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BREAKING SURF
A California Congressman introduced the Peer-to-Peer Piracy Prevention Act to the US House of Representatives on July 25. In a nutshell, it excepts copyright-holders from any anti-hacking law if they use hacking methods to block access to the content they own. The bill has aroused much public outcry, which has mostly focused on potential abuse by the music and movie industries. The bill actually has provisions that help guard against such abuse, although a friendly US Attorney General would make all the difference in the world. What we see as insidious, and what Wired only notes at the end of one article, is that any hackers who look through your private files can defend themselves with the claim that they were just looking for copies of their own copyrighted content. CNET also has a piece on the bill. Hey, if the bill becomes law, maybe people can attack the RIAA's servers - oh, wait. Read the next article....Bill: http://www.house.gov/berman/pr072502.htm
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,54153,00.html
CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-946316.html
ZDNet: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-947101.html
RIAA Web Site Hit by Denial of Service Attack
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has certainly not made any friends among consumers in the recent past. Its current effort to support the Peer-to-Peer Piracy Prevention Act (see above) has met with opposition and even hatred among the very customers to whom they sell music. Last weekend, the RIAA fell victim to the very tactic it wants to reserve for itself. The RIAA Web site suffered a denial-of-service attack that limited access for four days. One interesting tangent is that the RIAA buys their connectivity from WorldCom, now in high-profile bankruptcy. CNET has more on the attack.RIAA: http://riaa.org/
CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-947072.html
ALICE... Who the Heck Is ALICE?
Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity (ALICE) is a prize-winning artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot designed by Richard Wallace. This remarkable Slashdot interview with the inventor provides a perspective on contemporary work in AI as well as Wallace's own views on academic politics, especially within the University of California system, and on mental illness, with which he is unfortunately well acquainted. This interview makes clear why his ALICE ranks among the few programs even close to passing a Turing test (to pass it, an AI entity must fool humans into believing it is human in a blind test), at least for some of the people, some of the time.Slashdot: http://interviews.slashdot.org/interviews/02/07/26/0332225.shtml
ALICE: http://alice.sunlitsurf.com/
FBI Fumbles Terrorist Web Sting Opportunity...
Jon Messner, a porn Web site entrepreneur, likes to keep track of domain names with registrations about to expire in hopes of snapping them up to use in his own business. One day, he noticed that the domain for the militant Islamic web site Alneda.com had expired. He grabbed the domain name, quickly built a copy of the original Alneda.com with the site's original content, and did his patriotic duty by turning over the information to the FBI. He guessed that the feds could use his site to run a sting for visitors or to launch a disinformation operation against al Qaeda and other militant Islamic organizations. Unfortunately, by the time the FBI got its act together word had gone out among visitors of the old Alneda.com that the site was no longer the real thing, and the opportunity was lost. Says Messner about his dealings with the slow and tech-oblivious FBI, "It was like dealing with the motor vehicle administration." MSNBC has the story.http://www.msnbc.com/news/787754.asp
...While Private Company Sets Up Wireless Honeypot in D.C.
The next wireless network you attempt to log on to may be run by the spooks. SAIC, a private company with classified business ties to the US government and which owns bits of VeriSign, has set up a hacker observation point in the US capital. Its goal is not to prosecute freeloaders, but to learn how hackers are exploiting insecure 802.11b networks. So far, SAIC has turned up nothing nefarious, but the method does logically seem to lend itself to the entrapment of bad guys and spies, especially given the location. Wide-open wireless networks that allow anonymous access are clearly a nightmare to a security-conscious government, so it's not surprising that this kind of research is going on. SecurityFocus reports.http://online.securityfocus.com/news/552
Ivy League Admissions Espionage
Yale didn't used to worry much about computer systems security issues, which would explain why the admissions department from another Ivy League school, Princeton, was able to access its student admissions files. The victimized prospective students had applied to both schools, so the folks from Princeton browsed the Yale Web site and plugged in the applicants' birth dates and Social Security numbers. Bingo! Of course, the people at Yale are extremely offended and have dragged in the FBI to examine the issue. While we do not absolve Princeton of wrongdoing, if Yale had implemented even the most rudimentary of security measures, this wouldn't have happened. Princeton has placed on administrative leave an associate dean of admissions who admitted to improperly accessing the Yale info. The Washington Post first revealed that President Bush's niece, Lauren Bush, had been accepted at Yale and that Princeton computers accessed her notice four times in one afternoon - and there weren't even any pictures of her! (She has dabbled in modeling.) The Yale Daily looks at campus reaction but avoids the hard question of stupidity. Yahoo has a running index of relevant articles.Yale Daily: http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=19454
Yahoo: http://story.news.yahoo.com/fc?cid=34&tmpl=fc&in=Tech&cat=Hackers_and_Crackers
Perens Backs Out of DVD Decryption Speech
Buy a DVD in Europe or Japan and you probably won't be able to play it in the DVD player you own back in the US. DVDs are marketed by region, and the motion picture studios don't want you to watch any films but those designed for and released in your region. Bruce Perens, famous Linux guru and Hewlett-Packard employee, planned to demonstrate how users can overcome this limitation at the recent O'Reilly Open Source Convention. However, as all proper consumers should know, the act of informing people how to circumvent corporate copy prevention or encryption schemes violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and leads to fines and possibly a striped wardrobe. Hewlett-Packard pressured Perens not to give his demonstration and Perens complied; he apparently likes his job. Instead, Perens explained to his audience how to break CD copy protection with an indelible marker - old news covered in NSD 8.19 - but he didn't pass the markers out. Strictly speaking, the DMCA cops might show up at his door anyway. Wired and CNET have more.NSD: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v08/nsd.08.19.html#BS4#BS4
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,54168,00.html
CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-946667.html
DVD FAQ: http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html
The nice folks running Hotmail at Microsoft want to help us - yes, really, they do. The company knows we just can't keep our Hotmail files spanking clean and nicely purged of anything that's no longer useful so it has decided to do that for us and has abruptly obliterated any stored e-mail older than 30 days. Sadly for the clever Hotmail strategists, however, the helpful clean-up has made hordes of users hopping mad. Despite the heart-rending pleas of customers anxious to recover precious e-mails that Hotmail purged from their servers, the company says nothing can be done. Hotmail claims it warned users about the e-mail wipe in a message sent out in the middle of June. The move appears to benefit Hotmail more than it does its users - and we're just shocked about that. Hotmail sells a plan to users that offers additional storage space and extra services, so it's no surprise that it has started vigilantly enforcing its 2-MB limit for free accounts. There's nothing wrong with making changes, but there's simply no excuse for this high-handed treatment of users. CNET has the sad tale.
Hotmail: http://www.hotmail.com/
CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-946430.html
AOL Retreats from Chat Interoperability
Users don't generally enjoy installing and using two or three instant messaging (IM) clients. That's why applications like Trillian (for Windows) and Proteus (for OS X) were built. Yet, AOL has announced that it is scaling back efforts to make AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) work with other chat networks. Upon approving the AOL/Time Warner merger, the FCC forbade AOL from offering advanced streaming features until AIM servers could interact with other IM services. The FCC demanded that this be done at the server level rather than the client level - which Trillian, etc. do. That's easier said than done - particularly after AOL has spent years and boatloads of cash trying to keep its service proprietary. Now, AOL has got to be asking itself whether merging chat is worth it for the company. Given its recent financial woes, the short answer is, for now, no. The only sticks the FCC can wield are to prohibit AOL from offering video conferencing to broadband subscribers and to send AOL to bed without dessert. Wired and CNET have more detail.Trillian: http://trillian.cc/
Proteus: http://indigofield.com/
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,54128,00.html
CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-945909.html
How the US Postal Service Almost Owned E-Mail
At one time, the US Postal Service (USPS) seriously considered getting into the e-mail business. Its electronic mail ambitions date way back to the 1890s, when the Western Union monopoly blocked its attempt to grab a piece of the telegram delivery pie. Some 90 years later, the USPS tried to entice companies that sent high volumes of direct mail to electronically deliver their messages to the USPS, which would then print out the messages and deliver them. In the end, law dictated that the USPS could only commercially deliver hard-copy mail. Stuart Brotman wrote this brief history of the USPS flirtation with various forms of e-mail in Technology Review.http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/7045.asp
EULA stands for End User Licence Agreement, the long piece of unreadable legal text you always ignore in favor of the Agree button when you install new software. Weslee Bilodeau figured it would be useful to have a searchable historical archive of EULAs through the years. You'd be able to use it for obvious things like legal research, but also to follow trends through time. There's a general suspicion that these documents have become more restrictive over time, and such an archive could be used to prove the hypothesis. If you have examples of such EULAs from programs, games, hardware, online services, or whatever - past and present - submit a copy here for the common good. Read the About link at Bilodeau's EULA-DA site for a longer justification of the archive, and Slashdot for discussion of the idea.
EULA-DA: http://la.shano.org/
Slashdot: http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/02/07/29/1655222.shtml
O'Reilly Open Source Conventioners Parody Apple Switch Ads
As we noted in NSD 8.27, Apple has fastened onto a sure thing - user frustration with Windows - with its clever and persuasive ads. But while Apple focuses on the folks working on front-line operating systems, some attendees at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention borrowed the format to mock some of the less visible computer tools. They cranked out some amusing take-offs on the originals. Sure, the production values aren't up to Apple's standard, but the parody values are certainly way up there. We liked Sarah Burcham's switch to Windows XP and Ken Williams's move to boxers best; they are both so ridiculous, they're funny. They are all worth a look.NSD: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v08/nsd.08.27.html#SS4#SS4
Apple: http://www.apple.com/switch/
O'Reilly: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/1758
Salon Hosts Blogs and MP3s for Pay, Gets Investment
Salon is running out of money (see NSD 8.25), so it's nice to see the online magazine pursuing creative sources of revenue. It has begun hosting blogs for $40/year, but bloggers will need the Windows or Mac operating systems to manage their pages. Salon has also introduced a music sampling service to its premium subscribers. The MP3s consist of an eclectic selection of tracks by mostly obscure though decent artists. These strategies should help Salon's bottom line, as should a recent infusion of $715,000 in investor financing, deals with a number of high profile advertisers, and an increase to 44,000 paying subscribers. Check out Salon's press release. It's good news all around and a textbook example of how to milk ancillary services for revenue. Incidentally, guess which Salon blog is second in popularity behind the e-zine's own in-house blog. Yep, it's Pornographer's Picks. Some things never change.NSD: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v08/nsd.08.25.html#BS11
Blogs: http://www.salon.com/blogs/index.html
Music Sampler: http://www.salon.com/premium/musicmix/intro/index.html
Press release: http://www.salon.com/press/releases/2002/07/30/bridge_financing/index.html
Pornographer's Picks: http://blogs.salon.com/0001132/
UK Libraries Adopt the Net en Masse
What brings in traffic and leads to the taking out of books? No, it's not a librocidal traffic cop - it's the Internet in the UK library system. The UK is wiring all its libraries to bring about a new golden age for these institutions. The project will install over 30,000 terminals as it turns the libraries into universal "access and learning centers", as Wired puts it. UK librarians get a chance to become relevant in the Information Age; otherwise offline UK library users get an opportunity to use e-mail and explore the Net for jobs and a host of resources. The best payoff is that the libraries' initial mandate doesn't suffer; with the increase in library visitors, book circulation has surged.http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,54151,00.html
IT Standard Security Benchmarks Released - Should You Use Them?
The Center for Internet Security (CIS) has released a set of security benchmarks. The Center is an unusual non-profit organization formed by a collaboration between high-profile government outfits - such as the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) - and a bunch of high-profile corporations such as Intel and Visa. The free, operating-system-specific benchmarks consist of two components. First, a document details what needs to be done to bring an operating system to the minimum CIS Level-I Benchmark, the prudent level of minimum due care for operating system security. The second component is a scoring program that automatically checks your system against the benchmark. The paranoid will note that to get the benchmark package you need to provide all sorts of identifying information, that the site forbids tools to be shared, and that there's no mention of open-source code on the Web site. Trojans? Covert databases? Do you really want to run closed code from this group on your machine? Sadly, these kinds of questions need to be asked in the current security climate.http://www.cisecurity.org/
Administration of the .org top-level domain (TLD) will change hands in October, when ICANN will award a new contract to manage that domain. The current administrator of .org is VeriSign, which agreed last year to give up its management in exchange for solidifying its hold on the .com TLD. Eleven bidders are trying to get the .org business. The Washington Post has a good overview of the political implications and ICANN has information on the process.
Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12982-2002Jul28.html
ICANN: http://www.icann.org/tlds/org/
ONLINE CULTURE
Music File Sharing: A Bit Harder, But Still Relatively Easy
Salon performed an experiment to see if it could find a recent, modestly obscure jazz album in the post-Napster peer-to-peer landscape. It took a while, and was a bit of a pain, but in the end Salon found what it wanted. The article looks at the latest developments in the music file-sharing wars, including the proposed Peer to Peer Piracy Prevention Act (see above). The general point of the Salon article is that the music industry's well publicized campaign to kill file trading has not been particularly successful. All it did was to create a population of consumers who hate the commercial music distributors. Worth reading.http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/07/30/file_trading/index.html
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
We hadn't really thought about it before visiting this site, but we are dominated artistically by the rectangle. Look for the nearest piece of visual art - we bet its a rectangle. See, we told you! Artist Roy Lawaetz is doing something to free us of this quadrilateral state of affairs. He's painting on triangles - not just single triangles, mind you, but multiple linked triangles. He's not painting on just any old random triangles, either. He has a system, and a book to explain the system, which is based on zemis, triangular stone artifacts of long-extinct native Caribbeans called the Taino. Lawaetz's colorful art contains many allusions to traditional island themes. His site has all you would expect from a good artist's site: an art gallery, biography, and interviews. You also get an explanation of the modular triangular system art theory and a place to buy his book. Don't miss the awards page for a trip down Web award memory lane.http://www.roylawaetz.com/
In the same way that an artist wouldn't choose to display 3-D work in a two-dimensional world, the curators of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) like to display Web sites in their online gallery. Two years ago, the SFMOMA inaugurated e.space, a Web gallery of HTML art. The museum has re-launched the project with a greater focus on works created for the online experience. Interactive, digital, non-linear art forms the heart of the new collection, although its former incarnation is still available in an archive.
http://www.sfmoma.org/espace/
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/ |
Development of the Space Shuttle, 1972-1981 (History of the Space Shuttle, Volume 2)
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
The Art of Mingling: Easy, Fun, and Proven Techniques for Mastering Any Room
Mac OS X Disaster Relief
Dead Can Dance 1981-1998 [BOX SET]Reviving the Lost Art of the Short Story
The short story is, sadly, a dying format. How many you've read may determine whether you enjoy Short Stories at East of the Web, a collection that may raise eyebrows right off the bat with its necessarily arbitrary categorization. The initial appeal of free stories is tempered somewhat when you find that not all content is original, although it is originally categorized. The public-domain golden oldies here include shorts by Washington Irving, Jules Verne, and Bram Stoker in the Sci-Fi & Fantasy section. Great, but this section also contains much-anthologized authors such as Saki, Edith Wharton, and Charles Dickens, whose works you probably won't find in any bookstore's SF section. Conversely, popular SF authors are conspicuously absent, owing, maybe, to copyright issues. According to the guidelines for writers, "The site receives over a quarter of a million unique page views per month, so successful submissions are likely to be viewed by more readers than in almost any other short story publication. In addition, the site receives attention from the press, schools, universities, film makers and other publishers." Crime fiction, humor, and stories for children are also part of this ambitious mix.http://www.short-stories.co.uk/
Television Without Pity is a snipefest by informal critics who can never watch enough TV. As one part of the FAQ states, "Our mandate is, more or less, to give people a place to revel in their guilty televisual pleasures. In most cases, we have a complex love/hate relationship with the show, and this site is a way for us to work through those feelings." Boy, do they have a lot of feelings to work through! Reviews of weekly shows are detailed to the point of obsessive windage. Of course, you can best appreciate the sass and speculation if you've seen the episode or identify with the character in question. Note that no contributor ever watches a rerun - all repeated episodes are called classics. The reviews here will satisfy the millions of viewers who thought there was little more to their favorite show than the show itself. There are forums for Active Shows such as "Enterprise" and "The West Wing" and Permanent Hiatus Shows like "Ally McBeal" and "Boot Camp". If you like disgruntlement and begrudging fascination, you're in good company here.
http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/
SURFING SCIENCE
What's your favorite number? Think you're alone? Think again. In the Secret Lives of Numbers, Golan Levin analyzes search engine data "to determine the relative popularity of every integer between 0 and one million" - or, perhaps more accurately, to rough out the amount of confusion each of those integers generates. Check out the Visualization Java applet for the really cool part of this app, but be aware that it's going to suck up a lot of RAM. It's fascinating how the curve drops to meet the asymptote near 1,000, then rises again starting around 1,750. We assume that everyday number use ends at 1,000 and the use of numbers in marking historical years picks up around 1750. If you're curious as to why a certain number is so popular, you can click a button to learn which particular search strings contained that number.http://www.turbulence.org/Works/nums/
The Be All, End All Engineering Vortal
Remember vortals, the industry-specific vertical portals that were all the rage a few years ago? A vibrant example of this supercharged directory is eFunda. Think engineering fundamentals. This well designed, extensive collection of technical resources lives up to its self-billing as "The Ultimate Online Reference for Engineers". Even non-engineers can appreciate the ease with which they can find standard measurements for screw threads and design guidelines for O-rings in Design Center, one of six major sections. Much of the site provides the details that engineers learn in school but forget at work. The section on mathematics could help out teachers and advanced students as well as engineers. Some of the Cool Calculators are free; others require a paid membership. Extending the vortal concept, the Trade Show area lets you search by product category or company name, while Member Search lets you view public profiles of eFunda members. The e-commerce features include a bookstore, metals store (need sheets of copper or Teflon?), and instant quotes for 3-D CAD models. Of course, geek factors pervade the entire site. Recent hot topics on eFunda forums include "Galvanic Corrosion in Stainless Steels" and "Air flow through an open window." For all you know, friends of yours use the Ask an Expert area to impress you with their expertise.http://www.efunda.com/home.cfm
Got kids? Maybe ya just want to give the kid in you some running room. In either case, virtually visit the American Museum of Natural History's Ology section. It might sound boring, but it isn't. What's an Ology? Good question. They have an answer. Which we know, but we aren't giving away - this is tough love. Either figure it out on your own, or visit the site and track it down. The only help you're going to get from us is the URL. We're still grappling with the question of why astronomy isn't an ology, although it is an Ology, if you get our drift. Well, it is semantically if not in name. We figure that the quacks got ahold of the term first.
http://www.ology.amnh.org/
SOFTWARE
Music Codec Quality Comparison
Which music encoding standard produces the best sound quality? Darryl Miyaguchi, who is apparently quite interested in audio compression, created a set of tests to compare different music samples encoded with different codecs. He got test groups to download the software and rate the samples. The results are in some ways as complex as individual musical preferences. Certain codecs produce better results for certain musical styles. Basically, there is no single best codec - it all depends on what music you compress and listen to. This is pretty technical stuff, and fodder for endless geek flame wars, but worth looking at if you care about the quality of music coming out of your computer.Miyaguchi: http://ff123.net/
Microsoft has released a new version of its handheld operating system. This is a direct competitor to Palm OS, though judging by the number of applications available at the local computer store, not nearly as popular. One notable feature of the new version is support for IPv6, the next-generation Internet communication protocol. It also features support for speech recognition, and also enhanced support for viewing documents in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Adobe Acrobat, and various graphic formats. The performance of the operating system has also been improved about 15 percent.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/Embedded/ce.NET/default.asp