BREAKING SURF
| Embrace File-Sharing or Die |
| Google and the Voyeur World |
| John Perry Barlow Interview |
| Touring the Oregon Coast |
| An Aussie's Guide to Yank Living |
| Top Five Films That... |
| Rondellus Redux |
| A Truly Digital Mona Lisa |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| Spying New Words |
| The Dave Barry Blog |
| Take a Gander at Viz |
| Testing Six Degrees of Separation |
| Animated Engines |
| Tigers - Not Just for Breakfast Anymore |
| The Science Tunnel |
| Drug Info and News |
| An Assessment of Space Shuttle Flight Software Development Processes |
| GNOME 2.2 Released |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
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Netsurfer Books Because a room without a book is like a body without a soul. http://www.netsurf.com/nsb/ |
BREAKING SURF
Given the blanket of media covering the Columbia shuttle disaster, the best thing we can do is point you to some primary sources. NASA's Columbia Web site has links to practically all the information the agency is releasing. That info and NASA's daily teleconferences (available online via NASA TV) are basically the fodder that the media is digesting and passing on to the public. While you can find many places from which to follow the press coverage, we recommend the Space.com archive for completeness and clear organization. The general tone of worldwide editorial opinion is probably best reflected in the collection of editorial cartoons about the tragedy at Daryl Cagle's Professional Cartoonist Index. A fantastic independent resource is a FAQ, continually updated, set up by the folks who inhabit the sci.space.shuttle and sci.space.history Usenet newsgroups. For a first-rate technical background on the shuttle, see the "Development of the Space Shuttle" books in our book recommendations, below.NASA Columbia: http://www.nasa.gov/columbia/
NASA TV: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/
Space.com: http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/sts107_storyarchive.html
Cagle: http://cagle.slate.msn.com/news/ShuttleColumbia/main.asp
FAQ: http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq_x.html
Slammer/Sapphire SQL Worm Analysis
The Slammer/Sapphire SQL Worm that inundated networks last week was the fastest spreading computer worm ever. A succinct analysis by the Computer Science Division at UC Berkeley shows that the number of computers infected by the worm doubled every 8.5 seconds. Ultimately, the worm took less than ten minutes to infect more than 90% of the vulnerable hosts - at least 75,000 hosts in total. This superworm would probably have spread even faster, but was delayed by bugs in its random number generator which it used to pick IP addresses to infect. Fortunately, the worm's payload was not destructive. The Computer Science Division paper has plenty of graphs and lessons learned from what used to be only a theoretical species of superworm. Business Week has a look at the worm from the business perspective.Computer Science Division: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/sapphire/
Business Week: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2003/tc20030131_4727.htm
How a Hacker Posse Roped In the Leaves Worm
Since June 2001, computer security experts from the FBI, the Defense Department, the White House, and private companies such as Symantec and Network Associates have been working together in an informal network to hunt down hackers. The trigger for this unprecedented level of cooperation between the private and public sectors was the Leaves worm, which had alarmed the FBI with its virulence and behavior. By reverse engineering various forms of the worm and setting Internet traps to capture information about the person responsible, the group was able not only to provide information about the nature of the threat and develop ideas about how to stop its spread, but also to hunt down and arrest the perpetrator. In the end, Leaves did little damage but how the posse got its hacker and again proved its worth against the far more destructive Code Red worm makes for interesting reading at GovExec.com, even if the style of the telling is just a bit florid and overblown.http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0103/012903worm.htm
Smallpox Research Grid Project
A new distributed computing project aims to develop new drugs to combat smallpox infections. We've covered such projects in the past (see NSD 7.07), but in sum, distributed computing, or grid computing, is based on the well proven methodology pioneered by SETI@Home and similar efforts, in which computer users donate their spare computing cycles to science. In the smallpox project, the final beneficiary is the US Department of Defense, which has an understandable interest in managing any terrorist-related smallpox outbreaks. The project employs computational chemistry to analyze chemical interactions between a library of 35 million drug molecules and several protein targets on the smallpox virus. You can get in on the action by downloading from Grid.org a screensaver that will do all the work - still only for flavors of Windows. Incidentally, the smallpox project is not the first such anti-bioterror grid computing effort. The global grid has already completed work on analyzing 3.57 billion molecules for a potential cure for anthrax in only 24 days. Pretty amazing.Grid.org: http://www.grid.org/home.htm
Smallpox: http://www.grid.org/projects/smallpox/
NSD 7.07: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v07/nsd.07.07.html#SW1
AOL Loses Ted Turner, Subscribers, and $98.7 Billion
The giant Internet service AOL and its Time Warner conglomerate appendage lost a staggering $98.7 billion last year. That amount sounds only a bit less spectacular when you learn $54.2 billion of that was due to obscure accounting rules having to do with the Time Warner merger. Still, that's a record pro-forma loss for any corporation, ever. The company has also reported that even though its revenue increased by 8% last year, for the first time in the AOL's history, it had a net loss of subscribers. There's more. Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, a key member of the AOL Time Warner colossus, is out as co-chairman, though it's hard to say whether this is good news or bad. CNET and the New York Times have coverage, with the latter also providing data about the shift from dial-up to broadband usage and how that's impacting the fortunes of the major ISPs.CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-982648.html
Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/03/technology/03ONLI.html
VeriSign Makes Play for Monopoly on Non-English Domain Names
VeriSign is not endearing itself to the Net technical community with its latest attempt to gain a mini-monopoly on non-English domain names. Right now, there's no firm standard for how domain names with characters like â or ö should be resolved into IP addresses. This is a problem for many non-English speaking parts of the world because there's then no way to register domain names with such characters. VeriSign pre-empted the Net standard-setting process and implemented a misguided solution that only works for people who access the Web using the Internet Explorer browser. Basically, VeriSign offers to install into that browser a proprietary plug-in that would handle non-ASCII domain names whenever a netsurfer wants to go to such a domain. Needless to say, this only works for Windows users, and does nothing about resolving domains for e-mail or other servers connected to the Net. The Register explains the immediate problem with VeriSign's solution, but the larger and more complex issue of how to handle non-ASCII domain names will not be resolved any time soon. This is of interest to all non-English-language Web site administrators.http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/29058.html
AT&T researcher Steven Bellovin has discovered a way to count the number of computers behind an organization's firewall. More specifically, he discovered that it is possible to deduce the number of servers behind a Network Address Translator (NAT) box - usually part of the firewall - by looking at certain predictable fields in the IP packets that it generates. NATs are widely used to mask multiple servers behind a single IP address, both for security reasons and to conserve the number of globally available IP addresses. His research paper offers technical details about the method and its limitations. This discovery is generally bad news from the standpoint of security and privacy and no simple global fix is available. On the other hand, this method should let demographers get a better count of the true number of computers connected to the Net. It's a clever bit of research.
http://www.research.att.com/~smb/papers/fnat.pdf
Mobile Phone Test Cheaters Caught in Sting
SMS looked like a godsend to a number of University of Maryland students facing a difficult accounting exam. The plan was simple: bring your cell phone into the exam site, and use the phone to contact friends on the outside who could look up exam answers on the Net and relay them back via SMS. Sweet. One problem: the university business school had posted a fake answer key and patently wrong answers on the Net, which made it easy to determine who'd been cheating. This isn't exactly uncommon; Wired notes that 26 students in Japan recently failed after attempting the same scheme. This illustrates a common failing among tech-oriented students: they tend to think they know more than they actually do. Kids, think about this. You're in school for a reason - to learn from people who know more than you do. It wouldn't hurt for lazy professors to design tests that require complex answers, either....http://wired.com/news/school/0,1383,57484,00.html
If the team led by Vic Teplitz and Eugene Herrin is right, Earth is frequently visited by tiny, high-mass nuggets of strange matter that pass right through the planet with relatively little fuss. Their hypothesis is connected to theories of what might make up the dark matter that theoretically accounts for the universe's missing mass. Looking for the precise sequences of faint seismometer needle twitchings that such events might produce amid a huge archive of seismological data is a huge information-sorting challenge. Using ten reels of old data from millions of seismic events and using finer and finer criteria to separate out unexplained sequences of signals from known, point-source events, the team found two sets of data that seemed to provide evidence for its concept. To develop this idea further, additional evidence is needed so the team wants to turn its attention to newer, digital seismic data. Although this is more plentiful, it's also harder to screen. In the meantime, if you happen, just happen, to see a little spark of light near you one day you'll be entitled to tell folk you saw something strange. Wired has more.
http://wired.com/wired/archive/11.02/matter.html
A Patron Saint for the Internet?
A group of Italian Roman Catholics seem to believe we need one, but the Vatican's keeping quiet so far. To date, the Internet has been a triumph of secularisim and diversity. Does this effort signal a trend toward Balkanization of the Net along religious lines? It doesn't appear so as yet, but vigilance is warranted. CNN has a brief story, and you can vote for your choice at Santi Beati.CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/01/31/internet.saint/index.html
Santi Beati: http://www.santiebeati.it/patrono.shtml
To cattle ranchers, teenagers are a challenging market. Almost one in four young 'uns consider vegetarianism cool; the meatless approach to diet is particularly popular with girls. To overcome this trend away from good, honest, wholesome red meat, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association and the Cattlemen's Beef Promotion and Research Board have launched Cool 2B Real, a Web site that clearly equates "real" with eating beef. At the site, young women build strong bodies and strong minds and feel cool about themselves, no doubt because they eat red meat. Keepin' it Real features an image of a towering burger, with a big fat juicy beef patty right smack in the middle. "What type of beef do you most like to eat with your friends?", a poll asks, as if eating anything else was unimaginable. Time brings us the story but isn't optimistic that the site's fake rad, teenybopper approach is likely to do much to make the meatless see the error of their ways. Cool 2B Real makes no bones about telling you its parent organizations and even links to them, in small print.
Cool 2B Real: http://www.cool-2b-real.com/
Time: http://www.time.com/time/health/printout/0,8816,412343,00.html
Poets against the War states that the US's Iraq policy flies in the face of near unanimous opposition from UN members, but this notion rather flies in the face of reality - as the UN Security Council has supported the broad tenets of the American position. Nonetheless, the poets united in this movement claim to have mustered over 2,000 fellows to the cause. They plan is to mount a National Day of Poetry against the War. The date they're shooting for is Feb. 12 - a date chosen because First Lady Laura Bush had originally scheduled a poetry symposium at the White House for that day but, suspecting that poet activists would use the symposium as an anti-war platform, later cancelled it. (The Washington Post has that story.) We'll be watching. When last we looked, exactly seven poets were presented for inspection, offering a poem apiece. Many more, however, did chip in for two volumes of anti-war poetry organized through and available at Nth Position.
Poets against the War: http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org/default.htm
Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4004-2003Jan30.html
Nth Position: http://www.nthposition.com/
Can you make money from your blog? Andrew Sullivan recently made roughly $79,000 US during a pledge week at his site. Now, entrepreneurs and companies are beginning to think that blogs might become powerful vehicles for advertising, given the committed character of a blog's audience. This Guardian essay includes many neat terms such as "nanopublishing", which suggests that the language of targeted marketing is becoming ever more precise. The real question is whether or not bloggers really want blogging to become a commercial enterprise rather than an outlet for individual opinion and belief online.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,884658,00.html
If you recognize the word "Xupiter", you're not alone. Xupiter is a tool bar that installs itself in Internet Explorer and then hijacks your system despite your best efforts to uninstall it. This Wired article has all the details about this nuisance-ware, as well as where to go to find out how to eradicate it from your machine. You know if you need it.
http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,57467,00.html
ONLINE CULTURE
John Snyder, a board member of the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), makes his case for why NARAS should not go over a cliff with the RIAA. Snyder's long, quote and link-filled Salon article sums up the various arguments against the confrontational stand on intellectual property taken by the RIAA. The article goes over familiar ground for anybody who's been following the music-sharing wars, but it does serve as a good compilation of all the arguments in opposition to the draconian anti-file-sharing forces of the music industry. We could not possibly do justice to the many threads Snyder takes in hand here, but since the piece is likely to be the talk of the blogosphere for some time to come, you may wish to become familiar with it. Reader reaction to the article can be found in the Salon letters section.Snyder: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/02/01/file_trading_manifesto/index.html?x
Letters: http://www.salon.com/tech/letters/2003/02/04/file_sharing/index.html
We've been reporting on the growing power and cultural relevance of Google for some years now, so none of the issues in this long cover story is really all that new, but this Boston Globe Magazine article brings them all together in one major thread. There's everything here, from the phenomenon of Googling people to the final coming to pass of the proverbial permanent record your teachers warned you about. A little bit of Google history is thrown in as a bonus. Long time readers of NSD will find the stories familiar, but those who were not paying attention can catch up with the profound Google legacy.
http://www.boston.com/globe/magazine/2003/0202/coverstory_entire.htm
Mother Jones is running this lengthy interview with John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Grateful Dead lyricist. (We're pretty sure there's some law that requires all stories about him mention that.) Barlow talks about the Bush administration's proposed Total Information Awareness program and about which dystopian SF writers got the future right. He also chimes in on the invention of viral marketing by the Grateful Dead, and many other equally interesting topics. Worth a read.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2003/06/we_268_01.html
ONLINE TRAVEL
A virtual tour of the northern half of the Oregon coast should be cool, as this is a rugged section of coastline. This would be an ambitious project for a radio station - and that's who feeds it to ya here. A Portland-area station has a compelling section of its Web site devoted to the northern Oregon coast. It throws in some photos, but those are really small potatoes compared to the landscapes it paints with words - which is rather fitting, as talk is its stock in trade. If you check out the site, there's a good chance that you'll want to look at what they talk about, but since the sites described here are physical locations, that means you have to pack up the gear and actually visit these places. Many have visited, and returned home alive. It could happen to you.http://kxl.com/coast.asp
An Aussie's Guide to Yank Living
Anne came to the US from Australia in 1998 as fiancee of an American. It appears that she promptly started setting up Web sites, of which this is but one. This one's particularly interesting, however, as it remarks in detail upon the differences in culture between Aussies and Americans. An Aussie in America offers a great deal of insight and introspection in regard to the inevitable cultural clashes that result from a marrying southeastern hemisphere types with northwestern hemisphere types. It's worth a visit just for her take on the ubiquitous Outback Steakhouse chain.http://www.aussieinamerica.com/
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Name five films with one-syllable titles. How about five that feature monkeys? This eclectic collection of top fives by Michael Wilmington, movie critic for the Chicago Tribune, has been reproduced for all who enjoy non-traditional film categories. Some are insightful, like the description of how John Wayne in "The Alamo" rewrote history ("In fact, Jim Bowie lay in bed with typhoid during the battle, here he fights gallantly."). Others are tongue-in-cheek, like the unlikely category, "5 films of Arnold Schwarzenegger's that are actually good". Decide for yourself.http://metromix.com/top/1,1419,M-Metromix-Movies-moviefrontwilmingtontop5!ArticleDetail-11614,00.html
In NSD 8.38, we wrote about Rondellus, the classically trained medieval music outfit from Estonia, and their "Sabbatum" project, a collection of Black Sabbath covers played on medieval instruments and sung in Latin. We kind of feel bad that we occasionally misspelled the name of the album in that earlier item, so in the spirit of supporting weird yet cool art, we'll point you to a Web page where you can download all the MP3 tracks from the band's earlier "Sanctum Rosarium" album. Be nice - if you do grab any of these tracks for yourself and decide to keep them, for heaven's sake, buy one of the albums from Amazon. The band can probably use the money and if you really like the music, you should support it. You'll also be showing the music industry that making content available for free really does drive sales.
NSD 8.38: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v08/nsd.08.38.html#AO2
Sanctum Rosarium MP3s: http://www.sabbatum.com/sanctumrosarium
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00007MB39/netsurferdigest
In 1965, Control Data Corp. created a device that was a clear precursor of today's garden-variety scanners. One of the first subjects "scanned" by the Digigraphics technique was a high-quality reproduction of the Mona Lisa. A copy of the original digital Mona Lisa is owned by Andy Patros and is the subject of this site. History, links to other Mona-related sites, and graphics of the Mona graphic are featured. The taste is tantalizing but needs more body: higher res graphics and more on the actual creation technique would be a great start. The site succeeds as a bit of history, but has a yet unmet educational potential.
http://www.digitalmonalisa.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: Netsurfer Books: http://www.netsurf.com/nsb/ Netsurfer Library: http://www.netsurf.com/nsl/ |
Development of the Space Shuttle, 1972-1981 (History of the Space Shuttle, Volume 2)
America in an Arab Mirror: Images of America in Arabic Travel Literature: An Anthology 1895-1995
Pattern Recognition
Leaving Reality Behind: Etoy vs Etoys.Com & Other Battles to Control Cyberspacehttp://www.wordspy.com/
You either love or hate Dave Barry. If you find his wit and wisdom irresistible, or simply amusing, then you're going to love his new blog. Believe it or not, it's even tasteful - enjoy the new rumor that Joe Millionaire is a woman. See, tasteful! The Miami Herald is kind enough to offer an archive of Barry's recent newspaper columns, but if the site goes down or melts or something, have no fear - you can always generate your own Dave Barry column with AutoDave. If you think of AutoDave as a viable Turing Test implementation, does this mean we've achieved Artificial Humor?
Barry Blog: http://davebarry.blogspot.com/
Herald: http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/columnists/dave_barry/
AutoDave: http://www.peacefire.org/staff/bennett/autodave/
"Viz is a humorous magazine produced in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Born in 1979, it continues to avoid topical political satire, instead concentrating on cheap laughs about farting, swearing and turds." This is how Viz describes itself and we have little to add to that description, save to point out that it is also an institution of contemporary British culture. Part of the fun is that the format, themes, and styling are virtually identical to the classic British children's comics of days gone by, with heroes and heroines with special powers and children up to mischief. But look closer and you'll see that the content is distinctly adult. One of the comic's strengths is its ability to blend old favorites - such as Johnny Fartpants, Buster Gonad, and Sid the Sexist - with fresh strips that often hint at current trends or events in an oddball fashion. Some of the funniest content comes from the readers themselves, and the perennially popular and ludicrously hilarious Top Tips and letters pages are here too on Viz's online portal.
http://www.viz.co.uk/
SURFING SCIENCE
Testing Six Degrees of Separation
How connected are you to a dairy farmer in New Zealand? According to conventional wisdom, there are only six degrees of separation between you and the dairy farmer, or anyone else. Drawing inspiration from a research project originally conducted in 1967 by Harvard social psychologist Stanley Milgram, a team of sociologists at Columbia University has developed a global experiment to test Milgram's theories. Named the "Small World Research Project" (SWRP), the entire experiment occurs through e-mail and interaction with the SWRP Web site. As a participant, you're required to locate a target person by forwarding an e-mail to one person only. You choose an acquaintance who you think has the best chance of getting you one step closer to your target person. In theory, your original message will only pass through five computer terminals before being received by the target person. Results will be available through this Web site upon project completion.http://smallworld.sociology.columbia.edu/
Matt Keveny loves the details of how engines work and so he has created animations showing 19 different kinds of engines. The old favorites - the locomotive, the Stirling group, and, of course, the four-stroke internal combustion engine that powers most cars - are here as expected, but the Newcomen, Gnome rotary, and Wankel get equal treatment. The animations use simple line art and color to explain each engine's operating principles. They are all clear and a delight to watch in action. Keveny explains how each animation is created and offers tips for other engine animation artists. If you have the slightest bit of mechanical curiosity, this site is a must bookmark.
http://www.keveney.com/Engines.html
Tigers - Not Just for Breakfast Anymore
How many types of tiger are there? The orange ones listed next to "tiger" in the dictionary and the white ones (not that there's anything wrong with that) in Las Vegas, right? Actually, there are five subspecies of tiger left today, and the orange and the white ones mentioned above might very well be brother and sister, since they could both be Bengal tigers. Find out more about the other subspecies at 5 Tigers, sponsored by the Save the Tiger Fund and hosted by the Minnesota Zoo. They have activities and information online tailored for children from ages six to 13, but the research section is geared to adults.http://www.5tigers.org/
The Science Tunnel is a project of the Max Planck Society. The traveling exhibition just closed at the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, UK - but no worries. There's still a lot to explore at the Web site, and it doesn't keep museum hours. You'll need Flash and a fairly recent browser to view the place - but you likely have all that in place already. From the development of the cosmos, through the building blocks of matter; from outer space to inner space, this site offers up a short stack of interesting photos. Served on the side is a short paragraph describing current scientific trends in each topical area. Site design is not particularly intuitive, so be prepared to do some rather unnecessary mousing around to find all of the content. Movies in Real or Quicktime 4 format are available, once you know where to look.
http://www.sciencetunnel.com/
With the rapid advancement of medical and pharmaceutical research in recent years, it can be daunting for the average person and even healthcare professionals to find facts on the drugs and remedies currently available. This Web site has the answer to many of your pharmaceutical questions. The enormous amount of information on this site is somewhat intimidating, but the effortless search engine makes displaying search results quick and easy. Within a few minutes, you'll have much of the information you need to educate yourself on an endless number of drugs, from common pharmaceuticals such as aspirin to alternative remedies such as St. John's Wort. A virtual library of drug information is right at your fingertips. Be sure to check out the latest drug news discussing innovations in the pharmaceutical industry and the most recent advancements in research and development.
http://www.drugs.com/
SOFTWARE
An Assessment of Space Shuttle Flight Software Development Processes
While doing research on the Space Shuttle, we came across this 1993 report which, while not necessarily related to the current accident, is of general interest to anybody doing software engineering. The report was written seven years after the Challenger disaster but is suffused with the lessons of that tragedy. There are no smoking guns here - on the whole, the Space Shuttle software development process was found to be top notch. What the report does do is provide recommendations for making it even better. This is fascinating reading for anybody in the software business. You can get it two ways: a facsimile copy on the National Academies Press (NAP) Web site or in book form on Amazon.NAP: http://bob.nap.edu/execsumm/030904880X.html
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/030904880X/netsurferdigest/
While last week we reported on the release of the latest KDE desktop environment, this week it's GNOME's turn. GNOME and KDE have been battling for desktop mind share on the Linux platform, each release of one trying to outdo the other in features and stability. Notable new features include new frameworks for handling multimedia and fonts plus some enhancements in GNOME applications that come with the desktop. Beyond that, this release has the usual batch of performance, usability, and stability enhancements, well covered in the lengthy release notes.
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.2/