BREAKING SURF
| Why Online Groups Disintegrate and What to Do about It |
| Tracking the Spammer Community |
| What Kind of E-Mail Do Spammers Receive? |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| Know Your Dicks |
| Powergen Italia |
| Flattery Generator |
| Bullfighter Software Decrypts Biz-Speak |
| Latest Browser Releases: Mozilla 1.4 and Netscape 7.1 |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
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BREAKING SURF
This year's Tour de France marks the famous bicycle race's 100th anniversary. Four-time winner Lance Armstrong will be striving to make it five in a row, a feat accomplished by only one other man, Miguel Indurain. Although the 31-year-old Texan is this year's favorite, a win is anything but a foregone conclusion as plenty of rivals will strive to take him on where he's strongest, in the arduous mountain climbs. As a prelude to this year's Tour, Lance won the eight-day Criterium du Dauphine Libere in France in June (for the second year in a row), so he's in strong form for this year's ultimate cycling challenge. ESPN and Yahoo have lots of stories about the contest and the competitors; the official site and Armstrong's own site round out coverage.Tour: http://www.letour.fr/
ESPN: http://espn.go.com/oly/tdf2003/index.html
Yahoo: http://sports.yahoo.com/sc/
Armstrong: http://www.lancearmstrong.com/
USPS to Offer ID Verification for Digital Certs
The US Postal Service (USPS) is getting into the business of verifying identity. It has just announced a program called In-Person Proofing, whereby organizations that need to issue a private digital certificate can have the USPS do an in-person identity check before authorizing the download. To get a certificate, you would register at the company or government Web site, print out a form, and take it to the local post office. After the postal workers verified your identity, they would then tell you how to download the digital certificate, which could then be used for digital signatures, encrypted Web site access, and other identity-sensitive uses. Any bets on how long before this is used to verify the identity of American domain-name purchasers? It's all explained in gory bureaucratic detail in a PDF file available from the USPS.http://www.ribbs.usps.gov/files/fedreg/usps2003/03-15211.PDF
Security Worries over Student's Fiber-Optic-Network Maps
Sean Gorman is a student at George Mason University. As part of his Ph.D. dissertation research, he compiled a map of the fiber-optic networks that connect major businesses and government facilities in the US. He did this using public information available on the Net. Now, a lot of people think Sean's work should not be allowed to see the light of day. Why? Because they're worried about security. Bad guys in possession of this information could conceivably pick vulnerable points in the network and sabotage it, causing great grief to critical infrastructure businesses such as financial and power companies, not to mention government installations. Meanwhile, Gorman is worried that if his work is classified he'll never get his Ph.D. MSNBC has more.http://www.msnbc.com/news/935948.asp
Open Government Information Awareness
Do you remember Total, err, Terrorist Information Awareness, the US government's attempt to mine open databases to create informational portraits of its citizens and others of interest? Researchers at the MIT Media Lab have created a democratic alternative, Government Information Awareness (GIA). This wedding of various open-source technologies allows visitors to find out about the members of the US government. For example, do you want to know who contributes how much to Tom DeLay's congressional campaign war chest? Simply click on the nice C-SPAN image of Delay and all the publicly available information is yours for perusal. At GIA, you can learn about the US government in the same way that it can find out about you. The site is currently overwhelmed by visitors and not all of its functions are operating, but it's still amazing what you can find out. As one commentator in a Wired article observes, sunlight is democracy's disinfectant; if you see it you can understand it.GIA: http://opengov.media.mit.edu/
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,59495,00.html
Xbox Hacking without Hardware Modification
A group of hackers has discovered an exploit that allows anyone to run Linux on Microsoft's Xbox without hardware modification. This is big news in hacking circles, since from day one there has been a great deal of interest in running Linux on the comparatively cheap yet powerful Xbox hardware. This has previously been possible with modified chips and soldering of wires, but the hacking group Free-X has found a vulnerability in the Xbox software that lets you control the boot process and thus not only install Linux but also play pirated games. After trying to negotiate with Microsoft only to be basically ignored, Free-X finally posted the exploit online. As you may imagine, Microsoft is not amused - and the hacking community rejoices. ZDNet has the story.ZDNet: http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/security/story/0,2000048600,20275965-1,00.htm
Exploit: http://lists.netsys.com/pipermail/full-disclosure/2003-July/010895.html
RFID Consortium Gaffe Reveals Confidential Documents
A misconfigured search engine at Auto-ID Center has enabled an enterprising consumer watchdog group to download a large number of confidential documents from the site. The Auto-ID Center is a consortium of about 100 universities and businesses which aim to make radio frequency identification (RFID) tag technology ubiquitous (motto: "Identify Any Object Anywhere Automatically"). Aside from perfectly illustrating a classic Web security gaffe, the watchdog group notes that many of the documents discuss how to overcome consumer objections to the privacy implications of universal RFID tags. Other documents deal with technical standards and business strategies. Cryptonome has both the details and mirrors of the documents themselves. In an apparently unrelated move, Wal-Mart has just cancelled a planned test of retail RFID technology, although it is still encouraging suppliers to use them in wholesale transactions. CNET has that.Auto-ID Center: http://www.autoidcenter.org/
Cryptonome: http://cryptome.org/rfid-docs.htm
CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1019_3-1023934.html
On July 1, 2003, Christopher Swain became the first person in history to complete a swim of the entire length of the Columbia River, all 1,243 miles of it, from the headwaters to the Pacific. It took him a year and a month to finish. Swain did it to "raise awareness of the dislocated peoples and disrupted ecosystems of the Columbia River Basin, and to support efforts designed to make the Columbia fishable, swimmable, and drinkable for future generations." Drinkable? After activists have swum in it? What kind of sucks for Swain is that during and after his effort, he was all but ignored by the media. Well, we think it's a pretty amazing feat and the cause is surely just, so we're doing our part to publicize Christopher's feat. Pass it on.
http://www.columbiaswim.org/
Mobile Camphones Lift Images from Newsstands
Talk about unintended consequences.... The rise of camphones (mobile phones with built-in cameras) in Japan has led to instances of digital shoplifting: the phone-user photographs magazine or newspaper pages, then transmits them to others or stores them for later perusal, without purchasing the item. Newsstand owners say the practice is hurting their already straining businesses and has to be eliminated. So far, a coordinated bookstore campaign against the practice has posted leaflets that urge customers to refrain from the snap-and-saunter, but who knows where it might end? Bookstores with staff members devoted to canceling all outbound camera calls? Wait until this catches on in the US! South Africa's IOL has a bit more.http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?art_id=qw1056959460701B215
Sneak Peek at Bloggerific AOL Journals
Blogging has swerved off the thoroughfare of mainstream acceptance and taken an ramp onto the megamegacorporate highway. AOL has embraced blogging technology and plans to provide tools to advance it. Jeff Jarvis has blogged his first-person sneak preview, and lists as the most advanced feature: the ability to blog from AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), including phone-based AIM. Moreover, AOL Journals, as the service will be called, will publish all weblogs in RSS/XML, which means that linking to the blogs will be easy. According to the big-shot bloggers who saw the prototype, AOL clearly gets the concept that linkage is important and is acknowledging the blogosphere that exists outside the friendly confines of the AOL community. Of course, it's banking that that linkage will bring more folks into the AOL community in the long run. It may be a good bet.http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2003_07.html#004146
BlogChatter: Real-Time Weblog Aggregation
Weblog tracking sites like Weblogs.Com already do a pretty good job of gathering data on which blogs have been recently updated. BlogChatter does almost exactly the same thing, except it does so in real time. Typically, sites like Weblogs.Com are updated only every few hours in order to limit bandwidth. Bloggers have to ping the site either automatically or manually to let it know that their blog has been updated. BlogChatter works in a similar way, but lists all the blogs which have been updated in the last 30 seconds - instant gratification. Blogchatter uses a special Apache webserver module called mod_pubsub, which lets developers easily create push-driven data sites. Anybody who needs to publish continuously updated data feeds should probably check it out.Weblogs.Com: http://www.weblogs.com/
BlogChatter: http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/
mod_pubsub: http://www.mod-pubsub.org/
We wrote about the First International Love Hotel Moblogging Conference in NSD 9.24. The results are in. To refresh your memory, the conference concept centered on taking camphones to a Japanese love hotel and posting pictures in the mobile blogging style. Think more artsy than pornographic. The Japanese are known for their obsession with cuteness, after all. But come on, you go to a Love Hotel and wind up watching tennis? How banal. How comfortable.
NSD 9.24: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v09/nsd.09.24.html#OC2
Results: http://www.tokyotidbits.com/lovehotel/
How does the Internet affect the economics and commercial opportunities of the comic publishing business? In a nutshell, profoundly. Todd Allen gives us a business primer on the subject, free of caped crusaders and fiendish villains. As the Internet has offered tantalizing new possibilities, the old distribution channels, mainly specialty stores, have suffered painfully. Although comic book Web sites get lots of hits, the challenge of making money remains: sales for most comic books have fallen dramatically. Allen's story shows us that the business is a lot more complicated than most of us realize and provides a fascinating view of the barriers, human and social, to a business in transition. Challenges include the difficulty of marrying traditional comic book design to the Web, encouraging subscriptions (never popular for graphic literature), and developing outlets through conventional book stores, which haven't been much good at flogging comics. If the business interests you, or if you like taking peeks at businesses you're not familiar with, the document provides a fascinating glimpse of the business of funnies.
http://www.indignantonline.com/eclectica/comics_white_paper.htm
New Micropayment Scheme Launches with Graphic Novel
Remember Millicent and other early Web payment schemes? These ideas reflected Net idealists' hypothesis that people would happily pay a few cents for online content. Scott McCloud, a medium-sized cheese in the comic-book maze, has seen Internet payment schemes come and go, but he believes the technology is now ripe. He thinks a new one called BitPass is mature enough to earn him some cash from surfers willing to pay 25 cents to read online graphic novel, "The Right Number". "The Right Number" makes full use of the Web; it wouldn't really work in a book. It remains to be seen whether this will be successful, but if it gets McCloud online, who cares? CBR News has an article and Slashdot has some misguided - according to McCloud - discussion.Millicent: http://www.w3.org/Conferences/WWW4/Papers/246/
McCloud: http://www.scottmccloud.com/
CBR News: http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=2421
Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/02/2235226
European Online Journalism Awards 2003
The European Online Journalism Awards have been, well, awarded. As might have been expected, the dominant themes are war, peace, and corporate greed. The big winner was BBC News Online, which garnered eight of the 21 prizes available, including Best News Story Broken on the Net (about an asteroid that might wipe out a continent on Feb. 1, 2019). Journalists from 20 European countries submitted 1,014 entries that were judged by a panel of 118 representatives from European journalism schools and media. The best part of the site is the selection of links to the winning stories. several of which allow you an opportunity to brush up on your foreign-language skills.http://www.net-media.co.uk/awards/winners.asp
ONLINE CULTURE
Why Online Groups Disintegrate and What to Do about It
Clay Shirky oozes experience in the field of sociality and software, so when he talks about why online groups often self-destruct, it's worth listening. Almost always, he points out in this keynote transcript, the originators of interactive systems are unpleasantly surprised by what happens, and it seems to us that there's plenty of evidence in NSD stories over the years to support this. Shirky asks and answers three questions: How is a group its own worst enemy? Why now? What can we take for granted? He cites the work of psychologist W.R. Bion, who concluded that almost all groups adopt one of three main patterns of conversation: sex talk, vilifying external enemies, or religifying some tenet or other - all of which interfere with open, free discussion. There's a lot of work going on to develop collaborative and group communication systems, and a lot of interest in these ideas. Shirky provides more richness and depth to his answers than we can simply summarize. He offers practical advice to anyone running a community, but he's best at promoting understanding, and in the long run, that's more useful than simple rules.http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
Tracking the Spammer Community
It's not news that spammers hijack computers to send spam or that hackers hijack webservers to host sites, or even that the two groups often overlap. The BBC's Andrew Bomford, however, tracked down the origins of one spam and what he found is enlightening. The spammers, a South American group called Superzonda, were also storing a mail-order-bride Web site on servers belonging to British Airways. The spam network spread to a Dutch ISP, and to an unwitting Spanish telecom. This article notes not only some players, but some of the increasingly crafty techniques they use. When British Airways pulled the plug on the hijacked server, Superzonda simply shifted operations to another vulnerable system in Madrid. If nothing else, this piece at least explains why half your e-mail is spam.http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3036092.stm
What Kind of E-Mail Do Spammers Receive?
Spamvrij.nl, a Dutch spam-fighting organization, obtained the domain Cyberangels.nl, which once belonged to a notorious and voluminous spamming outfit, Cyberangels (see the BBC link above). As a result, Spamvrij.nl now receives all the inbound Cyberangels e-mail. Members of the Spamvrij.nl decided to analyze the traffic as they wondered what kind of e-mail spammers get. They published an analysis of the 6,305 messages received in one day. The vast majority of them (5,880) were e-mail bounces, only 371 were complaints, 12 were spam, 40 were attempts to annoy, and two were legit business letters. Spamvrij.nl now owns the Cyberangels Web site, and that's where it provides its detailed analysis and links to the story of how Cyberangels was vanquished and how Spamvrij.nl obtained the domain.Cyberangels: http://www.cyberangels.nl/
Spamvrij.nl: http://www.spamvrij.nl/
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What Not to Wear
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
Roma Eterna
The World's Worst Poetry: A Compilation of Rhyme Without ReasonSURFING SITES
Time Tales is an exquisite little project by photographer Astrid van Loo and Web designer Dick Dijkman. It's a gallery of photographs found in thrift shops, abandoned houses, and even fluttering in streets and alleyways. The pictures are catalogued in five eras that span the 20th century, and the overall effect is of a charmingly enigmatic series of moments in time preserved in photographic amber. There is no narrative to the collection other than the one the viewer imposes and each picture, severed as it is from any meaningful context, crackles with delightful, unanswerable questions. One of the 300 or so photographs, a beautifully composed black-and-white picture, shows an improbable group of overdressed Europeans on camels in front of a pyramid. What were they doing in Egypt? Who took their picture and how did it end up in a thrift shop in Athens 50 or so years later? We'll never know of course, and that is kind of the point; you find yourself attempting to answer these questions with your own imagination.http://www.timetales.com/
A "quiet" war over prescription drugs has gone on for more than a decade in the US, but it's heating up, big-time. Senior citizens struggle with the high cost of prescription drugs, and often buy them for less from Canadian suppliers. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies point to enormous research and development costs, not to mention risks and costly failures, approval delays, and bitter competition, as reasons for those costs, while failing to adequately explain why Canadian prices are lower. PBS Frontline covers the sick situation with "The Other Drug War", a fascinating companion site to its June 19 telecast. This state-of-the-war backgrounder analyzes the crisis in Maine and Oregon, two key battleground states, along with the positions of the federal Food and Drug Administration and state pharmacy boards. Among the experts interviewed are Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, John Kitzhaber, former physician and former governor of Oregon, and Sidney Taurel, chairman, president and CEO of drug giant Eli Lilly. It's worth your time.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/other/
Slot Machines May Not Be as Random as You Think
Some 250,000 electronic slot machines, "fruit machines" in the local lingo, are in use in the UK, and some Brits are unhappy with how they function. The authors of the FairPlay site contend that these one-armed bandits are just that - bandits. They present evidence that indicates that the outcome of certain spins of the reels is predetermined and therefore constitutes neither gambling nor luck, but plain old out-and-out theft. How do they know this? They run the program from a real fruit machine's ROM chips on a PC, and capture the output. Don't want to take their word for it? No problem. They provide links to the emulator and program code for fruit machines. Their analysis has generated considerable discussion throughout the UK, including a hissy rejoinder from one arcade manager to the effect that these are not intended as games of chance, but simply as amusement with prizes. Right.http://www.fairplay-campaign.co.uk/fruit/fruit1.htm
The Google Guide to Evil Geniuses
Maniacal laugh, check. Air of restrained menace, check. Gang of violent but eccentric henchmen, check. Fluffy white cat, check. Congratulations, you're an evil genius! But don't rest on your laurels - after all, your tendency towards hubristic over-reaching and your reckless urge to explain your plans to your nemesis just before you try to toss him to your pet alligators means that the road to world/galactic domination/destruction (as appropriate) may not be as straightforward as you think. Thankfully, those geniuses at Google have created a search directory dedicated entirely to you and your cruel, black-hearted kind, and it's a resource no self-respecting evil genius can ignore in this age of information. Use it to find out whether that well-guarded mountain stronghold of yours is as impenetrable as you think it is, to get all the latest on particle-beam or bowler-hat weaponry, or simply to revere your heroes and role-models like Doctor Evil, Ming the Merciless, and Bill Gates.http://directory.google.com/Top/Society/Subcultures/Anti_Social/Evil_Geniuses/
Visit computer geek Pascal Blonde's site for a photographic tour through the dangerously majestic world of volcanoes. Also an avid photographer, Blonde has captured some truly remarkable images of these fiery mountains. From smoke plumage to lava flow, these up-close photographs display the awesome power that make volcanoes both deadly and beautiful. With hundreds of pictures, this site provides visitors with a profound viewing experience. Browse photographs of these turbulent natural formations from all around the world including Hawaii, Costa Rica, Italy and many more. Although you won't find much in the way of verbiage at this site (at least not in English), you will discover that a picture is worth a thousand words.
http://opdaf1.obspm.fr/~pascal/pblonde_a.html
The Neosiliconic Age of Computing
What gems may be uncovered among the Blinkenlights Archaeological Institute's classic computer archives? The list may not be endless, but it is surprising at times: a 1976 open letter to hobbyists by some guy named Gates, who describes the work that went into production of Altair BASIC. Maybe you'd like to pick up an emulator, so you can run that hot Altair 8800 program, or some software for that old Commodore you have in the garage. Other links lead to virtual museums, histories, and more. We found Triumph of the Nerds a particularly entertaining article, and can report as well that the article on the origin of Java has nothing to do with Starbucks.http://www.blinkenlights.com/
We all love to curse our computers and blame technology for everything that goes wrong, but these guys do it with style. If you have any interest in how gadgets and gizmos influence our lives then this site is a must. You can take a tongue-in-cheek quiz to find out just how much technology wrecks your life or read a rant about the evils of voicemail. Other technological woes which get their goat are netstalking (using the Web to find out everything about your ex-boyfriend), flaky Internet connections in Dunedin, New Zealand, and of course the ubiquitous spam. The most thought-provoking article we read covered e-mail anthropology. This recently invented field postulates what alien scientists would conclude about human life if the only record we were to leave behind was our e-mails.
http://www.technocursed.com/
The National Library of Canada Shoots and Scores
The National Library of Canada's tribute to Canada's favorite sport proudly boasts that hockey is Canada's game, and it is, at least until the next Olympics. The site is divided among category pages like Great Hockey Stories, Books and Links, and Educational Resources. A tour through the Great Hockey Stories pages lets visitors learn a bit about hockey's storied past, although even only moderately experienced hockey historians will notice gaps. Nevertheless, a search function lets visitors find and read newspaper articles dating back to the late 1800s. You can also browse the article database by theme, decade, photo, or article. If you're an educator looking to incorporate hockey themes into your curriculum, a visit to the Educational Resources will provide you with many great ideas. While the Stanley Cup may not be in Canada at the mo', the pride and spirit of the game is, as this site aptly demonstrates.http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/hockey/
A fourth-draft script of Robocop - need it? If you're a scriptwriter, it might teach you something, like many of the other scripts available through Simply Scripts. This portal specializes in links to scripts that are not final drafts - the FAQ explains why. TV writers will find links to scripts for familiar shows ("Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Roswell", for example) and bombs (such as "Depressed Roomies" and "Rambling Pants"). Writers in love with movies have a larger selection that includes a transcript of "The Matrix: Reloaded". In addition to the main fare, other resources such as screenwriting software, as well as contests, are brought to light. A discussion board was recently added to the site. There are reviews of about 25 movies and a section each on musicals, plays, and unproduced scripts in major Hollywood genres. Just remember that if you sell a major script, you heard it from us.
http://www.simplyscripts.com/
You probably know the "Hot or Not" format - a Web site shows a series of photographs of people (usually), and surfers grade them. It's nothing more than a bit of harmless fun, isn't it? Well, not always.... Underneath the seemingly calm surface of Panther Martin's Rate My Catch contest boils a bitter controversy. The contest is straightforward - people submit photos of fish they've caught to be rated from one ("Throw it back") to ten ("It's a keeper"). At the end of the month, the votes are counted and the winner gets $50 worth of fishing gear. Go to the site's discussion board, however, to find accusations and counter-accusations of bad faith and skullduggery. One winner is accused of voting 4,791 times for his own fish, and a proud father steps into the flames to defend his prize-winning 15-year-old daughter after she is told "Your pictures suck and you do not deserve to win." I guess we shouldn't really be surprised, after all, "trolling" was originally a fishing term.
http://www.panther-martin.com/trophy_fish/
The Used BMW Purchase Horror Story
BMW's M3 is, to some, a marvel of engineering. The author of this tale falls into that group, and here chronicles his quest for a used M3. It ain't pretty. The buyer lives in Washington, the seller in Florida. Come to think of it, the buyer might have done a whole lot better had he looked a bit closer to home. The combination of little sleep, a long plane flight and bloody Marys probably didn't do a whole lot to improve the situation, either. This tale of woe is both extensive and expensive. Read it and weep, or chuckle.http://bimmer.roadfly.org/bmw/forums/e21/forum.php?postid=3378984
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
This clever Web page features over 204 famous Dicks, Richards, or some other variation thereof, including Richard Gere, Moby Dick, Denise Richards, and many more. Click on images for short bios, and soon you'll be an expert on all Dicks big and small.http://www.fscwv.edu/users/rheffner/ydkd/
The UK energy company Powergen has extended its operations to Italy and, before the company took it down, had the Web site to prove it. What's so funny about that?
http://www.popdex.com/c/1081977
Are you having a bad day? Do you need someone to tell you that you're great and restore your ego? Go directly to the Automatic Flatterer and enjoy the compliments.
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~geoffo/humour/flattery.html
SOFTWARE
Bullfighter Software Decrypts Biz-Speak
Deloitte Consulting freely admits that it has helped foster obfuscatory terms like "synergy", "paradigm", and "extensible repository", but now it has decided to help us all escape these monsters. The company is providing new, free software called Bullfighter, which will help writers of business documents to avoid jargon. It even claims that failed companies like Enron could have been singled out by Bullfighter as the tool would have revealed the increasing convolution of corporate documents as corporate troubles deepened. Apparently, Deloitte employees had fun developing the program as they came up with about 10,000 bullwords for the dictionary. Bullfighter flags your bullwords and gives you a good-humored lashing over why you have used those words. A survey of the project-workers has revealed that "leverage" is the most hated term, followed by "bandwidth", and the ubiquitous "touch base".http://www.dc.com/bullfighter/
Latest Browser Releases: Mozilla 1.4 and Netscape 7.1
This release of Mozilla includes primarily numerous bug fixes, but also has a limited number of improvements in bookmark handling, pop-up blocking, HTML composition, and junk-mail filtering. It's worth noting that Mozilla 1.4 is the last planned version of the integrated browser. Future releases will be split into two separate programs, a browser and an e-mail/news client. Meanwhile, AOL's Netscape has released a new version of its browser, based on the Mozilla 1.4 code. It shares all the enhancements of Mozilla 1.4 and includes some extra plug-ins that AOL thinks you'll find useful, primarily under Windows.Mozilla 1.4: http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.4/
Netscape 7.1: http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/