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Internet Archive - The Lost Web: "A few isolated clusters of miraculously primodial Web content still survive, not in a Hypermedia Museum display case, but on the very same servers upon which they were laboriously constructed back in 1994 or 1995." Steve Baldwin is the creator of Ghost Sites of the Web, the Net's only resource identifying and critiquing aging, abandoned, and derelict web sites.
Bobby WorldWide is a tool for Web page authors. It helps them identify changes to their pages so users with disabilities can more easily use their Web pages. For example, a blind user will be aided by adding a sound track to a movie, and a hard-of-hearing user will be aided by a written transcript of a sound file on a Web page. Bobby will recommend that these be added if they do not already exist.
The Web the Way It Was - Leander Kahney, WIRED.com: "In a sign that content is once again king, one of the Web's earliest and most interesting publishing activities -- weblogging -- appears to be undergoing a huge surge in popularity."
Son of DIVX: DVD Copy Control. An excellent article by Rob Landley of Fool.com about DeCSS. "The deCSS program is neither designed nor necessary for copying DVD movies, which isn't economically feasible anyway and not technically possible with the partially prewritten blank disks being sold today. In any case, a tool to copy DVDs would be legal for personal use."
A large number of sites are attempting the mirror the CSS technology information, and a small fraction of these are listed below. Several will no doubt be down:
www.devzero.org/freecss.htmlMy friend Iain installed a desktop-style firewall program on his
cable modem connected PC some time ago, and assailed me with stories of hacker attacks. It wasn't that I didn't believe him, but rather that I sometimes think of myself as hackerboy. What a fool I am: even script kiddies can be a bit of a problem.
So after trying out the bloated Norton Internet Security 2000, I have been lucky enough to find two free apps that bring more to the table. ZoneAlarm is a free "personal" firewall that will only allows traffic that you understand and initiate. The other is Proxomitron, which on top of managing proxy access is also a Swiss Army knife of sorts for Web page filtering. For example, the thing will stop pop-up alerts and confirm boxes, convert blinking text to bold, and even remove frames or tables from a page.
Why do you need both? A proxy will hide your real IP, the address of your computer, from servers that you visit. The firewall will notify you of any attempts to either contact your computer over the Internet, or attempts by your own machine to call another server. While you won't be exactly invisable, you will be more secure.
None of these percautions should stop you from having maximum fun with your cable modem. God knows I'm trying. My second PC, the old IBM Aptiva warhorse that I couldn't really upgrade, now has its own static IP. I am, for the moment, still running Windows 98 on it, more for the file sharing than anything. Want a domain name to go with that IP? Try Dynamic DNS Network Services. Need a server? I've been playing around with the Sambar Server.
Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life: "Bad Subjects seeks to revitalize progressive politics in retreat. We think too many people on the left have taken their convictions for granted. So we challenge progressive dogma by encouraging readers to think about the political dimension to all aspects of everyday life. We also seek to broaden the audience for leftist and progressive writing, through a commitment to accessibility and contemporary relevance."
Most documents made available on the World-Wide Web can be considered part of an infostructure -- an information resource database with a specifically designed structure. Infostructures often contain a wide variety of information sources, in the form of interlinked documents at distributed sites, which are maintained by a number of different document owners (usually, but not necessarily, the original document authors). Individual documents may also be shared by multiple infostructures. Since it is rarely static, the content of an infostructure is likely to change over time and may vary from the intended structure. Documents may be moved or deleted, referenced information may change, and hypertext links may be broken.
As it grows, an infostructure becomes complex and difficult to maintain. Such maintenance currently relies upon the error logs of each server (often never relayed to the document owners), the complaints of users (often not seen by the actual document maintainers), and periodic manual traversals by each owner of all the webs for which they are responsible. Since thorough manual traversal of a web can be time-consuming and boring, maintenance is rarely or inconsistently performed and the infostructure eventually becomes corrupted. What is needed is an automated means for traversing a web of documents and checking for changes which may require the attention of the human maintainers (owners) of that web.
The Multi-Owner Maintenance spider (MOMspider) has been developed to at least partially solve this maintenance problem. MOMspider can periodically traverse a list of webs (by owner, site, or document tree), check each web for any changes which may require its owner's attention, and build a special index document that lists out the attributes and connections of the web in a form that can itself be traversed as a hypertext document. This paper describes the design of MOMspider and how it was influenced by the nature of distributed hypertext maintenance and requirements for the good behavior of any web-traversing robot. It also includes discussion of the efficiency requirements for maintaining world-wide webs and proposed changes to HTML and HTTP to support distributed maintenance. The paper concludes with a short description of MOMspider's future and pointers to its freeware distribution site.
BotSpot classifies bots (a software tool for digging through data) and intelligent agents by subject... Most of the bots you'll find discussed at BotSpot can be downloaded and used on your computer; some require a fee for permanent registration. Others are completely free. Browse through Bots by Category to begin your journey in the brave new world of bots.
As it turns out, Robot Wisdom Weblog was the first to use the term weblog, in December 1997. More interesting things at Jorn Barger's Weblog Resources FAQ.
What appeared to be a one-off denial of service (DDoS) attack Monday against the Web's most popular site, Yahoo, has turned into something else. We just don't yet know what.
A denial of service is one of the simplist attacks one can pull on a site. The idea is to flood the site with requests for data, and therefore clog the works. It is somewhat similar to getting a busy signal when using a telephone. To suggest that the sites are "under attack" is a bit misleading; a DDoS attack rarely means any data is lost or user information compromised.
The Hacker News Network today asked, "Who's next?" It's a valid enough question, as up until this point only high-profile commercial sites have been hit.
I suppose this will get everyones juices flowing about "cyber-terrorism," though I have to say I'm not sure how there's much terror in a DDoS.
I read today with some concern of the impending lawsuit
brought by Canada's most notorious media bully, Conrad Black, against a member of Parliament here.
It seems said member was hoaxed by a local satirical magazine and ended up issuing a press release calling Black's newspaper chain "corporate welfare bums." When he discovered that he'd been duped the MP apologized, but that wasn't good enough for Black et. al. Now they are suing the fellow for CDN$500 000. Said Black's lawyer, "There's a price to be paid for this sort of stupidity."
Some hoax. Does this sound like a mean-spirited nuisance lawsuit to you? Perhaps a huge corporation trying to harass a politician and political party with whom they do not agree? An out-of-control media tyrant who is used to getting his own way? It does? Well, be sure not to say so or I expect you will be the next to be sued by Mr. Black and his cabal under Canada's wacky libel laws.
The best approach would seem to be that taken by a wonderful Web site called BlackEnvy: accept that you are envious of Mr. Conrad and his lovely and talented wife Barbara Amiel, and spread the word of their "prodigious political potency."
I am not "sleeping like a bear in some cave," though thanks to Lori from Maryland for asking about that.
I have begun to populate the Horrible Truth area. Specifically, I have been writing about my UFO "experience" when I was a wee tad of 12 in Nova Scotia.
As it turns out, the thing you are reading, this literary form of links and gossip and edification, is called a weblog, or, more precisely, a blog. I like the term blog if only because "weblog" makes me think of an access log, and when I do searches on the term I get people's Webtrends reports. Julia Keller of the Chicago Tribune has an article talking about blogs, as does Jim Battey of Infoworld.com. I will probably slap all this stuff into a site at some point, as I have been having trouble finding blog software and info.
A blog also appears to be a drink. Here's how to make one:
1 can lemonade
1 can orange juice
1 can limeade
4 cans vodka or 151 rum
1/2 can of grenadine juice
Chris Nandor, perl.com, RSS and You.
I recommend that everyone get some education about the free DVD conflict that has been ongoing for several months. With depressing predictability the mainstream media is towing the party line, saying that the cracking of the weak DVD encryption will somehow mean that people will be copying DVDs. Ignored is the fact that (1) pirates in Asia have been copying and selling DVDs for months without decrypting them and (2) it is more expensive to decrypt and then copy a DVD then it is to buy a DVD in a store. An excellent story by Rob Landley at Fool.com gives the whole story, and an advocacy site called OpenDVD.com has been established.
I cannot help but be reminded of the introduction of the music CD way back in the 1980s. Whatever the advantages of the format, the retail price of a CD was and remains well above the price of a vinyl LP, even though CDs are cheaper to produce. Initially this was what I would consider to be plateau pricing: a CD was better quality than an LP, and therefore was priced higher. But now, with virtually no access to vinyl music, the price remains the same.
Enter the DVD. Like the CD, it is designed to provide significant advantages over its predecessor medium, in this case the video tape. But these advantages come with a high price. Copying is impossible. One cannot "backup" a DVD as one might copy a CD; one cannot even make a video tape copy of it. As well, regional coding make playing DVDs from other parts of the world difficult or impossible. And, of course, they cost more than video tapes to purchase, though, I expect, not to produce.
While we can count on industry to maximize its profits, sometimes by questionable means, we can also depend on the hacker ethic to resist that which it considers excessive. So it is with open DVD.
joan stark's ASCII Art Gallery: "-- unique text graphics for use in email, ezines, BBSs, mIRC, MUDs, and text-only webpage development. This website showcases the amazing creations of 'jgs', as well as provides complete information, history, and tutorials."
During my thesis research last year I had the pleasure of being able to read an original edition copy of Theodor Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines, long out-of-print. Nelson is an academic and computer visionary who is generally credited with creating the term "hypertext" in 1965. While hypertext had been conceived of as early as the 1940s, Nelson was the first to construct it within the context of the emerging computer technologies of the 1960s and 70s as a new mode of publication.
The word "visionary" gets thrown around quite a bit when one talks about computers and the Internet: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos ... all visionaries. And then you read this book, which originally appeared in the 1970s, based on ideas Nelson developed in the 1960s, and you discover what visionary really means. Dream Machines is a bona fide computer culture classic; it is shocking that such an influential and important book is out of print.
Admittedly, I start many books in the middle, and so it was with Cremo and Thompson's Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race. My disappointment began when I read the chapter on "ape men" and the possible survival of bigfoot-like hominids well into the modern era. While I'm not completely closed to the idea, the section smacked of pseudo-science: little better than the Bigfoot books of the 1970s, filled with dubious eye witness accounts and third-hand facts. Given all the silliness and exploitation within crypto-zoology over the years, we need a bit more than what the authors provide to take this seriously. And so it is for much of this book. Cremo and Thompson have collected a great deal of material, some if contradictory, much of is dubious, and crafted a thesis which is difficult to trust. That's a shame, because there is more than enough fascinating, legitimate material on anomalous discoveries to easily fill a book this size.
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