Monday, August 25, 2003

Sobig.F worm could have originated on Usenet. The Sobig.F worm, which is estimated to have infected more than 100,000 computers and generated tens of millions of e-mails, could have begun life disguised as a pornographic picture in a posting to a handful of Usenet newsgroups. [InfoWorld: Top News] 9:52:52 PM    comment []

Painful Questions. Dr. Sally K. Ride, the first American woman to become an astronaut, speaks about the lessons learned from the Challenger and the Columbia disasters. By Claudia Dreifus. [New York Times: Science] 9:51:05 PM    comment []

Wm. Gibson: WHAT I THINK. WHAT DO I THINK OF THE PEOPLE WHO POST ON THE BOARDS, HERE? Someone asks. 9:49:11 PM    comment []

Virus Leaves Few Answers in Its Wake. Security experts are struggling to understand a mysterious software author who is trying to open many of the Internet's electronic locks. By John Markoff. [New York Times: Technology] 9:46:29 PM    comment []

Minister defends Japanese "Big Brother" idenity database as hackerproof [ISN]. Japan's home affairs minister attempted to allay privacy fears surrounding a nationwide computer network holding sensitive information on citizens by challenging hackers to breach its security. Please try it hard, Toranosuke Katayama said in a talk show on the private Asahi network on Sunday when asked about plans by one local authority to attempt to penetrate the system. The remark came a day before the nationwide computerised system, criticised for ushering a "Big Brother" society in Japan, was due to expand its service. Each Japanese citizen is assigned an 11-digit number in the new basic resident registry network which contains names, birth dates, gender and address and enables local authorities to identify people online across the country. Two reasons for blinking this: A blog doesn't need a clever name has been following a couple of Japanese privacy stories, and the chance to quote Please try it hard. 1:39:02 PM    comment []

Fast Company: 5 Technologies That Will Change the World. We set off in search of those people who were bold enough to think that the world might at some point be ready to take a giant leap again and to believe that innovative technology can still put serious distance between a leader and the rest of the pack. [Tomalak's Realm] 7:02:27 AM    comment []

Revisiting Faber College (Toga, Toga, Toga!). A DVD festooned with extras will be released on Monday to celebrate the 25th anniversary of "National Lampoon's Animal House." By Elvis Mitchell. [New York Times: Business] 7:01:33 AM    comment []

Little Demand for Video on Demand. Only about one-quarter of customers have accessed programming via video on demand. Plus: the most popular television shows, CD's, magazines and software. By The New York Times. [New York Times: Business] 6:59:54 AM    comment []

The Aftermath of Cyberattacks. How much can the Department of Homeland Security do about cyberattacks? By David Strom. [New York Times: Business] 6:59:05 AM    comment []

This Modern World. A fair and balanced look at the successes of the Bush administration. [Salon Headlines] 6:57:43 AM    comment []

Neal Stephenson Rewrites History. For the dark prince of hacker fiction, looking backward is another way of seeing the future. By Robert Levine from Wired magazine. [Wired News] 6:56:32 AM    comment []

End of an era for file-sharing chic?. Not long ago, civil liberties groups aiming to protect peer-to-peer networks like Napster and Kazaa were happy to dispense free legal advice to the RIAA. Are they now wishing they hadn't? [CNET News.com] 6:45:37 AM    comment []

An Inkwell.vue Special Double Feature: Mary Mackey A movie star wants to trade places with one of the masses and notices her resemblance to a check out clerk in a warehouse store. That's Kate Clemens' (Mary Mackey's) riff on Mark Twain's (Samuel Clemens') The Prince and the Pauper, titled, The Stand In. The clerk also teaches freshman comp, so, she can use the $100,000 the star offers her to switch, but their lives seem very different. Or are they? Mary Mackey has published poetry and novels, made the New York Times bestseller list, and optioned the film rights to The Stand In before it was published. In a previous visit to the Inkwell, Mary discussed trance, planes running out of fuel, the night of the army ants, and solving all the problems of Western civilization. Expect more ideas and stories, big and small, as author Kathi Kamen Goldmark welcomes Mary Mackey. Gary Wolf Plenty of netizens and would-be netizens carried on a romance with Wired magazine from its first days. If not with the magazine, then with its street cred sensibility or its idées fortes. And if not with its sensibility, then with the objects fetishistically portrayed in its stylish (or garish) pages. With unprecedented access to key players, longtime Wired writer Gary Wolf tells the history of Wired magazine and its ethos, from start up, to Bengali typhoon, to aborted IPO, to part of the Condé Nast portfolio in his new book, Wired: A Romance. Wolf is also co- author, with Joey Anuff, of Dumb Money: Adventures of a Day Trader. Leading the conversation with Wolf is Kevin Kelly, Executive Editor at Wired, and the author of Out of Control and New Rules for the New Economy. Join Gary Wolf in a discussion with Kevin Kelly about Wired's early days. 5:36:48 AM    comment []