Okay, everybody: take a Valium. I was mildly annoyed this morning by a poorly edited story in the Globe and Mail about the Code Red worm. "Protect against 'Code Red', experts urge" says the headline, which I am sure caused a lot of part-time computer users to rush out to Future Shop in search of Norton Anti-Virus.

Code Red is a very specific type of worm; it can only infect servers running some flavour of the Microsoft NT/2000 operating system and the IIS Web server. If there is any impact on Joe Internet, it will be a potential slowdown in network performance tonight when the infected servers begin bombarding the White House site with packets.

Or not. The mainstream media is making Code Red sound like an Internet apocalypse, and this much press attention does get noticed by senior management, resulting in enormous pressure on sysadmins to correct the problem. Remember, this can be fixed with a simple software patch, and if worse comes to worse, servers can be physically disconnected from the network. I cannot imagine, after the hype of the past few days, that many sysadmins have left their servers un-patched.

David Perry, director of global education for Trend Micro, told CNN today that "There will definitely be some traffic from this worm this evening. But I don't think there will be the widespread damage that's predicted. I could be wrong. But I don't think we're going to see anything like we've heard about."

We'll find out at 8 pm, when Code Red is expected to spring to life.

Posted by John at 4:20 PM | Permalink

Singlecell.org: "humankind's recent discovery of the World Wide Web has entailed a concomitant investigation of its fauna, and the birth of a new field, online zoology. SINGLECELL is a monthly bestiary of these newfound species: a collection of online life-forms discovered and reared by a diverse group of computational artists and designers."

Posted by John at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Evolutionzone.com by Marius Watz: Single celled design guerilla, new and old media, static and moving images.

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Hands up for martin wattenberg; his shape of song is beautiful... for more of martin's work, see bewitched.

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Interview with Seth Gordon: "If you attended the first Information Architecture Summit, you might remember Seth as one of the main rabble-rousers; he really got many of the librarians present all hot and bothered by his comments on how overrated information organization actually is. After time at marchFirst and ZEFER, Seth is now enjoying his new role as the ACIA's southeast Asia correspondent. He also squeezes in some user experience consulting when he can, drawing from experience working for such clients as AltaVista, Tower Records, and National Geographic. In this interview Seth has a lot of important stuff to say, especially about which information architecture metrics are good and which aren't..."

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I guess we'll walk. Much of eastern Canada is currently in the grip of one of the worst summers for smog on record, and a recent poll showed that 58 per cent of Canadians support the idea of limiting car use on smoggy days. However, just 37 per cent said they were willing to pay more taxes in order to improve public transportation.

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Over the past few days I have received well over 30 emails containing the Sircam.A virus/whale, all from distant work acquaintances mostly in Latin America. I cannot help but wonder, after the Love Bug and various other worms, why on earth anti-virus software isn't bundled with new PCs and Macs, and why personal fire walls aren't part of the operating system.

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B-movies, Godzilla, and bad movie reviews. The best resource for cult and pyschotronic film madness!

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Thomas Nolle, a New Jersey telecommunications consultant, tells us what's wrong with the Internet: "The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn't excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws. The problem is that it was devised by a bunch of hippie anarchists who didn't have a strong profit motive. But this is a business, not a government-sponsored network." My suggestion to Nolle: Build your own network.

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The Internet in Decline: "In the past two months, the number of active Internet users declined 1.6 percent and the number of people with Net connections stayed flat, according to data from Nielsen NetRatings (NTRT). That’s off from a year ago in June, when active Internet users were up 3.2 percent - or two years ago, when the same figure jumped 4.3 percent."

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Matt Drudge gave away the ending of Planet of the Apes, and director Tim Burton is really angry. Says Burton: "These Internet people are as dark as they come."

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"There might be consumer expectations here, but there is no legal right." For the last several months, music consumers around the world have unwittingly been buying CDs that include technology designed to discourage them from making copies on their PCs. The technology inserts audible clicks and pops into music files that are copied from a CD onto a PC. According to Macrovision, the company that has provided the technology to several major music labels.

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Without his schizophrenia, Charles "Buddy" Bolden - the man credited by some with starting off the jazz movement - might never have started improvisation.

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Who are the power elite, and what do they do? They Rule. Conceived, designed and built in Flash by Josh ON and the FutureFarmers.

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Drug War Facts from Common Sense for Drug Policy: "Updated regularly, Drug War Facts provides reliable information with credible citations on important criminal justice and public health issues. For this revised edition of Drug War Facts, our projects coordinator Doug McVay has analyzed data from a variety of sources to find new items for inclusion as well as updated those that appeared in earlier editions. Subsequent facts with the body of the relevant citations are carefully compiled and then scrutinized as to accuracy before posting. Our mission is to offer useful facts cited from authoritative sources to a debate which is often characterized by myths, error and emotion. We believe an informed society will correct its errors and generate wise policies over time."

Posted by John at 3:56 PM | Permalink

I wish I could spend the entire summer sitting in movie theatres watching flicks like the kind I saw this past weekend. The Fantasia Festival opened in Montreal this past week. Exhausted and needing to worship at the Temple of Monkeyhead, I made my weary way via Voyegeur bus to Montreal. If I could sit in the Cinema Imperial all summer and watch Hong Kong action films and anime and the Korean new wave, I'd do it.

You might get to the point when you think, There is nothing new in this world, Anything new would be frightening. To you, I say, Go to Fantasia. Here's what I saw:

Otogiriso (St. John's Wort) was shot entirely on digital video, and as one reviewer commented, is the first all-digital "film" to actually look good. Fantasia used a large, hi-res video projector to show the thing, and it was stunning. Director Ten Shimoyama has no qualms about using video-specific effects, such as increasing colour saturation, to good effect.

This is a movie about a video game: the protagonists are video game makers, and their latest game is Otogiriso. And Otogiriso is, in fact, one of Japan's best selling Playstation and Super Nintendo games. Unlike the doomed film students in the Blair Witch Project, the protagonists visit a haunted house with a mobile phone, video camera, and laptop, along with a wireless Internet connection. During a violent storm, a tree crushes their car; although trapped physically, they can still interact with their colleagues at the video game studio where they work.

Otogiriso's challenge does not come from the plot, or the characters, which fell pretty standard. Rather, there is a discourse here of personal empowerment through technology, not just to solve problems, but to change reality. You will have to watch it all the way through to the end to see what I mean.

Ban-chick-wang (The Foul King) is a wrestling movie, but nothing like El Santo or Vision Quest or Ready to Rumble. Dao-Ho (Song Kang-ho) is a put-upon bank clerk. Late for work once too often, his boss puts him in a headlock and won't let him go. Dao-Ho turns to pro wrestling to learn to defend himself and gain self confidence. High jinks ensue.

The Foul King is the latest from Korean director Kim Ji-wun, who is leading something of a Korean "new wave." Ostensibly this is a comedy; there is a great deal of expert physical humour, performed expertly by Song Kang-ho as the title character. But there is also substantial irony here. Pro wrestling is, after all, a performance. The fighting is not real, and the skills Dao-Ho learns have little application outside the ring. The audience wants Dao-Ho's success to transfer, impossibly, to the real world, and in that tension lies the real success of the film.

Posted by John at 7:45 PM | Permalink

Smoking creates "indirect positive effects." A report from tobacco giant Philip Morris concluded that the Czech government saved money because of the "indirect positive effects" of the early deaths of cigarette-smokers. PM makes about 80 percent of the cigarettes smoked in the Czech Republic. Said a Philip Morris spokesman: "Tobacco is a controversial industry, but we are still an industry and sometimes we need some economic data on our industry."

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Anonymous Juice is the on-line arm of the well-known photocopied magazine of the same title. Includes "the review of everything I've ever encountered."

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AnandTech, originally named Anand's Hardware Tech Page, was actually started up as a guide to upgrading a Socket-7 system to an AMD K6 based computer. Over the past five years it has grown into one of the most comprehensive independent Web sites devoted to PC hardware.

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User Agreements and a 'Timeless Issue': "Finding that 'the timeless issue of assent' has continuing vitality in the realm of cyberspace, a federal judge has ruled that Internet users who downloaded free software from a Web site were not bound by the terms of a software licensing agreement because they never consented to it."

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The head of the World Trade Organization, Michael Moore, seems a little confused about Internet entrepreneurs and their role in disrupting recent WTO meetings. Said Moore in a recent speech: "It would strengthen the hand of those who seek change if (non-governmental groups) distance themselves from masked stone-throwers who claim to want more transparency, anti-globalization dot-com-types who trot out slogans that are trite, shallow and superficial... This will not do as a substitute for civilized discourse."

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WEIRDSVILLE.com presents a mind-bending selection of swankadelic sounds from the hidden caverns of the underground. Their vinyl archeologist, DJ Doktor Benway, seems to have travelled deep into the sonic jungles to excavate a tantalizing mix of strange and obscure music. From the electronic to the organic, exotic to the narcotic, acid surf, psychedelic lounge, schizo C&W, avant-garde dub, free jazz, and noise skronk. Remember, the Universal Cosmic Groove invites you to GET WEIRD.

Posted by John at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Content filtering as business model: A Swedish company named TRIC develops a system to help content providers charge ISPs for allowing their users to access a Web site. And why won't this business model work? AOL has been making deals for "exclusive" content for years through their proprietary system; ISP @Home has tried the same thing and found its audience, which is more Web-savvy then the AOL crowd, didn't care. I would expect that IP filtering could take care of this, and I am sure that is central to the software TRIC has developed. This is, I think, a non-story.

Posted by John at 11:03 AM | Permalink

The "big stories" on the CNN homepage: Second attempt launched to save injured whale, Backstreet Boys postpone summer concerts, and, the big news in the year's political sex scandal, D.C. police want to search congressman's apartment. Please wake me up when the real reporters return to CNN.

Posted by John at 8:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I uninstalled Napster today. Very good review at Zdnet of Napster alternatives, but no mention of OpenCola.

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Lifted in part from nortonblog:

There's a story told by one of the more prominent people associated with the whole Bob Dobbs, Church of the SubGenius deal. We'll call this story a myth, in the academic sense, meaning that it's useful to explain things whether or not the story itself is actually true.

One day the guy is on an elevator, and there is one other guy in there along with him. He recognizes the other guy: he is a poorly regarded science fiction writer prone to self-aggrandizing statements who has managed to kick off something of a, well, let's be charitable and call it a "movement."

<coughcultcough>

So the first guy turns to him and asks "Ron, how did you do it? How do you get everybody to buy into your bs?"

Ron was apparently in a magnanimous mood, because he told him. And what he told him is absolutely, mathematically, provably and incontrovertibly true:

"You know how smart the average person is, right? Well, half of them are dumber than that."

Posted by John at 12:25 AM | Permalink

Yet another reason to avoid the Battlefield Earth DVD: A brand new "feature" called Regional Coding Enhancement, or RCE. Having the word "enhancement" in the title might make us think that we, the consumer, might actually benefit for this technology, but that isn't the case. The only people who will benefit are the movie studios. Thanks to RCE, if you own a region-free DVD player, guess what? You can't play Battlefield Earth on it.

Posted by John at 5:35 PM | Permalink

Bill Gates finds yet another way to scare the crap out of me. Is he going to eat those things? Oh, they mean all the ideas he stole from others and now leaves lying around on his floor, useless.

Posted by John at 4:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If Americans are less supportive of First Amendment rights than they were a year ago (according to an annual poll released by the First Amendment Center), and almost four in 10 respondents (39%) believe the First Amendment goes too far in guaranteeing rights, how would they suggest that these rights be curtailed?

Posted by John at 10:24 AM | Permalink

"WEBZINE represents people with a passion and a drive to create media that is outside of the mainstream, media where expression, rather than money is the bottom line. WEBZINE celebrates the fact that the Internet is still a powerful tool for personal publishers, despite the avalanche of corporate sites... Just because the business press fixates on venture capital, advertising budgets, revenue models and ROI doesn't mean the medium is dead."

Posted by John at 10:19 AM | Permalink

Plutonium: The Contest: "Basically, we want to create a memorial to plutonium, that nasty substance that stays radioactive for thousands of years, it can be made into nuclear bombs, and is deadly if ingested. But hiding it away, as conventional notions dictate, will prevent the world from learning anything from its folly... We're also giving away more than $3,000 in prizes to the person or persons who come up with the best design for our Plutonium Memorial."

Posted by John at 10:18 AM | Permalink

Everything as mess; that's what it felt like today, a lot of the time, though not all the time. Partly the result of my sister's visit, I had to spend some time alone, and D didn't understand.

Donna rented The Kingdom, a Danish miniseries something like E.R. visits Twin Peaks, but I hate suggesting a Hollywood description when there is something really refreshing and interesting. Just go get it.

Prior to that, walking the dog and then going to the coffee place because I wanted cake, overpriced and too sweet and I didn't finish.

Posted by John at 11:42 PM | Permalink

Writes Declan McCullagh for Wired News:

In the last few weeks, a law firm representing Lyons Partnership -- which owns the rights to Barney -- has stepped up its efforts to yank hundreds of humor sites poking fun at the children's cartoon character that so many Internet users love to hate... A typical nastygram from Gibney, Anthony and Flaherty goes something like this: "We have reviewed your website and have concluded that it incorporates the use and threat of violence towards the children's character Barney without permission from Lyons Partnership.

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Space Art in Children's books 1950's to 1970's: Gives an illustrated history of space art 1949-1974 found in children's books of the period.

Posted by John at 11:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week I purchased two books about making the Web that are quite different in every aspect except one: they are both crazy excellent.

Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think is the best introduction to Web usability I have seen in quite awhile. This is not the usability fundamentalist of Jakob Nielsen, ripping apart Web sites that don't adhere to some arbitrary standard. Krug writes about general principles and best practice, but his core philosophy is, as it should be, user testing. Usability is an art as much as a science, and it certainly isn't engineering. What is culturally appropriate for one audience will fall flat for another. The trick, I think, is to be able to look at a Web site as a new user would.

Nathan Shedroff's Experience Design isn't about usability, at least not directly. Nathan asks us to enter an environment -- a restaurent, gallery, Web site, whatever -- and ask questions about how it was constructed. This is not a technical book or a how-to manual: this is a cup of coffee, a jolt to get you going. Experience Design reminds me of the visually-centred books Marshall McLuhan created in the late-1960s, and the coffee table paperbacks of architect Paulo Soleri. One can open the book to any page and see an idea, a provocation, or a question, and yet read it cover to cover. For the designer, the visuals are evocative. It is about challenge, thank god.

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