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Friday, May 31, 2002

Hypertext guru: Webmasters bite

Ted Nelson has been busy building hypertext systems since, oh, 1960.

And yet, his work largely goes unrecognized. Perhaps it's because, like GNU guru Richard Stallman in his eternal struggle with Linus Torvalds, Stallman has fixated on some asymptotic ideal without caring about whether things actually work for normal people.

In his latest epistle, Nelson once again derides the Web:

The Web isn't hypertext, it's DECORATED DIRECTORIES!

What we have instead is the vacuous victory of typesetters over authors, and the most trivial form of hypertext that could have been imagined.

[T]oday's nightmarish new world is controlled by "webmasters", tekkies unlikely to understand the niceties of text issues and preoccupied with the Web's exploding alphabet soup of embedded formats. XML is not an improvement but a hierarchy hamburger. Everything, everything must be forced into hierarchical templates! And the "semantic web" means that tekkie committees will decide the world's true concepts for once and for all. Enforcement is going to be another problem :) It is a very strange way of thinking, but all too many people are buying in because they think that's how it must be.

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Uncle Walt is watching you

Forbes reports on how Disney will use Internet technologies at its theme parks:

If you value your privacy, a trip to a Disney theme park in the not-too-distant future may be an unnerving experience. Digital cameras disguised as lampposts will be scattered throughout the park. If you click on a handheld remote control, the lampposts will snap your picture as you wander around, then deliver the photos over the internet to your computer, from which you can order coffee mugs, T shirts or whatever emblazoned with whichever of them you prefer.

Via Boing Boing.

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Thursday, May 30, 2002

Data-mining Usenet

Now, no wisecracks about how data-mining the Internet's oldest public space would mean coming up with a mountain of X-rated JPEGs and make-money-fast spams.

Marc Smith, a research sociologist at Microsoft, has begun looking at ways of extracting trend data and other information from the network. His Netscan software sucks in the messages from 50,000 or so Usenet newsgroups and then analyzes them every which way, including average number of posts, the size of the posts, cross-linked newsgroups, etc., etc (the software is mounted on his site, so you can play with the info yourself).

The goal of the Netscan project is to collect base-line measures of the Usenet, its structure and dynamics so as to map of the kinds and qualities of the groups and institutions that form when people use the net to interact with one another. Netscan provides a range of measures of activity in the Usenet including the number of messages in each of the groups studied and the number of people who participate in them. This can reveal some interesting patterns when this data is analyzed over a period of hours, days, weeks or longer. Other network media like email lists, chat rooms, and proprietary discussion systems could also be studied in this way.

Those of you a little wary of anything in which "Microsoft" and "personal data" are mentioned in the same sentence might not be thrilled by this statement from the project FAQ:

The ultimate goal is to shed light on the vast invisible continent of social cyberspace and to see the crowds that are gathered there.

Because while sociology is the study of groups, it doesn't take too much imagination to figure out how something like this could be used to track specific individuals - or at least, the online names of individuals. Used properly, something like this might be helpful in law enforcement, but even there, recent news would give one pause.

Via Anil Dash.

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Is that a PDA in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?

Two months after he bought it, Dan Bricklin
still likes his Handspring Treo 180. Among the long list of things he really likes:

Having the rest of the PDA with me at all times without carrying two devices is great. So many times people call and I have to check my schedule. It's right there, and accessible during the call.

Having a browser with Internet access in my pocket has added a new feeling of access to data. (I've successfully used it to find addresses of obscure events, find current flight information, or track the news during lunch.)

Our own reviews editor, Keith Shaw, also pronounced it cool although he's not sure it will increase productivity for every road warrior.

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Wednesday, May 29, 2002

Nifty little Web sites

We're talking really little here:

WildMag's 256b.htm Compo is a competition to build Web pages or resources in 256 bytes or less.

guimp bills itself as the world's smallest Web site. Guaranteed eyestrain even on a 21-inch monitor, but fully functional games and even a Google searchbox all within a one-inch frame.

OK, TableArt isn't necessarily small, but it is different: An online art exhibit of the fun things you can do with HTML tables.

Via dive into mark.

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Managing your inbox the EZ way

Mark Hurst has written a 35-page report (in PDF) on how to manage your e-mail. The Prime Directive: Keep your in-box empty. The rest of the report is about the hows. A $10 donation is suggested, but you can download it for free.

Via Evhead.

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Tuesday, May 28, 2002

Amazon.com recommendations system jiggered

Where there's a will there's a way. Over on Kuro5hin, tandoor reports on how the author of a self-help PDF has gotten his file to be a top "recommendation" for bestsellers on Amazon.com.

This "clever" author of a $3 Self Help PDF has written a program to put his book in as a recommendation 12 times, on every single top seller at Amazon (at least random collection I checked in the first 500 top sellers).

As a result he is now the #3 best seller on Amazon.

And it looks like the practice is spreading rapidly as word of the technique gets around.

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If you use the Internet, the terrorists have won

We've got those TV ads that call casual drug users supporters of terrorism. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has begun his own little campaign to convince us Internet users are just as bad. Prime example: Mohammed Atta used Travelocity to book his last flight. Therefore, if you use the Internet, the terrorists have won.

In latest epistle (registration required to read), he says those pinkos over in Silicon Valley are finally coming to their senses and agreeing the government should be allowed to tap into 'Net communications whenever they want. Time to bring back the Clipper Chip, dagnabbit!

To which Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News replies: Balderdash!. More specifically:

Asking whether Silicon Valley should have supported the Clipper Chip, a wiretapping method for phones, or restrictions on encryption is like asking whether the valley should have supported measures to limit Moore's Law.

Restricting strong crypto could not work, not because the government was unable to jail people who dared keep their communications private. The feds could still do so, easily. It was a dumb idea because the cost of forbidding strong crypto would have been enormous. No networked society could function if the crooks could get through our security measures.

Friedman fears technology now, because he's seen it used for evil. For someone so smart, he's demonstrating an amazing lack of vision.

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Friday, May 24, 2002

Oh, no, no more $32-million offers from Nigeria?

The Register reports South Africa has arrested a bunch of Nigerians in connection with those spams you get roughly 10 times a day.

Now, what was particularly shocking to me was that some people are actually taken in by the letters:

Last year, a Nigerian gang lured a British businessman to South Africa and then held him for ransom. He escaped only because he was allowed to make a phone call and was able to alert his wife by speaking in his native Polish language.

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Microsoft fails to convince Pentagon open source is a threat to the nation

Well, a threat to national security, at any rate. The Washington Post reports:
In what one military source called a "barrage" of contacts with officials at the Defense Information Systems Agency and the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld over the past few months, the company said "open source" software threatens security and its intellectual property.

But the effort may have backfired. A May 10 report prepared for the Defense Department concluded that open source often results in more secure, less expensive applications and that, if anything, its use should be expanded.

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Thursday, May 23, 2002

Conference blogging

The esteemed Mark Gibbs recently put on his "oh, why bother?" pout and said, in so many words, trade shows are a waste of your time and your company's money.

Not anymore. Now, there's a new reason to go to as many trade shows as you can: To chronicle them in real time on a Weblog. Certain shows of late have attracted numerous bloggers with wireless modems who take notes on their laptops (Apple Titaniums PowerBook G4s, of course), then hit a button and instantly let the world know what's going on. Journalism for the masses, as exemplified by San Jose Mecury News columnist Dan Gillmor, who blogged some guy's talk, immediately after which said guy checked the blog and corrected Gillmor on some point.

Now industry pundit Amy Wohl is extending an offer: Next time she gives a conference or seminar, let her know you'll be blogging it and you can get in for free.

After all, if you're going to be part of a Great Experiment I can scarcely expect you to pay for the privilege.

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Music to get your Unix groove on

If you're a long-time Unix geek, then you know the words to that immortal song "Waka Waka Bang Splat," you know, the one that goes:

<>!*''#
^"`$$-
&[]../
@=<>,,SYSTEM HALTED

Now somebody's put it to music.
Sing it out loud or, if you can't read music, listen to the online version.

Via dive into mark (where you can also read Mark's moving mini-essay on sobriety).

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Wednesday, May 22, 2002

Court: FAQs not copyrightable

Law.com reports on a lawsuit involving an FAQ.

Now, this wasn't your basic nerdling FAQ on using mod_perl or somesuch. It was an FAQ on a spray-on tanning company's site, titled ""Mist-On Tanning Frequently Asked Questions." A competing company claimed the FAQ violated federal copyright law because portions were allgedly lifted from its own set of answers.

But, Law.com says, Judge Barbara B. Crabb, of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin has ruled against the plaintiff, arguing FAQs are not subject to the law:

According to the court and prior case law, regardless of the "original authorship" contained in a work, "the facts and ideas it exposes are free for the taking."

Taking it a step further, the court held that "a business cannot copyright a Frequently Asked Questions page" or the words or phrases that comprise such a page because "the format of a Frequently Asked Questions page is a common idea in our society." Indeed, "the elements of a Frequently Asked Questions page (a list of questions beginning with common words) are stereotypical."

Via Slashdot.

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Factual error found on Internet

The Onion reports on the shocking case of a Brady-Bunch fan site with a mistake. Thank goodness the Web host for the site immediately took the site offline:

"We at Cheaphost were deeply saddened and disturbed to learn that one of the millions of pages we host contained a factual discrepancy," the web-posted statement read. "Please be assured that we are doing everything within our power to ensure that nothing of the sort happens again. We will not rest until the Internet's once-sterling reputation as the world's leading source for 100 percent reliable information is restored."

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Tuesday, May 21, 2002

Google's next generation of services

Take a gander at what's cooking in Google's labs - potential new services include voice searching and keyboard shortcutting as well as fuzzy-logic searching (check out Google Sets).

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Exploding water balloons in space!

NASA advances the frontiers of science with an experiment involving a balloon, water and a pin in zero G. With plenty of video for you to watch.

Via Dave Kearns via writer and Border Manager guru Craig Johnson

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His mouse stinks

Not for lunchtime reading:

3 Stench Ridden Days...

Yes thats right, for almost 3 damned days I couldn't find what was cuasing this god-awful smell. All of my house mates and I were convinced that there was a rotting mouse either under the floor boards or in the wall. Well I say all my house mates except for James William Ascroft-Leigh, who suggested the smell was comming from my computer. I laughed and called him a fool, claiming that the computer surley wouldn't work with a dead mouse in it...

Via MetaFilter

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Monday, May 20, 2002

Monster.com in PowerPoint snafu

There's little love lost between online jobs-posting powerhouse Monster.com
and the newspaper industry, which sees Monster.com and its ilk as threats to its traditionally lucrative (and dead-trees) classified ads.

Editor & Publisher, a trade journal for the ink-stained wretch set, reports Monster.com is now using a PowerPoint slide presentation that uses a favorable quote from a newspaper consultant about how wonderful the Internet is as a jobs advertising medium.

Only problem is, Monster.com left out the second half of the guy's quote:

"My own opinion of it is that newspaper will basically give Monster two black eyes and tear off their limbs and feed it to them."

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Viral marketing indeed

Some hacker (Russian, apparently) has released an Outlook virus that appends a .sig to outgoing e-mail consisting of an ad for a porno site.

Of course, just like biologists are now trying to use viruses to deliver modified genes, perhaps some day somebody can release a "good" Outlook virus. As Mark suggests:

Maybe someone could do the world a favor and make a virus that deletes the "the information in this message is privileged blah blah blah" crap that most companies auto-insert into everybody's signature.

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Friday, May 17, 2002

Oops!

I've just learned a key networking lesson: Nothing is ever as easy as it seems (I know, I know, you're surprised it took me this long to learn that)>

We changed Web hosts Wednesday evening/Thursday morning (we made an, um, exodus, to WorldCom). Now, we have a whole Web farm thing going (a couple of servers for static pages, a couple of apps servers, separate boxes for our search engine and forum and, of course, a switch in front of all of it), so naturally our Web and IS guys were at the new hosting site until the wee hours getting everything to work.

Yes, we now have some DNS issues - it takes time for the new numbers to propagate. For some reason, our search engine/DocFinder system still appears dead to many people (on top of that, it started indexing midway through the cutover, so it wound up deleting links to the past month's worth of content, since the servers that content is on weren't hooked up; still if you need to use it, 65.214.57.167 will work for searching, but not for DocFindering).

And on top of all that, we use a VPN and a T-1 to connect NW staffers to the Web servers and, of course, some card in the new T-1 went on the fritz, so we had a devil of a time uploading new content.

And that's why I didn't post anything yesterday!

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How come there's no cent key?

Sure, pennies are increasingly irrelevant, but still, why don't standard keyboards have a key for it? At least in the English-speaking world, you're a lot more likely to need a cent key than, say, a tilde (well, OK, now you've got those personal-type URLs but still).

The Demise of the $.01 Sign says it's all the fault of the engineers who came up with ASCII, who, admittedly, faced some hard choices when coming up with a universal language for the micro-brained computers of their day:

Three handy fractions were cut: ¼ ½ ¾. This makes sense, especially when you consider that the ASCII committee was composed of engineers. I'm sure they thought, in their engineer's way, "Why have ¼ but not 1/3? And if we have 1/3, then why not 1/5? Or 3/32?" Similarly, the committee apparently found $0.19 an acceptable, if somewhat obtuse, way of expressing the price of a Bic pen. At any rate, the popular and useful cent sign didn't make it.

Via Meryl's Notes.

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So what if you just want to give content away?

There's certainly been no lack of discussion of online copyright issues of late. But most of it has focused on Giant World-Girding Multinationals that want to make sure that, if you hum a tune while brushing your teeth, you damn well better pay a copyright fee.

OK, but what if you have content you basically just want to give away? Creative Commons is an effort to create a clearinghouse for such stuff:

We are building a Web-based application for dedicating copyrighted works to the "public domain," and for generating flexible, generous licenses that permit copying and creative reuses of copyrighted works.

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Wednesday, May 15, 2002

The rise of the Semantic Web

With that Web hyperlink thing, Tim Berners-Lee made it possible for ordinary people to interact with computers the world over. Now he's trying to do the same thing for computers. His "semantic Web" posits a network in which intelligent software can query resources the world over and then give you an answer to a question (for example: the best flight for you from New York to Los Angeles) - using some set (sets?) of standardized tags to describe information (you know: XML).

Edd Dumbill says this largely theoretical exercise is getting closer to escaping the lab:
Despite the official positions of their employers, I have noticed several prominent members of the Web community taking a harder, more serious look at the Semantic Web. They may not be on the road to Damascus just yet, but there's a rise in credibility of the Semantic Web idea not seen last year. Another significant activity is the creation of a European research project specifically focused on delivering useful software components, which will take into its sphere the excellent Java and C RDF frameworks, Jena and Redland.
Still, Dumbill adds more work is needed to address real-life information management problems.

This is the critical issue: the Web succeeded because of the problems it solved, and the aptness of the solution. The developers of the Semantic Web need to see past their academic surroundings to address, however simply, some of today's information management problems.

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Walking around Quake

Time was, you had to do some serious drugs to think the monsters were attacking you while you were walking down the street. The Wearable Computer Laboratory at the University of South Australia has developed a prototype wearable Quake suit, a.k.a. Augmented Reality Quake, that lets you walk around in realspace shooting at evil aliens.

Via Danelope.

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Tuesday, May 14, 2002

Will 802.11b fall victim to its own success?

Sifry poses the question:

Will illegal amplifiers turn the spectrum into another Citizen's Band? Even without illegal amps, is it doomed to failure because the density of devices will increase too quickly?

I don't think so. But it does remain an open question - how much is enough? In other words, as 802.11h and other standards that help to reduce interference become more popular, at what density of spectrum do even those methods fail? Surely there is a transmission power and density for which the specrtum becomes unusable. The question is, can technological advances outpace the bandwidth needs of the public?

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RealMistake

Cameron Barrett writes the reason RealNames failed (see yesterday's item is not because Microsoft is evil (that being a separate question), but because RealNames chose a stupid business model:

The reason RealNames failed is because they decided to completely rely on Microsoft for their technology integration. RealNames bet the farm; Microsoft decided they didn't like farms; RealNames lost. For all those companies out there dreaming up revenue streams to take advantage of Microsoft's monopoly in the Web browser market, it'd be a good idea to pay close attention to the RealNames story. Oh yeah, don't be surprised in a few months when Microsoft announces something called ".NET Keywords" or something along that line.

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Monday, May 13, 2002

Did Microsoft destroy name-to-domain company?

RealNames used to be a sort of alternate DNS. Companies could buy keywords and then, through a deal with Microsoft, end users could type that word into their IE address box and get to a site (you know, rather than typing in a messy URL).

Last week, Microsoft ended its contract with RealNames. Keith Teere, RealNames founder, is bitter. On his personal site he writes:

So far as I can see this is a classic case of "not invented here". Microsoft dislike the product because they cannot control it. As this is likely to be the situation wherever infrastructure [which is by definition shared] is involved it also implies Microsoft is stepping back from its .NET commitments to build infrastructure. ...

Microsoft seems to be playing the role of the referee who decides whether any innovations succeed .

Microsoft only seems comfortable at the application level where they have control, not at the infrastructure level - and this ultimately keeps many innovations from happening.

Because of this they've just brought innovation in internet naming to a grinding halt - and the internet *really* needs innovation in naming.

Sort of the opposing viewpoint comes from Joshua Allen, a Microsoft developer who has his own Weblog. He disputes several of Teare's claims (such as that only RealNames can resolve non-Latin characters) and adds:

If RealNames is such an essential product, there is nothing at all stopping AOL from bundling it with the huge chunk of the browser market that they control.

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Scrubbed P2P clients

cleanclients.tk has versions of various file-sharing apps that have been hacked to remove embedded spyware.

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Friday, May 10, 2002

Macromedia goes ka-blog

Wired reports that Macromedia has turned to Weblogs - you know, those chatty, stream-of-consciousness daily journal things (like, oh, well, this) - to push its products.

At least five Macromedians are now using Radio and Blogger to discuss the company's plans to take over the Web, no, strike that, to talk about cool stuff happening with the company and its various products:

Indeed, it was important to Macromedia that its blogs seemed true, that readers perceived them as the thoughts of very helpful community managers instead of corporate shills. If the effort felt disingenuous, like the company was merely jumping on the blogwagon, it could have backfired.

"I'd hate for you to think this is some kind of marketing agenda," Hale said. "If there is an agenda, our agenda is related to getting good information in people's hands."

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Programming "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall

Here's another site that makes you wonder how we ever survived without the Web: 99 Bottles of Beer shows you how to spit out all the verses of the song in 272 programming languages.

Via dive into mark

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Thursday, May 9, 2002

The uber-cookie

The Scottish Government is helping to fund a new monitoring system that would let Web sites (and no doubt budding Doctor Evils) track not only which Web sites you visit but even what you type.

The developers claim the software would work even without cookies. By itself, that's no big deal; after all, even the stupidest spyware now typically installs Web-tracking software, which is why we periodically get complaints from people about popup ads that are triggered by the spyware, not us.

The government agency, Scottish Enterprise, is pretty optimistic about how wildly wonderful this all will be:

This technology can bring Scotland to the forefront of e-commerce, and will enable a spinout company to reap the commercial benefits of revolutionising web marketing intelligence and Internet security on a global basis.

Guess they don't have many privacy issues up there. Oh, yes, they do add:

The development of appropriate safeguards to prevent misuse of the technology in these contexts will be developed in parallel to the technology itself.

Well, then, glad that's taken care of!

Via E-Media Tidbits

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Cable-modem hacking about to get easy

Since broadband over cable is a shared medium, most providers give you modems with built in bandwidth limiters to keep you from sucking down all the bandwidth from your neighbors.

Hackers have, of course, figured out how to disable the limiters, but it's been a fairly, um, tedious process. Over at SecurityFocus, Kevin Poulsen
writes on a new tool that will make this as easy as configuring your basic app:

The work of a dangerously unemployed U.S. coder who calls himself "DerEngel," working with a colleague named "Byter", OneStep is described as a 30 megabyte monster of a program that rolls up all the various servers and spoofers needed to pull off a cable modem hack. It then hides it all behind a pretty interface with pull-down menus for selecting your service provider, modem make and model, and even the new speed limit you'd like to put on your modem -- in case you don't want the full 10 Mbs Ethernet speed.

Cable providers, natch, take a dim view of all this - Poulsen quotes one guy who was banned for life by AT&T Broadband for messing with his modem.

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Wednesday, May 8, 2002

The death of the celebrity CEO

The Economist says Bernie Ebbers is one of the last of a breed: CEOs who are, perhaps, better known than their companies:

Once started, this process is self-perpetuating. Stars become chief executives, not the other way round. "Ifyou were making a movie and said 'Get me a CEO' to the casting director, he'd give you Michael Armstrong," wrote Jeffrey Garten, the dean of the Yale School of Management, in his book, "The Mind of the CEO". Mr Armstrong had a "vision" to take an old telecoms company, in the shape of AT&T, to the heart of the new-economy revolution. The vision destroyed $140 billion of shareholder value and brought AT&T to its knees, a feat that few from central casting could ever hope to achieve.

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Google's new "Find Anything" service

BBSpot has the scoop:

One of the most touching success stories of the new service has been Kyle Ferguson who had long since given up hope. Kyle who was adopted when he just 3 weeks old has been searching for his mother for 27 years. "I just typed in 'mom' and it came up with two entries. One was a Thai restaurant but the other was my biological mother!"

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Seeing the future of the 'Net in porn

From the beginning, the online porn industry has pioneered some of the techniques other merchants have tried to duplicate, such as secure transactions and "syndication" of content.

Bob Jacobson takes a fresh look at online porn and says you can see where the rest of the B2C market is heading:

If the porn model is a valid forecaster, playing on the web will become a splashier but costlier affair managed by a very few, very large corporations. The online content industry will become much more centralized. Surviving entities, most likely the same entertainment companies that dominate the media today, may offer higher-quality features, but at substantially increased prices, often on a pay-per-view basis.

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Tuesday, May 7, 2002

Serviceless wireless

David P. Reed argues we need to stop thinking of public wireless LANs as a "service" provided by a particular company, just like we know the Internet is not really a service (AOL's subtle protestations to the contrary):

Most of the industry successes in the Internet understand that - Cisco, UUNet, Earthlink, Amazon. Whatever product or service they sell, it is not the Internet. The Internet is something they exist in relation to, not a service.

Yet when we start talking "wireless" it is assumed that we must have a "service" and a company to buy "it" from.

Wireless LANs are a combination of signalling schemes using electromagnetic fields (remember there is not even an "ether" out there), and equipment that understand those schemes and implement protocols.

There is no obvious reason we need to think about radio Internet as a "service" provided by company. It is just something that companies relate to. Various pieces of capital equipment may be operated as a service, in the sense that Internet has "access provider services" and "backbone services", but people like Boingo are no more than a "billing service" for "access providers", and not a "wireless service".

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If Pooh wrote a Weblog

It might look like Poohpundit.com:

Posted 8:55 PM by Pooh
OK, THIS is getting frightening. First, Heffalumps, now reports of Woozle tracks in the Hundred Acre Wood. Where's the New York Times on this story? Where's CNN? And where is Christopher Robin and his precious Department of Woodland Security? What're we paying him for?

Via Boing Boing

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Monday, May 6, 2002

New blog: Cool Tools Daily Dose

It's been lonely here in the blogging corner of Network World Fusion, churning out the high quality daily networking journalism you've come to epxect from Compendium.

It gets a little less lonely today - and you get a brand new source of info on mobile, wireless and just cool stuff. Keith Shaw extends his Cool Tools column from print into a new daily Weblog: Cool Tools Daily Dose. Every day, he'll run himself ragged posting news, commentary and fun on all your favorite gizmos, gadgets and software.

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Horrors! Fiber speeds over copper just a hoax?

The Florida Times-Union is running a series on a guy who got millions from investors for a "magic box" that could allegedly solve the last-mile problem by offering fiber speeds (actually, faster-than-fiber speeds) over old-fashioned POTS copper wires:

He appeared with his magic box, promising it could convert plain copper phone lines that run to almost every home in the country into greased-lightning pipelines for data and video, four times faster than the most advanced fiber-optic cables. It was a magic box that would shock communications like the television had, transform technology like personal computers had, redefine entertainment like Nintendo had. It was a magic box he built from $100 worth of spare parts.

Via Sifry's Alerts

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The Compaq iPaq or Seven of Nine?

whatsbetter?com is the latest variant in the "Am I hot or not" genre. You pick one of two choices, then see if you fit the norm.

Via Dave Kearns, who, like me, obviously can only stop clicking on things there long enough to scratch out a note to spread the word.

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Friday, May 3, 2002

When software kills

No, this isn't about some Weekly World News story about a computer virus infecting a hacker or something. Thomas Huckle, a professor at the Institut fur Informatik in Munich, has compiled a list of 44 Software Bugs - Software Glitches.
Among them:

Airbus downing during Iran-conflict
(Pattern recognition software, 1988)

He also has the requisite rockets-go-kablooie errors.

Via Slashdot

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Ratbot update: The Pentagon's involvement

The Philadelphia Inquirer gnawed on the ratbot story and found that funding for the study comes from the Pentagon.

Which, if one were paranoid, would make one wonder. Oh, sure, they say the point is to come up with a better way to detect landmines and people buried in rubble. But just imagine an army of bomb-laden rats airlifted into Baghdad. I'm drinking too much coffee again? We are talking about the Pentagon, which tried turning bats into flying micro-bombs.

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Thursday, May 2, 2002

Wireless rats!

Some researchers in New York are using wireless technology to make rats do their bidding. New Scientist reports:

The researchers implanted one of the electrodes into the medial forebrain bundle (MFB), the part of the brain responsible for sensing reward. They placed the other two in parts of the somatosensory cortical area that receive stimulation from the left and right whiskers. Finally, a radio receiver tucked inside a rat-sized backpack was plugged into an interface in the rat's skull.

The scientists said they could get the rat to navigate a maze from 500 meters away. Alas, the report doesn't specify the exact technology used, but that distance would seem to rule out Bluetooth. 802.11b, perhaps?

Note: To keep up with this sort of thing, check out Neuroprosthesis News.

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eBay isn't asking for your credit-card number

This morning I got two e-mails, allegedly from the security people at eBay (who call themselves Safe Harbor for some reason):

Dear eBay member!

Your information in our eBay file, was marked (flagged) as incorrect and/or (fraudulent). To avoid any inconvenience concerning an interruption of your service membership, in future. Please take just a moment and update your eBay billing file. Remember to "doublecheck" all the fields for any possible
mistakes.

Um, OK, I thought, I suppose it's possible, even though I haven't actually used eBay in roughly two years.

Yes, you know what's coming. The URL in the e-mail was an IP number that is not registered to eBay, and the moron scammer used the cc line instead of the bcc line. But I have to give him/them credit - the page that came up when I did click on the URL did look just like you'd expect an eBay page to look like (this is hardly the first time this sort of thing has gone around).

So complaints to the registered tech contact for the IP number and copies to the real eBay security people and our own tech people. Might not be a bad idea to let your own folks know about this scam, just in case they check their e-mail before their first cup of coffee.

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Networking poetry

Ah, love and networking technology, all in one melancholy quatrain: My heart is like a CPU.

Via Dashes.

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Wednesday, May 1, 2002

Web services mean fatter clients

Hey, remember client/server? Remember fat clients? Sure, you do. I know I do, thanks to the client/server publishing system we use that has such a fat client we had to upgrade all our workstations from Windows 95 to NT because it turned out the client was such a memory pig it kept us from doing anything else while it was running.

Anyway, along comes client/server II, the sequel, a.k.a. Web services. Sounds just groovy: universal access to everything (and forget for a moment the security implications of that), all in a marvelous XML wrapper (and forget for a moment that XML by itself is no lightweight, how else to explain things like Sarvega's new XML switch?).

The problem, Andrew Binstock writes, is that when clients get a flood of data, they have to figure out what to do with it, i.e., they have to analyze it to make some sense to the user:

As XML becomes more widely used and implemented, true peer-to-peer data interchange will occur, making what goes for P-to-P today look comparatively thin. Web services hold the promise of enabling applications of much greater complexity and sophistication. Users will want to take advantage of these newfound capabilities, and as a result, will need more power and more capability at the endpoints.

Via ecademy.

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Mobile gossip

Evolution, Alienation and Gossip takes a look at the role of mobile and wireless networks in fostering gossip. No, wait, that's supposed to be a good thing:

In the fast-paced modern world, we had become severely restricted in both the quantity and quality of communication with our social network. Mobile gossip restores our sense of connection and community, and provides an antidote to the pressures and alienation of modern life. Mobiles are a 'social lifeline' in a fragmented and isolating world.

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