character-display coding to spell domain names can fool netsurfers into visiting alternate Web sites. Until recently, all domain names were created with only the ASCII text code that depicts only all Roman letters and numbers. The use of Unicode in domain names makes it possible to spell domain names in non-Western alphabets, but also opens up the possibility of misuse of homographs. A homograph is a letter that looks like another letter, but has a different Unicode encoding. For example, a Cyrillic "o" looks just like the Latin "o" on your computer, but the two have different Unicode codes. Now, imagine somebody registering the domain name "microsoft.com" in Unicode and replacing the "o" with the Cyrillic "o". That's exactly what two university students did to illustrate the problem. Clearly, somebody with malicious intent could do some serious damage. Scientific American has the story.
Unicode: http://www.unicode.org/
Scientific American: http://www.sciam.com/2002/0602issue/0602scicit5.html
James Burke has made a career out of linking things, showing the surprising and unexpected ways in which apparently unrelated events are connected. His Connections articles in Scientific American, and his TV series, have fascinated and intrigued us for years. Now he wants to enlist volunteers to help broaden and expand the linking exercise, in a project called Knowledge Web. He's particularly keen to hear from programmers familiar with Java, XSLT, and XML, as well as experienced researchers and writers. Somewhere in the patterns and links between existing information lie new ideas, new truths, and new understandings, ready to be illuminated for the first time by the light of the links, the intricate tracings that create a delicate filigree of meaning. That's the idea, anyway, and the thrill of this kind of thing is that no one can predict where this will go, where it will end up. The site itself promises to develop into a discovery vehicle of unparalleled potency that users will be able to explore on their own or via guided trails. One to watch, or if you've got the right skills and the time, to volunteer for. Wired has more details. One Web site we found provides synopses of two of Burke's TV series.
Knowledge Web: http://www.k-web.org/
Wired: http://wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,52594,00.html
Synopses: http://home.earthlink.net/~billotto/Connections.html
FightCloud Sells Music CDs for $5 a Pop
The clue has been floating out there for a while and finally, someone has caught it. When CDs first came on the market, we were all promised that the price would drop because CDs are so much cheaper to make than contemporary vinyl LPs. And why not? Anybody who's got a burner knows full well that the physical CD is inexpensive, even when you buy a single spindle at Staples (or wherever). Bulk-buyers are going to get big discounts; one duplicator sets the price at 32 cents per blank in this short Salon article. Add packaging costs and the artist royalties, and the CD costs about a dollar to produce. Nevertheless, we're still paying around $14 per CD. A company called FightCloud, however, is now selling CDs for $5 (i.e. free with $5 shipping). You probably haven't heard of the artists, who earn half of FightCloud's net of $2.64 per disc, but this method for introducing new artists has the company running in the black. FightCloud president Jack Scalfani thinks folks will spend a reasonable $5 on a CD even if the artist hasn't been shoved down their throats by the industry marketing machine. An interview with Scalfani by the author of the Salon article is revealing. At FightCloud's site, you can listen before you buy. Novel concept! You'll need QuickTime.Salon: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/05/23/fightcloud/index.html
FightCloud: http://www.fightcloud.com/
Interview: http://www.lot49.com/archives/000655.html
Do you suffer from coulrophobia, the fear of clowns? Many people find the greasepaint, big shoes and shiny noses too overwhelming, and popular culture hasn't helped clowns all that much, either. Think of John Wayne Gacy, serial killer and part-time birthday party clown, and Krusty the Clown, who makes no secret that it's just a job, a racket for making money, on "The Simpsons". This Wolf Files column discusses this particular phobia while meditating on various clowns on the radar. Even if you hate clowns, it makes for good reading.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/WolfFiles/wolffiles220.html
An Army of One - Soon to Be a Free First-Person Shooter!
If you'd like to know whether or not you can be all that you can be, the US Army will soon have a game for you. The game, called America's Army, is divided into two sub-games. The first, Soldiers, is sort of a Sims military experience. You create a virtual soldier and guide him through basic and his military career. Operations, the second sub-game, is a military first-person shooter. The games don't allow you to rip body parts off an enemy and use them to club him to death - that's just not how the Army works. Lots of folks are complaining, regardless. Comments such as "you jerks are no better then the towel heads" (sic) are fairly abundant on the America's Army forums, at least until the moderators pay a visit. The Army envisions the games as a sort of screen test for potential recruits, and it says that if the game brings them 300 new recruits, it will have paid for itself. Let's see: the Army plans to spend $7.5 million - less than one percent of its recruiting budget - on this. Carry the one.... Hmm. Looks like the Army figures each new recruit to be worth about $25,000. And, boy, that's one huge recruiting budget! GameSpy has a review from what it saw at the E3 gaming conference and a Reuters article at Yahoo has some juicy quotes.America's Army: http://www.americasarmy.com/
GameSpy: http://www.gamespy.com/e32002/pc/armyops/
Yahoo: http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/020522/tech_army_1.html
Doom III News and Carmack Interview
Be afraid, GameSpy tells us, be very afraid! Doom is on the way - Doom III, that is. If you were lucky enough to attend this years Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) you could have seen id Software's first revelation of the most eagerly awaited computer game on the planet. If you weren't there - well, that's why there are sites like Gamespy. Doom III features a brand new 3-D engine that provides realistic lighting, real-life physics, and highly detailed models. The emphasis in the Doom III first-person shooter will be on the single-player experience and terror, using intense atmospheres and a deliberately slow pace. To add to the intensity of the experience, the game will support Dolby 5.1 surround sound. Clearly, this one's not for the squeamish, faint of heart, or sluggish of trigger finger. We've also provided a link to a Gamers.com interview with John Carmack, Doom coding whiz, with info about how he developed the new engine, and his views on the game and current video cards. No word yet on a release date but its not likely to be any time soon.GameSpy: http://www.gamespy.com/e32002/pc/doom3b/
id Software: http://www.idsoftware.com/
Gamers.com: http://www.gamers.com/news/1156460
Audio Interview With Doom III's John Carmack and Trent Reznor
Wired has a lengthy audio interview with the two famous names behind the upcoming Doom III game. Carmack talks about the leaps in graphics technology that imply a slower game pace and prettier eye candy, the balance of story vs. action, and a change in emphasis from furious action to more moody ambience. Reznor talks about creating music for a much more immersive environment made possible with advances in treatment of light and sound. He calls the goal of the compositions "more Eraserhead and less Star Wars". There's more, providing a unique glimpse into the creative process behind cutting-edge next-generation games. Interesting, even for non-gamers.http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,52835,00.html
LookSmart Raises Search Engine Fees
All of us use search engines, but how many understand the business behind them? For example, users of the LookSmart search engine, which provides the guts of MSN's search facility, should know that LookSmart charges commercial sites a fee to be listed. So be it, right? It's a deal that LookSmart offers and that sites can accept or reject. However, LookSmart recently unilaterally changed their fee from a one-time fee of $299 to a scaled fee of $49 plus 15 cents per click-through. That is, anytime a visitor uses LookSmart to get to a specific site, the vendor has to pay the search engine. Those sites who have balked at the new imposed terms vanish from the listings after LookSmart's sop of 100 free click-throughs per month gets used up. Frankly, who cares? Does anyone here use LookSmart? Or MSN Search? The only real lesson here is that - no big surprise - there's little truth in searching. Even Google has sponsored sites, although Google clearly identifies sponsors as such. LookSmart doesn't even bother. Check Wired and the Ihelpyou Services LookSmart discussion forum for a full understanding of how the Web is being shaped by the invisible hand.Wired: http://wired.com/news/business/0,1367,52741,00.html
Ihelpyou Services: http://www.ihelpyouservices.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?forumid=12
Guess What? Blogs Can Get You into Trouble
Bloggers beware! What you say has consequences in the real world. Witness this case at Hamline University where a resident advisor's blog has led to his firing. The case raises some interesting questions about online responsibility and visibility as well as about the pitfalls of sarcasm on sensitive subjects. On the other hand, reading this blog might make you wonder about the value of the genre....http://www.plastic.com/article.html?sid=02/05/24/22265100
Microsoft Exchange Servers Vulnerable to Denial of Service Attack
Microsoft has warned that its Exchange 2000 e-mail servers have a gaping security hole. Certain e-mail messages can cause the CPU of the machine running the server to peg at 100% activity, effectively crippling the mail system. This is certainly a critical bug, given the wide use of Exchange in business mail servers. Fortunately, a patch is available and should be installed immediately. CNET has more.CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1001-928055.html
Patch: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms02-025.asp
ONLINE CULTURE
CD Database Reveals Eminem CD a Hit Before Official Release
Music players such as WinAmp, RealOne, and iTunes can be configured to access an online CD database when you insert a CD in your computer. The players download information about the CD - for example, the names of all the songs. Gracenote, which maintains the most popular CD database, announced that so many computers were requesting data for Eminem's "The Eminem Show" that it reached second place on the list of top 40 requests - a week before the album was officially released. Since Gracenote only works with CDs and not just MP3s, this means that there a lot of people out there burning pirated copies of the album. From analysis of detailed player data, Gracenote determined that the pirated CDs came from eight separate original sources. So far, no one has guessed how this piracy will impact sales of the album, but it's safe to bet that the music industry will scream about lost profits and that file-sharing advocates will scream that this will actually increase sales. Our take? We have spyware, piracy, content fingerprinting, and Eminem in one story, an online journalist's dream. CNET has the story.CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-923472.html
Gracenote: http://gracenote.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.
 For more selections, check out the Netsurfer Library at http://www.netsurf.com/nsl/ |
A Season with Verona: Travels Around Italy in Search of Illusion, National Character, and...Goals!
Nexus: The Groundbreaking Science of Networks
Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism
Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized AutobiographySURFING SITES
The Boer War was fought long ago (100+ years) and far away (for us at NSD; South Africa). It was one of the first modern wars - it had guerilla tactics, concentration camps for "enemy" civilians, and automatic weapons. Many British officers, and others who studied the British experience, learned the basics of war from this conflict and many of those lessons helped create the carnage of World War I. Those interested in the Boer War have always had decent references, but the bulk of the source material is usually not close by nor readily available. This site, a true virtual library, lets anyone access a wealth of Boer War-related material. It's a big library, and well organized. Both casual users and serious scholars will be pleased. It's also an excellent model for similar subject-oriented libraries.http://www.bowlerhat.com.au/sawvl/main.html
Of Conception and Curators: Roll Over, Andy Warhol
Tired of brick-and-mortar museums? The footsore frugal have recourse to a wide-ranging collection of collections at the Museum of Online Museums. At this cultural portal, institutions such as the Smithsonian and the Art Institute of Chicago in the tasteful, de rigeur Museum Campus and Permanent Collection sections seem overshadowed by a larger number of sites (all less well known) in Galleries, Exhibitions & Shows. Thanks to art historians among the site designers at Chicago-based Coudal Partners, this eclectic list of links is one of the weirdest in our recent memory. Recovered barfers may enjoy the Museum of Air Sickness Bags. Critics can ponder graphic ephemera at Michael McNevin's Etch-a-Sketch Gallery. Writers and editors can explore the Gallery of Misused Quotation Marks. If you're researching milk-bottle pull tabs, Japanese coffee cans, or cardboard containers, this is one place to start. You wouldn't think a museum portal would lead to vintage postcards or Soviet cars, but guess what? All you need to do is follow a link from MoOM to Bizarre Record Covers or Vintage Fruit Crate Labels to see that the world of museums is changing.http://www.coudal.com/archives/museum.html
Pretty much anyone with a brain who has received the Nigerian scam e-mail - and that includes everyone who receives e-mail, we guess - knows something about hoaxes. The Museum of Hoaxes does not yet list this current scam, but with entertaining variety it covers hoaxes from the donation of Constantine in 750 CE ("A forgery that became the basis for 1200 years of Papal rule") and Pope Joan ("Was there once a female pope?"), to the more recent Freewheelz ("Internet-age company gives away free cars," an April Fool's Day enterprise in 2000) and the Emulex Hoax ("23-year-old college student terrifies Wall Street"). Naturally, descriptions get more detailed as you approach the Information Age. Pope Joan couldn't make documentaries for PBS, nor did the young Mark Twain hold a press conference to explain his finding a petrified man. We're pretty sure you've never heard of many of the amusing and outlandish stories recounted here. If you've ever fallen victim to a hoax, rest assured you have company - even though that company may have died a long time ago.
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/index.html
The Consumer World site offers current consumer-oriented news and features as well as links to over 2,000 useful consumer resources. Every purchaser should gather as much information as possible before money changes hands. That's common sense. This site has good advice, links to numerous product comparisons and reviews, and an excellent low-price searcher. There's also support for purchasers who have problems. Links to product recall lists are worth checking regularly and, when all else fails, you can click on links to online consumer complaint services. The site says it's non-commercial and in a broad sense it is, but non-commercial and non-profit are not the same. There are ads and our reviewer wasn't sure all the material was as unbiased as it should be here. Still, Consumer World is a valuable and useful public service site.
http://www.consumerworld.org/
Burn Rate, the Dotcom Failure Game
Call us frugal, but we found no reason to buy Burn Rate, a dotcom card game by start-up Cool Studio, for this review. The Web site alone is a riot. The concept is simple yet engaging: "...you and your friends will struggle to keep a dot-com startup afloat as the bad business pours in and the money runs out." All e-businesses in the game will tank. Your goal is to tank last. As the first pop-up of the site tour puts it, with searing enthusiasm, "Here's your chance to go back to 1999 and do it wrong, all over again." Now that's nostalgia! Anyone in sales, development, human resources, or finance is in for trouble, because "You won't be getting any revenue." Clearly, this game is not based on the fiscal success of Netsurfer Digest.... Even the feedback form has attitude. Feel the burn. Turn bad ideas against your opponents. Raid their staff. Hire lots of vice presidents and watch your venture capital go down the drain. You're going to need great strategy and luck, not to mention blundering opponents, if you want to make a killing with, say, your online pet store. Woof!http://www.burnrategame.com/
TV Advertising of a Bygone Age
Nowadays, TV stars tend to do commercials, if they do any at all, when their star power is on the wane. (Ed McMahon comes to mind. Sorry, Ed. That's life.) In the golden age of TV, many commercials featured the very stars you were watching before the commercial break. George Reeves pushed Sugar Smacks as Clark Kent, for example, before he went back to being Superman. Other commercials were seamlessly, or not, fitted right into the flow of the program. And you thought product placement was a new ploy.... When Stars Did the Commercials is a sort of celebrity media museum where those with RealPlayer can watch Willie Mays drink Coke, or salivate as Hogan's Heroes enjoy Jell-O and Dream Whip with Colonel Klink and Sergeant Shultz. (Hey, why weren't they Oberst Klink and Unteroffizier Shultz?) Of course, there are tie-ins with Amazon and elsewhere should you want to buy videos or DVDs of classic TV shows, but these are not intrusive. This is a nice place for nostalgia. If the clips bring back memories, though, you might end up feeling a bit guilty you spent so much time watching the originals when you could have been doing something constructive.http://www.tvparty.com/vaultcomsp.html
The Web continues to be a helpful resource for parents of pre-schoolers. Sites of interest to children ages 6-11 are also available, but sometimes hard to find. PBS Kids has recently revamped its content, activities, and games to appeal to those older visitors. In a section entitled Behind the Scenes, kids can help produce a short animated video comprised of characters, a setting, story line, and the music to accompany it. Kids can then view each completed short online, giving budding directors a glimpse at the result of their efforts. Weekly quizzes and polls accompany a variety of other features. The result is a site that will interest both pre-readers and older kids. Safe content put together in an instructional and fun style lets your children spend constructive and enjoyable time with you online.
http://www.pbskids.org/
Mayonnaise is one of the three most popular condiments in the world (along with mustard and ketchup), and it now has a fitting Web site. Here you'll find and see the labels of exotic and ordinary mayonnaises from the world over, bone up on mayonnaise arcana and lore, obtain (a few) recipes that feature mayonnaise (obviously not needed by the true mayonnaise afficionado) and lots more. Eggs and oil were never so well combined. One warning: this site is hosted by a free service and the sheer number of pop-up ads may drive you straight to Miracle Whip (blecch).
http://www.angelfire.com/punk/mayonnaise/
As information proliferates across what seems like an infinitely expanding number of Web sites, many traditional search engines have difficulty keeping their indexes even slightly up-to-date and complete. One solution is the metasearch engine, which accesses multiple search engines rather than keeping an internal index. Turbo10 is a metasearch engine that connects to specialized search engines and databases that traditional engines frequently overlook. The 10 in the title is the number of engines searched in each search. The search categories are first grouped into broad areas: news, reference, legal, sports, health, and finance. Performance is good; results took only slightly longer than they would on more traditional searches. If you're looking for specific information in any of Turbo10's areas (and reference is very broad), Turbo10 will prove useful.
http://turbo10.com/
ONLINE TRAVEL
Say you want to go on safari and need to convince travel partners to go with you. You might help them get in the mood at Adventure TV, especially if you have a fast online connection. The company behind this aggregative site cooperates with tour operators and other content providers to stream some pretty slick videos. "Queen of the Beasts", for example, seems as much a documentary about lions as a promotional piece for national parks in Tanzania. Our reviewer learned that lions are the only cats that naturally live in groups. You're bound to pick up such tidbits here; the longest streams run 30 or 40 minutes. The Web site presents seven channels based on travel themes such as jungle, water, and snow; at last count, the desert channel alone contained 17 videos. Most useful, maybe, is the Trip Search page, which has filters such as price range, difficulty ratings, and maximum group size. If you find yourself daydreaming about Mt. Everest, New Guinea, or Alaska, Adventure TV just might be for you.http://www.adventuretv.com/
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
A Little Man, a Little Box, and a Cool Browser Effect
This does one thing, but does it very well. It's a little Shockwave presentation that features a man in a small box, struggling against the walls, the floor, and the ceiling - and in the process, moving your browser's screenspace in perfect accordance with his gyrations. Worth a quick trip, just because it's so cool.http://www.lebonze.co.uk/stuff/move.htm
In the '80s, the boom of electronic devices gave birth to tinny renditions of songs on small gadgets. Two decades later, better-sounding toys have not managed to replace earlier silliness. Drop by this Web time-sink where you'll learn to play songs like "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on your telephone.
http://michaelvincent.iwarp.com/songs/
The Evil Plan site is for ambitious but planning-disabled potential miscreants. Answer a series of detailed menu-style questions and get a plan of action to implement your schemes. All levels of evil are accommodated, from getting the last slice of pie to world domination. It couldn't be easier.
http://www.darksites.com/evilplan.php
Do your e-mail pal's signatures cause you envy? (You should see that of our editor.) Despair of ever creating such a witty .sig of your own? This small site can help. It's really just a list of (mostly) pithy quotes. A couple are so good you'll likely see them soon in correspondence from other NSD subscribers.
http://www.docflash.com/quotes.html
SOFTWARE
It's been a while since Netscape 6.0 came out, but AOL has kept working on the browser. Last week, it released a beta version of the upcoming Netscape 7.0. There's a limited number of new features, the most notable a new tabbed view of multiple pages in one browser window. This reduces window clutter and is already a popular feature in browsers like Mozilla. Other new features include the ability to save a complete web page and all of its graphics in one operation, automatic search on highlighted words, and a special full-screen mode that gives you more Web real estate on small screens. PC World has a brief review.Netscape: http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/7/
PC World: http://www.pcworld.com/resource/printable/article/0,aid,100564,00.asp
This version of PHP is mostly a bug fix release, so grab it if you have unexpected crashes. It's also worth noting that this release also improves support for Apache 2.0, though the developers do not recommend using this feature for production work just yet. The release notes have more details.
http://www.php.net/release_4_2_1.php