Apologies for Choating (at least there is no inline HTML in it) but every single one of the articles in the most recent Tasty Bits log is relevant to something or other that has been on the list recently. If you don't already know of TBTF you should consider signing up to it. Ken Brown dawson@world.std.com wrote:
TBTF Log, weeks of 2001-01-07 and 2001-01-14
These weeks' log entries:
< http://tbtf.com/blog/2001-01-07.html > < http://tbtf.com/blog/2001-01-14.html > __________________________________________________________________________
Friday, 2001-01-19
++ Light stopped in its tracks 9:47:41 am
Now this is flat amazing. The scientist whose group last year slowed light to a saunter [1] has now stopped it dead. Another group of scientists, also in Cambridge, MA independently achieved the same result. Frozen light. Turn on the laser and it starts up again. You could even pick it up and carry it across town, if your supercooling rig and laser setup were portable.
The BBC coverage [2] is good, but the NY Times [3] outdoes the Beeb with a handy illustration of how you encode a light beam in the spins of chilled rubidium atoms.
The research is to be published in forthcoming issues of the journal Nature (Lene Vestergaard Hau et al., Rowland Institute for Science, Cambridge) and the Physical Review Letters (Ronald L. Walsworth et al., Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge). The Times piece quotes extensively from the work of Walsworth's group; Hau refused to discuss her work in detail because of restrictions imposed by Nature.
[1] http://tbtf.com/archive/0176.html#s11 [2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1124000/1124540.stm [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/18/science/18LIGH.html?pagewanted=all ____________________________________
Thursday, 2001-01-18
++ Time to dump NSI 9:17:32 am
Been waiting for the right moment to transfer your domain names out of the control of Network Solutions? It may have arrived. This morning I moved the last two domains in my stable to Dotster [1]. Until Feb. 18 this registrar is offering free transfers and a one- year extension on the registration of any (.com, .net, .org) domain name for $11.95 US.
The last time I transferred a domain name, 6 months ago to the day, the process involved faxing a registration form with a copy of my driver's license. Today's transfers were initiated entirely online. I already had a name registered with Dotster, so the process re- quired only 5 steps and 5 minutes. If you need to set up a new account, add another 5 minutes.
Dotster's registration agreement [2] is middle-of-the-road. Like all ICANN-affiliate agreements, it binds you to the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy. Unlike some, it names you as the "owner" of the domain name, not its lessor. Dotster's prices are very good, but bargain shoppers can find lower (for example at joker.com [3]).
Go here [4] to initiate a domain-name transfer. I get no consider- ation if you do. I looked into Dotster's affiliate program, but they use something called Commission Junction [5], which asked for my Social Security number and bank information (!) and had no privacy policy that I could find. Welcome to the world of affiliate market- ing. Life is too short. If you want to support TBTF, please visit the Benefactors [6] page, and thanks.
[1] http://www.dotster.com/ [2] http://www.dotster.com/Register/Agreement/ [3] https://joker.com/domain/index.html?lang=EN [4] http://www.dotster.com/anniversary/ [5] http://www.cj.com/ [6] http://tbtf.com/the-benefactors.html ____________
++ Underground online 7:30:39 am
By now the entire world knows that Suelette Dreyfus and Julian As- sange, the authors of Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier, have made available the full text of the book online as "Literary Freeware: Not for Commercial Use." The book's home [1] has been unavailable since the first moment I tried -- surely before it was Slashdotted [2]. (The flash crowd will have died down by now.)
Julian Assange has sent a followup note pointing out some mirror sites. I list a few here and reproduce Julian's note below.
- (mirror) http://rubberhose.sourceforge.net/underground
- (mirror) http://the.wiretapped.net/security/info/books/
- (zip) http://demonstreet.com/underground.zip
- (text) http://www.matthewmiller.net/underground.txt - (Palm) http://www.matthewmiller.net/underground.pdb
- (text) http://www.core.org.au/mystuff/underground.zip - (Palm) http://www.core.org.au/mystuff/underground.pdb ____________
> Several people have noted that that www.underground-book.com has > been slashdotted to kingdom-come (it doesn't even ping any more!) and > have asked for mirrors.
> There are a number listed in various slashdot replies, here:
> http://slashdot.org/articles/01/01/18/0141232.shtml
> Failing that, you can try http://rubberhose.sourceforge.net/underground, > which is an officialish mirror of the download page.
> Note that there are no mirrors of the web-site proper (just the > download pages). But google has cached most of the site. A few > of the more useful pages:
> Main page: > http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.underground-book.com > Critical reviews: > http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.underground-book.com/critics.php3 > Reader reviews: > http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.underground-book.com/readers.php3 > Ordering hard-copy on-line from Australian university bookshops (note that > amazon.com does *not* stock books published by non-us publishers.. even > Random House Australia!): > http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.underground-book.com/coop.php3
> Otherwise try http://www.underground-book.com/ in a few days when the deluge > is finally over.
> Cheers, > Julian
[1] http://www.underground-book.com/ [2] http://slashdot.org/articles/01/01/18/0141232.shtml ____________________________________
Wednesday, 2001-01-17
++ How many horseman? 11:38:51 am
Salon runs a piece by Katharine Mieszkowski called "Turn Off the In- ternet!" [1] in which she explores the tangled reasoning and shoddy statistics behind the latest rap pinned on the Internet economy.
> In addition to taking the heat for everything from kiddie porn > to the gentrification of urban neighborhoods, the Net is now at > fault for overloading our national power infrastructure.
The blame-the-Internet meme seems to have originated with Mark Mills and Peter Huber, two right-wing energy consultants frequently in the pay of the coal industry. Their exaggerated numbers began seeping into the mainstream with a Forbes article [2] last spring in which they claimed that 8% of the nation's energy goes to power Internet computers and infrastructure. This analysis [3] (note: PDF file) by two UC Berkeley scientists says that Mills and Huber's numbers are high by nearly an order of magnitude.
Mieszkowski reports that energy usage went up by 2% a year in the late 90s, but by 3.3% during the go-go late 80s. Paul Krugman re- cently argued [4] that California's energy woes can be laid solidly at the feet of the state's flawed deregulation scheme.
[1] http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/01/17/net_power/print.html [2] http://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html [3] http://enduse.lbl.gov/SharedData/IT/Forbescritique991209.pdf [4] http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/07/opinion/07KRUG.html ____________________________________
Wednesday, 2001-01-10
++ Memory slag 5:21:20 pm
A couple of years ago, Rebecca Eisenberg offered some free advice to PR folks on how not to waste the time of online journalists [1] (cited in TBTF for 1999-09-11 [2]). Central to her advice was this suggestion: don't send me MS Word attachments, send me URLs.
But did they listen? Not hardly. Today I received a press release, complete with attachments, that significantly upped the ante on this poor PR practice.
James Fallows's column in the Industry Standard this week, "No Thanks for the Memories" [3], talks about what he calls memory slag: leftover bits of data from a hard disk, or even from DRAM, that can show up in documents. Fallows claims that such slag was very common in Microsoft environments up to the middle of the last decade, but that Microsoft made a big push starting after the release of Windows 95 to make sure its code zeros out memory that is supposed to be blank. (Here's an explanatory page [4] on the site of the data- recovery expert who opened Fallows's eyes.)
Fallows's example concerns an obscure output format from MS Outlook, which he guesses didn't draw the attention of the code cleaners. But from the MS Word file I received today (apparently created in Word 98 on a Macintosh), it's clear that more mainstream formats are also vulnerable to memory slag.
The attachment was a two-page press release from a company I shall not name. They had thoughtfully attached both .DOC and .PDF versions of the release. Having just read the Fallows piece, I was curious to note that the .DOC file was more than 10 times larger than the .PDF. Instead of opening it using Microsoft Word, I dropped it onto BBEdit, a Macintosh text editor that cheerfully showed the file's binary content in all its glory.
It quickly became clear that the extra 200K in the .DOC file con- tained more than just Word's apparatus. I located several lengthy lists of names -- apparently distribution lists -- and several versions of what appeared to be a completely different press re- lease. When I mailed these back to the sender in clear text, she was rightly alarmed.
Fallows quotes an employee of a computer-security company:
> When we get a resume, in Word, from job applicants, we put it in > the hex editor and go right to the end to see what else they've > been writing.
You have been warned.
[1] http://www.bossanova.com/rebeca/clips/prletter.html [2] http://tbtf.com/archive/1999-09-11.html#s09 [3] http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,21271,00.html [4] http://www.crak.com/clinton.htm ____________
Updated 2001-01-11, 10:42 am: John Waterson, ITS, EC, SE writes:
> It is quite alarming to think that non-zeroed blocks of > malloc'ed memory might find their way into documents, but I > figured it was worth mentioning that there is another -- more > mundane and widely documented, although no less dangerous -- > explanation for the garbage you found in the press release.
> Word includes a (mis)feature called *Fast Saves*, whereby text > deleted from a document isn't actually removed from the file on > disk when the user hits the Save button. Instead, Word just ap- > pends any new text to the end of the file, and some flags are > set which result in the "deleted" text being skipped by the > document parser. This saves Word from having to rewrite the > whole file, which appears to be a fairly disk-intensive oper- > ation.
> However, this becomes a very widespread problem when you con- > sider how most non-technical people use a word processor. Not > having much of a grasp of stylesheets, templates and the like, > an average user will almost never create a new document from > scratch. Instead, they'll pick a document from their personal > archive that is broadly similar in format to the one they want > to create, copy it, and start deleting the stuff that they want > to change. I figure that this behaviour -- coupled with the Fast > Saves feature -- is the most likely explanation for the detritus > in your press release.
> Anyway, the other thing that is worth mentioning about Fast > Saves is that -- mercifully, and unlike the non-zeroed memory > problem -- they are fairly easy to switch off. Have a look under > the Save tab of the Tools, Options dialog, and just disable the > relevant setting.
> Also, for reference: Microsoft have released many a technote > about the Fast Saves option in Word. Some samples: [5], [6], > [7]. These all reference Word for Windows, but the Mac version > definitely seems to incorporate the Fast Saves feature too, viz: > [8].
[5] http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q211/2/09.ASP [6] http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q237/3/61.asp [7] http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q197/9/78.ASP [8] http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q51/8/40.ASP ____________________________________
Tuesday, 2001-01-09
++ Much ado about peering 7:04:31 pm
The NANOG list has recently carried some close-to-the-ground mes- sages on the murky and little-understood world of ISP peering. Someone notified Dave Farber (the Paul Revere of the Internet [1]), and readers of his IP list enjoyed this piece of apparent news [2]. Now unless the tech reporters read NANOG, the media will probably pick up the story, reporting that UUNet has at last published its requirements for peering and the world will be a better place.
For the record, there's no news here.
Background: in the earliest days of the commercial Net, at the point when the phrase "Internet backbone" ceased to have a well-defined meaning, the largest ISPs met at public exchange points [3] and swapped traffic for free. Soon the largest of the large were ex- changing for free only among themselves; they began charging to take the traffic of smaller carriers. In 1997 TBTF marked [4] the point at which the next smaller fish, tier-2 carriers, began to charge exchange fees to the still smaller downstream regionals and ISPs.
In recent years, as Net traffic has continued its wild growth, peering arrangements have gotten increasingly complicated. It used not to be possible for a mid-sized carrier to discover anything about the peering policies of the big guys without signing a non- disclosure agreements and engaging in exhaustive price negotiations.
The piece that caught Farber's eye was news of UUNet's publication of its peering standards [5]. This event was neither the first of its kind -- Genuity had published their standards [6] last fall, as a Farber follow-up mentioned -- nor was it particularly meaningful for mid-tier ISPs. As one of NANOG's stalwarts posted [7], knowing what a tier-1's peering policies are is not the same as obtaining a peering agreement with one of them. UUNet's publicly disclosed policy will simply make it easier for smaller carriers to rule out the possibility of ever peering with the giant.
[1] http://www.privatesectorcouncil.org/imtw00.html [2] http://www.interesting-people.org/200101/0015.html [3] http://www.mae.net/east-contact.html [4] http://tbtf.com/archive/1997-05-08.html#s07 [5] http://www.uu.net/peering/ [6] http://www.genuity.com/infrastructure/interconnection.htm [7] http://www.cctec.com/maillists/nanog/current/msg00693.html __________________________________________________________________________
TBTF Log home at http://tbtf.com/blog/ . To unsubscribe from this list send the message "unsubscribe" to tbtf-log-request@tbtf.com, or visit http://tbtf.com/blog/#subscribe .
To subscribe to the TBTF newsletter, send the message "subscribe" to tbtf-request@tbtf.com, or visit http://tbtf.com/#autosub .
TBTF and the TBTF Log are Copyright 1994-2000 by Keith Dawson, daw- son@world.std.com. Commercial use prohibited. For non-commercial purposes please forward, post, and link as you see fit. _______________________________________________ Keith Dawson dawson@world.std.com Layer of ash separates morning and evening milk.
2000 -- TBTF named to Forbes Magazine's Best of the Web 1999 -- KD named Internet Freedom's Internet Journalist of the Year 1997, 1998 -- TBTF named to PC Magazine's Best Free Stuff on the Web