PhysicsWeb Features - The physics of the Web : Statistical mechanics is offering new insights into the structure and dynamics of the Internet, the World Wide Web and other complex interacting systems. Heavy article that examines the fine structure of the internet from a network math point of view. One side effect is to explain why Supernodes in P2P systems may well be a good idea. Sample Statistic, "Any two documents chosen at random are a maximum of 19 clicks apart"

Risks of the Passport Single Signon Protocol : Risks of the Passport Single Signon Protocol An excellent analysis of the security risks inherent in MS Passport. All the more pertinent as Code Red II sweeps across the internet.

EE Times: Cipher attack delive - EE Times: Cipher attack delivers heavy blow to WLAN security. [Tomalak] I'm fascinated by the effect maths experts can have on the world when so much of our lives are becoming dependent on strong encryption. The end result of this is that wireless LANs are inherently insecure, which just means that you have to use strong encryption methods on top of them. But then this is hardly surprising. It doesn't have any great impact on home use, but could be a concern for corporations. If, of course, they have anything worth stealing.

Microsoft Research Netscan - Cross post Networks : Cross post Networks Another cool mapping project. This one maps cross-posts between usenet groups.

And Antarcti.ca as well.

What is WebBrain? Combining a Java GUI with the Dmoz open directory.

BEA updates WebLogic Server for services - ZDNet Aug 4 2001 12:24AM ET [ Internet Europe news]
BANG! BEA build SOAP, WSDL, UDDI support into the latest release. This is significant when so many B2B packages and sites are built on top of BEA.

Netscape alumni to launch P2P company - ZDNet Aug 2 2001 9:41PM ET [ moreover... P2P] Hmmm. The Kontiki announcement. Peer to peer, swarmed, video distribution and cacheing? Sounds like the Freedom Controller. from Jamby.

The jet powered beer cooler : What follows is my story about a shed, a warm beer and a home made jet engine Well it made me laugh! A Kiwi explains how to cool your beer in the shed, by building an LPG jet engine and using the cooling gas cylinder in a bucket of water to cool beer cans. Even more cool is the jet engine built out of an old car Turbo.

In July my RSS file has been downloaded 15741 times . That's 134Mbyte, 55% percent of my total traffic. This is way to much, if you compare that to the 2617 times my html weblog has been downloaded last month. [w3future.com weblog] There's some concern that publishing RSS files will increase your traffic and this does tend to bear it out. The issue is what you do with it. Aggregators are generally pretty careful to only collect the data at most once per hour (and usually store it locally before serving it up again). What's awkward is that people would like to display a box on their websites of other people's feeds. If this is created on the fly every hit on their website is a hit on the feeds source as well. So the feed gets N hits. We do need some tools to easily do this, but it needs local cacheing to do it properly.

Line56.com | Lead Story : "Siebel was out of our range and it's turning out that Pivotal is kind of out of our range too. We want to do some customization for a Web-based eCRM package. Pivotal can do that but it will still cost about $200,000, not what we had in mind." I'm constantly amazed by the cost figures for B2B software and especially CRM and SCM software. And that's before you factor in the consultancy and implementation costs. And when you get the software you find you can't customize it without spending the same again? Contrast this with open source and GPL, were customization is always possible and the software costs are essentially zero. The problem with this picture is that software companies need to live too.

newsisfree.com : FREE EXPORT DISABLED!!
Really sad to see newsisfree.com (temporarily) stop the free export of RSS. It's been a great source of RSS for 6 months. Let's hope it's back soon.

OXO International : Terms of Use This is one of the best damned "Terms of Use" contracts I've seen. So much so that I'll just say "Me Too" and tell you that it applies to voidstar.com as well. With the notable exception that "All Rights are Reversed" so go ahead and "Steal this website" and all the text on it. But don't blame me if the little people who live behind your skirting boards steal all your socks if you do.

Scripting News : Either the BigCo's don't want SOAP to gain traction, or they have no clue how to develop a community around a new platform. They throw confusing juju all around, they confuse themselves and each other, leaving random developers to say "Let us know when you figure it out."

UDDI has been extraordinarily bad at explaining itself. Not so much in documenting the specs but in explaining why the specs should be used.

http://www.computerworld.com/rckey52/story/0,1199,NAV63_STO62494,00.html

There are some valid points in here about the quality of the information being registered.

But I do find it fascinating that the journalists (and by implication the analysts) focus on the human readable part of the data. For me, it's the web services/SOAP part of the registry that is far more interesting. There are any number of databases of textual information about companies available such as Yahoo, but very, very few databases of either XML data sources or public function/API/SOAP interfaces.

Now given that SOAP implementations are still really at the toolkit stage and there are just not that many live, publicly accessible SOAP based services, it's hardly surprising that UDDI is still in it's infancy. At this stage, the UDDI effort feels like preparation for the time when there are millions of SOAP function points out there and as such represents a remarkable act of faith on the part of the founders that this *will* happen.

SF Chronicle: Mystery links. T - SF Chronicle: Mystery links. TOPtext is an example of "contextual advertising," the latest attempt by online advertisers to reach the eyes and minds of Web surfers. TOPtext turns existing words on a Web page into hyperlinks that redirect a computer user to the advertiser's site.
[Tomalak]
Hot Damn! I thought we'd buried all this Smart Tags nonsense!

Tracking Microsoft is clearly getting to me. In the middle of the Smart Tags, .Net, Messenger crash, etc etc, I've just woken up from a vivid dream. Now to save you reading the rest of the product of my disturbed mind, here's the punchline.

If you were in a quiet, relaxed situation with Bill Gates and could ask him one question or tell him something, what would it be? Think carefully.

The Dream.

I'd been invited by a close friend to a meeting but had no idea what it was. He's got a doctorate in the psychology of visual responses and some wacky ideas about quantum time machines so you never know what's going to come up. I'm wearing Geek style jeans and T-shirt. I walk into a big boardroom with low lighting and a table that would seat 30. There's an endless supply of coffee and donuts on a sideboard. There's several groups of people and apparently several meetings happening at the same time. Round the table we have Bill Gates, two secretive people from NCR, 15 or so from a major PC Mfr, and a couple of 2 or 3 person groups, my friend and me. Bill's in a lounge suit with no tie. The atmosphere is quiet and respectful with private conversations happening around the room. Naturally I sit down at Bill's left. There's some serious business going down so I keep quiet and watch. Bill's engaged in some sort of negotiation with each of the groups and is working the room. In an idle moment, he pushes the NCR guy's contract towards me. It's a proposal to form a joint venture that effectively sells their Borland/Inprise division to Microsoft (it's a dream, right? The names are not completely accurate). I said something like "trying to imagine what's going to be "the next greatest thing" three years out is hard isn't it?" Somebody's got off their mobile and Bill's back to a negotiation, as his attention goes back he says, "Interesting, we must talk some more"

Which is about where I woke up.

I've been reading about the Messenger crisis and trying to imagine the buzzing swarm of angry bees that will be the operators, and middle managers trying to bring it back up with senior management throwing brick bats and demanding a report "on my desk at 9am". This must be so embarrassing for them. "I don't care what you do, wave a dead chicken over it if you have to, but BRING IT BACK UP!"

Then there's Cringely's article suggesting that as MS is already the size of a nation, why not just buy one and move off shore. Belize would do nicely.

And then I realized that we're watching something straight out of Macchiavelli's "The Prince". Bill hasn't made Emperor yet, but he's well on his way to being King. There are the trusted lieutenants, the court, the enemy states, the subservient and heavily taxed populace, and so on. To quote himself, like all states from The Moors, to Venice, to the United Kingdom, MS is only N years away from being irrelevant.

Before waking up, I thought of what to tell Bill and this was it.

"The next greatest thing, three years out, is going to be massively de-centralized databases"

Make of all that what you will.

Gosh. People with good internet access watch less TV.

What's TV?

Internet Users Watch Less TV. Two in five Europeans have online access and consumer consumption of traditional media is changing, inform researchers at Forrester Research. 9 July 2001, 10 am GMT [Content Wire via NewsIsFree]

A completely de-centralized tax system. hmmm?
Peer-to-Peer Taxation.. O'Reilly Network: Peer-to-Peer Taxation. [Hack the Planet]

Somebody at Plastic is bemoaning the poor state of SCi-Fi films.Where Are the Intelligent Sci-Fi Films? [Plastic]

But you might equally ask "where are the intelligent sci-fi novels?" Something that continually winds me up is that Sci-Fi is lumped togather in bookshops with what is laughably called "Science fantasy". So exactly where is the science in the average swords and scorcery, elf tome?

We should all be basing apps on the browser...
P2P fat clients are wrong for Internet collaboration,. IDG Jun 25 2001 9:23AM ET [moreover...]

Hmmm? One of these days people will realize that HTML is appalling for a transaction based UI. It's pretty bad for a writing environment. We've been living with GUIs for 20 years now and are very used to tabs, menus, dialog boxes, listboxes, cascading combos, spell checkers and so on. Should we really chuck all this out so that we can just use a browser and nothing else? This is 1995 thinking isn't it?

I bet the guy who wrote this uses Outlook Express. I wonder what he'd say if you told him he is only allowed to use Hotmail for all mail?

Time does a short piece about Moreover, one of our favourite sources of news feeds.
A Master of Headline Grabbing. Time Jul 6 2001 4:51AM ET [Internet Europe news]