The Mercury's GMSV site is not bad -- but turn off frames first. It
collects the top Murky coverage (of course) and pointers to daily
developments in OTHER webzines, too. For example, Salon's second
excerpt of Ellen Ullman's new book, "Close to the Machine:
Technophilia and its Discontents" (City Lights Books, $21.95, 189
pages), an autobiographical exploration of the lives and minds of
software engineers, is out today.
Ullman's book is VERY recommended riffs on the transcendent and greasy
reality of sw development. [Excerpt below, at the end] (only $8!!!)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0872863328/forkrecommendedrA
GMSV's available as Netscape In-Box direct daily retro push, too. Now if
I could just get all NYT Markoff pieces pushed to me...
RK
PPS: welcome to some new FoRKees: Greg Bolcer and Roy Fielding are fellow
vineyard workers here at UCI. Philip DesAutels is the new Security Maven
at W3C. And, Gerald, won't you say hi sometime?
>
>
> This was on 'Good Morning Silicon Valley' this morning.
> Just in case you ahven't seen the site...
> http://www.sjmercury.com/gmsv/
>
>
> > [unverified -- first report R]
> >
> > Oct. 17
> > Ralf Hueskes discovered a major Internet Explorer 4.0 security hole
> > that apparently makes it possible "to spy on the contents of any
> > text and HTML files on somebody else's computer" using dynamic
> > HTML. He says, "Not only local files are in danger, but also data
> > on your company's intranet - even if it is protected by a
> > firewall." A c't article has more details and notes that the
> > MSIE 4 pre-release for the Mac OS apparently isn't affected.
> >
> > http://www.macintouch.com/
>
FROM Ullman:
Every Monday morning, three trade weeklies come sliding through my
mail slot. I've come to dread Mondays, not for the return to work but
for these fat loads of newness piled on the floor waiting for me. I
cannot possibly read all those pages. But then again, I absolutely
must know what's in them. Somewhere in that pile is what I must know
and what I must forget. Somewhere, if I can only see it, is the
outline of the future.
Once a year, I renew my subscription to the Microsoft Professional
Developer Network. And so an inundation of CD-ROMs continues.
Quarterly, seasonally, monthly, whenever -- with an odd and relentless
periodicity -- UPS shows up at my door with a new stack of disks. New
versions of operating systems, libraries, tools -- everything you need
to know to keep pace with Microsoft. The disks are barely loaded
before I turn around and UPS is back again: a new stack of disks,
another load of newness.
Every month come the hardware and software catalogs: the Black Box
networking book, five hundred pages of black-housed components turned
around to show the back panel; PCs Compleat, with its luscious
just-out laptops; and my favorite, the Programmer's Paradise, on the
cover a cartoon guy in wild bathing trunks sitting under a palm
tree. He is all alone on a tiny desert island but he is happy: he is
surrounded by boxes of the latest programming tools.
Then there is the Microsoft Systems Journal, a monthly that
evangelizes the Microsoft way while handing out free code samples. The
Economist, to remind myself how my libertarian colleagues see the
world. Upside, Wired, The Red Herring: the People magazines of
technology. The daily Times and Wall Street Journal. And then, as if
all this periodical literature were not enough, as if I weren't
already drowning in information -- here comes the Web. Suddenly,
monthly updates are unthinkable, weekly stories laughable, daily
postings almost pass . "If you aren't updating three times a day,
you're not realizing the potential of the medium," said one pundit,
complaining about an on-line journal that was refreshing its content
-- shocking! -- only once a day.
There was a time when all this newness was exhilarating. I would pore
over the trade weeklies, tearing out pages, saving the clips in great
messy piles. I ate my meals reading catalogs. I pestered nice young
men taking orders on the other end of 800 phone lines; I learned their
names and they mine. A manual for a new programming tool would call
out to me like a fussy, rustling baby from inside its wrapping.