Compendium

Entries

Tuesday, April 30, 2002

The social network

Last month, Valdis Krebs used network mapping techniques to chart a terrorist network.

Now he reverses things - using some sociological techniques to look at how to design a computer network. In The Social Life of Routers, he says human interactions and networks have more in common than you might think:

Social network analysts look at complex human systems as an interconnected system of nodes (people and groups) and ties (relationships and flows)--much like an internetwork of routers and links. Human networks are often unplanned, emergent systems. Their growth is sporadic and self-organizing. Network ties end up being unevenly distributed, with some areas of the network having a high density of links and other areas of the network sparsely connected. These are called "small world networks." Computer networks often end up with similar patterns of connections--dense interconnectivity within subnetworks, and sparser connections uniting subnetworks into a larger internetwork.

Using these techniques, he says, can help in measuring and meeting the goals of reducing hop count, reducing available paths and increasing the number of failures a network can withstand.

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Stupid computer stories

Computer Stupidities should really be titled Computer USER Stupidities, but in any case, lots of stuff to keep you busy here, even if many of the stories will sound familiar.

Via WebWord

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Monday, April 29, 2002

This XP patch is no fairy tale

Q310510: Recommended Update - Microsoft is being modest; this is THE XP patch of the year.

Via MetaFilter.

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A gift for your outer geek

Geek Culture Caps are geek beenies, complete with propeller (well, you can get 'em without propellers and save some money, but what's the point?)

Via Danelope.

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The Internet is for everyone, isn't it?

RFC 3271 doesn't describe some cool new way to zap management packets over IP or anything. Instead, it's Vint Cerf's answer to this question:

The Internet is for everyone
How easy to say - how hard to achieve!
How have we progressed towards this noble goal?

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Friday, April 26, 2002

Inter-fada just a myth?

Virus icononclast Rob Rosenberger has been turning his jaundiced eye of late on a growing groundswell of stories about the supposed all-out cyber-war between Israelis and Palestinians. In his latest rant, Rosenberger says this whole "Inter-fada" thing is more like a game played by a bunch of not-particularly skilled script kiddies:

Hoffman (perhaps unintentionally) pointed out the absurdity of an Israeli-Palestinian cyberwar when she observed: "since a March 29 terrorist suicide bombing at an Israeli resort hotel and Israel's subsequent military onslaught in the West Bank, Israel has been the victim of 10 significant computer hacking incidents."

Wow, ten hacking incidents? That'll teach Israel not to invade the West Bank.

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Saving the DNS root

Paul Hoffman argues that in all the hullaballoo over ICANN and its, um, domain over such things as global top-level domains, a key issue is being lost: the administration of the DNS root, which, of course, is at the heart of the Internet itself.

In this paper, Hoffman argues for steps he said will keep the name servers running well, including creation of a TLD Secretariat, the addition of 25 new gTLDs every six months and, finally, the end of ICANN itself:

While ICANN looks unfixable, the DNS root is still manageable. Where ICANN has floundered, the DNS root operators have fostered a useful and stable Internet naming system. This part of the Internet has weathered the massive growth of both traffic and avarice, and its resilience is admirable.

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Thursday, April 25, 2002

New spyware deletes anti-spyware software

You think that's your PC sitting quietly there on your desk. In fact, it's a battleground. At first, you had to worry about virus invaders. Now, though, you have to worry about warring applications, too. And not just conflicting DLLs anymore.

Adaware is a very nice little app you can download to clean your system of spyware, applications that monitor what you do on the Web and pester you with pop-ups and strange-colored hyperlinks.

But the spyware purveyors are fighting back. Spyware Weekly reports:

There is a software media player being distributed which searches for and removes Adaware if it is installed. Radlight media player has been tested by several testers and by the Adaware developer himself. Radlight, which bundles with the spyware application "Savenow" and with New.Net software, makes repeated searches for the installation of Adaware and removes it if found.

The EULA that comes with Radlight (quick, when's the last time you read a EULA?) states:

You are not allowed to use any third party program (e.g Ad-aware) to uninstall application bundled with RadLight. Such programs will be removed.

Naturally, Lavasoft, which makes Adaware, vows to fight back.

Simple solution this time: Find some other media player. I hear RealNetworks and Microsoft have some you can download.

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All Pong, all the time

More proof dot-com insanity is not quite dead: Reuters reports that

1. Comcast has spent $150 million to set up a new cable channel devoted entirely to video games
   
2. It plans to broadcast a live game of Pong for seven straight days.
   

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Wednesday, April 24, 2002

Robbing Peter to wire Paul at Verizon

For some, MetaFilter is more than just a Web site - it's an adddiction, a place to keep up with what's going on both on the Web and around the world. So when MetaFilter stopped coming up on Monday afternoon, at least a couple of us here at Fusion Central started going through severe withdrawal and wondering "what the hell is going on?"

Jason Levine, who shares a T1 with MetaFilter in Manhattan discusses the outage:

(Verizon techs) came this afternoon, and within an hour, determined that another Verizon tech had stolen one of the cable pairs that makes up the T1 to use in another line. The kicker? The tech said that they'll never be able to figure out who did it. Yep, that's right -- they know that it happened at 12:53 PM, and they know which pair was involved, but their records aren't good enough to determine who it was that caused a 30-hour outage on a T1.

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The big ball o' Ethernet cable

Used to be, obsessed people would make giant balls out of tin foil or rubber bands. Then people got creative. There's an artist making a giant ball out of used bras (hurry, she still needs 11,500 to complete her project). And now we've got Etherknot, a project to build a giant ball out of used Ethernet cables.

We welcome any artist to contact companies to find unused wire and cable suitable for contribution.

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How one college handles hackers

DePaul University gets tough.

Via Weblog Wannabe.

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Tuesday, April 23, 2002

You don't want to get a librarian mad

Fiat Lux is an attempt by librarians to catalog good, solid information on the Web.

Now, you might be tempted to think "what a phenomenal waste of effort - that's why God invented Yahoo and Google!"

But as Karen Schneider writes, Yahoo today is

clogged with pop-up ads, compromised by paid placement, and cluttered with irrelevant features.

Schneider, who's already coordinator of The Librarian's Index to the Internet adds:

We librarians clearly have a clue about organizing the Internet. In the hectic go-go years of dot-com mania, many other mainstream Internet portals came and went, while the earnest little library-built portals struggled along on amazingly Spartan budgets and support systems, thriving on the hard work and enthusiastic support of our small user corps. ... What we lacked in glitzy IPOs complete with ice carvings at the company party was a total devotion to our mission: public service.

We can’t let this chance pass. The dot-com world is in an atypically quiescent mood, now that the big party is over and the 22-year-olds in their Lexus SUVs have gone back to Minnesota. (Not that there’s anything wrong with Minnesota.) People "out there" - our potential users - increasingly need good electronic information, and the public has a renewed interest in government for the people, by the people.

Via The Shifted Librarian.

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Proof that Apple is flush with success

Presenting: The iToilet.

Via Vitally Important Information.

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N.Y. Times Random Registration Generator

The only surprise is that this took so long, this being an app that logs you into whichever Times story you want to see by generating a random user ID and bogus demographic profile to go with it.

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Monday, April 22, 2002

The Commodore 64 Parallel Super-Computer

Yes, of course, there's a project to link those old doorstops up in thousands of attics into a sentient being, or something:

A system design has been developed but volunteers are needed to code the operating software for the system.

But, hurry! Organizers want to get the thing running in time for the fall Vintage Computer Festival in Silicon Valley.

Via Boing Boing.

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Privacy Bird tells on AT&T

A few days ago, I wrote about some beta software from AT&T, called the Privacy Bird, that lets you know whether the Web sites you visit will do anything with your information you don't want them to (the plug-in chirps when you get to a nice site and caws when you get to a mean site). A reader writes:

I saw your mention of the privacy bird. This being a largely useless, completely uncertified, but interesting application, naturally I had to download it. I have an att.net account. After I loaded up the AT&T Privacy Bird, and set it to look for rather modest privacy requirements, I went to the att.net site, which it flagged with bad language and a flashing red head, indicating that the site would not only sell your most personal data to the highest bidder, but also insert a probe into your head in order to suck that data out. I should give the bird a whistle-blower award.

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Friday, April 19, 2002

The birth of Geek Nation?

What's a nation without politics? NewsForge spills the latest on the American Open Technology Consortium and its proposed political-action offspring, GeekPAC, both designed to fight for what founders consider the right way to think on cyberspace issues (you know: against entertainment-industry copyright schemes, against Microsoft domination, for free speech, etc.). From the opening manifesto:

It is up to us to take action. Geeks built the Net. We put in the development time to invent the new technologies and write the software. In the post-Arpa period, we invested our own money in BBSs and other services when people looked at us and said, "What's an Internet?". Years of sweat and millions invested to build our products and industries. The phone companies didn't do it; the broadcasters and studios didn't do it. Nor did ABC, CBS or NBC. Nor Disney. Nor Warner Brothers. Nor United Artists. Nor Microsoft, nor Intel, nor Sun. We did it -- working from within government agencies, the military, universities, and businesses of our own founding. We thought and dreamed and worked and persuaded and occasionally even scammed the resources to build today's Internet. And it's up to us to lead the way in taking it back.

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IBM: We won't charge for key XML patent

Earlier this week, ZDNet reported that IBM holds a patent on key parts of ebXML, a proposed set of definitions for business transactions. "A recent IBM patent claim could threaten royalty-free access to a key Internet standard protocol backed by the United Nations" is how ZDNet put it.

But as Amy Wohl follows up:

What the ZDNet article failed to note was that IBM has no intention of collecting royalties on these patents. "We could have told them that, if they'd asked," said Dr. Sutor, who interrupted his vacation to explain the OASIS process and the status of IBM's (intellectual property)."

Read more on the tempest in a teapot.

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Thursday, April 18, 2002

Calif. buys more Oracle licenses than it has employees

The Sacramento Bee reports on a scandal involving the state of California and Oracle. According to a state auditor's report, the state agreed to spend $95 million in a long-term (six years with an option for four more) contract with Oracle for software it may not need. Part of the contract (which also involved a reseller called Logicon):

calls for 270,000 software licenses and maintenance agreements -- more than the number of state workers.

The report (which you can read here) says:

Although the State's actual demand for the software license is uncertain, the contract could establish the perception that Oracle Enterprise Edition 8i database is the de facto standard throughout state departments in spite of a statewide policy that agencies should adopt the best technical solution for their particular needs

The report adds:

By entering into a long-term contract that lacks legal safeguards, the State faces considerable financial risk over many years. For example, the ELA gives the State no protection against risks such as Oracle's lowering prices, software upgrades not being included in the purchase price, and a declining need for the licenses.

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Cameras watching cameras

Ananova reports that police in the Dutch province of Brabant have installed cameras to watch the cameras they had earlier installed to catch speeders.

They are acting after losing a fifth of all speed cameras in the province of Brabant to attacks from vandals and irate drivers.

The new security cameras will be placed high up, looking down on the speed cameras.

Why does this remind me of an old Onion story?

Via Aberrant News.

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Wednesday, April 17, 2002

Digital identity: Who am I?

Kuro5hin has an interesting discussion on the topic:

In my opinion, the technical hurdles -- fascinating though they are -- are not the biggest problem facing Digital Identity. Most of what we want Digital Identities to do has been possible since the invention of public key cryptography, and is only advanced, not fundamentally altered, by recent advances in fingerprint scanning, facial recognition, and so forth.

No, the biggest problem facing Digital Identity is a social and cultural problem. There is a difference (a significant one) between those applications which would benefit individual members of society, and those applications which would benefit large influential corporations.

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Go outside, will ya?

This is today's best 404 page:

The page cannot be displayed because you need some fresh air

The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. Your ISP has told us that you're online several hours every day, and that just ain't right.

Thanks to Dave Kearns for this rejoinder to my increasing need for a vacation.

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Why free software usability tends to suck

Matthew Thomas lists 10 reason, all of which can be summed up:

(I)n practice, the vast majority of open-source projects are also volunteer projects; and it seems that the use of volunteers to drive development inevitably leads the interface design to suck.

Via Joel on Software.

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Tuesday, April 16, 2002

Preserving old software

Tim O'Reilly discusses an effort by software guru Grady Booch and others to set up a library or museum of "classic software products" (hmm, would that include Windows 1.0?) before the software and its authors fade into dust:

Executables are interesting only insofar as we have the machines upon which to run them (and preserving running hardware is an entirely different issue), but the code and designs that these executables manifest tell us much about the state of the software practice, the minds of their inventors, and the technical, social, and economic forces that shaped these products in their time. Preserving such artifacts for future generations is certainly a valuable historical curiosity, but they also offer a statement of prior art (relevant to the issues of proving/disproving software patents), the evolution of software architecture (and how they were products of their time), and the creation of architectural patterns (patterns are common solutions to common problems, and such patterns have emerged for particular domains and development cultures).

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Great, something else to worry about

New Scientist gets us all worried with a story about how the earth's magnetic poles may be about to flip.

The last reversal happened about 780,000 years ago, over a period of several thousand years. Now Gauthier Hulot from the Institute of Earth Sciences in Paris and his colleagues think they have spotted early signs of another reversal.

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Why I need a vacation, part 3

Driving to work today, I passed a local resturant with a sign out front offering "half-price apps in our lounge" and I immediately wondered why they were discounting software.

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Monday, April 15, 2002

Her domain was hijacked and the registrar won't help

This story doesn't inspire much confidence in Network Solutions (more here and here). And what has Network Solutions done to inspire not one but two "anti" sites?

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Netmaster 10baseT is in the house

Imagine: rap lyrics for networking professionals:

I be jackin'.
I be crimpin'.
I be tracin'.
I be pingin'
I be routin' yo packets like a Cisco;
I'm gonna grease yo cables with Crisco.

There are plenty more lyrics where that came from, but vitally important caveat: don't click on the link if you're easily offended by four-letter words.

Via Boing Boing.

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Friday, April 12, 2002

The true life adventures of Max Throughput, CCIE

The latest installment from the Router Gods begins:

There I was, minding my own sweet business, drinking a shot of rot gut whiskey and having a smoke when suddenly the phone rang. With a sense of weary anticipation I picked up the phone, "Talk to me" I barked. On the other end there was a moment of silence and then a woman spoke "Is this Max Throughput, the famous CCIE?". "The one and only, Babycakes. What can I do for ya" I growled. "It's...it's my router, something's wrong...look, can we meet somewhere?" she replied nervously. "Sure doll" I said, "I haven't had breakfast yet, how 'bout we meet at the House of Pancakes in an hour". Her reply was short and sweet: "I'll be there" and she hung up.

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The Google API

Just in case you missed it, Google's released a beta API that lets you interact with its database via SOAP. You're limited to 1,000 queries a day, and each query is limited to 10 results, but it's still way cool, especially the way that Google is getting the user community to come up with potential new products for it to sell (the API is currently for non-commercial use only).

Within hours of the news, Webloggers rushed out interfaces to call the database via Perl, AppleScript and Radio Userland (you can find other implementations here).

While Google's the best known info aggregator, it's hardly the first to do something like this. O'Reilly's Meerkat has been, um, queryable in a variety of formats for a couple of years. Even our own Do-It-Yourself RSS Feed has been available since December.

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A joke that women who date engineers would get

Just read it.

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Thursday, April 11, 2002

Fighting spam with P2P

New Scientist reports on an effort to use peer-to-peer technology to fight spam.

Folsom was co-designed by developers Vipul Ved Prakash and Jordan Ritter - one of the people behind the music-swapping site Napster. It will be marketed to email-handling companies by a US-based start-up company called Cloudmark in May 2002.

You won't find anything on the Cloudmark site. However, New Scientist says one of the developers of Folsom is Vipul Ved Prakash, who has already built a P2P spam-filtering prototype called
Vipul's Razor:

On receiving a spam, a Razor Reporting Agent (run by an end-user or a troll box) calculates and submits a 20-character unique identification of the spam (a SHA Digest) to its closest Razor Catalogue Server. The Catalogue Server echos this signature to other trusted servers after storing it in its database. Prior to manual processing or transport-level reception, Razor Filtering Agents (end-users and MTAs) check their incoming mail against a Catalogue Server and filter out or deny transport in case of a signature match. Catalogued spam, once identified and reported by a Reporting Agent, can be blocked out by the rest of the Filtering Agents on the network.

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The AT&T Privacy Bird

The AT&T Privacy Bird lets you know about the privacy policies of Web sites you visit. This plug-in for IE 5.0 and above (on Windows), has a little bird that turns green for "good" sites and "red" for evil nasty sites that, who knows, are turning your information over to terrorists, or something.

Via Anil Dash.

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Wednesday, April 10, 2002

What the alpha geeks are up to

Tim O'Reilly, of the eponymous computer publishing empire, says we can often see the future in what the mega-geeks are up to. He lays out the next big things, which include: community wireless networks, smarter search engines, more advanced instant messaging, grid computing, Web spidering and more.

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Hardware vs. software vendors

Amy Wohl asks Can HW Vendors Understand SW?:

I'm thinking that we should recognize that these are inherently different businesses and that we should judge success in them by the different and appropriate metrics so that success in one does not mean that we (that is, customers) are automatically granting permission to play in the other.

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Tuesday, April 9, 2002

The Web via e-mail

You can access your e-mail through the Web, but can you access the Web through e-mail? Of course you can! This page discusses various ways to get Web pages sent to your inbox via e-mail commands. Why? Aside from the coolness factor, there are still people out there sitting at the end of creaky 14.4 connections (think of people out in the bush somewhere). Anybody remember when you could use e-mail to access databases in pre-Web days?

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Keeping up with Web services

The absolute bestest way to keep up with Web services is, of course, our Web Services Breaking News page. But if you just can't get enough,
WebServices.Org posts daily Web-services news and press releases.

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Monday, April 8, 2002

OS Sucks-Rules-O-Meter

Don Marti is interested in determining which operating systems really suck and which really rule. He could do extensive benchmark testing, but that, of course, would be hard. So instead, he does periodic AltaVista searches on combinations of various OS names and the words "suck," "rules" and "rocks" to create this chart. One guess which OS "wins."

Via Boing Boing.

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We Have the Way In

We have the way in is, of course, a parody of the Microsoft/Unisys campaign to convince people that Windows is more reliable and modular than Unix.

Via CamWorld.

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Irony plug-ins

Having trouble figuring out which Web sites are just sarcastic parodies and which are for real? Irony Plug-ins, which work on both IE and Netscape browsers, helpfully analyze Web pages you view for both irony and sarcasm.

Bug update
Since the last release the following bugs have been noted:
- occasional failure to distinguish hypocrisy from an ironic situation
- giving an incorrect "satire" rating to many non-satirical sites belonging to Christian fundamentalists and right-wing political groups (e.g. http://www.nra.org/)

Via Weblog Wannabe.

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Friday, April 5, 2002

What if software self-destructed - on purpose?

It's the question Jon Lasser asks in this essay. And no, he's not talking about the need for software vendors to assure themselves a perpetual revenue stream:

(I)f network daemons such as rpc.statd were "renewed" on a yearly basis, crackers could stop wasting network bandwidth and security professionals' time with these outdated attacks.

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The annotated Jack Valenti

LawMeme takes an interview with Hollywood mouthpiece Jack Valenti on the subject of digital copyrights and annotates it. Example:

What rights [being taken away] are we talking about? [Just a little one, called the First Amendment] I'm not trying to be glib. [Well, actually, yes he is.] A lot of people who haven't thought it through believe that anything on the Internet is free, that you can just go and take down a movie from Morpheus. [This is called changing the subject or dodging the question. When asked about the rights being taken away, start talking about the horrors of piracy instead.]

Via diveintomark.

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Thursday, April 4, 2002

Free XML tools

Free XML tools and software is exactly what it sounds like: A listing of all sorts tools for working with XML data and files.

Via WebWord.

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Cat-proofing your computer

PawSense is software that supposedly can detect the sorts of keystrokes cats would make if they jumped on your keyboard and started moving around:

If a cat gets on the keyboard, PawSense makes a sound that annoys cats.

This teaches your cat that getting on the keyboard is bad even if humans aren't watching.

It's for Windows only. Maybe they figure Mac users like having their cats hit random keys.

Thanks, Drew!

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Wednesday, April 3, 2002

Paul McCartney on the importance of backup

Well, or somebody pretending to be him. Check out these lyrics:

Yesterday,
All those backups seemed a waste of pay.
Now my database has gone away.
Oh I believe in yesterday.

Thanks to Brian Clark for the pointer.

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Mapping a terrorist network

Valdis Krebs uses some network mapping techniques to look at the connections between the terrorists on the 9/11 planes and how they might be used to disrupt such efforts in the future:

The best solution for network disruption may be to discover possible suspects and then, via snowball sampling, map their individual personal networks - see whom else they lead to, and where they overlap. To find these suspects it appears that the best method is for diverse intelligence agencies to aggregate their individual information into a larger emergent map. By sharing information and knowledge, a more complete picture of possible danger can be drawn.

Via CamWorld.

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Tuesday, April 2, 2002

Do as I say, not as I do

Section508.gov is a Web site on the government's efforts to ensure Web sites comply with federal laws relating to handicap accessibility. You know, things like ensuring the blind can use Web sites. But as Jeffrey Zeldman notes, the site's home page says: "best viewed with MS Internet Explorer 5+."

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We are Blog; Resistance is futile

John Hiler argues that Weblogs are taking over the world. Or something. He recounts the snowball effect that happened after he wrote about Google bombing and how he began to resent all these bloggers discussing and advancing his story:

Something about the whole experience bothered me. My ego was too wrapped up in the process. In my mind, I was at war with the Blog Collective. Getting scooped had really bothered me. This was MY story! Who were these bloggers who were stealing my story?!

But wait... blogs are my friend! What was happening to me?! I was getting sucked into the ego-driven world of exclusive scoops and breaking news. That's not what I'm all about. Besides, I WANT people to be reading my articles. I don't want to think about blogs as my competition.

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Monday, April 1, 2002

Alert: Why Google is so fast

This new white paper from Google is quite illuminating.

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Unix more complex than Windows?

That's the theme of a new marketing campaign by Microsoft and Unisys that features ads showing somebody who's painted himself into a corner with a shade of lilac suspiciously like that used in the Sun logo.

Funny campaign on a number of fronts. To start, as the NetCraft report shows, the campaign's Web site is running on FreeBSD - albeit with FrontPage extensions (thanks to CamWorld for that link). But also, read this copy from one of the ads:

We have the way out. No wonder Unix makes you feel boxed in. It ties you to an inflexible system. It requires you to pay for expensive experts. It makes you struggle daily with a server environment that's more complex than ever."

Hmm, where have we read that inflexibility argument before. Oh, yeah, it was in a story Fusion ran recently about the Microsoft anti-trust case, in which a Microsoft lawyer said the company could not separate its browser from the operating system.

The software company would be forced to develop a version of Windows without middleware that is the functional equivalent of Windows with middleware, which Webb argued is technically impossible. For example, if Microsoft took its Internet Explorer browser out of Windows, it would also remove the OS' help options, because the two sections of code are integrated, he said.

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Use Yahoo Mail? Expect even more spam

"And what part of 'no' don't you understand?"

Go ahead, ask Yahoo the question. See what they say. In case you missed it, Slashdot reported last week that Yahoo has reset all its mail user's marketing preferences. Basically, this means that if you said you didn't want any of those special offers, tough, you're going to get them from now on. Unless you go into your Account Information screen and re-set your preferences back again. Be sure to look for the checked Yeses for snail-mail and phone solicitations.

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Contact Online Executive Editor Adam Gaffin