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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 09, Issue 21 Saturday, May 31, 2003 |
NETSURFER LINKS
![]() BREAKING SURF
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BREAKING SURF Information Technology at the CIA You get no credit for supposing that the computing environment at the CIA can be complex. How does the CIA information technology (IT) environment cope? Considering the nature of the work, a primary consideration has to be dealing with very secret and compartmented information. That's the relatively easy part, solved by giving each CIA analyst two terminals - one for the open Net and the other for a classified network. The more difficult issues have to do with such bureaucratic problems as the government budget cycle, the perception that technology is inherently problematic in a classified environment, and a lack of modern resource-management practices. The CIA engaged academic Bruce Berkowitz to look at its IT practices. He produced this unclassified report, which details the unique problems facing both the agency's computing environment and its problematic IT culture. Eminently worth reading.http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/vol47no1/article07.html You've probably heard of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) - or at least its popular name, mad cow disease - which infects ruminants (cattle, sheep, and other kosher animals). The popular media freely throw around the notion that humans who eat BSE-infected products can contract a similar affliction called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) but the truth is that the link between them is somewhat tenuous. BSE is back in the news as Canadian authorities detected the disease in an old beef cow that has since become dog food. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) informs us that there have been no reported cases in the US and notes that in the UK, where most cases have occurred, only one human contracts CJD per ten billion servings of beef. Scientists don't even agree on what causes this class of brain-wasting diseases. Nova hosts both sides of that argument. Yahoo has a nice current events page that keeps an eye on international BSE coverage. FDA: http://www.fda.gov/oc/opacom/hottopics/bse.html Nova: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/madcow/ Yahoo: http://news.yahoo.com/fc?tmpl=fc&cid=34&in=health&cat=mad_cow_disease The Bad Erotica Contest Winners The winning story in the Original Erotica category is entitled "Untitled", which is probably a blessing considering the cloyingly turgid peni... - er, prose. The runners up and honorable mentions are only slightly more spectacularly flaccid, as expected. Moving on, the Found Erotica category throws up a bit of sexy fan fiction inspired by the TV series "Alf", some French priest/virgin play, and an actual excerpt from "Dungeons & Dragons Book of Sex" - will somebody think of the children! - and, heretically, something from the dark Marquis de Sade himself. One must salute the staff members of Nerve for their endurance in having to read all the entries. It's all quite brilliant, of course.http://nerve.com/fiction/baderotica/baderotica/ Earth and Jupiter as Viewed from Mars Space explorers just can't resist a peek back home, and the Mars Global Surveyor team took advantage of an opportunity when Mars, Earth, and Jupiter neatly lined up as if ready for inspection. The team used the probe's Mars Orbiter Camera to take a look at our tiny blue dot. The team released images that they had enhanced in contrast and color - the camera only records greyscale images - but the results manage to intrigue despite the technical trickery. To create a single image of Earth and Jupiter together, the team had to splice together exposures of each planet owing to their vastly different distances from the sun. The Earth-moon system is neat, but not as impressive as Jupiter and its orbital entourage. The Mars Global Surveyor page gives you thumbnails, but you can download all images in larger format, enhanced and not. The page explains the colorizing process and the rationale behind it. Somehow, seeing how tiny and insignificant our planet appears from our nearest neighbor makes you realize that in the grand procession of the solar system there's an awful lot of space.http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/05/22 This week marks 50 years since the first known ascent of Mount Everest, an event marred May 27 by the crash of a helicopter at a base camp that killed two passengers (see CNN). Most people know that Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay conquered the tallest mountain on Earth on May 29, 1953. Today, anybody with about $60,000 can do the same thing, and Silicon.com reports that a cybercafe is even opening at the mountain's base. In fact, this season is seeing the largest ever number of tourists attempting the climb. So, what's a climb like? If things go well, you can be rewarded with the world's best view, as can be seen in a first-rate panoramic photo available on the Web. On the other hand, Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" is by far the best account of an ascent that went very badly indeed. By the way, if you're the kind of person that obsesses over such things, for the record both Hillary and Norgay have always maintained that they reached the summit simultaneously. And that's the way it should be. CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/south/05/28/everest.crash/index.html Silicon.com: http://www.silicon.com/news/500019-500001/1/4383.html Panorama: http://www.panoramas.dk/fullscreen2/full22.html "Into Thin Air": http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385492081/netsurferdigest Serious Study of Gator Ad-Hijacking Program Benjamin Edelman of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society provides what could be called "All You Ever Wanted to Know about Gator Ad-Hijacking Practices and Then Some". Not surprisingly, Gator has been sued by many content providers - and Edelman has been called as an expert witness in some of these lawsuits. He knows all about the product and its unwanted intrusion into the Web experience. Gator software is designed to display Gator-designed ads (which include pop-ups, pop-unders, and sliders) when you visit Web sites, and sometimes superimposes its ads over a site's own ads. Gator claims that its ads have a higher click-through rate than other Web ads and its premium ad rates reflect that claim. Edelman's article is informative and detailed. He provides a listing of over 7,000 specific sites targeted by Gator and a partial list of advertisers whose products are plugged by Gator software. By intercepting messages that pass between the Gator client and Gator servers, he has been able to figure out a lot about how the software works and the overall approach Gator uses. So far, he has found no evidence that Gator profiles users, but it's worrying that the information Gator collects is certainly sufficient to allow them to do that. The Internet has attracted more than its fair share of parasites and infections. While Gator is not exactly malicious or destructive, it certainly is parasitic and has no redeeming features.http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/ads/gator/ Office-Hour Habits of the North American Professor Most institutes of higher education require faculty members to make themselves available to students outside class for a minimal number of hours a week. This requirement leads professors to adopt one of a number of behaviors, jovially categorized for us by James Lang, a field researcher and assistant professor of English at a New England liberal-arts college. From our student days, we recognize the shifty cleverness of the Early Bird, who schedules his availability in the pre-dawn hours before 11 a.m. We here at NSD HQ who have been known to teach a class or two must admit to deploying the tactics of the Door Closer - just about the ultimate display of passive aggressiveness. Lang has published the results of his fieldwork in the Chronicle of Higher Education. He welcomes further contributions to his research.http://chronicle.com/jobs/2003/05/2003051301c.htm Sony Playstation Supercomputer Cluster The National Center for Supercomputing Applications, best known as the birthplace of the first Web browser, Mosaic, is at it again. A group of researchers there have assembled a scientific supercomputer out of 65 Sony Playstation 2 game consoles. Their goal was a proof-of-concept design, to demonstrate that you can do serious scientific supercomputing at a fraction of the cost of even modern inexpensive multi-CPU computing clusters. They tossed together the 65 Playstations for about $50,000, and note that the most time-consuming part of the operation was getting the consoles out of the plastic packaging. The cluster runs a special release of Linux that allows access to consoles' graphics chips, the high-speed computing engines that do all the real processing work - to the tune of an aggregate half-trillion operations a second. The cluster is already running useful quantum chromodynamics calculations for NCSA.http://arrakis.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ps2/index.php Rand Miller is the creator of one of the all-time bestselling computer game franchises, Myst and its sequels. The puzzle-solving adventure games are noted for their beautiful graphic design, compelling storylines, and atmospheric soundtracks. As a follow-up, Miller is developing an online role-playing game called "Uru: Ages Beyond Myst". Unlike well known online games such as Ultima or EverQuest, Uru does not feature any monster-killing or player vs. player combat. The goal in Uru is to explore the rich and varied world of the game, either individually or in groups. Miller is gambling that the great richness of the game's now-extinct D'ni civilization and its puzzles will lure and enthrall players into coming back and paying their monthly fees. The game is planned for a fall release. MSNBC has a story about Miller's vision while Wired has a brief interview with a few screenshots. Miller's company, Cyan Worlds, has the Uru Web site, sticky with eye candy. MSNBC: http://www.msnbc.com/news/917506.asp Wired: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/play Uru: http://uru.ubi.com/us/ So what would happen if you brought the open-source philosophy to music? That's the basic idea behind Opsound, a Web site that seeks to have musicians upload sounds to an open-source database that other musicians might browse and borrow from. Opsound is part of the Creative Commons project, an attempt to create a digital public domain to augment the shrinking pool of publicly available resources as intellectual property laws grow in scope and authority. The Creative Commons site is a good introduction to the project in general, and offers a thoughtful, albeit short, interview with Opsound founder Sal Randolph. Opsound's site itself also offers a fine explanation of the project and its technical components. Opsound: http://www.opsound.org/ Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org/learn/features/opsound Hollywood Not Keen on easyCinema No-frills cinemas could be the latest and greatest thing. Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the guy that got easyJet to take off, has moved into movie theaters. You can buy a seat at his easyCinema, in Milton Keynes, England, for a mere 20p, provided you buy your ticket far enough in advance. Buy closer to showtime and you pay more. easyCinema doesn't have a concession stand, so if you want popcorn, you'll have to bring your own. The theater doesn't have ushers and other luxuries. You have to buy your ticket online, and when you go you scan your own bar-coded ticket to enter. Hollywood hates the idea, apparently, and seems to be keeping its prime goodies off easyCinema's screen. The BBC has more - also look for the See Also links in a sidebar to the right.easyCinema: http://www.easycinema.com/Enquiry/Enquiry.aspx http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3051075.stm Location, location, location - those are the golden words in real estate. But where can you find the best real-estate listings, on the Net or on the ground? Traditional real-estate brokers are attempting to limit the information that online brokers can provide to potential buyers. The groundpounding brokers believe that the online competition operates with lower commissions, thus forcing them to lower their own rates. Opinion is divided on whether online real-estate brokers are at fault and even on what a real-estate agent should earn as a reasonable commission. As the online world continues to encroach on and transform traditional commerce, more of these debates are bound to arise, as this Wired article makes clear. http://wired.com/news/business/0,1367,58931,00.html Online ads aren't going away - in fact, quite the opposite is happening. As broadband penetration increases across the US, advertisers are salivating over a more capable Internet as an adjunct, and possibly successor, to television. About 20% of American households have broadband Net access, and with efforts undertaken to preconfigure new housing, that share is going to surge. This isn't lost on advertisers, who think they can spend only $5 to reach 1,0000 Internet users, versus more than $30 to reach the same number of TV watchers. For the advertisers, the future seems bright. For the rest of us, well.... Forbes has more. http://www.forbes.com/home/2003/05/23/cx_pp_0523ads.html Oakland Public Library Gains Books with Online Drive What if a library asked the public to help it buy books? That's exactly what happened in Oakland, where the public library system set up an Amazon.com wish list and asked the public to help it through a current budget crunch. Librarians, who can be subversive at the best of times, have embraced this tactic, and you can probably expect your local library to publicize its own campaign sometime soon. Until it does, you can go ahead and donate anyway - take a book or two from your own library to your local public institution. It will open space in your shelves and enrich someone else's mind. Plastic has the discussion and related links.http://www.plastic.com/article.html;sid=03/05/22/08500738;sid=03/05/22/08500738 eBay May Have to Pay $35 Million for Patent Infringement A federal jury has found eBay guilty of patent infringement and ordered it to pay $35 million to a company called MercExchange and its founder, Tom Woolston. Woolston charged that eBay willfully infringed on his patents with its Buy it Now feature, which lets bidders skip an auction and agree to pay whatever price the seller is asking. As with most things legal, eBay is appealing the verdict and this is hardly the end of the story. The 2001 lawsuit may well drag on for a few more years. CNET has the story.http://news.com.com/2100-1018_3-1010397.html ONLINE CULTURE Here's a question that should give would-be bloggers pause: with blogs a-plenty, what chance does a newcomer have to get heard over the background roar? Jared Blank, of Jupiter Research, wrote an article on how to promote your blog and tested his advice in practice. Take the advice, and you probably don't have to worry about it. Blank considers his blog to be a logical marketing tool that helps reinforce his credibility as an expert in his subject, online marketing, appropriately enough. Blank wanted his blog to be noticed and the plain fact is that, at first, it wasn't. In the hope of attracting some traffic, he started buying Google keywords. That worked, but only after considerable tweaking. Terms that he thought would be surefire winners weren't, and the process was not as easy as he thought it would be. There's not a lot of detail in Blank's article, but what there is should be useful to anyone who wants to join the blogosphere.http://www.clickz.com/mkt/capital/article.php/2206231 Instead of plowing through flames and "me toos", what if you could have the items you're seeking in Usenet newsgroups delivered to your e-mail account each day? You don't even have to go to a search engine; sign up with Kevin Savetz's NetNews Tracker and it does all the searching for you. It's not an original idea - Savetz is just re-establishing a service he misses since it went defunct. Twice a day, NetNews Tracker will send you excerpts from any posts that contain your search term and links to the full posts. As we wrote this review, only 170 accounts had been set up, although we have our suspicions that the number will skyrocket once word of this contraption gets out. http://www.savetz.com/netnewstracker/ ONLINE TRAVEL Carthalia is an online collection of old and new postcards of theaters, but you'll need to click within its elegantly country-sorted index to discover the full extent of this personally maintained project. The images cover every type of theater you can think of, from the ancient to concert halls to modern open-air stages. The creator of the site lacks the time to give a full history of each depicted theater but most images have at least a few lines of explanatory text. One of the most compelling collections here is that of images of the majestic Sydney Opera House, which show it under construction. You can also check out the strange but alluring images of banks of empty theater seats, or the painted stage curtains that adorn older theaters worldwide. Producers can look for that perfect coastal or sea-faring theater for their next production of "Pirates of Penzance".http://www.andreas-praefcke.de/carthalia/index.html The Foreigner's Guide to America This site promotes a book, "One Nation, Extra Cheese: the Foreigner's Guide to America" by Patrick Broderick, and adopts that book's quirky view of the consumption-driven American way of life and attitudes. Broderick even provides a glossary of the terms used to sanitize foul language for television. His observations are almost painfully accurate. The doctored photographs that demonstrate how Starbucks owns the ad rights to national monuments, but even more so the diagrams that explain typical behavior, add a visual layer to the satire. Broderick elucidates the eternal mysteries of why the volume in movie theatres is set to max, how to avoid crime if you are a naive tourist, and why SUVs rule the roads. His pocket guide to the attractions of Minnesota will have the average Minnesotan either laughing uncontrollably or forming up a gun-toting posse.http://www.modernhumorist.com/mh/0105/guide/ NASA'S Aerospace Technology Enterprise site has an amazing compressed record of one day's flight activity over North America. The first time we saw it, we thought of an ant farm, all confusion and fury in miniature, signifying nothing. In reality, it signifies a high degree of order and infrastructure. "A Day in the Life of Air Traffic over the Continental US" is a 13-MB QuickTime movie, based, it appears, on the commercial and military flight activity of Mar. 18 (we're not sure of the year). It's long on size and short on details. A log running at the top of your browser indicates time of day and number of flights in the air. Everything looks a mess in the beginning. Jets everywhere! Activity tapers till you can follow individual flights. Then comes rush hour. Flights on the eastern seaboard seem to spread westward, like a virus out of control, as the black background map becomes white as more than 4,500 icons jam the sky. We don't know whether this demo is useful, but it's reassuring that someone is trying to get the big picture. Even with a broadband connection, you may wait a minute or two to download the file, which took us only a few seconds to replay. http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/aero/ ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT Myths are stories that explain the world and thus touch on the most fundamental issues of human experience. Artists, who also attempt to explain the human experience, have been as a result inspired throughout history by myths, and sometimes works of art are the only remaining record of a particular culture's beliefs and structure. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts has launched this Web site to explain the interaction between art and myth, and it is ideal for students as well as curious adults. Artwork can be viewed by cultural region or by theme. Each piece comes with discussion prompts in text and images, an outline of its key ideas, a description of the legend depicted, and background information about the culture it hails from and how it would have been used in festivals or rituals. A Compare and Contrast section lets you select two pieces and write an interactive essay on their similarities and differences. Woohoo! Homework!http://www.artsmia.org/world-myths/ "Strokes of Genius" is an exhibition of Iraqi art that showcases some extraordinary pieces by Iraqi artists living in and outside of their ravaged nation. In early 1995, London-based Maysaloun Faraj began searching the world for other Iraqi artists in an attempt "to bring together Iraq's scattered 'talents in the wind'", as he puts it. United, these artists have collaborated on an exhibition that will tour Europe and the US. You can view a sample of the works at this online gallery. Through artistic representation, we may experience the horror and strife that television has sanitized. Many of the pieces are inspired by themes of war, religion, and martyrdom. While often eerie and disturbing in interpretation, these artists have ensured that the voice of the Iraqi people is carved into history through the powerful expression of art. http://www.middleeastuk.com/culture/art/genius/index.htm If you've ever been absorbed in examining a portrait of a person, wondering what the tilt of a head or the twinkle in an eye indicates about the subject's beliefs and obsessions, then you'll appreciate this Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery collection of images of influential American women of the 20th century. Featured women include Sylvia Plath, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Rosa Parks, whose kind and innocent face was captured a few months before her fateful bus ride in Montgomery, Ala. Behind each image is a potted biography of the subject and details of when and where the portrait was taken. This exhibition is a must for anybody interested in the faces behind history, or for anyone who loves to view elegant, passionate, or joyful faces. http://www.npg.si.edu/cexh/woot/ Photo galleries appeal to photographers, purveyors of photographs, and folks like us who enjoy a free look now and then. AmericanPhotojournalist offers many fine galleries for your browsing pleasure. With a tagline of "for photojournalists, by photojournalists", the site has an emphasis not on the news (although it has an excellent page of news in the field), but on the photographers themselves. We bring this site to your attention mainly because of the range and large number of excellent contemporary photographs you can view easily and for free in individual portfolios. It would be nice to have a topic search engine or a directory to make it easier to find photos about sports, for example, or war, but that's a minor complaint. Many site visitors will be more interested in the photos than in those who took them. Photographers, editors, and advanced hobbyists are invited to join the site to post photos and resume highlights and to access the Black Book of professional contacts. http://www.americanphotojournalist.com/ Photography from a Low Perspective There are thousands of photography sites online. In order to rise above the rest, a site needs to have a unique perspective, which in the case of this site means a low perspective. The site contains photos submitted by amateurs and professionals from around the world. Guidelines for submission indicate that camera height must be lower than 30 cm above the ground. The stipulation provides for some truly unique photography that may not have been captured otherwise. Visitors are treated to new looks at common subjects, from cars to a mass of people at a party. You'll require Flash on your system to view the goodies here.http://www.retrospectiv.com/ If you've always wanted to direct your own short, go check out Dfilm's Moviemaker. This Flash dashboard lets you create your own animation. You get to build the set, decide on the plot, cast it, write the script, choose the soundtrack and, at the last minute, pull in a different team to create you a fresh-looking title sequence. Best of all, you can then send it to your friends, who will be in complete awe of you until they find out via a link in the e-mail that contains your masterpiece how easy it was. Dfilm claims this is a beta, but it seems fully arrived to us. http://www.dfilm.com/ BOOKS & E-ZINES
http://www.blacktable.com/ English teachers have an inconsiderate habit of assigning huge texts that take forever to read, and even the Cliffs/Coles Notes guides demand a time investment that today's busy youngsters will balk at. The solution? Book-a-Minute Classics. The site has extracted the filler from 70 literary classics and boiled them down to their essential essence. No text need detain you for more than a minute, and some summaries, such as that for "Huckleberry Finn" ("Goes rafting. Goes home.") will occupy a couple of seconds at most. In the time it takes to download a couple of MP3s, you can have Homer's "Odyssey", Dante's "Inferno", "War and Peace", "Don Quixote", and several Shakespeare plays under your belt. The site is worth a look even if you're not at school; a neat one sentence summary spared us the ordeal of reading "Gravity's Rainbow". http://www.rinkworks.com/bookaminute/classics.shtml Head over to Ed Foster's GripeLog if you have a beef to air about the various tech products and vendors, or just read along and identify with the gripes of the main players. The GripeLog Hall of Shame is worth the visit all by itself. Who tops the list of bad actors? Surprise! It ain't Microsoft. Ed Foster, a long-time author of InfoWorld's Gripe Line column, knows what he's doing. http://www.gripe2ed.com/scoop/ SURFING SCIENCE Every week, Physics Central highlights a frontier in physics on a cool educational subsite called Physics in Action. Normally, if you want to learn about physics, you have to confront some pretty dry stuff. Here the dose is reasonable (think introductory physics for high-school and journalism students). Its well written background helps you get the gist of current research. Its range of topics is wide enough to satisfy teachers, Popular Science devotees, and "Star Trek" fans alike. Recent topics include gravity waves, metabolism and size, and slow light, and older essays are kept accessible in archives. The articles are supplemented by illustrations and photographs, links to external sites, and, in some cases, movie files. The navigation bar will likely entice you to explore corollary sections of news, essays, and profiles.http://www.physicscentral.com/action/ High-speed photography can yield some entrancing images of everyday events that occur outside our usual range of observation, as anybody who's ever viewed a photo of a splashing drop of milk knows. We bet you were less aware of what you can learn from such images, though. The Fluid Dynamics Gallery is not only replete with images captured as a by-product of study of the behavior of fluids and gases, it also offers up a bit of explanation: the "why" behind the images, be they high-speed captures of droplets and shockwaves or normal-speed shots of auroras or the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. You can also browse other galleries here, such as one that explores film, lenses, and other issues relating to photographing auroras. http://www.eng.vt.edu/fluids/msc/gallery/gall.htm How many conservationists does it take to move a two-ton rhino? The World Wildlife Fund attempts to answer this and many other questions in its take on translocating rhinos. The quirky site will have you scratching your head over some of the terms it employs, such as "illegal poachers". Is there a "legal poacher"? And what's a "heroic conservationist"? Get past that and into the dispatches, and you'll stumble upon a cool read on the logistics of translocating ten rhinos from the overpopulated Royal Chitwan Park in Nepal to the underpopulated Royal Bardia Park. The site presents a succinct explanation of why such moves are needed. Here at NSD, we can vouch for the fact that moving rhinos from one place to another isn't a particularly easy project. The WWF site gives a good overview to the uninitiated. http://www.worldwildlife.org/expeditions/teraiarc/index.cfm This site is really a joy - you get to build bridges and test them for stamina against earthquakes in the Bay Area. Designed for middle-schoolers, the presented material includes a bit of discussion of plate tectonics and how earthquakes happen. The whole thing's built around the damage that was inflicted on the San Franciso-Oakland Bay Bridge during the 1989 earthquake, and you can get a look at the design for its successor here. http://www.newbaybridge.org/classroom/ SOFTWARE Paul Thurrott continues his excellent series on the development of the industrial-strength Windows Server 2003 operating system. Thurrott is releasing new chapters every few months and this is his third installment, which focuses on the testing process. If you've ever been curious about how Microsoft develops its software, particularly its industrial-strength commercial software, try reading this. The series provides a glimpse into the internal culture and practices of the company. Part one covered the early years when the project was defined and part two discussed the software development process.http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winserver2k3_gold3.asp |
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