Attention Geeks and Hackers: Uncle Sam's Cyber Force Wants You!
posted on Jun 5, 2008 - View this thread

Having trouble connecting to a site? It may be you and many others got too close to a network event horizon and the packets ...disappeared.... The internets has black holes, too. via
posted on Apr 8, 2008 - View this thread

Before RSS and personalized aggregators such as Personalized Google and NetVibes, there was CRAYON, a service that allowed you to "CReAte Your Own Newspaper" by providing a page with links to chosen sources. [mi]
posted on Mar 28, 2007 - View this thread

Meet George -- 39, single, quirky sense of humour, looking for friends to chat with online. Last year, he won the Loebner Prize, to bots who can most successfully pass the Turing Test. More here from BBC. How long before we have our own Mefibots?
posted on Sep 16, 2006 - View this thread

They'll never piggyback on your wireless again Your router makes the computer look funny. (via MeTa)
posted on Aug 10, 2006 - View this thread

Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing (Google video) A fascinating 30 minute documentary about ARPAnet - the precursor to today's Internet. (Can you spot the real ubernerd mover and shaker at BBN? Hint: He wears no tie!) (via: all over the place)
posted on Mar 19, 2006 - View this thread

Seen anyone on Google Earth lately?
posted on Feb 17, 2006 - View this thread

NSA,FISA, and Privacy It is of course the president who finally approves of actions that may or may not be deemed legal but before 9/11, this is what he had been advised to consider "The largest U.S. spy agency warned the incoming Bush administration in its "Transition 2001" report that the Information Age required rethinking the policies and authorities that kept the National Security Agency in compliance with the Constitution's 4th Amendment prohibition on "unreasonable searches and seizures" without warrant and "probable cause," according to an updated briefing book of declassified NSA documents posted today on the World Wide Web. If this is the sort of reading you enjoy, then by all means dig about here: But then Windows allowed NSA to have a sure access to your machine . And by now we all know that Google will fight the government on making its search data base available in order to protect your privacy.(Reality: to protect Google stuff). And if you worry about search engines tracking you and making data available, then here is a workaround
posted on Jan 20, 2006 - View this thread

Interesting "New Yorker" article about online extortion via DDoS attacks. Call me naive and underinformed, but I had little understanding of how this works. "In the most common scenario, the bots surreptitiously connect hundreds, or thousands, of zombies to a channel in a chat room. The process is called “herding,” and a herd of zombies is called a botnet."
posted on Oct 7, 2005 - View this thread

Internet Explorer 7 announced We've heard about it for a while and it's been discussed here before. Will the new version of I.E. be able to hold its own against open source browsers like Firefox?
posted on Feb 15, 2005 - View this thread

Ain't this grand? Pop Goes the Gmail is a program that sits between the http://gmail.com web server and your email client, converting messages from web format into POP3 format that a program such as Outlook Express or Thunderbird can understand.
posted on Jun 15, 2004 - View this thread

Google To Start Selling Banner Adverts From the that-didn't-take-too-long-department, Google's ad sales VP Tim Armstrong says Google will now start selling graphical banner adverts. One concession to their old mores is that, for now, the banner adverts will only appear on affiliated websites running their AdSense referral program (as does MeFi), and there is an opt-out. However... "We have no plans to show images on Google.com", said Mr. Armstrong "but we are not opposed to it".
posted on May 12, 2004 - View this thread

Worldbuilder (no relation to the old Mac adventure game toolkit) is an excellent way to start off the week by completely crippling productivity. I've played many games from these guys before, and they're always great. I envy the independent game designer that gets to work with Lego so often. Via GTA.
posted on Mar 22, 2004 - View this thread

Good weekend project: start your own Internet radio station with peerCast. Mentioned here, very cool.
posted on Feb 6, 2004 - View this thread

A new MS Internet Explorer vulnerability is discovered. Most digerati already know about the spammer and lamer trick to publish URLs that look like legitimate hostnames to fool people in to trusting a malicious site. This trick is frequently used by spammers to steal people's PayPal accounts, by tricking them in to "resetting" their password at a site owned by the spammer but disguised as PayPal.com. Today's new IE vulnerability is significantly worse. By including an 0x01 character after the @ symbol in the fake URL, IE can be tricked in to not displaying the rest of the URL at all. Don't expect a patch right way, the guy who found the hole released it to BugTraq on the same day he notified Microsoft. (via Simon Willison)
posted on Dec 9, 2003 - View this thread

Skype, a new P2P Telephony service from the people who created KaZaA. [more inside]
posted on Sep 23, 2003 - View this thread

Community Memory : the world's first public computerized bulletin board system, set up in 1972 with an ASR-33 Teletype machine. Also, please welcome Benway, possibly the world's first net personality (beating Miguel and Quonsar by a couple of weeks). More on Benway in Steven Levy's book Hackers.
posted on Aug 18, 2003 - View this thread

amibiosornot.com Read it again. Then click.
posted on Mar 9, 2003 - View this thread

Textfiles.com: Before the Web, before Google, we scoured Fidonet, absorbing the forbidden fruits of anarchy, occult and a lot of bad fiction. For better or worse, TEXTFILES are relics of that age.
posted on Jan 23, 2003 - View this thread

Lee Felsenstein, saving the world with wifi and a bike. This old school computer hacker built a human powered wireless internet station named as one of the best inventions of 2002. Now he needs to raise $25,000 to wire five villages of farmers to the web (to obtain weather info, pricing data) and to each other. This is another story that reminds me not all of this technology is for gadget geeks. It really can help improve peoples' lives, as shown by the varied projects coming out of the Tech Museum grant winners and groups like this.
posted on Jan 2, 2003 - View this thread

Happy 20th Anniversary, Internet!

We ought not to let pass unnoticed the... 20th anniversary of the Internet. The most logical date of origin of the Internet is January 1, 1983, when the ARPANET officially switched from the NCP protocol to TCP/IP.

Where were you two decades ago on this date? And does anyone actually have a "I Survived the TCP/IP Transition" t-shirt?

Also being discussed on /.
posted on Jan 1, 2003 - View this thread

The US government recently released a draft of the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, essentially it advocates ensuring security through consensus, with vendors, government agencies and consumers taking responsibility for the tools they use. That's not enough for Marcus Ranman who in the TISC newsletter advocates passing legislation mandating consumers and ISPs to install firewalls and anti-viral software. At what point does an individuals (corporate or consumer) chosen level of computer security become a concern for the federal government?
posted on Oct 17, 2002 - View this thread

Information gods amongst mortals is the first in a series of three blog entries (so far, anyway) by Brad Wardell on the topic of the growing knowledge gap between the net-savvy and the non-wired. I found the link in a newsletter from WinCustomize today. They plugged all three:

1. Information gods amongst mortals
2. The Information Gods respond
3. Information Gods Srike Back

He explores the theory that those who are net savvy are quickly leaping ahead of the non-wired among us: "You know the situation. Someone has told you something you want to know more about and within a few minutes you have gotten yourself up to speed on it. You did it through the use of the Internet. A combination of search engines and helpful websites have educated you on that topic."
posted on Sep 27, 2002 - View this thread

Is self-regulation a legitimate approach to protecting copyright on the internet? This question is being debated at Spiked online which has commissioned responses from a variety of sources and also welcomes comments from readers.
posted on Sep 23, 2002 - View this thread

Bait and Switch? (Quicktime Movie) - One of the Mac Faithful at fury.com makes a funny (but true) statement about the new .Mac service charge that Apple recently announced. How far can Apple push their core consumer market with this type of thing? In a News.com report, Apple predicts losing up to 90% of their existing .Mac users. That's some public relations plan. They are indeed thinking differently.
posted on Jul 26, 2002 - View this thread

First JPEG virus discovered... "The W32/Perrun virus, as it is now being called, extracts data from JPEG files and then injects picture files with infected digital images. A fair warning to those individuals who are fond of sending multimedia files to friends and families." Is everyone's porn stash threatened now?
posted on Jun 14, 2002 - View this thread

Etherlinx, plans to offer high-speed wireless access to the Internet at inexpensive prices. (NYT) Without venture capital backing, in a garage just six blocks from the garage where Steven P. Jobs and Stephen Wozniak launched Apple Computer 26 years ago, Mr. Holt is making his clever and inexpensive radio repeater by modifying inexpensive Wi-Fi cards, the circuitry that sends and receives the signals. Their ambitious target: the cable and phone companies that currently hold a near-monopoly on high-speed access for the "last mile" between the Internet and the home.
posted on Jun 10, 2002 - View this thread

Globe of Blogs lists weblogs by location (Portugal, anyone?), title, authors's name, sex, age or birthday (why?). Problem is, the list is scanty at best. Sign yourself up.
posted on Mar 17, 2002 - View this thread

Ya gotta love interesting and useful internet directories.
posted on Oct 22, 2001 - View this thread

Remember the scary-sounding Hailstorm that was set to prove how evil Microsoft's system is? Well worry no longer, because it's now called .NET My Services. How could something with such a cute, gentle name like that be bad for users?
posted on Sep 25, 2001 - View this thread

Netscape 6.1???? Have you tried it? Do you like it? Should we get Mikey?
posted on Aug 25, 2001 - View this thread

Another "new economy" company bites the big one. A month ago Metricom filed for chapter 11. Tomorrow they're shutting down the Ricochet wireless network, leaving their subscribers high and dry. Employees are getting one week of severance pay. They're leaving behind $1 billion in debt. (It's Webvan all over again.)
posted on Aug 2, 2001 - View this thread

Seeing weird things in your website logs today? This will explain it... Running IIS and haven't patched it in over a month? Go here. 13,000 servers have already been affected.
posted on Jul 19, 2001 - View this thread

Woohoo! Follow the link to a post at the beloved-by-all-metafilterians Jason Levine.

read the fourth paragraph: it seems that i'm not the only one highly ticked off by the recent slew of x10 pop-under ads.

Jason has kindly provided links that will set cookies to prevent them from appearing for 30 days, 1 year or 10 years.

I modified the url yet again to keep it from popping up ever again within my lifetime.
posted on Jun 2, 2001 - View this thread

InfoBots are coming. I believe we've touched on this before, but now it seems to be moving from concept to reality: Instant Messenger "buddies" that are actually bots. You send them an IM with a question, such as "Hey pal, what's the weather in Thunder Bay, Ontario?" And it IMs you back with the answer, almost instantaneously. No waiting for messy web sites to load, no funky searches to run. ActiveBuddy has been the most, um, active in developing the technology, but they've been working on it forever without anything to show to the public. Now, it's out there, somewhere. CNET is reporting today that an ActiveBuddy beta bot has been live for a few months; you can play with it right now if you know its name. (And if you do know its name, a tip would be appreciated. I've been jonesing for this for a good while.) A more public version is supposed to be out in a few weeks. Here buddy buddy buddy...
posted on Apr 25, 2001 - View this thread

"Ah, the vibrant interaction of electronic conversation. Isn't it beautiful? In a word: No." A pessimistic take on "community."
posted on Mar 26, 2001 - View this thread

Digital Divide or Dividend? Is the Internet killing unique local cultures or strengthening them?
posted on Mar 16, 2001 - View this thread

One million credit card numbers stolen! News at 11! The FBI has gone public with a rather dry account of a huge organized attack on ecommerce sites, exploiting security flaws in NT which Microsoft fixed and offered patches for nearly two years ago.
posted on Mar 9, 2001 - View this thread

Vatican might name Saint Isidore of Seville the patron saint of Internet users and computer programmers. The world keeps getting weirder, doesn't it?
posted on Feb 6, 2001 - View this thread

The year is 1995, and GE Information Services is looking to sell off its unprofitable online service GEnie. (Here is a rate sheet.) GEnie Lamp Apple II offers some thoughts on the sale, and here is a synopsis of the big online services after GEnie's demise (choice quotes abound!)
posted on Jan 25, 2001 - View this thread

Maybe I spoke too soon. A lot of semipro tech-zines, sort of like blogs except with specific subject matters to cover, are financed by ad networks. In the recent past a bunch of them have lost their funding when their ad networks went out of business. Now one of the biggest networks which remains is changing their terms to the detriment of the web sites. I gather that a lot of the ad networks were running at a loss, and of course new funding has dried up. [more inside]
posted on Jan 5, 2001 - View this thread

Blast from the past
Oh, those halcyon days of text-based real-time chat, before there was a Web. (I'm catching up on my link quotient....)
posted on Dec 10, 2000 - View this thread

Misguided Brazilian script kiddies defaces Netherlands AIDS Fonds (Foundation). And what's even more bizzare is that it appears their "message" roughly translates as "Let us not forget World AIDS Day." Duh... go deface a denialist, idiots.
posted on Dec 1, 2000 - View this thread

The Background image is a little off, but.... here's a page created entirely on a Commodore 64. Nice to know that everyone's in the web design loop.
posted on Aug 7, 2000 - View this thread

"Dear Senator, As a user of the Internet and a fan of music, I am extremely concerned with the issues currently facing the digital music community, particularly those affecting my rights as a consumer to listen to the music that I have purchased. Your hearing has helped the public to understand my concerns."
posted on Jul 14, 2000 - View this thread

Any server can read all your IE cookies. From any domain. Anyone. I was just explaing to my folks that the reason cookies are (generally) safe is that this was NOT possible. Well, it's possible now.
posted on May 11, 2000 - View this thread

They bagged the kid who was responsible for all those Denial-of-Service attacks a couple of months ago. He's Canadian.

Here's an interesting legal question: could the US extradite him? The crimes were committed in the US, but he was in Canada at the time he did it, since he worked through the Internet. Whose laws apply?

(By the way, I've seen no indication that the US is considering extradition; I was just curious whether they could extradite him.)
posted on Apr 19, 2000 - View this thread

Cyber Patrol hacker sells out for one dollar < I made my political point and just don't want further annoyance... ...Mattel initiated legal action in e-mail subpoenas in mid-March and Skala and Jansson removed cphack from their sites, but not before urging computer activists to copy and distribute it.... ...Nevertheless, some mirror site operators think open source software protections make the issue moot. The court cannot impose an Internet ban because cphack was released under the GNU General Public License... > perhaps you've seen this--the final decision will be interesting with repect to free speech and the GNU GPL. something to watch anyhow.
posted on Mar 28, 2000 - View this thread

This article at zdnet is all about how wireless web devices aren't that handy, and how our lives would suck if wireless web access was everywhere. I heartily disagree. I have a wireless 2Mb LAN connection at work and it's liberating (it's possible to code, listen to shoutcast mp3 streams, and check email outside or down at the coffee house next door). My PCS phone is useful too, I can surf a few important websites when I don't have a laptop around, getting news, weather, and email. Wireless access is certainly a Good Thing, and should make our lives easier, but the article's author is blaming the possible deluge of information on wireless, instead of the user. How would a wireless broadband connection make your life better or worse?
posted on Feb 1, 2000 - View this thread

Kevin Mittnick is finally being released from prison today, but I wouldn't call what he's getting as being "free". Prohibiting Kevin from touching a computer for 3 years? This isn't like giving a toddler to a ex-con child molester, it's a computer. A person can do a lot of things besides hack into company servers. How does anyone expect Kevin to make the $125 restitution he owes each month, if he can't use a computer or get a job that requires a computer? Now that I think about it, what percentage of decent jobs are completely free of computers?
posted on Jan 21, 2000 - View this thread

Today on a web list I subscribe to, some members were complaining about spam and the need for sites to have privacy policies that promise not to sell your address. I have a hotmail address that I use whenever a site requires an email address and doesn't post a privacy policy. I hadn't checked my account in a month, but I did today and look what was in it. 74 useless messages in 30 days. Thanks spammers.
posted on Nov 21, 1999 - View this thread

I'm sorry, but using Java to play back streaming media does not make for a 'playerless' environment. Java is the player, and it needs to be active in order for this product to work. The only true 'playerless' browser environment uses server-push and html meta-refresh.
posted on Nov 20, 1999 - View this thread

Bob Metcalfe on how to be a startup millionaire. I love Bob, ever since he left 3com, he's been a prolific writer on the tech industry. This time he tells how to grow a successful company in 8 easy steps.
posted on Nov 19, 1999 - View this thread