BREAKING SURF
| Surfing Unsecured Webcams |
| The Annotated Command Line |
| Plucky Tool Powers Internet Explorer |
| Shipwrecks of Vancouver Island |
| Classic Cinemas |
| Dr. Seuss Ad Work |
| Excellently Escher-esque Art |
| Bleak Houses |
| A One-year Experiment in Rubbernecking |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls |
| Bonsai Blog |
| Local News from Sweden |
| Online Screenplay Outliner |
| Holy Comic Indexes, Batman! |
| The Science Aquatic |
| EFF Launches Anonymous Internet Communications System |
| bbPress Forum Software from the Authors of WordPress |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
|
|
BREAKING SURF
The most compelling evidence of the killer tsunamis produced by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast of Sumatra Dec. 26 are the images and videos. We've found the same set of about ten videos making the rounds online, in various levels of quality. The Asian Tsunami Videos site collects them all conveniently in one place. If it becomes swamped, you can obtain most if not all the videos through BitTorrent networks. Pointers to the torrent files are available on the Reasons Unbeknownst blog, and at Downhill Battle. Perhaps the most comprehensive photo and video collection of the tsunamis and their aftermath can be found at Wave of Destruction. It has many links to video torrents and a particularly good collection of photos of the waves as they came ashore. Satellite imagery hosted at the National University of Singapore (NUS) clearly shows the level of devastation and how the coastlines in the region have been altered.Asian Tsunami Videos: http://www.asiantsunamivideos.com/
Reasons Unbeknownst: http://crackhouse.blogspot.com/2004/12/media-experiment.html
Downhill Battle: http://www.downhillbattle.org/labs/battletorrent/demo/index.php
Wave of Destruction: http://www.waveofdestruction.org/
NUS: http://www.crisp.nus.edu.sg/tsunami/tsunami.html
Tsunamis are well understood by scientists, to the point where their impact can be predicted with sophisticated geophysical models. The US Geological Survey (USGS) has a page with many details about the quake that produced the tsunamis. It also has links to other sites with more data. Wikipedia has an excellent summary of the science underlying the event, and also turns to cover the human impact. As usual, Wikipedia is packed with links to related concepts for both the earthquake and subsequent tsunamis. Finally, the Web site of Japanese scientist Kenji Satake offers maps and an animation that depicts the propagation of the tsunami waves - large files, but worth looking at.
USGS: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqinthenews/2004/usslav/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake
Satake: http://staff.aist.go.jp/kenji.satake/Sumatra-E.html
At press time, deaths from the tsunami disaster total anywhere from 150,000 to twice that, with millions more in need. The response has been global, with just about every nation on the planet pitching in. The Net can help individuals donate money to any number of charitable organizations that are providing aid on the ground. Google has a compact list of the major relief organizations you can donate to. eBay lets you use your PayPal account to donate to other charities. Give.org has a handy database of charities and Better Business Bureau assessments of their credibility and effectiveness - a good resource to check before you decide where you will donate. FirstGov.gov has information specifically for US donors, and is the main source of information and links related to the official US relief effort. The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog (SEA-EAT) was one of the very first online resources to cover the event and remains an excellent way to track the developing relief situation. As usual, beware of scams masquerading as charities. Stick to these resources and you can be assured that your money will be well spent.
Google: http://www.google.com/tsunami_relief.html
eBay: http://pages.ebay.com/tsunamirelief/index.html
Give.org: http://give.org/news/tsunami.asp
FirstGov: http://www.firstgov.gov/Citizen/Topics/Asia_Tsunamis.shtml
SEA-EAT: http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com/
Five years ago, the US Geological Survey created a document that consolidated the lessons of recent tsunamis into a guide to surviving such disasters. "Surviving a Tsunami: Lessons from Chile, Hawaii and Japan" is based on interviews with survivors of the massive earthquake in Chile, May 22, 1960, and other tsunami events in Hawaii and Japan. So what should you do if you find yourself with a tsunami bearing down on you? First, heed warnings, both official and natural. You should expect more than one wave. Obviously, you should head for high ground. Don't try to hold on to belongings. If worst comes to worst, hold on to something that floats. This is common sense, mostly, but is vividly reinforced by the harrowing stories of the survival.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/c1187/
Not all tsunami photos touring the online circuit are what they claim to be. A set of photos of a tidal bore in China circulated as alleged images of the killer waves, and, as Crikey shows us, even managed to fool an Australian TV station. The Quiantang River tidal bore in the photos itself can be pretty awesome, as a video clip at the USC Tsunami Research Group vividly shows.
Crikey: http://www.crikey.com.au/media/2005/01/04-0004.html
Tsunami Research Group: http://www.usc.edu/dept/tsunamis/video/china/
Cassini-Huygens Descends on Titan
If all goes well on Jan. 14, the Cassini mission to Saturn will watch its associated Huygens probe descend into the atmosphere of the Saturnian moon, Titan. The probe successfully separated from the Cassini spacecraft Dec. 24 after a seven-year marriage. The two spacecraft proceed in tandem toward Titan. We'll probably report on the results in the next NSD, but you'll be able to get information in near realtime from NASA's Web site. Meanwhile, Cassini continues to return dazzling images of moons Iapetus and Rhea, taken before the separation of the probe. Check out the shot of the remains of a spectacular landslide from a 15-km-high cliff wall into a crater on Iapetus.Cassini-Huygens: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm
Landslide: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=1277
FBI E-Mail Implies Executive Order Authorized Torture
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has obtained, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, copies of FBI e-mail and other documents that imply that a Presidential order authorized the use of specific torture techniques in the interrogation of terrorism suspects. The ACLU is calling for the full disclosure of any such secret order. The FBI documents express concern that the bureau could be implicated in illegal actions that its agents are expressly prohibited from using, including the methods described in the secret executive order. Other e-mail describes reports of various interrogations in Guantanamo and Iraq in the presence of FBI agents, either real ones or impersonated by Defense Department interrogators. This is a complex piece of news, and if you're following this story, we encourage you to closely read the ACLU's press release and the source material linked at the bottom before jumping to any conclusions.http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=17216&c=3D206
BitTorrent Web Sites Shut Down, Face Legal Assult
Several major BitTorrent tracker sites went offline during the holidays, apparently prodded by a wave of lawsuits filed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The lawsuits target the infrastructure that lets surfers find the torrent files that initiate the downloads, even though the trackers themselves host no actual files for sharing. The most prominent site to succumb was SuprNova, which at its height served over a million people a day. Not all sites have surrendered without a fight. LokiTorrent has successfully appealed to its users for a legal defense fund. LokiTorrent and BroadbandReports.com have posted copies of the legal letters. While the MPAA's lawsuit strategy has scared off some sites, some foreign trackers, such as Sweden's Pirate Bay, have ignored the threat. It's also forcing the BitTorrent community to consider an even more decentralized approach that leaves no central hub vulnerable to legal attack. The SuprNova team is working on just such a tool, called eXeem; visit SuprNova for more info or the Peer-to-Peer Weblog for a brief review. Wired has a feature on BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen, CNET has two pieces on the tracker crisis, and you can see how the takedowns impacted traffic on Pirate Bay at P2PNet.SuprNova: http://suprnova.org/
LokiTorrent: http://lokitorrent.com/
BroadbandReports.com: http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/58231
Pirate Bay: http://www.thepiratebay.org/frame.html
Peer-to-Peer Weblog: http://p2p.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000913024815
Wired: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/bittorrent.html
CNET 1: http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5498326.html
CNET 2: http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5508073.html
P2P Net Pirate Bay Stats: http://p2pnet.net/story/3482
Wired's Eighth Annual Vaporware Awards
Duke Nukem Forever is the proud possessor of Wired's 2003 Lifetime Achievement Award and is thus ineligible for any further annual award. So what's left on the list for this year? There are several hardware entries, such as the promised speed increases in CPUs and high-end video cards which didn't materialize in 2004. On the software front, Wired points the finger at the long-promised Sony Playstation 2 "Grand Turismo 4" racing game missing since 2002, Microsoft's Longhorn operating system, promised for 2004 "though the company subsequently pushed the launch date to 3015 or something", and Cherry OS, ostensibly a Mac emulator for Windows. The top winner? The aptly named Phantom Game Console. Read the article for the full list and the entertainingly snide comments.http://wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66195,00.html
The editors of GameSpot give out nearly 50 awards for 2004, spread across five categories. That may seem a bit overwhelming, but it makes sense since the site track developments in games on PC, PlayStation 2, Game Boy Advance, and other platforms. What it means is that there's a lot of fun waiting for all sorts of game fans here. Naturally, you can visit forums to engage in endless arguments over just exactly why World of Warcraft is better than Half Life 2. We particularly liked the Dubious Honors category, with such gems as Worst Use of Celebrity Voices and Most Baditude. By all means, let us plug the fondly remembered old-school game play of Silent Storm, which won this year's Best Game No One Played award. Fun mind candy for gamers.
GameSpot: http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/all/bestof2004/
Silent Storm: http://www.silentstorm-online.de/
Buy Silent Storm: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0000DB4B3/netsurferdigest
Google 2004 End of the Year Zeitgeist
Why, oh why is Britney Spears the number one search of 2004 on Google? Yes, something must be number one, but, with all due lack of respect to the business savvy of the new Mrs. Federline, why her? We can only assume it must have been that trip down the aisle. Google's top four queries were all, dare we say, notorious women: Paris Hilton, Christina Aguilera, and Pam Anderson followed. This year, in addition to various lists (Popular Tech Stuff, Popular News Outlets, etc.), Google also has a little Flash application that provides an interactive look back at last year's zeitgeist. Choose a month and get some popular searches for some mildly diverting netsurfing. It's more clever than useful. The real problem with Google Zeitgeist lists is that they are sadly predictable for anybody who has even half an ear tuned to the TV.http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
The Creative Commons project is seeking to apply its successful model for open-content licenses to scientific work. Accordingly, it is launching a new initiative, the Science Commons. While the Creative Commons licenses are immediately applicable to a lot of scientific work already, the field of science and applied research has certain unique legal attributes that deserve their own set of open license terms. For example, the existence of and access to large data sets is a typical licensing application in science that requires some creative thinking in terms of who gets access under what terms. The Science Commons initiative is still somewhat experimental, since many of the issues don't have a clearly best option. The Science Commons site explains the background and issues associated with the project, which is supposed to formally launch in early 2005.
http://science.creativecommons.org/
Two important popular fantasy artists died last week. Kelly Freas was a well known science-fiction artist and winner of 11 Hugo Awards. If you read science fiction in the last half of the 20th century, you've almost certainly run across his artwork on the cover. He created hundreds of paintings for magazines and books during that period, and a visit to his Web site is sure to strike a familiar chord. Will Eisner will forever be known as the creator of "The Spirit", an atmospheric daily comic published between 1940 and 1952. In his later years, he produced many other graphic books, but it was "The Spirit" for which he was most famous. Links to Eisner's work are available on his site.
Freas: http://www.kellyfreas.com/
Eisner: http://www.willeisner.com/
If you've been paying attention, you know that Google Suggest is an experimental search interface in which Google pops up a list of sites you may want to view as you type in your query. An anonymous person known as "bayardo" has done a technical dissection of the system using a quick and dirty Java program that explores the entire space of suggestions for any given phrase. A preliminary analysis seems to indicate that the suggestions are generated from some older pre-computed database of Google data, that order of terms matters, and that suggested searches may not match the exact phrases you're typing in. It's hardly an exhaustive analysis, but it does provide a starting point and a methodology for anybody interested in serious Google hacking.
Google Suggest: http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1
bayardo: http://bayardo.youserv.net/Google_Suggest/Analysis.html
ONLINE CULTURE
What would you give to be able to control a webcam in a Japanese laundry chain? Control, as in pan left and right, up and down, zoom in and out. What if the cam were in a hotel lobby? Or a beauty salon? What if it had sound enabled? OK, many of us know some sites that let you do this, but what if the webcams you can manipulate are meant to be secured and not controllable by the public? A well crafted Google search reveals a number of highjackable webcams and has given birth to the new sport of random cam surfing. Apparently, many people are absolutely enthralled by the ability to freak out Japanese bar patrons by moving a camera above their heads. The majority of these vulnerable webcams are set up in Japan, making for a fascinating cross-cultural voyeurism, an opportunity leaped at by the Metafilter crowd when one of their number disclosed the info. i-Hacked offers technical details on searching for various cams.Metafilter: http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/38357
I-Hacked: http://www.i-hacked.com/Computer-Components/Software-Internet/Finding-Online-Webcams!.html
In 1999, Neal Stephenson wrote a long essay entitled "In the Beginning Was the Command Line", which discussed the philosophical differences between operating systems and became part of the open-source movement's canon. It didn't hurt that Stephenson had the skill to make the essay accessible to a wide audience, many of whom may have known little about the technology behind the software. Fast forward to 2004, when Garrett Birkel finally got around to reading the essay and started taking notes. Birkel learned that Stephenson himself was dissatisfied with the effort but was not likely to update it. Birkel obtained permission from Stephenson to embed his notes in a copy of the essay and to publish the package online. Slashdot has discussion and reviews of Birkel's commentary, which, although it has some good ideas, does not match the elegance and insight of the original essay. Nevertheless, it holds value for anyone with interest in the philosophy of software design.
Birkel: http://home.earthlink.net/~android606/commandline/index.html
Slashdot: http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/05/01/05/0022206.shtml
Plucky Tool Powers Internet Explorer
If you like TiVo and Swiss Army knives, or just want to see what Web software can do besides browse, you'll probably want to try Pluck, a freebie newcomer with useful features sure to hold the attention of some huge software company in, say, Redmond, Wash. On installation, Pluck integrates with Internet Explorer (in Windows 2000 and XP only for now). It works like a Web butler - Pluck finds, organizes, updates. You can put links in a personal folder, e-mail them, or share them with others. Pluck's Power Search tool lets you refine searches at eBay and Amazon based on category and price, and set up periodic searches ("perches") for news and Googled sites. Pluck will repeat perches at a preset intervals and notify you of new hits. Pluck's news reader comes preloaded with RSS feeds - thanks to the preloaded National Geographic News, we received a curious alert: "Crows as Clever as Great Apes, Study Says." You simply drag and drop new feeds to add them. Not feeling overwhelmed by options yet? Add a Pluck toolbar, especially if you already have three or four other toolbars and want to look like a power user, which is what Pluck can help you become. At first, you'll think you're losing screen real-estate, but resizing and hiding helps, as does the price. It's hard to beat free.http://pluck.com/
ONLINE TRAVEL
Shipwrecks of Vancouver Island
Anyone who loves tales of pirates, adventurers, or castaways will want to visit this virtual museum of shipwrecks in the waters around Vancouver Island, in British Columbia. Graveyard of the Pacific's aptly named "Shipwreck Times" tells the tales of ten wrecks of the past and today. The site has gathered all listings of wrecked vessels it can find in an online database that will prove especially helpful to researchers. Younger visitors will have fun in the Hazards section, learning how to avoid shipwreck with Captain Finn, snippets about surviving shipwrecks, and details of the human negligence that often precipitated maritime disaster. Those that yearn to can test their seamanship on the dangerous currents in the Flash game and assess their ability to get their cargo, crew, and passengers safely to port. This museum should keep trainee buccaneers and captains happily amused for hours. Cast off!http://www.pacificshipwrecks.ca/
Chances are that the last movie you went to was shown at some multi-screen megaplex practically indistinguishable from hundreds of similar theaters around the world. That is not the kind of movie theater featured in Cinema Treasures. The site, launched in 2000 by a couple of movie-theater enthusiasts, is devoted to classic movie-theater preservation and awareness. It unites movie-theater owners and fans in a common cause to save the few remaining movie palaces across the globe. The site presents regular news items about theaters at risk, but the hub of the site is the Theater Guide and its list of almost 8,000 theaters from Afghanistan to Ukraine, though the majority of the entries are in the US. The listings occasionally have photographs, around 1,600 in total. The site seeks submissions, so if you know of an old theater at risk of closure, Cinema Treasures want to hear from you. Otherwise, you can just browse the guide, searchable in all manner of ways, and see how people watched their movies before the multiplexes started to mushroom.
http://cinematreasures.org/
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Some people know that the real name of Dr. Seuss is Theodore Geisel. Fewer people know that before he became a famed children's author, he had already attained a certain measure of fame as a cartoonist in advertising. The Advertising Artwork of Dr. Seuss brings this part of his life to the Web. Working for companies such as General Electric, NBC, and Flit, Geisel produced cartoonish advertisements that spoke volumes of his potential as a children's book illustrator. You'll inevitably find the distinct, familiar Seuss look and feel in his ads, many of which are signed "Dr. Seuss". The site lets you view a plethora of Seuss ad illustrations and read a brief introduction on how he worked as an advertiser before he became one of the world's best-loved children's authors.http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dsads/index.shtml
The Zoom Quilt is a collaborative art project, the product of 16 participants. You start viewing what appears to be a single piece of art, and what isn't at all obvious is that other art appears at the center of the project as you zoom in. As you move further away from the starting point, the image changes in feel and content and what was the focus recedes to nothingness. Each artist has an individual style and concept, and it's all tied together with a continual red ribbon. Though this format might be a recipe for disaster, the artists here respect and enhance what already exists as they add their own parts. The styles vary. At times there's a strong evocation of Escher, while somewhat further along some 1930s realism takes over. The Zoom Quilt would bear repeated visits if it were updated, but we suspect it's a done deal.
http://zoomquilt.nikkki.net/
A plain wooden chair may seem a narrow subject for fine-art photography. Tip the chair on two legs in an otherwise empty room fit for demolition and something strange happens: you get pulled into Mustard Gas Party, a collection of photo essays - including the introductory "Two Legs" we just described - based on the premise that there is something intrinsically attractive about abandoned buildings and modern ruins. Some of the subjects here are industrial or institutional, others are residential. We wouldn't call many of these photos beautiful, even though perspective and/or composition make many seem technically excellent. Most display a pathos of habitual use and decay, evidence of grand design in ravages of time that makes you wonder what desires haunted or drove the photographer to record the bleak surroundings in these elegant shots. Individually, many of these photos would seem flat or contrived, but as a collection they constitute a sort of visual chorus, a prolonged lament outside history, like some dream recollection of an adult orphan or retired laborer who returns to a scene from youth now a shell of a mysterious past. Why should a pair of shoes, say, or a toilet in a sanatorium have a life beyond that lived by those who used them?
http://b.f11.org/
A One-year Experiment in Rubbernecking
Two guys in identical spartan rooms spend most of their time sleeping and typing on the computer. Sounds like freshman year of college, right? The trick here is that these guys can't leave. They're in the rooms for one year, and you can watch them, side by side, via the Web. It's an art experiment in the human willingness to look at anything. The experiment ends when the first person has clocked a year of watching, not when the guys have been in the room for one year. Warning, spoiler ahead. The secret? The guys aren't really there. Through some creative video and audio editing, it looks as if they are.http://www.turbulence.org/Works/1year/
BOOKS & E-ZINES
|
Items our staff likes and you might too. Click on the image or title to order at a hefty discount from our affiliate Amazon.com, and send a few pennies our way as well.
For more selections, check out: Netsurfer Books: http://www.netsurf.com/nsb/ Netsurfer Library: http://www.netsurf.com/nsl/ |
The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death
Trawler
Bound to Please
Old Man's WarDime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls
The professional ancestors of John Grisham and Danielle Steele produced their own droves of books, known as dime novels or, in the UK, as penny dreadfuls. Once printing technology spread sufficiently, it became possible to print many low-quality books for a growing, mainly youthful readership. It wasn't always just the print that was low in quality but in an era before the dominance of moving pictures and television reduced the reading public, these books were king. The books ranged from Wild West adventures to detective stories and costume dramas. Stanford University Libraries has gathered the best of its many copies online for a new public to browse from an academic perspective. You can discover the techniques used to print them and how their covers were designed. Fortunately, perhaps, you can even read some.http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/dp/pennies/home.html
Japan is a country known for the art of miniaturization from delicate origami to cars to advanced technological gadgets. Bonsai celebrates the art more than the science of the miniature, and Andy Rutledge's Bonsai Rant blog does, too. It also celebrates the skills gathered over generations by bonsai growers in Japan and elsewhere and it does so with considerable style. In an era where Web sites are becoming increasingly flashy to attract and hold our attention, it is a joy to find Bonsai Rant so tranquil in design and so instructive and enlightening in content. Even if you have no desire to ever grow, tend, or train a bonsai creation, it's still worth a look for the sheer passion behind the words. Those who do wish to learn the tricks of the trade can download the free e-books of instruction on the finer arts of clipping roots, training with wire, and creating a miniature world for your tree to inhabit.
http://www.andyrutledge.com/bonsairant.php
There's always something gripping about local news from foreign countries, and just as we kicked our addiction to accounts of disputed fishing rights and local government scandals from the Cook Islands, we became aware of the Local, an English-language newspaper from Sweden. Sure, the Local has some international news, such as a recent article about the deportation of two terror suspects to Egypt, but news from the Swedish homefront is what piques our interest. When we visited, we read about a 15-year-old murder mystery and the death of a rare-book thief in an unexplained explosion at his apartment. The Local also reported a survey which found that over 70% of Swedish 10 to 12-year-olds enjoy school. Knowing little of Swedish politics, we were also intrigued to read of the resignation of the former leader of the Left Party, the recovering alcoholic Gudrun Schyman, who crusaded against tax fraud in high places until she was implicated in, yes, tax fraud. If you find things hard to follow, drop into the Who's Who section for an alphabetical list of 150 famous Swedes.
http://www.thelocal.se/
Writing a Hollywood blockbuster has never been easier. All you have to do is use this nifty online story outliner. Selecting your title is the most difficult thing - after that, all you do is fill in some boxes with your characters' names, skills, goals and means of achieving those goals, and click the button to go to the next page, the Act II Showdown. Here you just fill in some more boxes with pretty straightforward stuff and then move on to the Act III Resolution, for some more of the same. You don't have to think for very long, just pull something out of your hat; that's what works best, and is, we understand, what all the best action screenwriters do anyway. Click the final button and an outline of your masterpiece appears in a pop-up window. We tried it, we're talking to Vin Diesel's people now, and "A la Recherche du Temps Hairdo" should be hitting the screens in 2007.
http://www.ncn.net/~msj/outliner.htm
Index every comic book ever published? That's a grand undertaking, to say the least, and it's the aim of the aptly named Grand Comic Book Database, undertaken in the style of the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). If you're looking for a particular comic book you remember from your childhood, you can search on writer, penciler, inker, publisher, character, or title. Unfortunately, those results are not sortable by every field and you can't refine your searches. Two things will probably limit this effort: the comic book-reading public is much less expansive than the movie-watching public and the submission process for the IMDb is far less complicated.
http://www.comics.org/
SURFING SCIENCE
Charles Darwin and Jacques Cousteau, never mind Steve Zissou, would have loved Marine Biology, a megasite for conservation, research, and education with the awesome goal to host the "most complete information about every marine plant and animal species online." Quite possibly, it is there already. Supported in part by conservation societies, Marine Biology can help kids and adults alike learn about sealife and the seas with backgrounders in the Oceans section, links to university degree programs and employers, and a variety of resources such as news, screensavers and an overview of journals in the field. You have a number of easy ways to search. Jump right into the Species Search for information about the bearded scorpion, say, or doctorfish. An "International" pull-down menu takes you to resources on four continents. There are menus with 79 journals and various databases. You can pop right over to Algae Base, for example, or the Sea Slug Forum. The site has introductions to scuba diving and submarines and relevant links all over the place, including logos linked to sites such as Ocean Alliance and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Did we mention eye candy? Just about every page has at least one nice photo, and links to sites with video clips and more photos abound. There's even a call for interns. Way cool.http://marinebio.org/
SOFTWARE
EFF Launches Anonymous Internet Communications System
What's important about the Tor anonymity system is that it's backed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the watchdog of privacy on the Web. The EFF has the technical knowledge to make such a difficult system work, unlike some amateur-created privacy networks such as Freenet. The Tor network routes your Internet packets to their destinations through a random set of servers. This means that no observer at any single point can tell where the data comes from or where it's going. Everything is encrypted along the way, and the system can be used by any application which supports the SOCKS protocol, which in practice means all major browsers, webservers, and chat clients. Like any real-world system, Tor is not perfect - there are vulnerabilities that may compromise your anonymity. Nevertheless, it offers a good compromise of features and performance. The EFF is encouraging more people to install Tor and join the network.http://tor.eff.org/
bbPress Forum Software from the Authors of WordPress
From the makers of the popular weblogging application WordPress comes this elegant take on the Web forum/bulletin board. This brand new alpha release already has the same elegant feel as WordPress, assuring it a receptive audience of users annoyed with the bloat of other forum packages. You can see bbPress in action at the WordPress support forums, where it's getting a good workout from a dedicated and knowledgeable user base. It's worth investigating, especially if you're a fan of free, lightweight programs and you're looking to host your own discussion forum. As the tagline says, "simple, fast, elegant."http://bbpress.org/