:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 5.12.2003 ::
:: Virus warning ::
From Wired:
Fizzer Virus Uses Kazaa to Spread
LOS ANGELES -- A new and complex computer virus called "Fizzer" spread rapidly across the Internet on Monday, infecting computers around the world via e-mail and the file-swapping service Kazaa, computer security experts said.
Businesses in Asia were the first to report the attack, followed by reports of tens of thousands of infections in Europe, and experts were expecting more cases in North America.
Fizzer appears as an e-mail with an attention-grabbing subject line that is activated once a user opens an attached file.
From there, it infects the shared files folder for Kazaa, the popular program that lets users swap songs and files anonymously over the Internet.
OTHER Wired reports:
Spammers, Reveal Thyselves!
A new antispam bill may require e-mail marketers to make known their physical and e-mail addresses. Expected to pass, the bill could send deceptive spammers to prison and impose hefty finds. But consumer advocates say it could increase spam as we know it.
To Err Is Creative in Net Art
To Dirk Paesmans and Joan Heemskerk, two artists whose medium is the Internet, HTML mistakes are a thing of beauty.
While other Web programmers seek to iron out the glitches in their code, Paesmans and Heemskerk intentionally replicate them. It's how they make their art.
The husband-and-wife team -- known collectively as "Jodi" -- is at the vanguard of a group of creative types called online artists, who use and sometimes misuse the technology of the Internet to create their works.
What some might see as a confused jumble of overlapping text and graphics, the result of faulty coding entered by a programming novice, the duo sees as art.
"We are not good coders, or good programmers -- we are not geeks," said Paesmans. "Many people may think that, but it is curiosity, the discovery of how the thing was made," that drives the artwork.
Designs by Paesmans and Heemskerk are currently exhibited at Eyebeam, a chic art gallery in New York City.
A work called e-poltergeist, by Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead, generates an endless cycle of search engine results and banner ads when the user launches it from his Web browser. The only way to stop the flow of data is to shut down the computer.
posted by me
:: 10:22:00 PM [+] ::
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