More Signal, Less Noise
Monday, March 21, 2005
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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 11, Issue 11 Monday, March 21, 2005
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NETSURFER LINKS
 BREAKING SURF
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BREAKING SURF Much of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology (ETech) Conference this year revolved around emergent Internet technologies, particularly user-driven services like Friendster, Del.icio.us, and Flickr. There was much talk of ontologies, life-hacking, and Firefox add-ons. Robert Kaye covered much of the conference in his columns for the O'Reilly Developer Weblogs. The folks over at Technorati blogged it extensively. O'Reilly has assembled an exhaustive Web page of conference coverage, with links to Kaye's articles, podcasts and blogs, and outside media coverage. Reading through, it appears that the main theme of the conference this year was networked social technologies, appropriate given that with wireless access, the Net is virtually everywhere, certainly so in dense modern urban environments.ETech: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/etech/ Coverage: http://www.oreillynet.com/et2005/ Technorati: http://www.technorati.com/tag/etech/ Yahoo just unveiled Buzz Game, a fantasy prediction market for high-tech trends. The goal is to predict how popular various technologies will be in the future, as measured by Yahoo search frequency. Participants, even poor ones, can win a Mac mini or an iPod just for signing up, and we suspect the site will attract a large number of players. Markets exist in broad categories like Entertainment, Operating Systems, and the large category of the Wild Wild Web. One glaring omission - sex does not figure in any of the Buzz Game categories. This is surprising given that sex generates huge cash flows both online and off, that it could easily fit into just about any of the categories, and that it is the perennial favorite in Internet search queries. http://buzz.research.yahoo.com/bk/index.html The DARPA Grand Challenge Applicants Last year, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) offered $1 million in a Grand Challenge. The team whose completely autonomous ground vehicle traveled most quickly (and in under 10 hours) across some 175 miles of treacherous desert roads and trails would win the cash. The problem was so tough that no vehicle managed even eight miles down the course, and DARPA did not award the prize (see NSD 10.11). This year, DARPA reissued the challenge, doubled the prize money, and established entry qualifications for competitors. Of the 195 teams that applied to compete this year, only 20 will be chosen for the final run for the prize. This year's aspirants' applications are available on the Grand Challenge site. You can find a great deal of information there, including videos of some of the entered vehicles in action. Look at the Team resources page, where fans of vehicular robots can check out the technical papers that the 2004 Grand Challenge generated. Fans of cars and girls will want to check out Shawnie and Julie, the Axion Racing Twins.NSD 10.11: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v10/nsd.10.11.html#BS7 2005 Grand Challenge: http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/ Axion Racing Twins: http://www.axionracing.com/Images/Twins2.htm NSA Seems to Want to Avoid Constitutional Restrictions The National Security Agency is the largest spook group fielded by the US, and the material it presented to the incoming administration would certainly reveal its influential perspective at the time. Portions of that material have been declassified and released, so we're not just talking into our hat here. It appears from documents made public that the NSA was pushing for some degree of exemption from the Fourth Amendment clause regarding unreasonable search and seizure. This and other revelations are buried in the depths of a whole lot of other fascinating reading. It takes a lot of time to go through the material, and an acronym scorecard is helpful.http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB24/index.htm#doc25 IRS Employees Succumb to Social Engineering, but Less Than Before In addition to such tedious duties as auditing IRS financial data, one of the fun things agents of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) get to do is run social-hacking scams on IRS employees to see if they can get them to give up their internal network passwords. Agents posing as IT helpdesk personnel seeking assistance to correct a network problem recently phoned 100 IRS employees. The TIGTA agents asked the employees to provide their network login name and to change their password to one they suggested. Of the 100 targeted employees, 35 fell for the ruse and gave out their login information. When scolded, the IRS victims gave excuses of not being aware of such social engineering methods, trying to be helpful to IT helpdesk representatives, and having network problems at the time. Believe it or not, this is good news - a similar test in 2001 had 71 of 100 employees giving up the goods. The TIGTA testers wrote up a brief report of the audit.http://www.treas.gov/tigta/auditreports/2005reports/200520042fr.pdf The Pros and Cons of Two-Factor Authentication One of the ways to authenticate your identification for, for example, your bank's Web site is an algorithm called two-factor authentication. Your bank gives you a small device that displays some semi-random number which changes frequently. In order to log in to the bank Web site, you have to know your password and you have to enter the number your device provides. Thus, you are authenticated by something you know - your password - and something you have - the device. This is two-factor authentication and it's becoming more common. Many banks in Europe already use it, and reportedly both AOL and Microsoft plan to roll it out for their online subscribers. But, as Bruce Schneier writes, two-factor authentication is not a panacea for security. While it works better than simple passwords, it still won't protect you from man-in-the-middle or Trojan attacks. Bruce's short blog entry is a jumping-off point for a good discussion in the comments about the pros and cons of two-factor authentication. The topic is worth understanding since you may be required to use it in the near future. ITsecurity.com has a clear explanation of how two-factor authentication works.Schneier: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/03/the_failure_of.html ITsecurity.com: http://www.itsecurity.com/papers/rainbow2.htm Spore: User Content Is the Game The cost of designing modern computer games is skyrocketing, at least partly due to the problem of content. Users are demanding scads of original content in their games. Games like World of Warcraft and Everquest by their very nature demand whole worlds' worth of content. What's a game developer to do to keep costs down? Why, let the users do all the hard work and develop game content themselves. To some extent, this is already being done - for example, the Sims lets you create publicly accessible houses for your characters, WarBirds has a cadre of players who develop 3-D models and skins for aircraft, and Neverwinter Nights lets players design just about anything. Will Wright, the creator of the Sims, wants to take this to the next level. At a recent game conference, Wright introduced a concept called Spore, which takes its inspiration from procedural programming popular in the demo community. In Spore, the user designs the initial look of an object or character, and the game program does all the hard work, figuring out how to animate it and, more importantly, how to evolve it. GameSpy explores Wright's Spore demo, in which he started with a little blob of virtual goo and evolved it to startling dimensions of complexity. The Ludologist has Spore pictures.GameSpy: http://www.gamespy.com/articles/595/595975p1.html The Ludologist: http://www.jesperjuul.dk/ludologist/index.php?p=171 It's not just your imagination or media hype. The blogosphere is expanding as is the universe, and nearly as fast. David Sifry of Technorati has been looking at the statistics of blogosphere growth, as well as other characteristics, and has posted his conclusions in three articles, parts one through three of "State of the Blogosphere March 2005". Of course, he put the three posts in his blog. Sifry finds that blogs are created at the rate of 30,000 to 40,000 a day, although this probably includes a fair number of spam blogs. More importantly, bloggers post roughly six posts every second, and some blogs are incredibly active. Some have become influential in ways that the mainstream media cannot help but find disconcerting. Another conclusion, an obvious one, is that more people link to you if you provide free content than if you charge admission. At press time Sifry had three parts of his state of the blogosphere analysis posted on his weblog. Part 1: http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000298.html Part 2: http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000299.html Part 3: http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000301.html Photo-sharing sites have evolved into visual blogs. Even if you aren't aware of sites such as Flickr or Fotolog, other folks use them every day to document their trips, celebrations, and mundane lives for a vast public audience. This Newsweek article does a fine job of explaining the sites, but doesn't delve into whether people are really going to use these sites to meet others or simply to display themselves in a new form of exhibitionism. What's clear is that Andy Warhol should have lived to see this - 15 minutes of fame is turning out to be so utterly analogue. Poor Andy, this world was made for him. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7160855/site/newsweek/ So what's your favorite blog? Is that the "what's your sign?" of the oughts? Check out who won this year's Weblog Awards for the best blogs. It's not quite the Oscars, but it does open voting to the public. http://2005.bloggies.com/ Think of PodShanking as sex between iPods. The germ of the idea was to find a way to transfer music from iPod to iPod when there was no computer handy. The Mod Gods came up with these instructions, a hack in the truest sense of the word, right down to the archetypal cleverness for its own sake and essential uselessness. The song transfer takes place in real time, meaning a five-minute-long song transfers in five minutes. Still, a good hardware hack is a good hardware hack, and it's even better if it involves a sexual metaphor. http://www.themodgods.com/2005/03/podshanking-physical-pod-on-pod.htm Apple Testing Authorized Business Agent Program Apple has just announced a reseller program and is actively recruiting people in the San Francisco Bay and New York City areas to join. Much like Web affiliate programs, this deal allows you to earn commission on Apple and third-party products when you manage to talk people into buying Apple goods through a special agent Web site. The program is clearly aimed at business solution resellers, but the barriers to entry are not particularly high. You'll need to apply with proof that you're a business entity and references, and go through a credit check. Once in the program, you'll learn the commission fees and you'll be able to display the AABA logo and get Apple reseller training. You won't be able to earn commissions from sales to non-profits, educational customers, foreign entities, or, in most cases, the government. Given the narrow geographical area of the program, we assume that this is Apple's test run of a larger program. The Web site has FAQs and finer detail. Given the large Mac fanbase in both San Francisco and New York, we suspect Apple will get a huge response.http://agents.apple.com/individual/index_pdfb.lasso The US has a home-builders association, and one of the things it does is track statistics on the median American home. The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) concludes that the median home encompasses about 2,000 square feet of living space. Seems roomy enough. Bill and Melinda Gates's digs are over 30 times larger, though. WIth this article on the NAHB's findings, from Forbes via Yahoo Finance, comes a little slideshow that gives you a glimpse of the homes of some of the wealthiest people on the planet. Don't hate them because they're rich. http://biz.yahoo.com/weekend/billionairehomes_1.html Google Code is the company-sanctioned site for developers interested in Google-related software and tools. Think of it as a support site for people writing Google API code, mixed with some open-source news and links to specific open-source projects that interact with Google in one way or another. The site opened this week with four featured projects: CoreDumper, for creating core dumps of running applications; Sparse Hashtable, an optimized set of hash functions; Goopy Functional, a Python library that brings functional programming aspects to Python; and Perftools, for creating multithreaded applications. So what do all those have to do with Google programming? Well, it's more that they're programming projects from Google, rather than Google-related programs, if you know what we mean. http://code.google.com/ ADMINISTRIVIA We're Looking for a Few Good Men or Women Boys, girls, and hermaphrodites work, too. Every year or so, we hire new writers. We're looking for one or two people willing to perform martini labor (i.e. not much work) at slave wages (i.e. not much pay). If you think you can write five or so NSD blurbs every two weeks, let us know at mailto:writers@netsurf.com along with a plain-text resume in the body of the e-mail (yes, that's a test) and three sample NSD articles (on anything you want). If you're both lucky and good, wait for further instructions. Work for us and we'll keep you in pimento-stuffed manzanillo olives the whole year through!ONLINE CULTURE The "Monty Python's Spamalot" Broadway show's Web site was hacked and its mailing list stolen - which raises the deliciously canned specter of "Monty Python's Spamalot" keeners being spammed. The show has several connections to Internet culture. The very practice of spamming was named after a famous Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch, as explained in Wikipedia's "Spam (Monty Python)" entry. The Broadway show is based on the movie "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". Eric Idle relates in the show notes that, ironically, he downloaded a technically illegal copy of the movie script to save himself the bother of typing it into his computer. The "Monty Python's Spamalot" site is a typically fun Monty Pythonesque production and is worth visiting - Idle's notes about the show being one of the highlights. The StarNewsOnline.com has the New York Times hack story. The show, by the way, is already a huge hit."Monty Python's Spamalot": http://montypythonsspamalot.com/ Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_%28Monty_Python%29 StarNewsOnline.com: http://tinyurl.com/67j43 mSpace Takes Cues from iTunes, Google to Deliver Semantic Search What if you could combine the ease of iTunes with the information of a Google search? mSpace asked the question and delivered the goods, and we checked it out. It's a nifty application that more or less can act as an envelope in which a designer can present a specific subset of related information. The on-site demo use the world of classical music to show off its capabilities. It can present multimedia and images as easily as it can spit out text. Note that mSpace requires a Mozilla-based browser; if you aren't using Netscape, Mozilla, or Firefox, forget it.http://mspace.fm/ ONLINE TRAVEL Cities exert a certain fascination, even over those who loathe the traffic, fumes, and noise. Ancient cities like Paris, Istanbul, and Mexico City lure with more than mere hustle and pretty stone buildings - they have history. Their leaders have shaped time, their wars changed history, and their stories are complex and compelling. The Historic Cities project provides maps of cities in more than 50 countries across five continents. Each city comes with appropriate links, maps, and a short history lesson. You can choose a city to visit by country, year, or even by mapmaker. If you prefer to simply admire the wonderful cartographic details and flourishes of medieval scrolls, just download the site's screensaver of map images. If you're a cartophile and have documents to contribute to this ongoing project, drop them a line.http://historic-cities.huji.ac.il/ Photos of Tsunami on Memory Card There are countless images of the devastation wrought by December's Indian Ocean tsunami. Rarer are images of the tsunami as it made its way to land and crested over the shore. A Canadian couple vacationing in Thailand snapped images of the tsunami seconds before it engulfed them and the beach they were on. In the aftermath, a relief worker from Seattle found the couple's camera. It was damaged beyond repair but the memory card inside it survived and the photos it held were salvageable. The CBC published eight images from the memory card on its Web site, and a Flickr user named David B. has a few similar photos from other sources. also has links. The photos taken by John and Jackie Knill in their final moments are profound and heartbreaking.CBC: http://www.cbc.ca/story/news/national/2005/02/23/tsunami-pics050223.html David B.: http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidb/tags/tsunami/ ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT Noir Klezmer Muppets Homage Thing "Over Time" is a five-minute student animation filmed as a tribute of sorts to Muppet creator Jim Henson. The directors are Oury Atlan, Thibaut Berland, and Damien Ferrie. When they made "Over Time" last year, they were students at the French animation/media school Supinfocom. The film is a dark, black-and-white scene set at what might be a wake or funeral. The Muppet proxies dance in convincing Muppet style and play klezmer music throughout. The songs are "Inconsolable" by the Silberman Orchestra and "Shein Vi Di L'vone" and "Eli, Eli" by Cyril Ornadel and the Starlight Symphony Orchestra. The whole piece is moving and brilliantly well done. Both a broadband connection and QuickTime are required. A shorter version of the piece is also available.Original: http://www.joeytomatoes.com/muppetsovertimeoriginal05.htm Short: http://www.joeytomatoes.com/muppetsovertime05.htm Still, Moving, and Audio Art - with Hello Kitty's Skeleton Michael Paulus is an artist with plenty of talent, and attitude to match. Employing both visual and audio media, his art captures aspects of modern life we might all have missed, or at least not paid enough attention to. Paulus's image-stuffed Web site lets you browse a series of galleries with enlargeable thumbnails. Even cooler is the Java-powered full-screen slide show - though you may have to download the applet to view it. We really loved "Skeletal Systems", a collection of images of famous cartoon characters and their skeletons. The collection of highly original eye charts also brought us up short. There's plenty to see and do here. There are worse ways to spend an hour or three.http://michaelpaulus.com/gallery/albums.php Matthew Mahon's online photography portfolio is a little out of the ordinary. First of all, the design is refreshingly quirky - the pictures are laid out in a seemingly random swirl with no attempt at categorization. Click on each photograph, however, and you find yourself drawn in, not least by the mesmerizing Flash presentation. As one would expect from a photographer whose clients include an impressive array of multinationals and whose work has been featured in numerous national publications, the quality of composition and execution is tremendous. Besides the design, the really amazing features of the photos are the small icons in the bottom left hand corners of many of them. Click the head icon and Mahon and his assistant literally step into the photograph (straight into a headlock in the case of the picture of WWE wrestling fans) and provide an informative and often witty commentary. http://www.matthewmahon.com/ Art can be a messy business. If you don't like paint in your hair, on your clothes, and beneath your fingernails then try out Art.com's nifty artPad. It's a Flash app that's simple to use: just use your mouse to choose a tool and apply color. You can wield various paintbrushes or pens and pencils, or give your inner Pollock free rein and just tip whole buckets of paint everywhere. What makes artPad better than the painting program that's sitting unused on your hard drive is its built-in movie capability. You can replay or send out the process of creation as well as the final product. You can save your masterpieces, with a choice of frames, to e-mail to your friends (or agent) or hang them in Art.com's virtual gallery. A quick browse round the gallery should allay any concerns about whether your work will suffer in comparison to others. http://artpad.art.com/gallery/ Wicked RGB is an agency that markets a collection of computer artists, including artists who have worked on "I, Robot" and the "Lord of the Rings" movies. The agency doesn't have much to offer at its Web site except for a 60-MB demo reel of its clients' samples. The MPEG "clip" highlights the diversity of talent that is part of the collective, and if you can at all afford the time to download it, by all means do so. The expertise is mind-blowing, particularly some of the townscapes. http://www.wickedrgb.com/ Many movies follow a conventional storyline that can be summed up in a few sentences. If you're in doubt, check out Movie-a-Minute, dedicated to providing movie synopses in a sentence or two. You'll find synopses for classic movies such as "Gone with the Wind" and pop-culture phenomena like "The Matrix". The site claims that most movies have a lot of filler. If it's a really bad production, why bother sitting through a two-hour film when you can experience the entire movie in just under a minute. The bits posted here are clever, though not pieces of literary genius. Each synopsis has a dash of sarcasm that provides a condescending condensed look at some of your favorite and not-so-favorite movies. http://www.rinkworks.com/movieaminute/ BOOKS & E-ZINES
http://www.divisiontwo.com/ We're sure you've heard someone postulate that attention spans are shrinking in the age of television. Well, maybe you only heard the first part. Fiction seems to hold to that trend. You no longer find "War and Peace"-like novels that weigh more than you can comfortably carry along with a large cappuccino. We're looking for short stories, flash fiction, haiku - and, now, Espresso Stories. The Italians like their coffee concentrated and served in a tiny cup, and the world is ready for stories of 25 words or less. Don't think that these 25 words can just be random. These miniscule literary gems must contain theme, character, and narrative development, which is a tall order for a short tale. We tried some shots in Espresso Stories' categories like Epic Romances, Noir as the Night, and New York Love. The site is on to something. It is possible to condense fiction like this, but like rich coffee, sometimes it is best to sample sparingly at each sitting. http://espressostories.com/ If you're tired of music and film reviews that exist either to stoke the egos of the reviewer's personal friends or to informally enumerate the wad of public-relations dollars bankrolled, look no further. The folks at 2Walls are doing their best to bring their own unique and wittily honest views to the Web-viewing public. The aptly named Ranting Room lets them blow off steam about everyday life and politics (mainly in the US); Socially Inept will advise you on how to choose Christmas gifts that fit your wrapping paper; the Sports Dish gives you the analysis on the Superbowl that fans will recognize as the ramblings of their own kind. Other sections cover entertainment media and concerts. Sadly, the written word is poorly represented among the gobs of music and movie coverage, but a fresh opinion is always good. 2Walls is keeping it fresh. http://www.2walls.com/ There used to be many adjectives to describe kosher food; "bland", "boring", and "restrictive" were high on everyone's list. Things have changed, in part due to advocates like Kosher Blog, which spreads news of new restaurants and new products. The rules haven't changed a bit, but the food most certainly has. It's still kosher and for those who wish, still glatt kosher, but creative cooks and food packagers have added taste to the qualities that "kosher" has always promised. This blog is based in the Boston area, but covers kosher matters nationwide. It offers many great recipes and online and mail-order sources for the products discussed. Since this is an open blog, there are also lively discussions on everything covered. http://www.kosherblog.net/ SURFING SCIENCE MilesTag: Do-It-Yourself "Laser" Tag As the MilesTag site warns, you probably don't want to try this as your first electronics project. But, using instructions from this site, moderately experienced tinkerers can build their own laser-tag-like infrared system with more features and for less money than commercial offerings. The system uses infrared beams like those used by TV remotes, which are completely harmless unless you point them at your wife and press the mute button while she's talking to you. The MilesTag design team modeled this system after the MILES 2000 training system the US Army uses. The team drew inspiration from first-person-shooter video games and role-playing games, which helped them to make their product in some ways better then the Army system. MilesTag supports 32 players on up to seven teams, and a range of weapon types including mines and non-conventional weapons. Organizers can configure details like rate of fire, ammo capacity, and damage inflicted by each weapon.http://www.lasertagparts.com/mtdesign.htm UCLA Database of American Folk Medicine Ever wonder what your great-grandmother did when she got a headache, or what soldiers in the American War of Independence did to help heal their wounds? You can use UCLA's Online Archive of American Folk Medicine to find out. The result of more than 50 years of research, the archive stresses that the information listed is not valid medical advice nowadays. It records as many additional details for each listed treatment or belief as possible, so you can search by type of healer, ethnicity of the treatment, and the geographic origin of a particular piece of data, as well as more obvious categories like condition and method of treatment. We liked the rosemary and rum concoction for treating measles and the North Carolina tradition of burning the father's hat when the first boy is born to a family. Oh and your great-grandmother may have worn a nutmeg around her throat to cure her headache, in case you're still wondering.http://www.folkmed.ucla.edu/ Not So Gratefully Dead Species You've heard the Grateful Dead. Now, meet the not-so-grateful. The Typewritten Book of the Not-So-Grateful Dead is packed with information and photos of species and subspecies extinct, allegedly extinct, and on the way to revival. At the site, you can read about the ivory-billed woodpecker, the thylacine, and more in extreme detail and straightforward presentation. The animals on display are all dead now, which makes the information and photos all the more precious. Some of the animals, like the quagga and aurochs, are the subjects of attempts to reverse-breed related genotypes back into extinct phenotypes. Visit here, and you'll likely come away with a subtle desire not to repeat past mistakes.http://users.aristotle.net/~swarmack/deadbook.html The Art and Science of Industrial Drawing Industrial drawing is one of the most dreaded classes in most engineers' programs. The Smithsonian's online (and real-life) exhibit called Doodles, Drafts, and Designs highlights and provides context around the industrial drawings behind innovations over the past century. It's enlightening to see the birthing process for many of the devices we take for granted today, such as the Brannock device (a.k.a. the thing that measures your feet in the shoe store) and some less widespread today, such as the pigeon vests developed for paratrooping pigeons in World War II.http://www.sil.si.edu/exhibitions/doodles/ SOFTWARE PyMusique Blocks DRM on iTunes Enterprising hackers are again beating up the digital rights management (DRM) of the iTunes Music Store (iTMS). The latest hack is a Python program called PyMusique, which lets you buy iTMS music and save it without any of the DRM encryption the Apple store adds. The hack hinges on the fact that the iTMS only adds the DRM after you download purchased music to your computer. This makes it possible to write software that connects to the iTMS and buys the music, but then saves the files to your hard disk before the addition of any sharing restrictions. Basically, PyMusique is a wrapper around the iTunes experience, allowing you to do all you want at Apple's iTMS without the DRM bits. It's entirely possible that the PyMusique software home page will have disappeared by the time you read this, but the program is out there. One of the authors of PyMusique is Jon Johansen, famous for his DVD decryption code and earlier iTunes DRM-stripping hacks.http://fuware.nanocrew.net/pymusique/ |
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