BREAKING SURF
| Essay: The Internet Will Return Power to the People |
| Forum Software Dictates Social Architecture |
| Milk-Based Product with an Attitude |
| One-Minute Vacations |
| So Little Time, Sewer Much Chicago History |
| Gander, Nfld. and Sept. 11 |
| The Art of Comic Art |
| The Listening Post: Hearing the Net |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| Fine Film Criticism |
| The Humanure Handbook |
| The New Midway |
| The Art of Prime Numbers |
| Postal Experimentation |
| The Pill Known as "The Pill" |
| Not So Plane to See |
| Hiding Messages in Executables |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
|
|
|
BREAKING SURF
Fuss Over World Economic Forum Comments
There's nothing more likely to spoil a journalist's day than having her informal thoughts about an important event made public, free of all the spin and polish normally applied. That's what happened to Laurie Garrett, who cozied up to the powerful at this year's World Economic Forum. Laurie e-mailed her chatty take on the high-powered confab to select friends, one of whom forwarded it to an acquaintance, and so on, until it ended up on a mailing list, and archived. MetaFilter, an online discussion site with strong ties to the blog community, found it and the cat was out of the bag. There's nothing particularly revealing about Garrett's e-mail but it does expose a surprising lack of robustness towards uncertainty among the high and mighty - and she was highly and mightily pissed off to find her e-mail in the public forum. James Grimmelmann's analysis of the ensuing discussion is instructive and informative. There are profound lessons here about the impact of a world in which the Internet makes everything leaky. Grimmelmann points out that what's striking is that this kind of thing happens so rarely.E-mail: http://www.topica.com/lists/psychohistory/read/message.html?mid=1711891071
MetaFilter: http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/23493
Grimmelmann: http://research.yale.edu/lawmeme/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=938
World Trade Center Replacement
The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) has chosen the architect and plan for rebuilding the World Trade Center site. Daniel Libeskind's powerful design uses the original site's subterranean retaining walls, known as the bathtub, as an integral aspect of a plan that soars even higher than the original towers. Even more remarkable is the way the plan uses the date and time of the disaster as part of the memorial. Words have a hard time capturing the plan's power.LMDC: http://www.renewnyc.com/
Libeskind: http://www.daniel-libeskind.com/
The Annual Forbes Richest People List
Once again, Forbes presents its eagerly anticipated grand celebration of the free enterprise system, as usual sliced and diced professionally and entertainingly. To get but a toehold on Forbes's lofty perch you need a cool $1 billion, yet 476 people managed to totter onto it this year, including, for the first time, Oprah Winfrey. Forbes offers sub-lists of gainers and losers, wealthy bachelorettes, super-rich with criminal convictions, and, new this year, the ten wealthy people with the biggest global clout. The site offers many other money drenched topics including annual compilations going back to 1996 and helpful hints on the difficult job of frittering away a billion dollars. The billionaire and economic data by country are particularly interesting and at times surprising. The top few are in a class by themselves, so much richer than anyone else around that they form a kind of super elite of wealth, a small group of stunningly well-off folk, topped by Bill Gates. There's something inherently fascinating about those with lots of zeros in the wealth column.http://www.forbes.com/home/2003/02/26/billionaireland.html
The Complex Science of Pricing
How much is that doggie in the window? It depends. In this fascinating Fast Company article on pricing, you can learn about the complex software and decisions that affect the price you pay for an airline seat or shipping a package. You'll also discover that standard retail merchants are starting to use analytic software to determine how and when to mark down merchandise. Gaming the pricing software is set to become the next big consumer project.http://www.fastcompany.com/online/68/pricing.html
Is your blog worth money? Blogging Network is an experiment to see if people will pay to read blogs. Will enough cash come in to let the people who write blogs make money? Readers pay $3 a month up front, and then read whatever they want at the blogs registered with the Blogging Network. At the end of the month, Blogging Network divvys up half of each reader's $3 payment among the bloggers, according to how often the reader visited each of them. Blogging Network keeps the other $1.50. You get to read three lines of each blog entry for free and before blogger payment accrues, which isn't very much. Then again, how long are blog entries really, anyway? If this experiment takes off, it may herald a significant change in the blogosphere, or possibly in media culture as we know it. See Blogging Network's Help page for more detailed info.
http://www.bloggingnetwork.com/Blogs/
Dave Winer Gains Harvard Blog Fellowship
How hot is blogging? Hot enough that Harvard has awarded a fellowship to a content-tool developer. Dave Winer will head up the important-sounding Blogs at Harvard Initiative, and is apparently charged with developing a program to fast-forward students and faculty into the blogosphere. Winer suggests that blogs have largely replaced professional journalists for providing useful news, advancing this view in a remarkable but brief interview with CNET. The renowned Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School hosts both Winer and the blogs.Harvard: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/
Their story is here: http://news.com.com/2008-1082-985714.html
If you're not satisfied with mere text, and figure that the world needs your deathless voice uttering your deathless prose, audioBLOGGER now provides an easy way to post audio files to your blog. The audioBLOGGER service provides one free two-minute post. After that, a recurring three-month subscription that costs $3 a month will buy you 12 two-minute posts a month. Once you register, audioBLOGGER provides a telephone number. Dial the number and speak your piece; it's as simple as that. The service posts a link to the audio file and an associated icon with a time stamp on your blog. There's no mention of advice at audioBLOGGER, but we suggest you practice and polish that verbal diatribe before assaulting the ears of the world with it.
http://www.audioblogger.com/
Microsoft is inescapable. It is so enmeshed in the information technology (IT) industry that practically every modern business has to deal with the company. Consequently, Microsoft's plans and the trends that affect the company are of great interest to many people. Andrew Grygus wrote up this assesment of where Microsoft and the entire IT industry stands at the dawn of 2003. While there is no shortage of bland and boring Microsoft analysis in the press, what makes Grygus noteworthy is that he so neatly and at length summarizes virtually all the problems and opportunities that face the company. Grygus, who works for a small regional PC system integrator, pulls no punches in his often scathing analysis of Microsoft's markets and strategies. The insightful piece is extensively annotated with references which are worth a visit in and of themselves. It's definitely worth reading for anyone in the IT industry, or anyone thinking of investing in Microsoft.
http://www.aaxnet.com/editor/edit029.html
AOL Blocks 1 Billion Spams in 24 Hours
Any way you cut it, that's an impressive number. An AOL press release contains the news, which translates in a more human scale to AOL stopping an average of 28 spam e-mails daily for each account. An AP report at SFGate.com quotes an AOL spokesman who said that about 10% of the spam came from Hotmail accounts, the largest such source ISP. The latest AOL client software has a Report Spam button which the company's subscribers are not shy about using.AOL: http://media.aoltimewarner.com/media/newmedia/cb_press_view.cfm?release_num=55253063
SFGate.com: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2003/03/05/financial1928EST0343.DTL
EarthLink Gears to Battle Spyware, Adware
EarthLink believes that as many as half its subscribers have some form of spyware or adware on their machine. Despite their best efforts, many netsurfers find it almost impossible to keep their computers clean. If you've ever run a spyware detection program on your machine, you may know that intimately. EarthLink is looking for a general solution to help its users. This CNET article gives you some sense of the scope of the problem, as well as its roots in the widespread use of peer-to-peer networks. Read it and follow the links to software that will remove the spyware from your system.http://news.com.com/2009-1023-985524.html
Fake Job Ads Prey on the Unwary
While the US economy feebly beats, and Americans hope it gets off life support sometime soon, vampires are settling in for a filling meal. They want to eat your identity and they prey on your desire to find a job. Unemployment's running out, you have bills to pay, and you need to pursue every avenue that may lead to work - and that makes you a target. One surging scam is the posting of fake employment notices. Identity thieves post these ads in the hope that you'll respond and give up a few of the harder-to-harvest goodies - like a social security number. The vampires are out there, and they are out to get you. CNET has a short take on this that includes a link to a warning posted by the Monster.com job site.http://news.com.com/2100-1029-990612.html
Major Sendmail Security Bug Discovered, Fixed
A security firm discovered that Sendmail, the software that delivers the majority of e-mail on the Net, contained a serious security bug. By sending a suitably configured e-mail header, a hacker can obtain root access to a machine running the software. Apparently, the bug has been there for years, undiscovered until recently. Fixes are widely available for all versions of Sendmail - fortunately, since exploits are also already widely available. Any sysadmin running Sendmail - and that includes the many individuals running Linux machines at home - should update their version immediately. The recommended fixed version is Sendmail 8.12.8, but check with your operating system vendor just for safety. The Internet Security Systems (ISS) advisory has detail about the problem. The Sendmail Consortium has the fix. ISS: https://gtoc.iss.net/issEn/delivery/xforce/alertdetail.jsp?oid=21950Sendmail Consortium: http://sendmail.org/8.12.8.html
Anybody looking at a modern consumer computer would think that the command line interface is long dead and buried. But in the world of sysadmins and programmers, the command line and the terminal software that serves it up are very much alive and well. Terminal programs are ubiquitous in the infotech industry, and many of them have advanced features by which special keyboard commands can prompt the software to do useful things. Few people even know about these key escape sequences and what they can do: it's possible to use such features to hack into systems right through firewalls. The basic idea is to insert carefully crafted key sequences into Web requests. If a sysadmin then reads the log on his terminal, the key sequence can invoke commands to compromise the system. This paper at Digital Defense has the very technical details and recommendations about which terminal programs are or are not secure.
http://www.digitaldefense.net/labs/papers/Termulation.txt
Creative Hack Targeting with Google
A little creative googling can present the enterprising database hacker with targets galore. Type a common phrase associated with a database, for example "Select a database to view", into Google and lo and behold, you'll be presented with a list of databases potentially available for hacking via the Web. In this case, the selected phrase comes from the FileMaker Pro database software, and in one case, it led to an easily hacked database of medical information. This method can obviously cut two ways. Sysadmins can use Google to search for similar phrases in their own domains and discover whether or not they're exposing more of their information than they should. Wired has the story.http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,57897,00.html
Google Gets Into Advertising Network Business
It looks like Google is expanding its AdWords advertising service into a full-fledged advertising network. The company has signed up a few major content sites to host ads bought by its advertising customers. The program is called Content-Targeted Advertising. Google claims that its technology lets it determine the topics of a Web page, and so which keywords apply to that page. Google promises to match AdWords keywords to relevant pages, serving up a client's ad when it's appropriate. Initial partners for the program include HowStuffWorks, Knight Ridder Digital, BURST! Media, and Weather Underground. Look for a rush of sites trying to become advertising partners with Google. This will be a major new revenue stream for the company. https://adwords.google.com/select/ct.htmlAs we relayed two issues ago, Google purchased Pyra Labs, which runs Blogger and BlogSpot and hosts a huge number of weblogs. A lot of people seem to think that blogs are changing our world, and the folks at Google seem to be buying in. The staffers at Blogger figure the change will allow them to offer greater reliability, among other advantages. Here's a FAQ on that they wrote about the changeover, which whispers sweet nothings to Blogger users - emphasis on nothings.
http://www.blogger.com/about/blogger_google_faq.pyra
Google Patent for Relevance Ranking
It has been common knowledge that Google ranks sites in its search engine by the number of other pages that link to them. Was that an original concept pioneered by Google? Whether or not it was, the company now has a patent on the technique. CNET has more.http://news.com.com/2100-1024-986204.html
Last week, we wrote about Salon's look at the soap-opera behind the artificial intelligence Loebner Prize. Salon now has part two of the story available. Still worth reading. Maybe even re-reading. Surely, there's an entertaining book in this.
Part 1: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/02/26/loebner_part_one/index.html
Part 2: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/02/27/loebner_part_2/index.html
ONLINE CULTURE
Essay: The Internet Will Return Power to the People
This essay postulates the Internet as a basis for direct democracy, then quickly moves to buttress that idea by pointing to blogs as an enabling technology. Author Joichi Ito seems disinclined to dwell upon the fact that direct democracy has never worked; it leads simply to tyranny of the majority. Representative democracy, warts and all, is the best approach we have today, but Ito argues that in this system, the "silent majority" of common voters becomes disenfranchised. This well documented essay covers a lot of ground, and ultimately pushes blog-enabled direct democracy as an increasingly viable alternative to representative democracy and other forms of government. Ito concludes that political issues are too complex for representative governments to understand. It's an interesting perspective. This is an excellent and thought-provoking piece, and an excellent example of just how far the digital divide has separated us from poorer parts of the globe.http://joi.ito.com/static/emergentdemocracy.html
Forum Software Dictates Social Architecture
Joel Spolsky runs Fog Creek Software, a one-man operation that publishes a content management program. He provides customer support for his product through a simple online discussion forum. So far, nothing unusual there, but Joel has some interesting thoughts about how the software architecture of his forum impacts the behavior of his posters. Joel wrote up his philosophy, which is sprinkled with some pithy observations about the social dynamics of discussion forums in general. Anybody who reads forums and discussion groups will instantly recognize the behaviors and phenomena Joel identifies here. Anybody who runs such forums will benefit from Joel's thoughts on how they should be organized and run in order to be genuinely useful to the community.http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html
Milk-Based Product with an Attitude
Yes, a marketer did indeed come up with that phrase, and yes, it's for a real new product called Raging Cow. The product itself is irrelevant for our purposes. Instead, we want to focus on the marketing campaign that is trying to use blogs to start a grassroots, word-of-mouth publicity campaign. First, you have the blog at the Raging Cow site. Next comes a seed network of "key influence bloggers", six teens and 20-somethings who are encouraged to flog the product in their blogs without informing their audience they've been recruited to do so. No, they don't get paid, but they do get promo gear like free hats and T-shirts. Christopher Filkins deconstructs the whole thing in his Chronotope blog, complete with numerous links and an interview with Todd Copilevitz, the mind behind the project.Raging Cow: http://www.ragingcow.com/
Chronotope: http://chronotope.com/chronotope/2003/03/02.php
ONLINE TRAVEL
Have you ever sat at your desk, closed your eyes, and wished that you were somewhere else, even if only for a minute ? Well, that can happen, sort of. Visit One-Minute Vacation and listen to one-minute audio snapshots of random remote locations. There are new recordings of somewhere, somewhen added every week. Some of the more recent snippets are of Dixieland jazz outside a Paris cafe, Chinese new year celebrations in San Franciso's Chinatown district, and marimba-playing buskers in Jalisco, Mexico. The sheer diversity of location is outstanding - with every continent represented, the choice is practically endless. Each audio vacation is explained with some text that describes what the recorder observed at the time, which aids the mental journey to another place. Traveling this way is cheaper than a package holiday and even makes going around the world in 80 minutes possible.http://www.quietamerican.org/vacation.html
So Little Time, Sewer Much Chicago History
Drainage problems nearly doomed Chicago's expansion in the 19th century. In a monumental feat of engineering, the city of big shoulders reversed the flow of the Chicago River - the first time that humans forced a river to flow away from its mouth - and created the nation's first comprehensive sewage system, which went far toward maintaining public health and ensuring prosperity. Chicago Public Library maintains a fine story of that underground history. Down the Drain: Chicago's Sewers will enrich your understanding of at least one vital, if often creepy, part of urban infrastructure. Along the way, you'll read about cholera and typhoid fever, a woeful water supply system, industrial growth, and pollution. Building the Sanitary and Ship Canal required new technologies that "became known as the 'Chicago School of earth moving,' and would later be employed in the construction of the Panama Canal." Later, suburban sprawl began to overwhelm the sewer system, so once again the city of Carl Sandburg dug deep and began to build the Deep Tunnel, which is still under construction. Maps and photos enhance your visit, as do two QuickTime sewercam videos. Hmmm, "Guess the Debris" might make a dandy drinking game.http://www.chipublib.org/digital/sewers/sewers.html
The events of Sept. 11, 2001 left fear and sadness in many hearts. Many of us have discussed the attacks that devastated not only a nation, but much of the world. As with any traumatic event, we all too often concentrate on that which brought pain and fail to focus on that which gave comfort and ease. Passengers and flight attendants on some of the flights that were forced that day to land unexpectedly in Gander, Nfld. have initiated the healing process by paying tribute to the citizens of that small community. Several Web sites have been created with stories of inspiration and reverence. Read the accounts of the incredible hospitality and warmth extended to the passengers and crew members of over 50 flights. The citizens of Gander showed the world what it means to be pure of heart and to love thy neighbor.
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/deltaflight15.htm
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Hollywood is pumping out blockbusters based on comic-book characters, but the days when you could buy comic books in any drugstore or supermarket seem gone. Hence, there's something almost heroic, if not quixotic, in the educational site of the National Association of Comics Art Educators (NACAE). The association has many teaching resources - enough, almost, to make you think everyone and his sister wants to become a cartoonist. The Exercises and Lesson Plans section alone has 29 pages, and many are challenging. After reading "How to Read Nancy" in the teaching resources, you'll never be able to ignore that strip again. Teachers who want to teach visual storytelling can find justification in the collection of articles on comic theory and practice and in the meaty "Syllabi" section. NACAE makes a good academic case, as in the introduction to "Writing Through Media": "This class explores the practices of literacy in the context of popular culture including cinema, television, advertising, popular fiction, journalism, comics, hypertext, and video games." Talk about drawing students into your classroom! This site may help spawn a future generation or two of superheroes, although it may not make it any easier for you to sell their work to the New Yorker.http://www.teachingcomics.org/
The Listening Post: Hearing the Net
The Whitney Museum of American Art is hosting an innovative piece of cyber art based on the ongoing live online communications. The piece takes its input from tens of thousands of chat rooms, forums, newsgroups, bulletin boards, and other public online communication channels. This mass of data is processed into topic clusters and presented both visually and as a soundscape. While you're looking at words presented on numerous small LCD displays a synthetic, British voice intones the text. It's quite eerie and very compelling. The artwork was designed by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin, whose project web page includes background and sound samples.Exhibit: http://www.earstudio.com/projects/ListeningPost.html
Project: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/departments/sia/ear/index.html
BOOKS & E-ZINES
|
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/ |
Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town
Altered Carbon
The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea
Sendmail, 3rd Editionhttp://www.filmtribune.com/
The Humanure Handbook is a guide to composting human feces. It's a subject you might not have given serious thought to, but it's one to which author and long-time composter Joseph Jenkins argues that you should. He certainly has, and he doesn't come across as some crank with a bee in his bonnet (or bowl). Currently, he points out, we dispose of our bodily waste by placing it in expensively purified drinking water, pumping it at further expense to a place where it is treated with toxic and potentially damaging chemicals, and then we pump back the purified water at yet further expense to drink or drop more turds into. This is a big mistake, Jenkins argues, not only because we're discarding valuable organic resource materials, but also because we're polluting our environment in the process. His meticulously referenced, thought-provoking, and entertaining book has won numerous environmental awards and is produced here online. Our only problem with it being an e-book is that we can't read it in the place where we produce the subject matter.
http://www.weblife.org/humanure/default.html
The Midway, a satirical e-zine, has been redesigned and now claims to be "14% funnier". So is it ? Well, the archive of Kevin Frank's True North comic strip, about an American who moves to Canada, certainly helps. Another hit is the fake reality TV show called "Kindergarten Survivor" - and sadly it is probably only a matter of time before this happens for real. Other gems include a listing of rejected book titles, the diary of a gene-splicer who is a cross between Dolly the Sheep and a Raelian, and an extensive archive of fake news stories which are only subtly different from the real news we hear every day. Future plans for the site include world domination and "finding a way to make nap time mandatory at all workplaces." We applaud these worthy aims.
http://www.themidway.net/
SURFING SCIENCE
Prime numbers are the most fascinating integers. We know what they are, and we know a lot about them. However, for every bit of knowledge there seem to be two or more questions or unknown facts. Adrian J.F. Leatherland looks at primes as patterned art. His techniques result in work as beautiful and amazing as fractals. His Web site, Pulchritudinous Primes, lives up to its name. The 2-D and 3-D visualizations look as wonderful as they are thought-provoking (in both mathematical and philosophical senses). The Prime Island series mates mathematics and nature perfectly. This site is devoted to the artistic side of primes, but the links let viewers explore the wide and constantly amazing full world of prime numbers.http://members.optushome.com.au/primes/
Back in the summer of 2000, a research conglomerate decided to test the patience and sense of members of the US Postal Service (USPS) by sending weird stuff through the mail and recording whether or not it was delivered. The USPS, despite a bad reputation best exemplified by the phrase "going postal", remains among the most reliable and forgiving delivery systems on the planet and as a result, most of the stuff made it. The USPS went above and beyond the call of duty: for example, a pair of high-end shoes that were shipped strapped together with duct tape arrived arrived at their destination with the laces tied together, apparently as an additional precaution against separation in transit. The researchers conclusions? Primarily that "the USPS appears to have some collective sense of humor, and might in fact here be displaying the rudiments of organic bureaucratic intelligence."
http://www.improb.com/airchives/paperair/volume6/v6i4/postal-6-4.html
Birth control remains controversial in many places, but few doubt the Pill played a large part in an American social revolution. On Feb. 24, PBS aired a documentary on the Pill; this engaging companion Web site has plenty to offer. PBS puts the Pill in context with short historical and socioeconomic essays, background on women's rights activists Margaret Sanger and Katharine McCormick, and a fascinating timeline that stretches from the Book of Genesis to 1990. Take a virtual Pill in a Flash app and see how the menstrual cycle reacts. They never had interactive lessons like these in our sex-education classes. With concision and judicious cross-linking, the People and Events section covers buzzword medical and cultural issues such as informed consent, side effects, and women's liberation. Other resources include a synopsis and transcript of the documentary, as well as a guide for teachers. This site will improve your understanding of complex issues no matter what your opinion.
http://www.pbs.org/amex/pill/
Between 1996 and 2001, the US Department of Defense entertained fierce competition between Lockheed Martin and Boeing for the largest contract in military history - $200 billion for appetizers and possibly $800 billion for the rest of the feast. It costs a lot to develop something like the Joint Strike Fighter, a "stealthy, affordable combat plane for the 21st century" to be flown by all fighter-flying branches of the American armed forces. "Battle of the X-Planes", which PBS aired as a NOVA program Feb. 4, is a companion site that with typical NOVA excellence looks behind the scenes at the competition, which Lockheed Martin won. The producer's diary, Behind the Scenes, is a good read. ("You realize, of course, that divulging any information gathered during the making of this film could threaten the national security of the United States, not to mention your own personal well-being.") Most of the articles and Flash demos, however, focus on aircraft design and technology rather than corporate intrigue. The Designing for Stealth applet has eerie relevance in light of imminent war over Iraq. You don't have to be a hawk or dove to learn something here.
http://www.pbs.org/nova/xplanes/
SOFTWARE
Hiding Messages in Executables
Science student Rakan El-Khalil has came up with a clever new method of steganography, the art of hiding messages in other content. His program, called Hydan, uses certain redundancies in the Intel x86 instruction set to encode individual bits in program binaries without affecting the program's size or function. The method has some drawbacks at the moment, being less efficient and more susceptible to detection then other widely available steganographic methods. That's mostly because the program is still more a proof of concept than a serious steganographic tool. El-Khalil's method could also be used to attach digital signatures or watermarks to binary executables. Security Focus has the story.Security Focus: http://securityfocus.com/news/2623
Hydan: http://www.crazyboy.com/hydan/