Dot-com to bare all
Reuters reports that Internet Advisory Corp., which sells e-commerce tools and Web hosting, hopes to emerge from bankruptcy by buying a New York strip club and then expand the franchise across the country. Reuters says:
"We are charting a new course for the company," Internet Advisory's Chairman and Chief Executive Richard Goldring said. "We intend to become the industry leader in adult nightclub entertainment."
Via Fark.
iMac Dance
First came Hamster Dance. Now, put your hands together for iMac Dance.
Via Boing Boing.
01/10/02
Winner, specification with best hidden powers
XML.com has posted the list of winners of its 2001 Anti Awards. Most are really XML insider jokes, so you might not get them - but we found that substituting the name of your favorite spec or technology works quite nicely to give you the basic idea. Among the winners:Most Technically Deficient Initiative Kept Alive by Marketing Dollars
The winner of this category is the much-vaunted UDDI, whose press-intensive launch depleted entire rain forests, yet somehow failed to produce anything of any use whatever. The sheer momentum of the bandwagon has meant a UDDI 2 release was required to fix up the ailing specification -- a possible contender for next year's awards.
Via Dive Into Mark.
Wendy's remembers Dave
Wendy's home page now has a memorial to founder Dave Thomas (see below). In fact, the entire home page is a remembrance.
Search engine bites the dust
Well, part of it, anyway. Northern Light says it is ending its public Web-wide search engine on Jan. 16 as it concentrates on selling its search technology and databases to the corporate world. The company will continue to offer a free public search engine for recent news articles, however.
01/09/01
Wendy's Web site ignores Dave's death
As you of course know, Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy's, died this week. William Dupuy, who advises companies on how to improve their Web sites, didn't have anything good to say about the company's Web site:
Dave Thomas likely would not be a happy man if he were alive today and looking at the international front door to his enterprise. That door -- his corporate web site -- creaked and groaned throughout the day his death was announced, often not even loading the homepage.
For visitors lucky enough to be able to load the www.wendys.com homepage late in the day, they found there no mention of Dave's death. Instead, his smiling face was on the screen, asking, "How may I help you?" Copy on the page touted the company's wares.
...
With Dave dead, it appears no one is watching the store.
Dupuy does note that a separate Wendy's site for investors was quickly re-done to commemorate Thomas and to announce an investor conference call on his death.
Geek comic strip
Joy of Tech shows definite promise. Get there immediately.
Via Weblog Wannabe.
01/08/02
Youngest security expert ever
SecurityFocus reports that a 16-year old in South Bombay, India, recently won certification as a Certified Information Systems Security Professional.
Namit Merchant was sixteen when he sat for the six-hour, 250-question CISSP test in Mumbai in November -- he turned seventeen later that month. While there's no official minimum age for obtaining the certification -- which is widely recognized in the industry -- aspirants are required to have at least three years of full-time professional computer security experience under their belt when they take the test.
Perhaps understandably, the CISSP test proctor became skeptical of Merchant's qualifications when the teenager checked in for the exam using his high school I.D. card. "He saw my birth date on there, and he asked me how old I was," says Merchant. "I told him I was sixteen, and that was why I didn't have a driver's license."
Spam poetry
SatireWire has announced the winners of its Second Annual Poetry Spam, in which readers are invited to send in poems composed entirely of phrases from their spam - or to write odes to spam:
I Answered All My Spam
I never know what I might find,
on any day I go online.
I used to get in quite a huff,
while wading through unwanted stuff.
But then I changed the man I am,
the day I answered all my spam.Now every time I check my box,
I load up on fantastic stocks.
I'll gladly say I felt no loss,
when, with a smile, I fired my boss.
With just one click, the best thing yet,
I freed myself of all my debt.
01/07/02
Confessions of a hacker
You may have read recently of how a number of federal agencies flunked a network security audit.Mark Hershberger found that out firsthand. He's a classic Unix sysadmin - he likes to hack around with things.
Last fall, he was working for a branch of the Department of the Interior. He writes:I, being a foolish, consious person, decided to run a port-scan on the network. Now, being foolish, I didn't discuss this with anyone — they would just tell me to stop. And, as further proof of my foolishness. I decided to scan the entire class B subnet that the DOI owned, not just the segments used by MMS. Finally, I put it in a cron job so that it would run every Tuesday.
He briefly describes what happened next, as well as:
Yes, I learned quite a few things from that episode, not the least of which was Don't portscan using nmap's default settings.
Breathless Apple
OK, so by now you either know that Apple's Next Big Thing is a flat-screen PC designed for Swedish furniture or you don't care. Still, you have to admit that Apple's daily-countdown homepage was something - for once, Apple was playing up the hype, not dismissing it. See alternative Apple homepages.
Via Boing Boing.
Dave Barry does Windows XP
Dave Barry has used Windows since the beginning. And he still doesn't like it:
My computers keep having seizures, but I keep buying Windows versions, hoping I'll get lucky. I'm like the loser in the nightclub who keeps hitting on the hot babe. His shoes are squishing from the piña colada she poured on him, but he's thinking: "She's warming up to me!"
I bring this all up because now Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according to everybody is the "most reliable Windows ever." To me, this is like saying that asparagus is "the most articulate vegetable ever."
RELATED LINKS
Compendium archive: Week of 01/21/02 Week of 01/14/02 Week of 01/07/02 Week of 01/02/02 Week of 12/03/01 Week of 11/26/01 Week of 11/19/01 Week of 11/12/01 Week of 11/05/01 Week of 10/29/01 Week of 10/22/01 Week of 10/15/01 Week of 10/08/01 Week of 10/01/01 Week of 9/24/01 Weeks of 9/10/01 - 9/17/01 Week of 9/3/01 Week of 8/27/01 Week of 8/20/01 Week of 8/13/01 Week of 8/6/01 Note: Compendium's entire staff took the week of 7/30 off. Week of 7/23/01 Week of 7/16/01 Week of 7/9/01 Week of 7/2/01 Week of 6/25/01 Week of 6/18/01 Week of 6/11/01 Week of 6/4/01
Tracking down a stolen Mac; Dead C Scrolls; Googlewhacking; How bad is it in the Valley?; Storage lessons from the Wayback Machine; The pub-seeking handheld; Internet gang wars; Outlook XP breaks MIME.
Why should iMac owners have all the eye candy?; Luxo Redux; So you think your job is bad; Google as a DNS replacement? Not so fast; Nokia exec cites stock plunge in speeding-fine appeal; The tragedy of the .coms; The Google parlor game; Some people *like* Steve the Dell Guy; Ban all Microsoft attachments?
Dot-com to bare all; iMac Dance; Wendy's remembers Dave; Search engine bites the dust; Wendy's Web site ignores Dave's death; Geek comic strip; Youngest security expert ever; Spam poetry; Confessions of a hacker; Breathless Apple; Dave Barry does Windows XP.
Dropping everything to vote; The best Apple rumors, ever; Guess Steve Case isn't getting into Harvard; Make your own O'Reilly cover; Boosting your wireless juice; Telnet lives!
This space intentionally left blank (vacation).
The most useless software ever; Is Microsoft getting ready to squash PC vendors?; Excite@Home: The Watergate of the New Economy?; No more 3Com Park. Is CMGI Field next?; Are you an e-bore?; This site'll have you coming and going; Entertainment Weekly's loss of innocence; Ensign Crusher as Entertainer of the Year; Oh, for the old days.
The Museum of Broken Packets; Just in time for Thanksgiving; Tourist Guy found; Why virtual offices suck; A domain ruling that sucks; Hacking the iPod.
Why you shouldn't ship computers via UPS; When .Net requires Java; High-tech grafitti artists; Spam from beyond the grave; New group tries to oversee the whole Internet; Paging Dick Tracy; Students use PDAs to cheat; Windaz for Aussies, Newfies; Another alternative to Passport; A virtual honeynet
Bill Gates: Father of open source; Verizon exec: Monopoly is good; Weird molecule names; E-mail: too much of a good thing?; A cluster of one; More woes for dot-bombers; Spam as weapon in the war on crime; Just when you think the Web can't get any better; Just when you think the Web can't get any worse; More proof I shouldn't be a wiseass; Using your Web logs to ID hacker attacks; Help save the FAQs; Who do you trust, baby?; Powerpuff Girls powerless against virus; Big IP pipe between US, Europe.
The profit of turning thugs into programmers; Work Name Generator; A programmer's lament; The world's best ATM; Are anti-spammers killing people?; Web services and storage; Get your Aerons here; Perl for the XXI-imum century; Microsoft's blocking of non-IE browsers.
Government info taken off the Web since 9/11; Beware hackers who talk too much; A contest you can enter sitting down; Now don't try this in the office; Bob Patterson must die; Finally, a useful 404 page; Tech calls from hell; Teletubbies XP; More XP fun; Anthrax and e-mail; Larry's ID card; World's longest gum-wrapper chain.
Let's drop PDAs on Afghanistan; Voice control? Try grunt control; Spam gets back to business; A content-management portal; Share your system tray with the world; Would you let the recording industry onto your network?; Al Queda's low-tech high tech; 9/11 archive; Shoe company gets open source after all; Pod people, coming soon to a cube near you.
Larry and Scott's dueling ID cards; Cringely: Broadband is dead; The dangers of Photoshop; The dangers of copy protection; Microsoft mining whois for telephone solicitations?; How to REALLY throw a LAN party; Good fences don't make good 'Net neighbors; How Google adapted to 9/11 news; Web services as over-hyped hooey; Why shoe guys shouldn't do open source; Online air hockey.
AT&T waives 9/11 wireless charges for some; Shifting gears; Craig Burton on the Novell/Microsoft suit; In search of the post-PC interface; Vibrating PDAs and wearable phones; Gary Condit's Web site; No, that isn't a real photo of a WTC tourist; How to throw a LAN party; How sucky is your intranet?
For grizzled 'Net veterans; UK ISP forced to pull deceptive ads; Pretty Good encryption controversy; Are you as smart as Miss America?; Really securing your computer; Still lots of insecure IIS servers; Kids, don't try this at home; Anthrax Kills; Larry's national database; Nimda hysteria?
Attack and post-attack items.
999,999,999 bottles of beer on the wall; Finally, a wind-up cell phone; Enough with the ringing!; The VoIP calculator; 802.11b insecurity; Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf explains IOS DHCP; Is ENUM the mark of the devil?; AOL gives user permanent demerit; The Ballmer music video; Cleveland news flash: Y2K was last year.
Re-routing around censorship; Us vs. them in scripting; The boss button; Fighting off the hackers for fun; Peer computing as a weapon of war; Unix poetry; The Windows Fatal Exception Decoder; New Fusion widget: Getting rid of spyware; The sound of 200 cell phones going off at once; Taleban Web site hacked; Hey, sysadmin, remember Sircam?
On the importance of flame wars; Bill Gates sees dead people?; A markup language for grunts and groans; Is Microsoft leaking those Ballmer dance videos?; Good Samaritan not so good?; Steve Ballmer works up a sweat; Open-source wireless cracking; When technology goes too far; Another dumb computer arrest?; Is Cisco Communist?
Moron marketers threaten 'Net users; Finding free wireless access; Complete wastes of time; OS holy war flares in North Carolina; Are programmers weird?; Somebody actually buys an X10 camera; We're number, uh, two!; Those after-hours computer discussions; An entire city running on Linux; Distributed spam fighter under development; Could a Warhol virus infect the entire 'Net in 15 minutes?; Tell AOL what to do with its CDs.
Fusion shatters a myth; Bridging .Net and Java?; AT&T Broadband cuts off non-IIS servers to fight Code Red; Bluetoothless; Tennessee town bites into Apple; And you thought TI-99/4A fans were over the edge; Biometrics coming to your local supermarket; Steve Ballmer a-hootin' and a-hollerin'; Speaking of Web images; Just how far PC prices have fallen; Does Starbucks' CEO get his own wireless strategy?
Crackers getting more sophisticated; Sex and Microsoft Office; The wonders of science, part MXXII; Finally, a useful virus; A shocking game controller; Big Ball of Mud school of programming; Two vitally important new resources; Adobe: Ooops; Eudora Welty, dead at 92; Centralizing Unix administration in Perl; Spellchecking the entire Web.
Worm turns on Microsoft Web servers; The day the ISP died; Cell-phone users have no shame; Even Internet consultants can screw up the 'Net; Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers; The ultimate cup of coffee; The solar-powered ISP; Everhost; Internet VCer: Oops; The Lego Palm and the pink fuzzy laptop; The Microsoft-English dictionary; Putting a loved one in the home.
Saving those all important VoIP calls; This site is a bright idea; Could wireless end messy divorces?; How much will that software really cost you?; Ghosts of failed dot-coms; The spy's guide to securing your Cisco routers; Oprah for Internet czarina?; What's Microsoft doing at an open-source conference?; Like a big pizza pi; Cyber-bullies; Better check your phone bill; Have some birthday pi.
How HP wastes energy to save energy; New toy for the bored and lonely; Weird programming languages; When sponsors are speakers; The case of the disturbing backwards monitor; Congress to ICANN: Drop dead; Yet another video game made into a movie; Smile, you're on Candid (Police) Camera; High-speed hotels; Network Solutions blocking name transfers?
One of the fathers of Usenet dead at 45; Are you ready for insta-spam?; Diary of a site collapse; Skirting the issue; Assimiliating the Web; Trolling for help; Software wars; Rating the rater; True tales from the help desk; How about spam embedded in your mail?
Unix diapers; A beautiful waste of time; A P2P taxonomy; This page is too stupid; Homeless dot-commer bogus?; Whee, Linux is fun!; Blue Screens everywhere; Forget viruses: This fungus eats CDs; Microsoft revises Smart Tags a bit; Homeless dot-commers.
Slashdot crashes the NSA; They may be Smart Tags, but they're not Original Tags; What open source and California wines have in common; Jakob Nielsen no tyro; How to make Windows 2000 really, really secure; Where the Internet begins; A useful computer bug; The clothes make the geek; The end of the Internet; Why PDF bites; Novel use of a wireless phone; Hidden info; When Web sites tell too much.
DSL modems are so '90s; Bye-bye Netscape; Get ready to upgrade those mail servers; The anti-.Net; The real reason to buy a Palm; Anatomy of a DDoS attack; Pain is good.
