A Complete Map of What? Buchanan International claims to have created a complete page-level map of the Internet. I think (the article's not really clear on that). Am I the only one who finds this ridiculous? And their motives are so pure: "the completion of the map is prob-ably (sic) the first big step in the quest to control internet anarchy." Does the Financial Times usually publish such drivel? (via
Brian Carnell)
posted by mrmorgan
on Oct 22, 2000 -
8 comments
Madonna finally wins madonna.com Under what grounds warrent her rights to that domain name? At the bottom it notes singer Sting was denied his attempt at aquiring sting.com, which is merely owned by some online gamer called
=Sting=.
posted by grank
on Oct 16, 2000 -
14 comments
NYTimes.com has low security
Even me, the casual passerby, could access secret documents about the mysterious "partners," while trying to avoid downloading a cookie. Heh, "channel", "partners", the number 10. They're all related somehow?
PS: "channel.nytimes.com" doesn't give access to pages without logging in. Any ideas?
posted by rschram
on Oct 13, 2000 -
8 comments
Private school ejects Sailor Moon fan for
inadvertently accessing an "adult" Sailor Moon site. The kid didn't know what the site was ahead of time, the site slipped through the school's content filters, and the boy "immediately logged off after less than a minute on the Web site". I don't know if this qualifies as a
zero tolerance issue, but it's definitely an overraction, not to mention an ugly failure of
blocking software. [via
Ribbit]
posted by harmful
on Oct 4, 2000 -
16 comments
Al Gore and the Internet A post to nettime from
Vinton Cerf, someone who knows a little something about the development of the internet (he led the development of TCP/IP), giving Al Gore props for taking initiative for creating the Internet. Al never said he "invented" the internet. But he's had a lot of influence in creating the internet we all know and love.
I have no interest in toadying for Gore, but it does bother me how people parrot the misattributed quote, and seemingly have no desire to know how things really developed.
posted by peterme
on Oct 2, 2000 -
4 comments
NBCi relaunches as probably the most boring, blase portal site I've ever seen and their stock
goes up? Is it just me, or does it look like they bought the site from "Al's Do It Yourself Portals"?
posted by owillis
on Sep 25, 2000 -
7 comments
Proprietary URLs? How many of these non-standard prefixes does
your system support?
Just off the top of my head with the programs I have running right now, I can handle
nap: aim: hotline: and a few others, not counting all the ones built into my browser.
More inside...
posted by anildash
on Sep 15, 2000 -
2 comments
New Go? Either Go.com really, really sucks, or I am just unable to find where the "new" go.com design is residing. And why doesn't c|net ever put related links in their articles? Do they assume I will just stay within c|net all day long?
posted by Brilliantcrank
on Sep 15, 2000 -
12 comments
Has Google finally sold out? You may have already seen this via
Robot Wisdom - evidence that Google has monkeyed with their search engine to give preference to partner Yahoo!'s pages.
I guess it had to happen sooner or later, but I'm sad. Anyone know of a better search engine on the horizon that still has integrity?
posted by straight
on Sep 13, 2000 -
8 comments
All Hands On Deck. If you're an engineer for IBM OZ or Telstra, don't expect to get a day off for the next three weeks. Here comes the Olympics!
posted by baylink
on Sep 9, 2000 -
0 comments
Bike Messengers Love IndyMedia -- Bike messenger Harim Veracruz says that the IndyMedia site has been "a godsend" for him and his colleagues. "All the messengers are using it," he said. "There's a map of the city, information on who is going to be where, what parts of the city to avoid, how to get from here to there fast, even restaurant recommendations. It's a very helpful site." Veracruz said he's even "gotten educated as to why these people are so angry" by reading some of the political news on the site, and is considering joining a protest walk to the U.N. on Friday.
posted by johnb
on Sep 8, 2000 -
1 comment
Imagine that. A chat-enabled telephone... What's next - a broom-enabled vacuum cleaner? A walking-enabled automobile? A hand-scrubbing-enabled washing machine? Next thing you know, they'll want to move all television transmissions to wire, and move all telephony to wireless. Uh, wait...
posted by quonsar
on Sep 4, 2000 -
8 comments
The weezils at AllAdvantgae.com are up to no good. - First of all, who thought paying people to surf was a brilliant way to make money? AllAdvantage is now seeing the error or their ways and is switching all members over from the Pay to Surf plan to a new Sweepstakes plan regardless of whether their members want to switch or not. Apparently those who have bothered to read the email they sent out about the switch are getting pissed.
posted by Nyarlathotep
on Aug 25, 2000 -
4 comments
AltaVista lies to England about free net access. I am shocked that a company in the honorable net industry could think of such a scam! Shocked I say!
posted by Mick
on Aug 22, 2000 -
7 comments
iCab 2.1 is out The fabbest little Web browser for adherents of the Macintosh religion, iCab, is now out in version 2.1. It lacks any CSS support, and JavaScript support is very poor,
but for a program written from scratch by one or two people (Alexander Clauss seems to be the lead), it's astounding. Absolutely full support for HTML 4 – every extended character (iCab seems to use its own font), weirdo tags like LONGDESC, ACRONYM, and ABBR, TITLEs on everything (no popups: text appears in status line). Filter out ads automatically. Only browser other than Lynx that handles metadata like LINK REL="next". The damn thing
validates your code for you (click the smiling or frowning icon at the right of the address bar). And so on. And so on. I love this program. And yes,
I'm in the minority. What else is new?
posted by joeclark
on Aug 21, 2000 -
4 comments
radio asatru is what happens when it gets dark at the renaissance faire and the wizards and wenches start getting loose. madmartigan! madmartigan!
posted by subpixel
on Aug 18, 2000 -
0 comments
The ultimate in online gaming? But seriously, if there isn't anyone home and in danger, there is no justification for the use of deadly force. And, you'd better be able to take cover quickly in the event of a crack...
posted by quonsar
on Aug 17, 2000 -
2 comments
John Seely Brown interviewed by Wired. The former head of Xerox Parc. There were two really insightful quotes I came across in this article;
Lurk is the cognitive apprenticeship term for legitimate peripheral participation. The culture of the Internet allows you to link, lurk, and learn. Once you lurk you can pick up the genre of that community, and you can move from the periphery to the center safely asking a question.
Sort of like Metafilter =) And...
Bob Metcalfe has it all wrong: The power of a network isn't the square of the number of people - it's the number of communities it supports. If you look at n people, there are potentially 2**n communities.
I've actually wondered about Metcalfe's law. This n^2 has always seemed metaphorical to me, but it seems a lot of people mention it as if it were a literal relationship. What is the "value" of a network anyway? Anyone know of research on this?
posted by lockecito
on Aug 16, 2000 -
2 comments
Real goes subscription. A decent business model, IMHO. But with two lacking elements: 1) Too expensive ($3-5/month is better), 2) More compelling content (needs more name brands). I think a flat rate type content model could work well for video/multimedia content (the porn industry does well with it).
posted by owillis
on Aug 15, 2000 -
8 comments
AOL's Netscape division is being sued by an NJ photographer over their SmartDownload feature, which allegedly allows surveillance of activity between websites and you. He claims "[SmartDownload] secretly transmits to Netscape the file name and location, along with an identification string unique to that Internet user.''
"...we've never used or accessed any information about SmartDownload users or files..." - AOL
posted by tomorama
on Aug 4, 2000 -
0 comments
This has been showing up in my referrer log. The site enables you to surf anonymously. It also blocks stats on systems, screen resolution and browser type. It might prove useful to some here. As a designer though, I have concerns about being able to track user statistics.
posted by centrs
on Jul 27, 2000 -
8 comments
