More Signal, Less Noise
Monday, March 28, 2005
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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 11, Issue 12 Monday, March 28, 2005
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NETSURFER LINKS
 BREAKING SURF
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BREAKING SURF Terri Schiavo - Get Your Facts Straight It's all Terri all the time. In the papers, on TV, and on the Net - wherever you look, somebody's talking about what seems to be the finally final decision to remove Terri Schiavo's feeding tube and welcome her death after 15 years of severe, unrecoverable brain damage. (We worked hard to make that sentence middle of the road on this.) Online debates rage even in unrelated forums over the contentious decision to invite/force her death, which her husband and dozens of courts support. You just can't escape. The media attention devoted to this is overblown, driven by the ease with which the story tugs on the emotions and by Schiavo's once-cuteness. Call it Lacey Petersen syndrome - if an attractive woman is involved, it will as news overshadow worse tragedies. So, why has NSD fallen into that trap? We're astonished at the ignorance we find about the facts of the case. Folks, if you're going to wade into a flame war, at least get your facts right. The University of Miami (UM) Ethics Programs offers a superb dossier on the Terri Schiavo story - the timeline is a must. Also, a St. Petersburg Times article records the cash payments that husband Michael Schiavo has turned down to pursue what he maintains is his wife's living will.UM: http://www.miami.edu/ethics2/schiavo_project.htm Times: http://sptimes.com/2005/03/11/Tampabay/1_million_offered_to_.shtml Andre Norton was the first woman declared a Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) Grand Master and the first to be inducted in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. For more than 70 years, Norton (nee Alice Mary Norton) produced some of the finest science fiction and fantasy literature of the 20th century. Norton was a pioneer, beginning her writing career with a historical adventure published in 1934. She changed her first name to Andre after a publisher advised that it would sell her to her target audience of young boys. Young adults became the focus of her long career as she turned out book after book of wonderful fantasy and science fiction perfectly tailored to them, not coincidentally inspiring a whole generation of SF authors. Ultimately, the SFWA created the Andre Norton Award for young-adult novels. Her works are too numerous to list, but you can't go wrong with any of her Witch World novels, the Ross Murdock (Time War) series, or the Solar Queen series. Individual classics include "Judgement on Janus" and the groundbreaking "Ordeal in Otherwhere", which opened the way for strong female characters in SF. Her Web site has numerous links to fan forums, memorials, and appreciations. http://www.andre-norton.org/anorton/andeath.html Everything You Need to Know about the PlayStation Portable Mar. 24 marked the North American release date for Sony's latest handheld game console, the PlayStation Portable (PSP). Video-game fans have been eagerly awaiting the device, primarily for its excellent color 4.3", 480-by-272-pixel display and considerable computing capabilities. The little console can play movies and music files, and Sony promises a firmware upgrade that will instill the capability to browse the Internet. All those features will probably benefit from more memory, which can be upgraded with a Memory Stick Duo expansion card. Best of all, the PSP allows you to wirelessly connect with up to 15 other units to play multiplayer games. Shipping price is $250, and 19 PSP games are available on launch in North America, but you can play imported Japanese games as well - the unit has been available in Japan since December. PSPworld has a nice introduction to the PSP, while Sony has the official lowdown.Sony: http://www.us.playstation.com/psp.aspx PSPworld: http://www.pspworld.com/playstation-portable/2005/03/23/sony-psp-101 UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has presented a number of proposals that he believes the organization should adopt. Among the proposals in his "In Larger Freedom" report are that developed countries should "give immediate duty-free and quota-free market access to all exports from the least developed countries." He's also pushing for the establishment of a relief fund for disaster victims and for coordinated response to terrorism threats. It seems reasonable to suspect that the latter will be far more likely to succeed. This is actually a major reform initiative which would significantly change many aspects of the UN. A press release summarizes the various initiatives. http://www.un.org/largerfreedom/ Memory - Not Just for Computers Anymore If you want to see human memory in action check out the championship memory circuit where individuals compete to see who can memorize a string of one thousand numbers in an hour, or the order of a deck of cards. Slate uses the US National Memory Championship to frame an article on memory champions and their methods. It makes good reading, but it doesn't mention two excellent books about the cultural practices associated with having a good memory: Frances Yates's remarkable "The Art of Memory" and Jonathan Spence's "The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci". Read either of these if you want to understand memory as more than a set of tricks to win some paltry prizes.US National Memory Championship: http://www.usamemoriad.com/ Slate: http://slate.msn.com/id/2114925/ "The Art of Memory": http://tinyurl.com/552fc "The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci": http://tinyurl.com/5gxzx Think your job is bad? Check out Channel 4's remarkable list of the worst jobs in British history. After you read the description of the Tudor era "groom of the stool", you'll have a whole new level of respect for manual labor. Also, if wearing wool holds any appeal for you, the job of a medieval fuller will quickly disabuse you of your affection. Suffice it to say that it requires you to remain on your feet all day while stamping wool in large vats of urine - like grape-pressing without all the glamor. It certainly makes the cloth smooth and less itchy on the skin, and you'll have very clean toenails, although you might have difficulty getting a date. http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/W/worstjobs/index.html Immortality has its good points and bad points, and much appealing SF has played that out. People have been trying to avoid the Grim Reaper since - well, probably since people figured out that they were gonna die. Ourmedia's just opened its virtual doors, offering you its Web space and its tools to let you archive some of your life content, free of charge, for life and beyond. It's essentially a volunteer Internet Archive - but Ourmedia needs you to act whereas the Internet Archive records all Web stuff through automatic spiders. Does the Ourmedia project have legs? It has the pedigree, certainly. Wikipedia, Creative Commons, and other players are working with the Ourmedia project. This thing may have not only legs, but wings. Ourmedia: http://www.ourmedia.org/ Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/ US Info Infrastructure at Risk Talk about stating the obvious.... The President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) issued a major report, "Cyber Security: A Crisis of Prioritization", that concludes that the US information infrastructure is vulnerable to attack. Furthermore, such an attack could generate a host of problems within the interconnected structure of the American computer landscape. What's striking about the report is not the finding, but that the authors believe it is news. Furthermore, the report calls for rather generic solutions: increased funding for cybersecurity training and research; putting academic,industrial, and government cybersecurity research into effective practice; and coordinating the US government's approach to cybersecurity. The latter looks to be an incredibly difficult task given the widely dispersed character of research and research support. Finally, we wonder how this may relate to the government's existing attempts to reform its intelligence services, which are among the heaviest users of information technology in the government.http://www.nitrd.gov/pitac/ PowerBook Motion-Sensor Unleashes Programmer Creativity One of the features of Apple's latest PowerBook laptops is a motion sensor that helps protect hard drives from damage when the laptop is dropped or bumped. Last week, programmer Amit Singh figured out how motion-sensor data could be accessed from the desktop and wrote up a short guide on how to do it. The article became an instant hit in the Mac community, and has led to a lengthy follow-up in which Singh demonstrates further uses for the sensor data. Using his experimental software, he shows how to control a rolling-ball game and how to scroll a page in a Web browser just by tilting the PowerBook. Singh's Web site has videos demonstrating the technique. Several other applications are now available to let you control things on your PowerBook by physically moving it, such as the BubbleGym game and a Python script called Bumptunes that lets you control iTunes by bumping your Powerbook.Singh: http://kernelthread.com/software/ams/ BubbleGym: http://www.balooba.se/baloobasoftware/index.html Bumptunes: http://interconnected.org/home/2005/03/04/apples_powerbook How Bad Is the 302 Redirect Googlejacking Problem? It's been known for some time that it's possible to boost the Google rank of a Web page at the expense of other, more popular pages. This is done with a "302 redirect" HTML header, which temporarily redirects users to another Web page. A hijacker can use "302 redirects" to lie to Google's spiders. Google will then assume the hijacking page is part of the Web site the bad guys are trying to hijack, and will assign it the target site's page rank. An excellent explanation can be found at CLSC. The issue flared up recently with an inflammatory post on Threadwatch, which claimed that millions of pages are hijacked in this manner. Many people are skeptical of that extent and of the poster who made the claim, but the "302 redirect" problem is real enough, as evidenced by an active Slashdot discussion. In one key Slashdot thread, GoogleGuy claims to work for Google and explains the company's response to the issue, which basically amounts to cautiously but perhaps not very effectively gathering more data. GoogleGuy's post attracted some scathing though reasonable criticism. The "302 redirect" hijacking issue is coming to a head.Explanation at CLSC: http://clsc.net/research/google-302-page-hijack.htm Threadwatch: http://www.threadwatch.org/node/2002 Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/articles/05/03/23/1446237.shtml GoogleGuy: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=143465&cid=12024599 Looks like Google is far enough along in its collaboration with publishers to begin including book results in regular searches. Try searching for "Moby Dick book". At the top of the search results, you'll see a little bookshelf logo and several links that lead you to Google Print, where you can see an image of a book page opened to some random place in the volume. The display serves as a convenient platform for Google to hangs ads off the Web pages, ads that mostly lead to online book vendors. That, alas, seems to be the only reason to ever click on these links, since Google Print typically limits you to a small book excerpt chosen by the publisher. You might as well go straight to Amazon.com or the publisher's Web site for that. Curiously, a Google search for "Moby Dick book" turns up no Google Print links. http://print.google.com/ Yahoo Searches Creative Commons, Ups Mail Space to 1 GB This week, Yahoo unveiled a beta search service that lets you search explicitly for content tagged with Creative Commons licenses. The Creative Commons site can help you tag your Web pages and other works with the correct license mocked up in HTML code, and Yahoo will then index your pages using that information. Yahoo's programming search API has also been updated to work with Creative Commons searches. Yahoo also announced this week that in late April it will up the mailbox storage limit in Yahoo Mail to 1 GB.Yahoo Creative Commons Search: http://search.yahoo.com/cc Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org/ Yahoo Mail: http://mail.yahoo.com/ Latest Symantec Internet Security Threat Report Symantec, not without problems of its own, has attempted to position itself as the global leader in information security. Be that as it may, the company's biannual reports regarding trends in Internet attacks make for great reads. The most recent finds a rising threat to confidential information and a steady increase in phishing exploits. Phishing baits you with e-mails that masquerade as legit notices from sites like eBay, PayPal, or banks to lure you into visiting a false lookalike Web site and hook you into revealing your private information like account numbers and passwords. Some of them are fairly clever and eBay, for one, has abandoned e-mail in favor of its own site-based message board. Symantec also detects an increase in the number of Windows security issues. Push past the opening and into the meat of the report, and things get a lot more disturbing. Think you're safe because you use Firefox rather than Internet Explorer? Think again. Symantec offers the report and a press release. Press release:Report: http://www.symantec.com/press/2005/n050321.html http://enterprisesecurity.symantec.com/content.cfm?articleid=1539 Online Social Networking with the Rich and Famous The social networking trend has come and gone, according to some. Others maintain that it's too soon to tell. Wired takes a different approach in a recent article. Wired looks at social networking, more specifically at the social-networking companies, from a marketing point of view. To make themselves a hip place to be, the networking sites have to attract celebrities, which in turn attracts the hoi polloi. It's like the New York City nightclub scene, or high school: are you in the "in" crowd? It's hard to tell for sure, but Friendster seems to be the most successful of these sites, with around 16 million people on its rolls, and the site hopes to earn enough revenue next month to cover its operating costs. The concept doesn't seem like a good place for your retirement funds.http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,66915,00.html The Person Responsible for Leaking "Doctor Who" Has Been Sacked When the pilot of the new "Doctor Who" leaked online a few weeks go (see NSD 11.10), some skeptics speculated that the leak was really a clever viral marketing ploy on the part of the BBC. Alas, the Beeb is not quite so enlightened. Rather than riding the wave of publicity generated by the leak for all it was worth, the BBC reports that the person responsible has been sacked. (Obligatory Monty Python reference included. Search for "sacked". Repeatedly.) As the brief BBC story notes, it was apparently somebody working for a "third-party company" in Canada who did the dirty deed. Obligatory Monty Python Reference:NSD 11.10: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v11/nsd.11.10.html#BS5 BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/4378881.stm http://www.mwscomp.com/movies/grail/g-titles.htm A Flurry of Dotcom Acquisitions The past week saw a flurry of major dotcom acquisitions. The biggest deal by far was the $1.85 billion acquisition of Ask Jeeves by Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp. Probably less expensive but with possibly greater impact on Net culture was Yahoo's purchase of the very popular Flickr photo-sharing site under undisclosed terms. This purchase was echoed by news that Hewlett-Packard is also acquiring a photo-sharing outfit, Snapfish, which allows users to share and print photos online. Terms of the Snapfish deal were also not disclosed. CNET covered the dealmaking like a rug.Ask Jeeves: http://www.irconnect.com/askjinc/pages/news_releases.html?d=74889 CNET 1: http://news.com.com/2100-1030_3-5627679.html CNET 2: http://news.com.com/2100-1038_3-5627640.html CNET 1: http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5628823.html Pssst! Word of Mouth Marketing Meeting Next Week Believe it or not, there is actually a Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA). It is planning its first meeting, but the group is cheating. Instead of word of mouth, WOMMA is relying on more traditional forms of advertising and marketing to gets its message out and to invite attendees. A Wired article on WOMMA is far more informative than its own Web site, since the article gets at the fundamental contradiction of word-of-mouth marketing. We don't think of friendly conversation as an occasion for marketing someone else's product. We recommend things we like to friends and colleagues, and when that isn't spontaneous but engineered, the chat is no longer friendly conversation, but a soft sell. That's probably why the conference isn't being announced through the medium it promotes. Academics sometimes tell a joke about a conference about gossip that one would only learn about through gossip - but WOMMA don't joke.WMMA: http://www.womma.org/ Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,66960,00.html The 18th Annual International Obfuscated C Code Contest This year's International Obfuscated C Code Contest runs from Mar. 21 to May 22. The goal, as always, is to write the most obscure/obfuscated C program possible. There are rules, and past winners have been quite fiendish, so it's not for the faint of heart. Our favorite was 1994's seminal smr.c entry, which at once defined and forever disqualified an entire category of C programs.Contest: http://www.ioccc.org/main.html smr.c: http://www.ioccc.org/years.html#1994_smr ONLINE CULTURE Ed Felten, researcher and anti-digital-rights-management advocate, has coined a variation on the well known Godwin's Law of online discussions. As you may recall, Godwin's Law states: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." Felten's Law occupies similar ground but applies to discussions of copyright policy. Felten remarked: "As a copyright policy discussion grows longer, the probability of pornography being invoked approaches one." He added a corollary: "When the topic of a copyright policy discussion switches to pornography, each side suddenly adopts the other side's arguments." Felten's blog gives an example. Interestingly, Mike Godwin himself named Felten's observation as Felten's Law, and pointed out that it should never be confused with Felton's Law, which holds that no party of role-playing game characters is so powerful that a clever trap can't defeat them. Read about it at the RPG Cliche List.Felten's Law: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000784.html Godwin: http://www.godwinslaw.org/weblog/archive/2005/03/18/feltens-law RPG Cliche List: http://atrocities.primaryerror.net/rpgcliches.html
SURFING SITES The despair that follows a diagnosis of terminal illness can turn into complete emotional breakdown. The notion of a positive attitude in times of personal sorrow can seem farfetched or impossible. Milton Mermikides was diagnosed last November with leukemia, but the inspiring young man has brought his positive and cheerful approach to the Internet. His MiltCentral.com is a personal archive of his fight with leukemia and includes articles, multimedia, and a host of other items. The overall design of his Web site is colorful, creative, and just plain fun. Video on the site allows visitors an inside look at the procedures some leukemia patients must endure. Mermikides takes you inside the hospital as he undergoes a bone-marrow aspiration and painful shots in the gluteus maximus. One thing you won't see on the site is Mermikides with a frown or in surrender. MiltCentral.com is an inspiration that will surely have visitors looking on the brighter side of life.http://www.miltcentral.com/index.html For pure intensity, Iwo Jima was perhaps the top battle in American history. Over 50,000 Marines landed on an island some 4.5 miles long by 2.5 miles wide that was defended by more than 20,000 (nobody knows exactly how many) Japanese soldiers, all completely dug in. In 35 days of nonstop combat, 6,821 Americans were killed; the Japanese, who almost never surrendered, nearly all perished. To this day, Iwo is the very symbol of Marine Corps courage, yet the decision to take the island is still controversial. Was the island, only needed as an emergency airfield, worth the tremendous casualties? The 50th anniversary of the Marines' first assault on Iwo Jima passed Feb. 19, so it behooves us to remember this epic struggle and the men who fought there. Iwo Jima, a Look Back is Raymond Backstrom's online memorial. It features a day-by-day account of the battle, a section on the battle's 27 winners of the Medal of Honor, detailed battle diaries of the three Marine divisions that participated, maps and photographs, and related info. This is a fine site for learning about Iwo Jima; let's hope Backstrom can find a better Web host than Geocities. http://us.geocities.com/rbackstr2000/index.htm Color photography was still in diapers when World War II broke out. Kodachrome had been invented in 1935 but was rare and expensive, so most of our images of the war are black and white. Nonetheless, more than a few keepers of the visual record of the war used color film, and WWII in Color is an extensive online gallery of around 2,000 public-domain photographs of the various theaters of operations, of various national armed forces, and even of the home front. Don't miss the Home Front gallery. The pictures there do not only portray Rosie the Riveter types - although there are a few of those - but also show the towns, the people who lived in them, and in some cases what they looked like after the armies passed through. These images capture the common men and women caught up in this titanic struggle - but there are enough shots of famous leaders and of weapons and transport to satisfy the most jaded military history buff. If you're not completely sated, the site even offers color films for your downloading pleasure and edification. http://www.ww2incolor.com/ The Virtual Museum of Canada has a site that will likely touch even the most jaded hipster. Imagine childhood as a time of fear and struggle for survival. You think having only one color TV and no cable is hard? Head over to Open Hearts Closed Doors for a brief glimpse of life as a Jewish child refugee in World War II. Click on some of the images, and try to imagine a time in your life when your only possession was a metal cup, a small one. And that was if you were lucky enough to survive. This little exhibit presents a part of the story of transition - from surviving the war, to relocation, and eventually to acceptance in Canada. The stories come from first-person accounts and include pictures of people and documentation. http://www.museevirtuel.ca/Exhibitions/orphans/english/ Illuminated Sacred Music and Other Collections The Fondren Digital Collection (FDC) is an ongoing project of the Fondren Library at Rice University that aims to provide online access to a variety of formats and media on a wide range of topics. Constantly augmented, the FDC currently includes three compilations: the William Ward Watkin Collection (papers and photographs of his the academic and architectural career); a collection of illuminated sacred music manuscript leaves, mostly from the 15th century; and a collection of correspondence on and about the composer Robert Schumann (1853-1930). We were certainly awed by the sacred music leaves, which display a stunning array of skill, color, and faith. The Wadkin Collection is a serious immersion into the life and work of an architect whose career spanned many years and was a fixture of the Art and Architecture department at Rice. Note that you may have to disable your pop-up blocker in order to view the various files.http://www.rice.edu/fondren/hyperion/hyperion_home.html The Dubious Origin of Superman The character Superman was created in 1938 and has since become the world's favorite superhero. Most of you know the bare essentials of his origins - he was blasted into outer space by his scientist father shortly before the destruction of his home planet, Krypton, and was adopted and brought up by the kindly Jonathan and Martha Kent when they discovered the infant superhero on Earth. Jay Pinkerton, editor of National Lampoon, has taken old Superman strips and added his own words to the speech bubbles to create a hugely entertaining and vulgar new take on the origins of the Man of Steel. There are too many coffee-splutteringly hilarious one-liners to single one out, but we rather liked the idea that the Kents, mild-mannered Kansas swingers, discovered Supes on their way to a key-party. We gather that DC Comics hates what Pinkerton has done to their character, but the comic fanboys love it, and so do we.http://www.jaypinkerton.com/superman/index.html Toby is the most adorably cute bunny wabbit you could hope to see. His current owner found him, soaking wet and at death's door following a mauling from an alley cat. The kind-hearted Samaritan took in Toby, his new name, and lovingly nursed him back to health. He has done his bit; now, it's time for you to do yours. Toby's savior promises to butcher, cook, and eat Toby on June 30 unless the public contributes $50,000 in donations and merchandise purchases to save him. Some, unsurprisingly, view this with distaste, and the hate mail at Savetoby.com contains entertaining missives from people who threaten to sic PETA and the police on the site's owner. It's hard to know whether the threat of ingestion and/or the alleged $20,000 in earnings are serious, a scam, or just a bit of a joke, but we notice that Paypal seems to have pulled the plug on the donations account. We hope that doesn't mean that Toby will get eaten. Don't miss the mouthwatering rabbit recipes on the site's Recipes page. http://savetoby.com/ Lejo is a Dutch puppeteer who creates puppets using just his hands, some wooden eyes, and a bare minimum of props. The simplicity is part of the charm and the result is both distinctive and hilarious. You can check out the multilingual site (click GB for English) for photographs and videos of his marvelous puppet show. It's amazing what a cute little finger puppet can do - watch him perform magic tricks, play the accordion, and even hit the decks to show his DJ scratching skillz. The show's itinerary would suggest that you won't be able to catch the act live unless you live in northern Europe, but there's a lot of fun to be had at the site regardless. http://www.xs4all.nl/~lrvk/lejo/ When a network feels the need to drum up excitement in a waning television show, it may opt for the classic crossover, a publicity stunt in which a character from one show shows up on another show - for example, Ursula Buffay appeared first on "Mad About You" and then as Phoebe' twin on "Friends". Thom Holbrook's Crossovers & Spin Offs Master Page traces the venerable history of the device, and of spin-offs, from the days of black and white to HDTV. Did you know that George and Louise Jefferson showed up on "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air" not once but twice, the second time sharing the episode with Arnold and Mr. Drummond from "Diff'rent Strokes"? We'd say, "Whatchu talkin' 'bout, Holbrook?" but he verifies each of his crossovers himself before documenting them and documentation appears to be his specialty. http://www.poobala.com/crossoverlist.html If you're wondering what to do with that old junk in your basement or garage, the folks over at SSI have a solution: shred it! The industrial-sized versions of the familiar paper shredders are put to the test by shredding everything from aluminum cans to a refrigerator. These gargantuan machines will even tear a steel drum full of concrete to tiny bits. SSI has a heap of Flash videos for us that depict unadulterated shredding fury. We recommend that you turn down your sound volume - not only do you get to watch all the shredding action, you get to hear it to. Trust us, the sound of a washing machine put through the shredder isn't exactly music to the ears. http://www.ssiworld.com/watch/watch-en.htm You've scoured the antique fairs, eBay, and bargain basements but you still haven't found what you're looking for. If you're a UK resident and can collect your purchase from a local police station, it just might be worth your while to try out Bumblebee Auctions. Much lost and stolen property goes unclaimed each year at police stations around the UK. Previously, the police auctioned these items in person, but the bobbies are embracing the 21st century and have set up an online stall instead. Judging by the array of goods available, the thieves of Britain must be very fond of bicycles - it might be time to buy another padlock. When we checked out the site, we found some definite steals to be had, but of course one man's treasure is another's clutter, so you had better check it out yourself. At least you can count on the honesty of the seller. http://www.bumblebeeauctions.co.uk/XcAuctionPro.asp From the appearance of Jolt Cola on the mainstream retail market in the late '80s, energy drinks have exploded in popularity. Subsequently, attempts to find that perfect excessive pick-me-up can lead to big, nasty headaches, and that's not only due to the sugar content. If you're looking for the perfect tonic for a boost, check out Energy Drink Review, which regularly posts, yes, energy drink reviews. Browse the latest additions, search the monthly archives, or type in a keyword to locate a detailed analysis of a wide variety of energy drinks. The site considers price, size, and active ingredients to come up with an overall rating. While every person's taste differs, this site provides a good start for those who want to narrow down the purchasing decision. http://www.bandddesigns.com/energy/ FLOTSAM & JETSAM Scenes from the Cultural Revolution We generally avoid the cesspool of politics but this site is clever enough to evade our filter. It contrasts quotes from media reports about contemporary American conservative viewpoints and historical material from Maoist China's Cultural Revolution. Though clearly hand-picked, the parallels are striking.http://billmon.org/archives/001752.html What's getting the most attention on eBay this week? Take the pulse of the world's largest online flea market at eBay Pulse, an official site that lists the most popular search phrases for a variety of categories. The market research applications await mining. http://pulse.ebay.com/ If you're into IRC, the QDB (a.k.a. Bash.org) site is for you. Even if you're not into IRC, QDB's top IRC quotes will make you LOL. Check Answers.com for the complicated and sometimes controversial history of the site. QDB: http://bash.org/ Answers.com: http://www.answers.com/topic/bash-org Who's on First "The Day after Tomorrow"? Chris Gavaler provides a hilarious modern re-imagining of the classic Abbott & Costello "Who's on First?" routine with movie titles. It's possibly the most worthy homage so far to the original. Baseball Almanac has the text and audio of Abbott & Costello, on their way to comedic immortality, doing the original routine on radio.Gavaler: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2005/3/4gavaler.html Who's on First?: http://www.baseball-almanac.com/humor4.shtml Whitehousetapes.org features hours and hours of tape-recorded Presidential phonecalls. The one where LBJ orders a pair of pants is thought to be the only Oval office phonecall to feature both the words "nuts" and "bunghole", although we haven't trawled through JFK's tapes to see if that's accurate. http://www.whitehousetapes.org/clips/1964_0809_lbj_haggar_pants.html Tony Tang and Eric Pattison came up with this idea over two years ago. They combined an RFID tag with a dart gun and created their own form of ballistic information transfer. It's the carrier pigeon for the modern age. http://grouplab.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/phidgets/gallery/dartmail.html Type an author's name or title keyword and it will be rendered with cover photos of the books, slurped from an Amazon.com search. Try "Shakespeare" - very cool. http://amaztype.tha.jp/ Fractured English emanating from Japan is nothing new, but here's an original take on the phenomenon. Japanese porn magazine covers feature amusing and occasionally puzzling exclamations. Do we need to warn you that the site is emphatically not safe for work? http://www.adultengrish.com/content_pages/mags/mags.htm Robo-Maid is a clever floor-dusting gadget, similar in purpose to a Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner. We're ashamed to admit that when we first saw the title, we envisioned a Sorayama gynoid in an erotic French maid's outfit. Robotic hamster balls trapped in a Frisbee just don't have the same appeal. Robo-Maid: http://www.the-robo-maid.com/ Sorayama: http://www.sorayama.net/gynoids/gynoids.html The Experimental Gameplay Project To qualify for the Experimental Gameplay Project, a lone game designer must build a game in less than a week, including all art, sound, and programming. Each game must be based on a single concept - e.g. gravity, vegetation, or swarm behavior. The four participants present their 17 games.http://www.experimentalgameplay.com/ 3M's Duct Tape Workshop shows you step by step how to make a wallet out of everybody's favorite fix-it tool. What about making money out of duct tape? 3M has that particular market cornered. We'll also remind you of the wallet instructions from the Duct Tape Guys, whom we covered in NSD 8.35. 3M: http://tinyurl.com/3b25 Duct Tape Guys: http://tinyurl.com/48w74 If you need 50 million digits of pi, and you need them before your own computer can generate them, try Digits of Pi. Why, it also has 30-million-digit slices of 1/pi. NSD and pi have a connection from way back, but you'll have to hunt for it on the Pi-Search Page. Digits of Pi: http://www.cecm.sfu.ca/projects/ISC/data/pi.html Pi-Search Page: http://www.angio.net/pi/piquery SOFTWARE Mozilla, Thunderbird, Firefox Updated The Mozilla Project has updated its big three. These updates increase security and stability; they add no new features. The release notes for each application describe the security bugs, all serious enough to warrant a quick fix. It's a good idea to upgrade your version ASAP.Firefox 1.0.2: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ Thunderbird 1.0.2: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/ Mozilla 1.7.6: http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/ IBM Unveils FairUCE Anti-Spam Software IBM's new anti-spam technology, FairUCE, tries to match the identity of an e-mail's sender against several criteria. The simplest and easiest check compares the IP address of the sending machine to the declared mailservers of the sending domain. Another criterion is how long the source domain has been registered. IBM says future releases will include checks of Sender Policy Framework data, which is another way to verify mailserver identity. If the program can't verify that the source of an e-mail is legitimate, it sends a challenge to the originating machine in hopes of finding a human there. IBM claims that this alone weeds out over 80% of spam sources. Currently, FairUCE only works with the Postfix mailserver, requires sysadmin privileges to install, and is not open source. It appears that IBM has only tested it on Linux systems with Java. As with most anti-spam systems, FairUCE should be considered only part of the solution - it won't protect against established Web sites that send out spam, and spammers will inevitably find ways to get around it.http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/fairuce |
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