BREAKING SURF
| That Funny Microsoft Knowledge Base |
| Index of Software Pests, with a Side of Anarchy |
| Buildings Crumble to the Dust Beneath |
| A Quest to Visit Every Starbucks |
| Walking the Globe for Charity |
| Riverwalkin' |
| International House of Wi-Fi |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| Short, Enjoyable Personal Essays |
| Magazine Cover Art of the 19th Century |
| The NewsIsFree Visual Newsmap |
| Refdesks's Virtual Reference Desk |
| Linnaeus |
| Cancer Facts |
| Kids' Health |
| Coax Low-Range Pirate Radio from an iPod |
| Tor: Anonymous Communications System |
| Mozilla Releases Security Fixes |
| Libpng Library Security Fixes |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
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BREAKING SURF
Once every four years the world's best non-winter athletes gather to compete in the oldest and most prestigious sporting event on the planet. We, the fans, get to see hardly any of it. Coverage of the Athens 2004 games, which begin next week, varies greatly from nation to nation, with entire events practically blacked out in certain countries just because the winning bidder for TV coverage doesn't think there would be any interest (case in point, fencing in the US, says our epee-equipped publisher). Sadly, the Olympic committee does not itself make footage of the events available online - though they should, even if only long after the fact - but it does sell national rights to online streams the same way it sells rights to TV broadcasts nation by nation. Web sites with the online rights have to ensure that no foreigners can access their streams. InformationWeek has an AP article that explains the terms and gives you some guidence about where you can turn for online feeds. We, the viewers, will have to follow the action with whatever our respective Olympic broadcasters make available on TV and online, or settle for print. All the usual suspects are gearing up for the games. For English language coverage, the BBC does a fine job, while the CBC and NBC hold the English North American franchises.Athens 2004: http://www.athens2004.com/
InformationWeek: http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=26806424
BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/olympics_2004/default.stm
CBC: http://www.cbc.ca/olympics/
NBC: http://www.nbcolympics.com/index.html
X Prize: Two Launch Dates Closer
Scaled Composites, the folks behind SpaceShipOne, have announced that they will try for the $10 million X Prize beginning with a first launch Sept. 29. The team will have to achieve two successful launches within two weeks. At the same time, the Canadian da Vinci Project has also announced it will attempt a launch, on Oct. 2. The Canadians have a decided disadvantage in the competition, even ignoring SpaceShipOne's three-day lead. SpaceShipOne has already undergone a successful, though not glitch-free, test launch, last month. The da Vinci team has yet to even finish assembling its rocket, which will launch from a balloon at altitude. These are just announcements, and we don't generally cover non-events, but we'll go out on a limb and say that achieving private space flight and claiming the X Prize will be one of the seminal events of the space age, and so the progress is well worth keeping an eye on.ANSARI X Prize: http://web1-xprize.primary.net/home.php
SpaceShipOne: http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/
da Vinci Project: http://www.davinciproject.com/
Sea Is for Sequence, D Is for DNA
Craig Venter doesn't exactly embrace conventional ways of doing things. Without his willingness to flout scientific orthodoxy in a private effort to sequence the human genome, scientists might still be plugging away at it. His competitive and daring approach galvanized the effort and cut years off the schedule. Venter has left the wresting of secrets from human genes to his peers in favor of a broader scope. He wants to catalogue all the genes of the planet, concentrating on microorganisms, which make up the bulk of life. It's not just what he's doing that's unconventional but how he's doing it. Instead of the standard collection and identification of individual species, he and his Sorcerer II Expedition samples the oceans with microbial dragnets, essentially, onboard his luxury yacht. Venter's lab in Maryland sequences the DNA, and is finding plenty of new genes, but can't define the species they come from. As a result, Venter has switched gears. His goal now is to create life from scratch, with genomes tailored to deal with precise needs such as environmental clean-up, cheap energy production, and medicine. Predictably, he has attracted opposition, mainly from fringe activists concerned that he's out to play God. Wired has a long article. As always, Venter is thinking big, this time about the world of the small.Sorcerer II: http://www.sorcerer2expedition.org/main.htm
Wired: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.08/venter.html
With the legendary status of the Doom game franchise, the release this week of Doom 3 was accompanied by a frenzy of gamer activity. The first-person shooter features state-of-the-art graphics that place you in the shoes of a marine on Mars, caught up in an invasion by monsters from Hell. GameSpot and IGN have long, thoughtful reviews of the game, both applauding its look and feel but being somewhat less enthralled by the "old school" gameplay. Read the reviews before you plunk down $50 for a copy. Over at GameSpy, a reviewer has kept a blog as he plays, giving an almost minute-by-minute account of the game in top-posting manner.
Doom 3: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00006C2HA/netsurferdigest
GameSpot: http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/doom3/review.html
IGN: http://pc.ign.com/articles/536/536387p1.html
GameSpy: http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/doom-3/535138p1.html
Bluesnarfing Your Phone from a Mile Away
First, a quick definition: Bluesnarfing is the theft of information from a wireless device through a Bluetooth connection. Many modern phones and most new laptops are equipped with Bluetooth short-range wireless capability. Bluetooth is a fairly young technology and, like Wi-Fi in its early days, its security leaves a lot to be desired. At last week's DefCon hacker conference (the forums are worth a look), two participants made some extraordinary claims about their ability to hack Bluetooth phones. They said they could use Bluetooth to hack certain phone models at a distance, and steal address lists, anonymously forward phone and SMS messages, and use phones as voice bugs. What's more, with a directional antenna, the hackers could break into phones from a mile away. Not all phones are at risk - see AL Digital's chart of vulnerable phones - and Bluetooth connections must be enabled (i.e. discoverable) for such hacking to be done. Nevertheless, the hackers claim that of the 336 Bluetooth phones they found while hanging out in the London Underground, 77 (23%) were vulnerable to attack. Wired has the alarming story.DefCon: http://www.defcon.org/
AL Digital: http://www.thebunker.net/release-bluestumbler.htm
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,64463,00.html
Citation Statistics from a Century of Physics
Nothing escapes the gaze of science, not even the very act of publishing scientific papers. One of the great traditions of science is citing references in your papers. All those interrelated citations form a network of scientific knowledge, a network that can itself be the subject of scientific study. This is exactly what Sidney Redner has done in his study of citation statistics in 110 years of papers in the Physical Review journal. He looked at the error rates in citations, at the impact of various top papers, at who has the most citations, and, most significantly, at the evolution of citation patterns over time. This kind of research is useful in characterizing the spread of scientific ideas and in discovering where fruitful areas of research currently concentrate. Of course, it doesn't hurt your tenure chances if your papers are widely cited, so it surely pays to find out which papers get all the attention and why.http://xxx.arxiv.org/abs/physics/0407137
Once plentiful, drive-in theatres are now rarer than hens' teeth in cities across the US and Canada. For those who still fancy watching a movie under the stars, however, all is not lost. Thanks to inexpensive technology and a nostalgic thirst, so-called "guerilla drive-ins" have been popping up with increasing frequency. With a DVD player, batteries, a video projector, and an iPod - about $1,000 worth of gear - organizers easily convert a blank wall into an open-air movie house. Participants enjoy the social aspect and, in a New York Times article, few mention the free admission as an incentive. The article offers plenty of links to info on planning or attending a guerilla drive-in. Of course, the events break copyright, even without admission fees, but the only opposition to shows so far has come from police concerned with the use of public property. The police don't interfere on private property unless prompted by a complaint, at least in Santa Cruz, Calif. Still, with copyright owners zealous to guard their turf, we've little doubt that lawyers out there are already planning to squelch this creative abomination.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/29/technology/circuits/29driv.html
Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1908-2004
Henri Cartier-Bresson was widely acknowledged as one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century even before his death this past week. His black-and-white photographs came to iconify the very look of Paris before and after World War II. His career took him all over the world, photographing everything from the man in the street to the liberation of Paris to the sports venues of the Cold War. Bresson had an unerring eye for what he called "the decisive moment", often managing to capture people right in the midst of some subtle or significant emotion. Photo-Seminars has a photography-centric online biography. "Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Man, the Image and the World: A Retrospective" contains over 600 of Cartier-Bresson's photos, some of which you can see at Magnum Photos.Photo-Seminars: http://www.photo-seminars.com/Fame/bresson.htm
"Retrospective": http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0500542678/netsurferdigest
Magnum Photos: http://www.magnumphotos.com/c/htm/TreePf_MAG.aspx?Stat=Photographers_Portfolio&E=29YL53IQ1W7
The Fourth Annual Everyman Photo Contest
The premise behind the Everyman Photo Contest is that anybody who has ever taken photographs has occasionally taken a good one. The pros just take good photos more often. If you're an everyperson with a photo you think is one of those select gems, what do you do with it? Sure, you can upload it to your blog for the benefit of your three readers (one of whom may be your mom), or you can try to snag a cool $50 - not bad for that shot of your adorable cat. You'd probably enter your cat photo in Everyman's landscape/nature category, one of seven, each with cash prizes for the top three entries. Submissions have to be in by Oct. 4. One of the reasons we mention this contest is that the contest Web site features a collection of striking photographs from the last four years. Let's just say that a snapshot of your cat probably isn't going to win....http://www.theeveryman.com/41.php
Where the Boys Aren't: Network TV
Where have all the young men gone? According to Nielsen Media Research, men 18-34 years old watch much less network TV than they used to. The ability to deliver that demographic has justified TV commercials, and the trend is bound to profoundly affect the advertising market, TV, and our culture. As Wired reports in two related articles, young men are surfing the Net, watching DVDs, and watching cable networks instead. Advertisers who used to rely on network TV to reach this group are now increasing spending elsewhere - at Web sites, in video games, and on cable channels. Two things stick out in Wired. First, the ways in which the targeted young men constantly undermine every attempt to sell them something. Second, the fact that companies, desperate to reach this group, are prepared to do anything, including hiring people to go out and use the product with potential consumers. (Any openings at Church & Dwight?) One unfortunate consequence of this change is that advertising will have to be everywhere to even have a chance of getting someone's attention.Wired 1: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.08/lostboys.html
Wired 2: http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,64367,00.html
Church & Dwight: http://www.churchdwight.com/conprods/personal/
File-Sharing Has Led to 5,762 Purchases (at Least)
If you listen to only the RIAA or MPAA, you might think that media and software companies have lost many a dime because of file-sharing. The Nuclear Elephant site is spearheading the File Sharing Experiment, a campaign to prove that file-sharing has, in fact, been good for business. The site solicits testimonials from folks who have been prompted to make purchases after sampling shared wares. Although the collected data is hardly statistically valid, the results shouldn't be ignored. Other, more valid studies and experiences, such as those we highlighted in NSDs 8.16 and 10.13, seem to put the screws to any movie and music industry cries of lost sales. The 5,762 number in the headline was noted at press time.File Sharing Experiment: http://www.nuclearelephant.com/projects/sharing/
NSD 8.16: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v08/nsd.08.16.html#BS3
NSD 10.13: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v10/nsd.10.13.html#BS3
FCC Rules on VoIP Privacy, TiVo File-Sharing
This week, the FCC adopted several far-reaching rules that touch on topics of interest to the Internet community. The commission ruled that US-based voice-over-IP (VoIP) phone networks must have hooks in them that will allow the government to tap the voice stream. A second ruling says that TiVo can deploy software that will let users share recorded TV shows with up to nine other parties over the Net, but only with onerous digital-rights-management restrictions. Wired has a good summary of the new regulations and what they mean. The FCC offers all its recent pronouncements in Word and PDF format.FCC: http://www.fcc.gov/
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,64470,00.html
Mozilla Announces Bug Bounty Program
Find a critical security bug in any Mozilla software package and you can be the proud owner of $500. That's the gist of Mozilla's new bounty program, which seeks to reward the user community for helping to make Mozilla more secure. The timing is a bit awkward; the organization had to release new versions of Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird this week (q.v.) to fix recently discovered security holes. Nevertheless, this is incentive for hackers to poke at the software with the metaphorical sharp stick, and an expression of confidence by the Mozilla team.http://www.mozilla.org/press/mozilla-2004-08-02.html
Google Invites US Persons to Register to Bid on Stock
Google is now knee-deep into its initial public stock offering, and it has opened its doors to "US persons" who want to bid on its stock. In order to register for a bidder ID, you must be a US person, which is defined as a resident human or corporation or whatnot. You want to get in on the action but don't qualify as a "US person"? Tough luck: "We have not undertaken any efforts to qualify this offering for offers to individual investors in any jurisdiction outside of the United States. Therefore, individual investors who are not US persons should not expect to be eligible to participate in this offering." After you get your bidder ID you can explore the Google IPO Web site which has many details about the IPO process, and of course a prospectus. https://www.ipo.google.com/ONLINE CULTURE
That Funny Microsoft Knowledge Base
Microsoft's error messages are legendary. Years ago, Bill Gates promised to improve them. Progress has been made, but there's a long way to go. Funny Microsoft Q Articles is a collection of support solutions from Microsoft's Knowledge Base that exemplify twisted logic, obtuse reasoning, and downright geeky silliness. "Remove All Does Not Remove Everything" refers to Exchange Server 4.0, but many administrators would caution that it's a useful thing to remember whenever you uninstall just about any Microsoft product. "Err Msg: Your Password Must Be at Least 0 Characters Long." You don't say! "Microsoft Sidewinder Game Controller Not Recognized in Windows XP" has a doozy: "NOTE: If you do not have a second USB port, plug and then unplug your controller between six and 12 times in the same port." Fun, fun, fun.... Jilly, the shadowy site maintainer, has posted many contributions. It would be nice if she were to post a form for future contributions, because history tells us there will be plenty.http://jill.jazzkeyboard.com/qarticles.html
Index of Software Pests, with a Side of Anarchy
Your hard drive remains a battle zone and maybe always will be. If spyware, viruses, or other pests cause you more than minor aggravation - as they do to network admins around the world - bookmark the Center for Pest Research. The makers of PestPatrol software have set up these pages as a mecca for defenders of computing integrity with resources for researching and fighting more pests than you care to consider. The New and Improved Pest Detections page, for example, is a long list of past and current malware that you may encounter in a variety of settings: e-mail, the Web, America Online.... The center's descriptive pages list variants and removal procedures. Among the other resources are a pest encyclopedia, news, and stats - should you have to prepare a report. White papers cover threats, defensive strategies, and liability. Oddly, the center also has pages for Anarchy and Explosives, which catalogue activities like bomb-making, drugs, and "Twenty two Ways to Kill a Man with Your Bare Hands" (sic). These links lead nowhere, but this place could be as valuable as "The Anarchist Cookbook". Jeepers.http://research.pestpatrol.com/
ONLINE TRAVEL
Buildings Crumble to the Dust Beneath
There's a certain curiosity about abandoned buildings. You can't help but invent stories in your head about the people who lived there and why they don't live there any more. There's a fascination in the power of time and inevitability as entropy slowly takes over and nature reclaims the structure. A few folks recognize these feelings and write journals and take photographs to try to capture them. Their efforts come together in a Web site named Lost Destinations. The collaborators also hunt for ghosts and other oddities on their roadtrips. We don't know about ghosts - OK, you caught us, we're pretty sure we do know about ghosts, or rather the lack of existence thereof - but the folks behind the Web site have definitely captured quite a lot of the bizarre on film successfully.http://www.lostdestinations.com/
A Quest to Visit Every Starbucks
Some people are extremely ambitious. Take, for example, those who have dared to climb Mount Everest, or those who have undertaken a trip around the world in a hot-air balloon. Whether or not the protagonist of Starbucks Everywhere is equally ambitious is a personal opinion, although no one can deny that he indeed has a peculiarly fascinating goal. Winter, his name, has embarked on a quest to visit every Starbucks coffee shop in the world. To date, he has visited over 4,000 Starbuckses in North America, over 100 in Britain, and over 50 in Japan. At each location, Winter snaps a photo and orders at least one steaming, hot cup of java. In bigger cities, Winter may find himself visiting several different locations, and this leads to the occasional binge of 15-25 cups of coffee in one day. Winter notes that the Starbucks Corporation is in no way affiliated with his quest, yet you can surely smell an endorsement deal in the air.http://www.starbuckseverywhere.net/
Organizations have been known to persuade people to jump from airplanes or walk sections of China's Great Wall in the name of charity. The BBC recently helped sponsor the mile-long Sport Relief charity run/walk/roll. James Slevin doesn't think a mile is long enough, so he decided to walk from London to Cape Town. He thinks it will take him two years to complete the journey south; he's currently in Spain. On his journey's Web site, you can browse his infrequently updated blog (which includes his musings on how his French skills suffered thanks to a sexy French teacher many years ago), follow his progress along the planned route, and donate cash to ActionAid, his charity of choice. Alternately, you can wonder how the locals react to the image of a 30-something Englishman pushing through snow a child's stroller containing his tent, food, and foot plasters. Perhaps they recognize a man with a mission and a big dose of hope for a better world. Perhaps not.
http://www.walkingaroundtheworld.com/
Navigating San Antonio's Riverwalk used to be best done in the company of friends. "Where's Biga?" "Isn't it down from where the Hertzberg used to be?" "No. It's across from the Marriott." "The Marriott Riverwalk or the Marriott Rivercenter?" You can still best enjoy the Riverwalk in the company of friends, but leave the navigating to a clever little site at RiverWalkMap.com. Some Austinites who found out first hand how difficult it is to find up-to-date maps of the river, which has a constant ebb and flow of new restaurants and nightclubs, decided to take on the challenge and have emerged victorious. It's a great site to keep handy for your next visit to the Alamo City.
http://www.riverwalkmap.com/
Before you take your wireless device on the road or overseas, you might want to find out whether your destinations have hotspots. It's easy to do with JiWire, an international hotspot directory. News, product reviews, and how-to guides are a click or two away to support the neat main course: search facilities that take you straight to interactive maps, driving directions, and access details. With the advanced search, you can restrict your results by location type (beach or business center, for instance), provider, and by standard geographic identifiers. On our most recent visit, JiWire claimed to log 34,457 hotspots around the world in its database. Best of all, JiWire offers a free hotspot locator for download to Windows, Mac OS, and Linux laptops, so you don't need to be wired to know how to get wireless. You do still need to be online to get maps and directions from the parent site, however. JiWire's how-to guides include security tips and an article on building a Wi-Fi home network. If you need even more Wi-Fi in your world, sign up for JiWire's weekly newsletter. That, too, is free.
http://www.jiwire.com/
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Have you ever come across the perfect font for your big project, and you're totally clueless as to what the name of the typeface is? WhatTheFont will evaluate your image sample of a font and attempt to identify the font. Given a reasonable quality scan, the site usually comes up with a font name. More complicated cases are referred to the site's associated user forum, where knowledgeable people help out others. As a last resort, WhatTheFont refers the visitor to Identifont, which prompts users with an approach that resembles a game of 20 questions. So far, one way or the other, these sites have always named that font.WhatTheFont: http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/
Identifont: http://www.identifont.com/
European Interior Design of 1974
Post-war austerity in the '50s and a danged good time in the '60s meant that it was not until the '70s that interior design became a lifestyle statement rather than a do-it-yourself pursuit for Europeans. This site charts European interior designers' fumbling first steps and holds them up for mockery. No words are needed; the interiors speak for themselves. The marriage of function and style is the hallmark of all the best modern design. One kitchen included here features a well planned layout with modern accessories, a coherent juxtaposition of natural and painted wood with vibrant color scheme, and a stable with a horse. The other great thing about these photographs is the human element, the models living the lifestyle the designer wants to sell. Look for the creepy blonde woman reading to a doll, and the startled naked woman with her arms across her chest kneeling on a canary-yellow and turd-brown bathtub.http://w1.461.telia.com/~u46103335/euro.html
Mark-Steffen Gowecke is a photographer with innovative projects that result in some spectacular photos. Perhaps his most intriguing project is his Polaroid within a Polaroid technique. Beginning with a simple shot of sand and pebbles, Gowecke inserts a Polaroid photo into the next shot, and then inserts the second Polaroid into the third shot, and so on from there. In total he has snapped a sequence of 151 of these Polaroids. Unfortunately, heavy Web traffic has forced him to remove all but six of the photos from his site in recent days. Another project with panache is Gowecke's Portrait & Word venture. Subjects are invited to write a favorite word (no names or verbs allowed) on a small slate board and to pose for the camera. Gowecke presents lots of breathtaking photos on his site, but the language barrier prevents anglophone visitors from learning the stated purpose behind his photographic missions.
http://www.raumzeitfilter.de/polaroi_e.htm
For those of us who are of a certain generation, electronic music began with "Switched-On Bach" or, perhaps, "Emerson, Lake and Palmer". Actually, the first electronic instruments, the work of German physicist Herman von Helmholtz, date back to 1870 and the genre has been active ever since. Hence the title of 120 Years of Electronic Music, an obvious labor of love by SimonCrab, the site creator. The home page lists some 100 musical instruments categorized by decade; each instrument links to illustrated pages that expound upon the inventors and the technology. Should you wish to know more, an extensive Links page will guide you to sites on audio software, instrument manufacturers, MIDI resources, and more. A thorough historical introduction and a bibliography round out this professional-looking web site. Our only complaint is that some sample sound files would have been nice.
http://www.obsolete.com/120_years/
Pitchfork Media, one of our favorite music news and review sites, puts its collective head on the block to list the Top 100 albums of the much-maligned and underrated decade, the 1970s. Paleo-punk'd, disco'd-out and past the flower-powered childhood, the '70s may yet come to be viewed as rock's golden era. So read the list, cheer or groan, and perhaps let it remind you of the gaps in your CD collection. Remember, "The Wall" and "London Calling" were actually '70s albums, at least according to the calendar. Pitchfork's reviews are thorough and insightful but we still can't understand how "Sticky Fingers" didn't make the cut. Oh well, everyone's a critic. Find your own omissions at your leisure.
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/top/70s/
NPR's Top 100 Most Important Pieces of American Music
When folks who are passionate about music try to choose their favorite pieces, they must make agonizing decisions. So imagine the dilemma faced by selected radio listeners and musicians whom NPR challenged to select the top 100 pieces of 20th-century American music, regardless of genre. You're almost certain to disagree with the choices made here, but isn't that the point of these lists? Regardless, the attempt is a noble one and if it attracts renewed attention and airplay for classics like Gene Autry's "Back in the Saddle Again", Patsy Cline's "Crazy" (which she didn't want to record), and Thelonius Monk's "'Round Midnight" then it's a good thing. The list offers melodies for any listener and it will certainly get people talking. The site offers the music and commentary in a RealAudio stream of the original NPR broadcast. The site also has a couple of articles about how the decisions were made, just so you can fight over the methods.http://www.npr.org/programs/specials/vote/list100.html
Right now, the best place to get concert listings online is from the folks who sell the tickets, which doesn't seem right. You ought to be able to go one place to get all the events, big and small, in town and not watered-down because the same writer had to review two restaurants and an art gallery the same day for some portal site. Mojam attempts provide a single place for music event listings. Unfortunately, even though they've been at it six years, events are still missing, probably because the word-of-mouth hasn't peaked yet to get people interested in entering concerts they know about for somebody else's benefit.
http://www.mojam.com/
BOOKS & E-ZINES
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Items our staff likes and you might too. Click on the image or title to order at a hefty discount from our affiliate Amazon.com, and send a few pennies our way as well.
For more selections, check out: Netsurfer Books: http://www.netsurf.com/nsb/ Netsurfer Library: http://www.netsurf.com/nsl/ |
Something Rotten: A Thursday Next Mystery
The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games
Fitzpatrick's War
SpamAssassinShort, Enjoyable Personal Essays
Fresh Yarn is a great place to take a lunch break. It's filled with personal essays by mostly television-show writers who here prove that they can write in a style that requires a longer attention span. But your attention span only has to be slightly longer. These essays are witty and pithy pieces that dig down into the personal past of these folks. They're real. They're painful. They're funny. When you read them, they make you reminisce.http://www.freshyarn.com/
Magazine Cover Art of the 19th Century
Magazines are the ultimate in throwaway writing. We read them for a day or two and then they're lining drawers or cluttering our homes. But have you ever thought about the cover art we throw away with the rest of the pages? MagazineArt.org is dedicated to that artwork, from the classic Norman Rockwell paintings through to early cover-girls and cartoonishly simple images of overseas travel from Adventure Magazine. We loved the barely illustrated black-and-white covers of Harper's Bazar from 1867 and how they contrast so sharply with the glossy, full-color covers on Harper's Bazaar today. Volunteers maintain the site, so some sections remain unfinished, but the galleries that do exist are worth a visit, if only to illustrate a simpler time in publishing. Why don't you clean out your attic and see if you have anything to send in?http://www.magazineart.org/
The NewsIsFree project is yet another attempt to visually depict the top news of the day. It uses a Java applet that lets you arrange online news stories in a grid by source, age, and popularity. NewsIsFree provides seven categories of newsmap, from top news to US news to tech news. The grids are quite snappy as they qualify the aspects of each story by size or color of its embedded box. Putting your cursor over a box reveals the headline, lead, and other info. A mere click can take you to the story itself. This is a worthwhile effort, but we're curious what can be done with similar depictions in 3-D, perhaps with a constellation of stories linked by topic in 3-D space. NewsIsFree is an experimental news portal that aggregates information from 12,232 news channels, and is worth checking out in its own right if you are a news junkie.
http://www.newsisfree.com/newsmap/
Refdesks's Virtual Reference Desk
Do your bookshelves groan under the weight of dictionaries, atlases, thesauri, and other research tomes? Well, help is at hand in the form of a virtual research assistant called Refdesk. Like any good portal, RefDesk wants to index sites useful to its mission. Facts and how to help you find them are what this site is all about. It's not all grim-faced business, however, and in addition to handy features like searches, daily global images, and categorized links on any topic we could think of, Refdesk also offers a Word of the Day and plenty of fun links. It's hard to think of anything it has missed and its rigorous selection process for new links means that the sites you access from here should be family-friendly, useful, and up to date.http://www.refdesk.com/
SURFING SCIENCE
A collaboration of notable archivists and museum curators from around the world, Order from Chaos: Linnaeus Disposes traces the work and significance of Carl von Linne (alias Carolus Linnaeus, 1707-1778), the Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist whose work laid the foundations of modern biological systematics and nomenclature. This beautifully designed site covers pre-Linnaean classifications, the rise of the natural sciences in Renaissance Europe, the life and accomplishments of the scientist himself, and how his system helped organize the explosion of species discovery that accompanied the era of European exploration and colonialism. Modern systematic biology would be unthinkable without Linnaeus's work and influence. All of the site's pages are lavishly illustrated with drawings and scans of books and manuscripts. They are a fine introduction to the work of one of the great discoverers of knowledge.http://huntbot.andrew.cmu.edu/HIBD/Exhibitions/OrderFromChaos/pages/intro.shtml
Cancerfacts.com was a People's Voice winner of a 2004 Webby Award. Its medical editorial board consists of physicians, many of them academics, and part of the site means to help healthcare professionals. We explored the portion devoted to patients and caregivers, which covers 20 kinds of cancer. General services include cancer news, personal accounts by cancer patients, and lists of local support groups. The main resource is a set of informational pages called NexProfiler Tools, which are also used by the American Cancer Society and other health organizations. The site requires a free registration, so we signed up and got access to two tools: treatment options and treatment outcomes. Complete a multiple-choice questionnaire for options, say, and you receive a report that describes your treatment options and the side effects of each treatment as well as a list of questions to ask your doctor. Handy pop-up glossaries clarify and detail concepts. Like the options questionnaire, the outcomes questionnaire is long, but you only have to answer four of its 35 questions to go on to the next step. If you can't complete the questionnaire on your first visit, you can save your answers for later sessions. That's one of many nice features here. Cancerfacts.com is serious and helpful. We heartily recommend it for those who know someone with a major type of cancer.
http://www.cancerfacts.com/
If you're the parent of a child or teen, you'll want to bookmark this site. KidsHealth is an in-depth online resource of family health information. You'll find three separate sections - one each for parents, teens, and kids - with their own designs and age-appropriate content. There is so much information at this portal that it is unlikely you could ever exhaust the resource. If you or your children have questions, this should be one of your first stops when seeking answers. The information provided is straightforward, jargon-free, and approved by experts in the field of child and teen health. Coincidentally, KidsHealth beat Cancerfacts.com (q.v.) for the 2004 Webby for Health.
http://www.kidshealth.org/
Coax Low-Range Pirate Radio from an iPod
If you don't mind doing some creative surgery on expensive and proprietary hardware, you can turn your iTrip mini and iPod mini devices into a pirate FM radio station. They may not be able to transmit far, and the mods will void the warranty, but you do get to broadcast anywhere you want on the FM dial. Suggested uses include sending tracks of silence to nearby, annoying boomboxes. Add an iTalk voice recorder, and you've essentially turned $375 worth of geek gear into an unstoppable, multifrequency Mr. Microphone.http://www.engadget.com/entry/3597373383872462/
SOFTWARE
Tor: Anonymous Communications System
Tor is an anonymous communication system financed, believe it or not, by the US Navy. The government has a need for an anonymous communication system because it doesn't always want people to know that, for example, its agents are surfing the Web from government computers. And before you ask, the project addresses the government backdoor issue by being thoroughly open source. Tor implements second-generation onion routing algorithms, which allow nodes to only know the source and destination of a message hop instead of the entire path. According to its design document, Tor "provides a reasonable tradeoff between anonymity, usability, and efficiency." Now that Tor is working, the system is getting a lot of attention, not least because it is a sophisticated, easy to use, and fully functional piece of programming unlike many other anonymizing systems out there. You can sign up to host a node right now. This is clearly something that will take robust, anonymous peer-to-peer trading much closer to reality, which is another reason for its sudden popularity with the hacker/geek community. Slashdot and Wired have more.Tor: http://www.freehaven.net/tor/
Slashdot: http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/04/08/05/2352235.shtml
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,64464,00.html
Mozilla Releases Security Fixes
The Mozilla Foundation has released new versions of the Mozilla Suite, Firefox, and Thunderbird to fix several recently discovered security bugs. One of the bugs was found in a programming library (libpng) used by Mozilla and by many other open-source projects (see next article). Other bugs affected how Mozilla Firefox handles cache files and how Thunderbird handled encryption certificates. You'll have to download the whole packages to upgrade since Mozilla has made no standalone patches available.Mozilla 1.7.2: http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/
Firefox 0.9.3: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
Thunderbird 0.7.3: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/
Several recently discovered bugs in the libpng programming library are affecting numerous applications widely used on the Net. The libpng library deals with PNG images, a popular alternative to GIFs. The problem is that a precisely malformed PNG could invoke security problems in any application that uses the library to manipulate such images. Many applications and scripts use the library just that way, not least of which are the Mozilla applications (see preceding article). Fortunately, a fix is available, and sysadmins who have applications that process PNGs - and you do know about them, right? - via libpng should apply it immediately. CERT has the alert notice, the libpng site has the latest version, while the PNG home has all you could ever want to know about the format and the applications that use it.
CERT: http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/techalerts/TA04-217A.html
Libpng: http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/libpng.html
PNG: http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/