BREAKING SURF
| Social Sharing: The Next P2P Phenomenon? |
| Another Whack at Spam |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| De Clunibus Magnis Amandis Oratio |
| Send Yourself a Message in the Future |
| iTunes for Windows |
| Latest Mozilla Releases |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
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BREAKING SURF
Yang Liwei, a 38-year-old former fighter pilot, has become the first Chinese astronaut. After 21 hours and 14 Earth orbits, his craft touched down safely in the steppes of Mongolia. You'll find only sparse information on the Chinese space program; the 11-year, multi-billion-dollar project is a secretive enterprise. Even the launch of Yang's Shenzhou 5 spacecraft was not covered on live television in China, probably to avoid official embarrassment in the event of failure. In any event, China has good reason to be proud of joining the exclusive spacefaring club. China is only the third nation, behind the US and the USSR/Russia, to accomplish the feat by itself. China Daily has an extensive special section with regional media coverage in English.http://www1.chinadaily.com.cn/en/doc/2003-10/14/content_272029.htm
PLoS Launches Biology Journal with Monkey Cyborgs
Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit organization committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. It is part of a movement among scientists who object to the stranglehold on knowledge exercised by the publishers of expensive scientific journals. These scientists believe that the modern Net makes immediate, unrestricted access to reports so economical and compelling that there is no need to lock them up in the pages of subscription-only journals. PLoS wants to publish the very best in freely available scientific papers through its non-profit model. (See NSD 8.22 for a similar project.) Its first project is PLoS Biology, whose first issue it just published. PLoS Biology vol. 1, issue 1 contained a paper on monkeys that control robotic arms with their brains, which you may have read about as the media widely covered it. PLoS Medicine plans to launch next year, and if it all works out other journals will follow. PloS Biology has made a splash, although less for its approach than for its monkey cyborgs.PLOS: http://www.plos.org/
NSD 8.22: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v08/nsd.08.22.html#BS5
PLOS Biology: http://www.plosbiology.org/
Monkey cyborgs: http://www.plosbiology.org/pips/plbi-01-02-carmena.pdf
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who love Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill", and their totally freaked-out mothers. To say that this is a violent movie is like saying that Adolph Hitler didn't like some people: accurate, but it understates the situation. But forget the violence on screen and appreciate the violence done to film culture in creating this breathtaking pastiche of film-culture references. It's as if Tarantino shredded copies of every Hong Kong martial-arts film ever made, every Japanese samurai flick, every spaghetti western, then sprinkled them with powdered anime, tossed it all into a blender, set the dial to "frog", and spattered the resulting mixture onto film while freebasing the mummified brain of Sam Peckinpah. That's how good "Kill Bill" is. Actually, that description is not too far off how Tarantino actually made this movie, except maybe for that brain thing. Check out the astonishingly informative production notes on the "Kill Bill" Web site. Say, did we mention the buckets of spurting arterial blood? Better bring a towel.
"Kill Bill": http://www.kill-bill.com/
Production Notes: http://www.kill-bill.com/Kill-Bill-Production-Notes.pdf
Hot on the heels of the Nobel Prizes, the MacArthur Foundation announces the 24 MacArthur Fellows for 2003, each of whom gets a cool $500,000 over five years. Unfettered by requirements of reporting or anything else, the so-called MacArthur genius awards are designed to further creative efforts by the recipients. While many of the recipients are artists and writers, others are biophysicists, archaeologists, and nurses. The list of winners is long and varied, and the MacArthur Foundation Web site looks at each of them. Over the last 22 years, they've given awards to a number of folks whose names you might recognize, with Stephen J. Gould, James "The Amazing" Randi, and Janine Pease-Pretty on Top among them.
http://www.macfound.org/programs/fel/announce.htm
The electrical grid in the US and Canada is basically one huge machine, part of which failed in August, bringing the joys of simpler life to much of the Northeast for a while. The Industrial Physicist looks at why this happened and what it means. Electricity flows, and in an interconnected system it goes wherever there are pathways, not just directly between two locations - in other words, it sloshes around. With deregulation of electric power, large scale energy trading began, often in the face of physical laws engraved in the fabric of the universe. Deregulators failed to realize that their actions ignored the real capacity of existing transmission facilities and placed control of the grid beyond the reach of any single authority. The article's description of the cascade of events that turned the lights off is fascinating. The culprit isn't really aging infrastructure, as some would have you believe, but new rules that ignored physics. The best way to fix matters is to keep the rules that fit the system and change those that put it at risk, says the article. In the US, Congress will determine what happens - tell your congressman to brush up on his physics.
http://www.tipmagazine.com/tip/INPHFA/vol-9/iss-5/p8.html
How People Use and Respond to E-Mail
Ever wonder why someone hasn't responded to your e-mail? Have you ever felt guilty about not replying to an e-mail? Researchers at Hewlett-Packard Labs have posted a paper that addresses the issue of e-mail responsiveness. Some of it is obvious - when you have an e-mail deluge, you are slow to respond. What makes the paper worth perusing is that the researchers actually studied how people use e-mail as a communications medium. What is striking is that e-mail has no built-in way to signal that your message was received, save for those odd requests that you acknowledge receipt. The authors hope their research will find its way into new e-mail system designs.http://www.hpl.hp.com/shl/papers/rhythms/index.html
What You Must Know about Unicode
Ask the average programmer what he thinks about Unicode and you'll probably get an enthusiastic endorsement of the concept. Ask him to explain how it works and you'll get an imitation of a politician trying to explain the economy - lots of buzzwords but no idea of how to actually deal with it. The bottom line is that this is the 21st century and you can't really call yourself a programmer, let alone an honest-to-goodness hacker, unless you know the difference between a Unicode code point and a character encoding. As Joel Spolsky writes, "IT'S NOT THAT HARD." He's raging at history here, years and years of lazy Americentric ASCII history, but his main point is well taken. Too many people who should know better are clueless about how Unicode works and are thus producing crappy software. Don't let it be you or Spolsky will make you intimately acquainted with his onions. Spolsky lucidly explains it all in his blog.http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time
The Guardian has just released cultural flame bait in the form of its choice of the 100 greatest novels. Is it just us or are does the list seem just a tad focused on British novelists? The Guardian wants your feedback, presumably to publish an eloquent reader-reaction post mortem. We're surprised to see no non-British SF - sure, there's "1984" and "Brave New World", but what about "Dune"?Guardian: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1061037,00.html
Dune: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0441172717/netsurferdigest
Conceptual artist Jonathan Keats, with obviously way too much thinking time on his hands - er, head, dreamed up the idea of copyrighting his brain as a sculpture and selling futures contracts on the neurons in it. At the recent IPO party, you could buy an option on a million of those neurons for a measly $10. Half the money he raises this way will go to feed said brain, the other half to his gallery. As performance art, this isn't bad, as either a running gag or a smart take on modern society. Realistically, the contracts pose some knotty legal and business questions about how Keats cares for and uses the brain and its six billion optioned neurons. Will shareholders get antsy if he goes on a drinking binge? Donna Wentworth of the Electronic Frontier Foundation comments, rather admiringly, that it's about commodification of the intangible. Now there's a phrase to set you thinking. For his part, Keats says he's "always trying to misunderstand better.... The perfect misunderstanding would lead to the greatest of conceptual artwork." We haven't read the prospectus, but we suspect that this is probably not for risk-adverse investors or for those with a short time horizon. Wired has the cerebral tale.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,60757,00.html
Dolling the Dress-Up Dollz of the Internet
The Internet subculture commonly called "dolling" is almost entirely dominated by females and consists of creating and dressing up 2-D dolls with various graphics programs, often pixel by pixel. That's dedication! The creations are often referred to as "dollz" (of course), and their creators range from elmentary school grrlz to grandmothers. One teenage fan considers dollz as Barbie in pixel form, but there are many subcategories. Salon has a couple of pages on the phenomenon, which it has packed with links to dollz sites around the Net. Other than a bent to the gothic, dollz are really just an updated version of the paper dolls that have been popular for centuries.http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/10/07/dollz/index_np.html
Blogger Says Google AdSense Makes Sense, and Dollars
Last week, we told you about Google's less-than-nimble treatment of some of its AdSense users. Here's another side to the story, not from Google but from an almost deliriously happy customer. Matthew Haughey started a blog on digital recorders, a subject in which he's well versed. He launched PVRblog in July and almost immediately earned from AdSense more than enough to cover his blog costs. In discussing his success with AdSense's text ads, he compares the bother that micropayments involve with the ease with which text ads work. Google deserves credit, he argues, for designing a system that is both easy and effective. He thinks Google's text ads are better than any others he's seen. They are highly sensitive to context, which is of vital importance to both advertisers and users, and they are performance-rated so that crummy ads don't stick around long. Haughey believes AdSense will be a financial boon to creative and hardworking people who have focused and visited sites. He even understands the Google gag order as a necessary attempt to prevent people from gaming the AdSense system, as they continually try to do to search engines. His informative article is worth reading even if you are only interested in blogging, never mind making money at it.http://a.wholelottanothing.org/features.blah/entry/007472
Polish Spackers Offer Invisible Hosting
Hackers and spammers are joining forces to make tracing spam nearly impossible. Spacking, as some call this new union, has produced at least one powerful tool, invisible hosting. For details, read the Wired article, but even the short and simple conclusion is disturbing: it is now possible for a Web site to avoid revealing its unique IP address. Polish spackers offer this IP invisibility for $1,500 per month. The service routes requests for IP numbers through a network of 450,000 computers, all of which are unknowingly routing traffic because they have been infected with Trojan-horse software. This, or something like it, may lie behind the Sobig infection and why it was designed to contact a set of servers at a predetermined time. The most disturbing things in the Wired article are that a defense against this new practice has not yet appeared and that the technology is probably the result of so many network engineers and designers being unemployed. If only they would turn their knowledge towards the forces of good, rather than be seduced by the Net's dark side.http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,60747,00.html
Open-Source Spam Filters Stay Step ahead of Spammer Tactics
Digital signatures were supposed to make us all safe, but most Net users don't employ them. Spammers do, though, in hopes of snaking their way past your spam filters and into your e-mail inbox. Spammers are deploying false digisigs (if that's not the short form of "digital signatures", it should be) to fool SpamAssassin and other anti-spam tools that have proven reasonably effective at blocking spam. SpamAssassin is an open-source product, and spammers have studied its code in hopes of bypassing its algorithms. The advantage of open source also works, as independent teams of coders around the globe can quickly respond to such intrusions. And they do. CNET looks at how the open-source SpamAssassin has adapted to spammer innovation.CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-7344_3-5089977.html
SpamAssassin: http://eu.spamassassin.org/index.html
Krishna Bharat and His Google News
Do you check out Google News regularly? If so, you're not alone. The site won a 2003 Webby for best news site. Online Journalism review has an interview with Krishna Bharat, the Google scientist who developed the algorithms that update the site. Bharat is remarkably candid about the site's design and philosophy. Particularly striking is the way in which he sees the site as a tool for democracy.http://www.ojr.org/ojr/kramer/1064449044.php
Bill Joy has left Sun Microsystems. As the inventor of Java and a host of other technologies, Joy is sometimes called the Edison of the Internet. He is also well known for a provocative Wired article on why the future doesn't need human beings. This Fortune magazine interview is a rather revealing look at Joy's current concerns, especially on the safety and stability of different networks, computer, electrical, and social. What's striking is that Joy believed that the only way to do something utterly new was to leave Sun and strike out on his own. His comments on Microsoft and Windows are simply icing on the cake.
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/print/0,15935,490598,00.html
ONLINE CULTURE
Social Sharing: The Next P2P Phenomenon?
Clay Shirky sees the RIAA's high-profile legal campaign against file-sharers as the latest impetus in a drive toward progressively greater decentralization in sharing. First came Napster's highly centralized service, which succumbed easily to a legal attack. The Kazaa and Gnutella peer-to-peer (P2P) networks that have taken Napster's place use dispersed supernodes - i.e. centralized loci - for reasons of efficiency. Technically, supernodes route traffic, but individuals who host a large number of files serve as content or social nodes. The RIAA is cracking down on these node users. Shirky thinks the next step will be the emergence of more fragmented and thus less efficient private P2P networks between file-traders who belong to a closed social circle. Not a bad call, but not a tough one, either. Remember that after the anonymous music-sharing FTP servers got put out of business in the '90s, file-trading traffic moved behind password-protected walls among small cliques of traders.http://www.shirky.com/writings/file-sharing_social.html
Tim Bray is getting some attention in spam-whacking circles for resurrecting an old idea for countering spam. His particular plan is a variation on the old penny-per-e-mail idea. He posits a company that will guarantee that any e-mail relayed through its servers is not spam. It could do this by limiting how many e-mails each individual subscriber could send and by charging a small amount per message. The e-mail would then be digitally signed, allowing the company's spam filters to identify the e-mail as non-spam. Bray even proposes that outfits like national post offices get into the act by administering these hypothetical companies. Slashdot has the inevitable discussion, where at least one person cogently dismisses Bray's particular brainstorm by saying that he is "reinventing the hexagonal wheel when other people have already figured out that round wheels with axles work better." Maybe, but it probably wouldn't hurt to give the idea a real-world try and see if it sticks.
Bray: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/10/12/SpamPlan27
Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=82205&pid=7207372#7211805
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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/ |
Winning Modern Wars: Iraq, Terrorism, and the American Empire
Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003
Fortress Third Reich: German Fortifications and Defense Systems in World War IISURFING SITES
The Smithsonian's Visible Storage for the Ages
One of the coolest image maps on the Web greets you at a Smithsonian Institution site called HistoryWired. It's a model of user friendliness in face of enormous complexity - a wealth of artifacts (450, to be exact) not on display at the Smithsonian Institution. Necessity is the mother of maps, and the Smithsonian may well have had to create this masterpiece to visualize this inventory and help guide folks through holdings in broad categories. In Art, for example, a random sweep of our mouse discovered Abraham Lincoln's life mask, a bronze mask made from a plaster cast taken soon after Lincoln was nominated for the Presidency. In Sports, we found a baseball autographed by Babe Ruth, with links to related images and a RealOne audio of the crack of his bat and cheers from fans. One thing leads to another. And another. Interactive features such as a draggable timeline bar, a rating scale, and text search let you customize your views and find objects of personal interest. Tip: Click, zoom, and then shift-drag to move the map inside your browser window (try it and you'll understand what we mean). This warehouse is fun to explore. It fascinates with many instant rewards. Administrators of large museums without similar Web treasures are going to be envious as all getout.http://historywired.si.edu/
Back to the Future of the Past
The concept of the Retrofuture site is best summed up in its FAQ: "The Retrofuture is a concept based on a simple question: what happened to all that futuristic stuff which was supposed to change our lives by the year 2000? Stuff like rocket belts, flying cars, food pills and inflatable homes." It's a series of well informed but essentially light-hearted essays about the history of the futures mankind has created for itself. Taken together, these essays provide a fascinating insight into our limitless imagination and our hankering after techno-utopias, and they show how sober bottom-line-obsessed business can trample these dreams. A case in point is the flying car. Back in the '40s, it was predicted that the market for the ConvAIRCAR, a lightweight fibreglass flying car that actually remained airborne for almost two hours on a test flight in 1947, would be far greater than that for light aircraft. Sadly, the destruction of the only prototype in a crash, the ensuing negative publicity, and a dose of business realism put an end to commuters' ambitions to live a Jetsons lifestyle. For now, at least.http://www.retrofuture.com/
The Cutting Edge of Advertising
Everyday, we are all bombarded with hundreds of advertisements. As we become more desensitized to media messages, marketers are busy concocting new ways to get us to take notice. The Adrants blog, aptly titled, seeks to expose the absurdity of the advertising and media industry. Updated daily, features include news bits and comments on the industry that has helped shape modern society. On the homepage, you'll find the most outrageous news flashes from the advertising and media worlds, which include links to further information, such as video, images, and additional readings. On the left, you'll find the vital advertising headlines spinning out of the industry. If you're in the business of creating advertisements, or enjoy a voyeur relationship with this outrageous industry, you'll appreciate the resources here. If after you're finished browsing you still want more, sign up for the Adrants newsletter.http://www.adrants.com/
The late John Paul Stapp, the late Edward A. Murphy, Jr., and George Nichols recently won an Ig Nobel Prize for jointly giving birth in 1949 to Murphy's Law. "Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong" is probably one of the most ubiquitous expressions in English, and after reading this feature, you'll know exactly who Murphy was. This site charts a quest to discover the history of the saying, which originated during G-force tests at Edwards Air Force Base in the 1940s. After some sensor gauges were wired in reverse and failed during one test, the frustrated engineer who fixed the problem, Captain Edward Aloysius Murphy, vocalized his annoyance at the bad workmanship and the phrase was born. It was later launched on the world by the project coordinator John Paul Stapp, although to this day there is still much debate and acrimony over who actually formulated the law. One fact remains - the law holds true far too often.
http://www.improb.com/airchives/paperair/volume9/v9i5/murphy/murphy0.html
If you think you're a uniquely eccentric sandwich artist with tastes such as peanut butter and cheese or chocolate spread and cornflakes, a visit to this portal will open your eyes to a whole world of sandwich aficionados. As you revel in their creations, you will salivate at the chance to get your taste buds on these often very different fillings. The Sandwich Project hosts over 1,200 delectable or otherwise interesting recipes to squish between your favorite sliced bread. Check out the (misnamed) Sandwich of the Week, where you'll find this week's (month's?) pick called a Melbourne Crown, or search by ingredients such as chocolate, chicken, and olives. If you're adventurous and want to experiment a bit more, try searching for sandwich oddities by visitor ranking. Those sandwiches that rated 5 or more are visitor favorites, some of which include Goat Cheese and Broccoli, Veggie Delight, PNBLT, and the Brunchwich. If you think you've got sure-fire winner in the race for sandwich supremacy, submit your recipe here and let the netsurfers of the world be the judge.
http://www.iliveonyourvisits.com/sp/
Create Your Own Bayeux Tapestry
One historical date, more than any other, has been ingrained into the minds of generations of English schoolchildren - 1066, the year of William the Conqueror's invasion of England and his defeat of the Saxon King Harold at the Battle of Hastings. One of the most notable accounts of this appears not in a book, but on a 230-foot-long tapestry that once hung in the nave of Bayeux Cathedral in France. The tapestry shows the Norman invasion, the battle of Hastings, the routing of the Saxons, and most famously (though controversially) the death of King Harold (maybe) from an arrow to the eye. History is written - and stitched - by the victors, however, and many English feel that the tapestry gives the episode a little too much of a Norman slant. The solution? Do-it-yourself historical revisionist sewing. This site enables its users to create their own versions of the Bayeux tapestry, complete with human figures, animals, and text. You can choose to relate an original tale from scratch or create a more acceptable historical narrative (such as "The Normans got creamed."), and you can send it as an e-card to all your French friends.http://www.adgame-wonderland.de/type/bayeux.php
While the locations of major battles often become tourist attractions, the sites of past massacres are often ignored. Archaeology magazine has stepped up to document three of those events online. The 1857 Mountain Meadows massacre saw more than a hundred pioneers in Utah fall to an alliance of Mormon militia and Paiute tribesmen. In 1864, 700 US soldiers killed 150 peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho despite a white flag of surrender at Sand Creek, Colorado Territory. More recently, in 1921, a legal case and inflammatory headlines in the local newspaper in Tulsa, Okla. sparked race riots. More than a thousand buildings were damaged or destroyed and the number of victims is still a matter of debate. In these three cases, modern archaeology is working to reconstruct the stories from oral and written stories and by locating mass graves, all in an effort to finally lay to rest the atrocities.
http://www.archaeology.org/magazine.php?page=online/features/massacre/index
City planners rarely get to create a city from scratch unless they play SimCity, but at this site anybody with a creative urge, an interest in architecture, or just a Lego-style obsession with building blocks can create their own. You first choose one of three city styles: Medieville is like a set for "Romeo and Juliet"; Snoland resembles a Christmas card; and Blankton is somewhat futuristic. You drag your backgrounds, cottages, castles, inhabitants, vehicles, and roads into position and drop them where you want them. If you register, you can even save your city designs, send them as e-cards, or use them as desktop wallpaper. The templates can take a couple of minutes to load but do include fine details like Medieville's trash-can being a wooden dumping cart or the igloos in Snoland.
http://www.citycreator.com/
Geeks of all stripes can preview what the rest of October holds for them. IT Horoscopes is a whimsical look at the celestial prophecies laid away for Information Technologists and equally geeky career-minded individuals. In the grand tradition of most daily publications and many fashion magazines, the stars have aligned and transcribed a heavenly message for computer masters near and far - available where else but the Internet? You won't find your typical love-struck prose here. If you're not technically apt, you'll find it difficult to relate to these celestial musings. However, if you do dabble in the technological arts, then you'll find this horoscope just what you've been waiting for in the long line of fashion tips and love chants in most mainstream horoscopes.
http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci919205,00.html
The Internet has made it easier stay in touch with family and friends who live many miles away. Funtigo is one of the many vehicles available to net-savvy users who want to share those Kodak moments with loved ones. It's also one of the spiffiest, although it isn't free. Funtigo lets you quickly and easily upload your favorite photographs into customizable photo albums that you can share with friends near and far. You can start by signing up for the free 60-day trial package that allows you to store up to 100 MB of images. After giving this simple online tool a try, you may want to sign up for any one of the low-priced packages available. While the idea of online photo albums has been around for some time, this one provides users with a brilliant interface that mimics the drag-and-drop model of modern operating systems. Each photo album can be customized with your favorite colors and fonts, as well as a unique name to aid in identifying the photo album's contents.
http://www.funtigo.com/
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
De Clunibus Magnis Amandis Oratio
"Vesanum poetam qui sapiunt fugiunt" - Horace"Magnae clunes mihi placent, nec possum de hac re mentiri" - Sir Mix-A-Lot
http://www.livejournal.com/users/quislibet/164084.html
Send Yourself a Message in the Future
If you could send yourself a vital message in the future, would you? You can at this simple and fun site. Write whatever, indicate if it is a private or public e-mail, pick a date up to the end of 2028, and enter your e-mail address - you can update it if it changes in the next 25 years.http://www.futureme.org/
SOFTWARE
Apple has announced the release of iTunes and the allied iTunes Music Store for Windows 2000 and XP. Apple's home page announced the fact with this hilarious headline: "Hell froze over." The hardware requirements are somewhat hefty for a music player, but iTunes is a bit more than just a music player, so we can't hold that against it. The geeks at Ars Technica and Slashdot sure seem to like it. With the Windows application, Apple is also introducing audiobooks to its iTunes Music Store and allowance accounts that parents can set up for kids. In order to make sure iTunes gets into the Windows marketplace, Apple will be giving away 100 million free downloads through Pepsi products starting in February. That's one for every three people in the US. Apple claims to already own 70% of the paid music-download market on the wallets of just Mac users. If the Windows client succeeds, Apple may end up octupling the market all by itself. Apple: http;//www.apple.com/iTunes: http://www.apple.com/itunes/
Ars Technica: http://tinyurl.com/r87u
Slashdot: http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/03/10/16/1837225.shtml
The Mozilla Foundation has released updates to its three flagship software packages. First, there is Mozilla 1.5, now slated to be the last release of the full integrated browser/mail/news suite. This is mostly an incremental release, with bug fixes and several minor new features added to Mail/News, HTML Composer, and tabbed browsing. The foundation also released new versions of the upcoming Mozilla successors, the Firebird 0.7 browser and the Thunderbird 0.3 Mail/News client. Those releases mostly boast stability and performance enhancement - in other words, they have lots of bug fixes. All of this software is quite usable and much more secure than the Microsoft alternatives. Give them all a download.
Mozilla 1.5: http://mozilla.org/releases/
Firebird 0.7: http://mozilla.org/products/firebird/
Thunderbird 0.3: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/