" Hackers exploiting a loophole in America Online's signup process have begun taking their pick of AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) accounts, hijacking them virtually at will.

The technique emerged early this month on AOL-Files, a meeting place for AOL hackers, where it was born as a harmless hack that allows users to establish AOL accounts with screen names that are -- unconventionally -- indented.

The more sinister applications of the bug became clear later. "It wasn't until recently that anyone noticed that it could be used to hijack Instant Messenger accounts," says Adrian Lamo, founder of Inside-AOL and a longtime chronicler of AOL's foibles. "And it only became a significant problem in the past week.""

"On the Semantic Web, the target audience is the machines rather than humans. To satisfy the demands of this audience, information needs to be available in machine-processable form rather than as unstructured text. A variety of information models like RDF or UML are available to fulfil this purpose, varying greatly in their capabilities. The advent of XML leveraged a promising consensus on the encoding syntax for machine-processable information. However, interoperating between different information models on a syntactic level proved to be a laborious task. In this paper, we suggest a layered approach to interoperability of information models that borrows from layered software structuring techniques used in today's internetworking. We identify the object layer that fills the gap between the syntax and semantic layers and examine it in detail. We suggest the key features of the object layer like identity and binary relationships, basic typing, reification, ordering, and n-ary relationships. Finally, we examine design issues and implementation alternatives involved in building the object layer."

Riding on the open-source wagon

"In a market overflowing with Internet-enabled applications, vendors increasingly are counting on the magic words "open source" to attract venture capitalists, partners, and customer interest.

But are software vendors using open source merely as a way to stand out from the crowd? Or do open-source versions of applications merit consideration above and beyond the buzzword factor?"

Those nagging open source details

""Basically, their message is, the only way to run your business is to have one very-powerful database," Error said. "Maybe you can have one back-up [database] server for redundancy, or if you really want to get crazy you can adopt their parallel server product, but most companies can't afford that. [Oracle] is really neglecting the whole distributed idea, that you can partition a database across multiple machines and take advantage of the scaling effects that come as a result."

In other words, the same market forces that three years ago forced many Internet Service Providers to use Linux and Apache as Web servers have created the opportunity for growing open source marketshare in the database market as well."

Choosing Open Source: What Does It Mean?

"So I guess if I had to formulate a succinct answer to Joe's question, I'd have to say this: Linux is not behind Windows because Linux isn't following Windows. We're doing things a different way, the correct way. We admit bugs when they happen and do our best to fix them. Our feature sets are not dictated by marketing and PR departments. We give back to the community. We help each other. We foster the belief that stability and correctness are fundamental to design. We do not lie to our users or to each other. Money is nice, but it's not our primary motivator. We are proud, passionate, nettlesome, partisan, opinionated, occasionally muleheaded and foul-mouthed. Linux is a belief system and a philosophy as much as a body of software.

I choose to belong to this society because I want to stand for something. I want my code to stand for something besides profit and loss."

Inside Red Hat: An interview with the CEO

"People don't buy operating systems. They buy solutions to a business problem. I think back on this because there were 14 applications running on Red Hat Linux at the time of our IPO. Today we guesstimate that there are between 5,000 and 6,000 applications."

"The place that we have is at the root-directory level of Linux. So imagine our capability: being able to get inside of somebody's network architecture, server architecture, with complete open source solutions that allow me to automatically configure systems for you, with over 600 different open source products and packages that have been certified by Red Hat. That can be mirrored and delivered to you all online."

Open-sourcing the Apple

"A powerful OS that runs popular applications would represent a Unix that has finally grown up. And it would present us with a truly interesting question: Should Microsoft be worried? I say yes, because Mac OS X can potentially challenge Windows both in usability and in industrial reliability; but, no, because Apple's slice of the market is still too small, and Microsoft's sway with developers and independent software vendors is too high.

Apple's chances would increase greatly if instead of merely incorporating portions of an open-source operating system in Mac OS X, the company fully committed to the open-source software development model and freed all of its OS source code."

Setting Up Shop: The Business of Open-Source Software

"Commercial software companies face many challenges in growing their business in today's fast-moving and competitive industry environment. Recently many people have proposed the use of an open-source development model as one possible way to address those challenges. This document investigates the business of commercial open-source software, including why a company might adopt an open-source model, how open-source licensing works, what business models might be usable for commercial open-source products, what special considerations apply to commercial products released as open source, and how various objections relating to open source might be answered. The target audience is commercial software and hardware companies and individual software developers considering some sort of open-source strategy or just curious about how such a strategy might work."

"BlogVoices is a free discussion system for Blogger-powered blogs.

BlogVoices is provided to members of the Blogger community who (1) do not have the resources to create a discussion system for themselves or (2) choose not to pay for the built-in system available in Blogger Pro. "

"Our exploratory user study on the use of a major portal site in Belgium shows that a category of "skeptical Internet users" has abandoned searching the web. The skeptical Internet user has made a return-on-investment evaluation of his Internet experience, and has come to the conclusion that the return on some sites is just not worth the investment of his personal time and energy. What about your site?"

"Cybergeography is also somewhat of a counter reaction to much of the off-hand reporting of the net that it makes geography redundant, that implies that distance, location, and place no longer matter. That cyberspace has enabled anything, anytime, anywhere. The classic utopian fantasy that you can transcend material world and exist in the digital ether. Clearly, this not happening, cyberspace is not immaterial, it is very much an embodied space.

However, cyberspace is *changing* geography, it is warping space, shrinking distance and reconfiguring our sense of place. It is this warping and distorting that is very much the heart of cybergeography. It is also increasing of interest to geographers."

"If you want to operate an internet radio station legally, you need to do these things:

1. Follow the play limits and other restrictions on content mentioned in the DMCA, and summarized above;

2. Fill out the licensing forms from ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC, and send each of them at least a couple hundred dollars a year;

3. Fill out the webcasting licensing form for RIAA, and expect them to start hitting you with a large bill some time next year."

"Many of the issues Joel raises are more related to the usability of Netscape 6 than they are to the way it was developed. These usability issues can be easily solved, if Netscape took the time to build them in. Unfortunately, Netscape pushed the product out the door too early based on marketing deadlines (Comdex) instead of deadlines based on software quality. So, many of the things that should have been solved during the normal quality assurance process were neglected. Open source software development is a very intriguing concept, and Netscape has almost made it work by using the Mozilla codebase. Unfortunately, because Mozilla is a true open source project, the kinds of project management you find in commercial software development are almost non-existant. This problem is being addressed by many people in the open source software developmeny community:

• How open source manages code
• Managing Projects the Open Source Way
• An Introduction to Open Source Software Development
• The path to open-source systems
• Open Source Projects Manage Themselves? Dream On
• Presenting Open Source to the Enterprise - Rules of Engagement
• Stanford Open Source Research Project
• Is the OSS Model Failing?
• Moving `Open Source' Into the Mainstream to Bridge the Software Gap

Anyway, I agree that Netscape 6 is a fine example of poor or non-existant software project management, but am a strong believer in what open source can do for the software industry. The innovations in Mozilla alone are enough to provide a solid application framework to compete against Microsoft's upcoming .NET services framework. But that's another discussion altogether.

-- Cameron Barrett (camworld@camworld.com), November 21, 2000"

"An aphorism from some twenty years ago, Brooks' Law, holds that adding more programmers to a project only delays it. But if this is so, what accounts for Linux? Paul Jones gathers perspectives on the open source development method and whether it defies conventional wisdom."

"Meerkat, O'Reilly Network's Open Wire Service, extends its open API with XML-RPC, affording a more standardized XML-based interface to its aggregated RSS database."

"RDF Site Summary (RSS) is catching on as one of the most widely used XML formats on the Web. Find out how to create and use RSS files and learn what they can do for you. See why companies like Netscape, Userland, and Moreover use RSS to distribute and syndicate article summaries and headlines. This article includes sample code that demonstrates elements of an RSS file, plus a Perl example using the module XML::RSS."

"10.am aggregates links to the latest technology based content on the web. This includes links to News stories, articles, Usenet announcements, software updates and much more, all from a huge number of continually indexed sources .

Once 'harvested' these links are categorized by their subject into a familiar browsable and searchable directory structure. This allows you to quickly get at the up to the minute information you want, track down that elusive article or just find something interesting to read.

Think of 10.am like a fine tuned 'realtime' search engine. Rather than randomly trawling the web 10.am knows what to get and where to get it, constantly updating its content."

"You wouldn’t think modern TV would go this far, says Robert Thompson, a professor of TV, film and pop culture at Syracuse University. The shocking thing about this is that nobody is trying to disguise it. There’s always a sneaky way to do product placement. But there’s usually a little shame associated with it. Here, it’s absolutely shameless."

"Netscape 6. What an abortion. What a visual scar on my desktop. So many things on it screaming for my attention. The really horrible ´just register, no, go on, it´s easy, please, no, really, I insist, no, REGISTER, why? BECAUSE no one knows how to make money in this ´free sofware model´ and we´re going to sell your demographics by changing our privacy policy when you´re not looking´ approach is messed up.

It´s not so much that Microsoft won the browser war through any of its normal ´cross-platform anticompetitive leveraging´ tricks (as one judge described it), but simply because, like Apple, Netscape has proven themselves completely inadequate for the task.

You know, imagine if Microsoft wasn´t around! We´d be STUCK with this miserable aberration called Netscape Navigator 6. Strategically, it doesn´t bode well with this´concession of defeat´ by Netscape, but well, Microsoft must be really laughing now."

"Please excuse the angry tone of this lecture. My hands still hurt from hours of debugging reams of HTML and JavaScript that supposedly works cross-browser. If you believe everything you read, especially if everything you read nowadays comes in some sort of punditry from the Web, you already know the cry: Netscape is dead. Microsoft rules.

I'm here to tell you a little something. If you're a web developer, listen close: It's YOUR fault."

" All his power, which he deigns to share with only those on a level with him, those few, those happy few on the battlements looking down, far far down on the rabble and scum below, circling and illuminating him like the rings of Saturn. 'ah,' he thinks to himself, sharing not this consummate clarity of cerebral enlightenment with those too dull or ignorant to understand even a tenth of its vast and inwieldy wisdom, 'what must it be like to be one of them."

"For seven nights they've stayed on separate coasts. She watches her brother's baby in a sleepy seaside town. He clicks and curses in New York.
        Every night they phone each other. But tonight was different.
        Tonight they talked.
        They talked for hours. Like they used to talk when they were falling in love.
        Before they lived together.

They've decided to buy a string and two cans.

For when she gets back."

"Finally got around to downloading Groove this weekend. I don't know much more about it than I did before. But I didn't dig into it too thoroughly. My assessment, so far, is pretty much the common one: potentially cool. Potentially being the key word. As much hype as it's gotten, it has a steep road ahead. It's rather obviously missing the elusive "killer app" to get enough people to download it for it to be ubiquitous enough to get people to write apps to get people to download it -- and, even more importantly, use it."

"At one point or another, all followers of the democratic electoral process have probably stopped, scratched their chins, and speculated that politics is really just a big game of chance. Shall we add a bit of proof to the pudding? Witness the shocking similarities between the infamous Palm Beach County ballot and a standard issue Milton Bradley Triple Yahtzee® score card.

Is this a simple coincidence or a nefarious, anti-establishment plot hatched by the trusted brand name behind some of the world's most popular family-oriented board games? You be the judge."

"It appears that some readers have taken my article to mean that Navigator 6.0 will not comply with standards at all, or that Navigator 6.0 will be as noncompliant as Navigator 4.x. That is not the case. Netscape and Mozilla engineers deserve tremendous credit for creating a browser that has very good standards compliance. In fact, according to many who have studied it more throughly than I, Mozilla and Netscape 6 are more standards compliant than the competition. See, for example, Netscape Standards Challenge. I regret that I did not make this more explicit and give more credit to the Mozilla and Netscape engineers in my original article."

"But American III's high point is its two-song centerpiece. The first is Will Oldham's, "I See a Darkness," on which it becomes clear that, perhaps because of his neurological disorder, Cash's voice isn't as sure and strong as it once was. When he quavers, with Oldham singing backup, "Is there hope that somehow you can save me from this darkness?" the effect is absolutely devastating. You won't listen to the song the same after this. The shivers will eventually leave your spine, but the residue remains.

That song's transcendent power also stems from its production, which, although still sparse, is relatively lush. The organ and piano that rise to match the guitar remain in use for Nick Cave's "The Mercy Seat." Chronicling the first-person thoughts of a man being executed, this song, more than any other on the album, was written for Cash. Building to a rumbling crescendo, he belts out, "And the mercy seat is smokin'/ And I think my head is meltin'." This would've brought even Gary Gilmore to tears."

"We began to notice in early March that Yahoo! pages seemed to be rising in Google search rankings. This was several months before Google's alliance with Yahoo! was announced on June 26, so we had no reason to think that there was any connection. But Yahoo!'s rankings kept rising in the succeeding months, and the announcement of the Google-Yahoo! alliance naturally raised questions about the connection.

A key point is the size and depth of the Google index. The claim has been made that the reason for Yahoo!'s sudden climb has to do with the size and depth of the Google index -- Yahoo! has risen because more pages are being indexed, or maybe because Yahoo! is being more thoroughly indexed after the alliance. In answer to these suggestions, however, the accompanying table of data shows that the rise in Yahoo! rankings in Google searches occurred well before the Google-Yahoo! alliance, and also well before the increase in size of the Google index."

"For the record, I did talk with Kimberly Vogel at Google, to see if they have an explanation for this. Her response is that "Google's index has grown significantly since January 2000 and it has indeed uncovered more Yahoo! pages." I told her that my data seems to raise questions about this because the big leap by Yahoo! in Google rankings seems to have occurred before the explosive rise in the Google index size. She had no further explanation than this, just saying that what I recorded is an "anomaly."

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes."
-- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

"I have heard from a variety of people about voting instrument confusion in many states, not just near West Palm Beach Florida. We know from lots of examples of usability studies that errors on tasks arising from "dumb mistakes" are very common, with rates of easily 5%, 10%, or more. Elections, even important ones like for President of the United States, are often decided by much slimmer margins than that. In our ever-mobile world, thorough testing of ballot techniques and standardization may be called for if we are to believe that we truly choose our elected officials rather than flip a coin."

"Before I review "A Field Guide to the Yettie" I should first acknowledge that I cannot offer an objective critique. I am, after all, a "young entrepreneurial technocrat" -- a "yettie" -- myself. I write for an online magazine; I own my fair share of midcentury modern furniture, as well as a soundtrack downloaded from the Web that runs heavily to electronica. Most important, I pass the ultimate yettie test: Although I'm not an extreme example of "an employee of an Internet company [who] cannot explain to my mother exactly what it is I do for a living," my grandparents still can't figure out what I do. I carry a cellphone, a Palm Pilot, an MP3 player and a bike messenger bag, drink lattes and shop vintage chic. I know what Unix is."

"Reading the discussions of individual bugs provides an interesting glimpse into the workings of the Mozilla open-source process, and into the interactions between Mozilla and Netscape. In a number of cases, Mozilla engineers have fixed standards-compliance bugs and have had their patches to the source code reviewed twice by senior engineers. Even when the patches are extraordinarily simple ones, and the engineers are convinced that they pose no risk of introducing other bugs, their requests to include the fixes into the Netscape 6 release are denied by the Netscape Product Development Team (PDT) out of fear, apparently, that accepting these patches would cause the release schedule to slip."

"As I write this, Netscape's 5.0 web browser is almost two years late. Partially, this is because they made the suicidal mistake of throwing out all their code and starting over: the same mistake that doomed Ashton-Tate, Lotus, and Apple's MacOS to the recycle-bins of software history. Netscape has seen its browser share go from about 80% to about 20% during this time, all the while it could do nothing to address competitive concerns, because their key software product was disassembled in 1000 pieces on the floor and was in no shape to drive anywhere. That single bad decision, more than anything else, was the nuclear bomb Netscape blew itself up with."

Jakob Nielsen, maintainer of www.useit.com, has published a hardcopy book entitled Designing Web Usability. This article asks "What can we learn from this book?"

Nielsen writes for a broad audience of decision-makers, HTML designers, graphic designers, and programmers. Nearly all of the examples are from e-commerce, corporate, or commercial sites. ArsDigita Systems Journal has a narrower audience in some ways. Nobody comes to ASJ to learn about HTML or graphic design, for example. But our audience is interested in a broader class of Web services than those treated by Nielsen. In particular, ASJ readers aspire to build sites that are collaborative, sites that use computing technology in an effective way, sites that have a dramatic impact on the users' perceptions of how the Internet can be applied. We do have readers that would like to sell a few more widgets from their catalog ecommerce sites, but on balance we'd like every article here to be worth the time of an MIT computer science senior taking Software Engineering for Web Applications (http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/one-term-web).

The goal of this article is to pick out the most interesting stuff from Nielsen's book, leave out stuff that would be obvious to our readers (e.g., "frames suck"), and tie Nielsen's material to related ideas."

"I have a certain tendency to think of Michael Moore as a funny, slap-dash kind of guy. I think it's because time dulls the memory of how dark Roger & Me and Moore's later TV shows were -- they were funny, but whistling-in-the-dark funny. From reading his latest letter, however, it sounds like he's stopped whistling, and started shouting."

"In my hometown of Flint, 32,000 GM jobs have been lost since you and Clinton took office. That's 5,000 MORE GM jobs than were lost there during the ENTIRE 12 years of Reagan/Bush! Are you even aware that two-thirds of the school children in Flint live below the federal poverty level? And you wonder why the race in Michigan is so close! These people you left behind had nowhere else to go EXCEPT to Nader -- unless they choose to just stay home on Election Day, which is what the majority of them will do."

"Another boy band? Hardly. 2gether is sort of a Spinal Tap for the turn of the century. The group was "created" as a parody of such boy bands as N'Sync. A mockumentary called, 2gether, aired on MTV earlier this year and a strange thing happened. The parody band generated 300 fan Webster; the soundtrack hit the charts; and Britney Spears asked the parodists to open for her last tour. It gets weirder. The musicians have started to take themselves seriously."

"Currently there are three levels of response to coercion, which can exist simultaneously in our culture. Some of us are readily fooled by the simplest of manipulative techniques. These people, who I call "Traditionalists," are the sort of folks who are emotionally moved by politicians' speeches, dedicated to their local sports teams, and ready to believe that government agencies would prevent us from being duped by misleading advertisements.

The next group - who marketers like to call "sophisticated" audiences - feels they understand how the media hope to manipulate them. These "Cool Kids" respond to coercive techniques that acknowledge their ironic detachment. Their television remote controls and video game controllers have changed their relationship to the television tube. They like to deconstruct every image that is piped into their homes. But they fall for the wink wink, nudge nudge plea of the modern advertiser or salesperson who appeals to their media-savvy wit. As long as the coercer admits with a sideways glance that he's coercing, the Cool Kid is likely to take the bait. He is being rewarded for his ironic attitude.

The last group has graduated from the culture of cool and is just plain fed up with everything that has a trace of manipulation. The "New Simpletons" want straightforward, no-nonsense explanations for what they're supposed to buy or do."

"The concept of Web services is the beginning of a new service-oriented architecture in building better software applications. The change from an object-oriented system to a service-oriented one is an evolutionary idea that sublimated from the global Internet and Web system. To understand how to build Web Services into your computing architecture, you need to carefully understand the role they play. This article details the software engineering concepts behind the Web Services architecture, how it has evolved, how it is structured, and how it can be brought into your existing computing infrastructure"

"The semantics of services -- what they do and what data elements they manipulate mean -- is the key issue. Business value results from B2B collaborations that do the right thing. If they do something else, the damage may be dramatic. How, then, do we trust that a service does the right thing before it is used? And how do we make that determination at Internet speeds?

In small-scale OO systems, interface compatibility usually implies semantic compatibility. That is, an object that implements the right set of messages with the right types of arguments probably does "the right thing." This is true, in part, because small-scale systems tend to be built by a small team of programmers with shared understanding of how the system operates and, in part, because small systems offer little opportunity for ambiguity. However, in large-scale OO systems, the semantics provided by a given class cannot be reliably deduced from the message interface alone. Clearly, in an Internet populated with many thousands of services offered by thousands of different companies with very different agendas, compliance with some specified message set will not be sufficient to deduce the semantics of the service."

"For many of Napster’s users, the main benefits of its file-swapping service are that it provides music conveniently and for free. Some people will be prepared to pay for the convenience and for good quality downloads, provided the price is right. That means the main challenge facing Bertelsmann and Napster is to produce a paid-for service which people would rather use than free sites which could copy Napster. Some of these other file-swapping services will be harder to police. Services such as Gnutella and FreeNet allow the swapping of music files between personal computers but without the use of a central service, like Napster’s. This makes it much more difficult for courts and regulators to act against them. By teaming up with Napster, Bertelsmann has accepted the inevitable: Internet distribution of music is here to stay and likely to grow enormously. But the deal does not mark the end of the music industry’s piracy problem. Music companies now have to show they have more to offer customers than free web-based services."

"For a moment there, as Napster's usage went through the roof while the music industry spread insane propaganda about the impending collapse of all professional music making, one could imagine that the collective will of thirty million people looking for free Britney Spears songs constituted some sort of grass-roots uprising against The Man. As the BMG deal reverberates through the industry, though, it will become apparent that those Napster users were really just agitating for better prices. In unleashing these economic effects, Napster has almost single-handedly dragged the music industry into the Internet age. Now the industry is repaying the favor by dragging Napster into the mainstream of the music business."

"PC Data's latest survey of the buying habits of some 120,000 US home-based Net surfers shows that Napster users soon cut the number of albums they buy, once they get proficient at downloading songs from the MP3 sharing service.

The company measures sales through online stores. It found that "new Napster users are just as likely to purchase music at cdnow.com after initially downloading Napster software. However, 90 days after downloading Napster software, consumers' online music purchases plummet"."

"The news couldn't be more shocking if the Catholic church suddenly announced it was embracing contraception: Apple is moving to a two-button mouse.

Sharp-eyed beta testers of Apple's new operating system, Mac OS X, have noticed that the pre-release software supports mice featuring more than one button."