Quick Comments and One Liners

The "bill sux" Intel hoax disclosed: The original image came from this book cover at http://www.amazon.com/covers/0/69/102/125/0691021252.l.gif

My spies tell me that the "Bill Sux" graffiti is a hoax.

A new Rumor Mill

http://www.ntk.net , once again new on Friday:

"If there were no profit to be made from dealing in software, then it would not be as attractive to criminals" - Microsoft's anti-piracy manager, DAVID GREGORY ...legal counsel advises me to rephrase that

Susie Bright complains in Salon Magazine that because of Viagra now all those trophy wives will have to have sex .

API - Time Magazine reports an interesting case of high-tech
graffiti. It seems that a couple of Intel engineers working
on the design of a recent version of the Pentium microprocessor
included a message that describes their feelings about Bill Gates,
president of Microsoft, a good corporate pal of Intel's.

When a portion of the Pentium chip is examined under a powerful
scanning  electron microscope, the phrase "bill sux" is clearly
visible, etched into the surface of the chip.

The "flaw" in the chip was only discovered by accident well after
the chip was  released into the market, too late for Intel to
prevent the chip from being used in the manufacture of tens of
thousands of PCs.

Intel says that both engineers responsible were former employees
of Motorola, makers of the chips that are the heart of the Apple
Macintosh.

Both engineers have since been fired by Intel.

Full picture on http://www.idt.mdh.se/kpt/billsux.jpg

A new mouthorgan this morning, talking about polyamory (again).

Blue laws are alive and well in the US. Shop owners in New York City have lost a decision which would allow them to stay in business while new zoning laws are under appeal.

Aaack! Something seems to have gone terribly wrong! There should be days of stuff here! Oh well, it'll rebuild over the next couple, maybe I'll try to copy some stuff up from the archives.

From http://english-www.hss.cmu.edu/bs/22/rentschler.html

Some men tell us we must be patient and persuasive; that we must be womanly. My friends, what is a man's idea of womanliness? Is it to have a manner which pleases him -- quiet, deferential, submissive, approaching him as a subject does a master. He wants no self-assertion on our part, no defiance, no vehement arraignment of him as a robber and a criminal ... while every right achieved by the oppressed has been wrung from tyrants by force; while the darkest page on human history is the outrages on women -- shall men tell us to be patient, persuasive, womanly?
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1870.

A standard response to all those pesky problem reports .

Salon laughs at The Next World War, and rightfully so. From their review it sounds like it replays all the tired clichs of the "info war".

And I think somehow Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet yesterday, it's got new strips.

Marylaine talks about the VH-1 100 greatest rock musicians poll, and of course I missed Need To Know on Friday.

If you haven't been keeping up with the evil genii at User Friendly , it might be a good time to drop back over to the cartoon about the staff of an ISP. Strictly fiction, so I've heard. And also in the comics world, new installments in Helen .

A new Topping the News from Pat Califia

Microsoft products bring us closer to world peace: By know I'm sure you've all seen the US Navy unconvincingly trying to blame the failure of the new smart ship on something other than the OS (which happens to be Windows NT) http://www.gcn.com/gcn/1998/July13/cov2.htm

Phil Specter: "The difference between the Spice Girls and a porno film is that the porno film has better music."

A new Rumor Mill

Well, I guess Excite's getting a good ad out of these updates. Electronic theatre last night, as usual Loren Carpenter's demonstration of humans in the hive mind was awesome (the audience is divided into two halfs which votes on which direction to move a controller playing "pong", for instance).

No real "wow" technology, some interesting talks on art. More in a bit, now for some free Excite advertising...:

Free web-based email, Forever, From anywhere! http://www.mailexcite.com

Greetings from alternately sunny and cloudy Florida. SIGGRAPH has started, although only at the course level, and as usual most of those seem to begin at the "This is a pixel" level. No loud thumping techno yet, and just a few clips from various movies and tests to illustrate technique.

More as I run across it.

Free web-based email, Forever, From anywhere! http://www.mailexcite.com

I may add some more stuff today, but I'm off to SIGGRAPH , so any updates to these pages for the next week are gonna be a surprise to me, too. If you're one of the few people to whom I've revealed the key in an off-hand manner (and you know who you are), feel free, NEWWWSBOY is pretty stable (and maybe on the airplane I can finish the docs so I can release it when I get back).

Remember Marylaine on Monday, Mouth Organ on Thursday, and get out and enjoy the sunshine a bit, hey?

Susie Bright on outdoor sex in Salon.

Friday, so Need To Know hits the web.

More soft porn parody , the obvious one, too the tune of John Cougar's "Jack and Diane"...

A new Rumor Mill , product pitches described as keynotes at Internet World.

I'll be gone to SIGGRAPH in Orlando next week, probably with limited 'net access. So while I'll try to send updates, I don't promise anything. Full report when I get back and decompress, I expect lots of loud techno and cool eye candy.

I'm sorry, it's like watching a train wreck. But the media hype surrounding that http://www.ourfirsttime.com/ publicity stunt is so much fun. Tish Williams' column in Upside is a fun read:

"Before 18 days of Internet scrutiny are up, Mike will have run off with the night cashier at Tastee Freeze, and Diane will gain her first lesbian experience with her consoling best friend."

A new Mouth Organ , lambasting the new Jane magazine. Seems like shooting fish in a barrel, to me. So here's a question: Can anyone out there imagine a media outlet that pays for itself that doesn't have to suck up to advertisers and therefore not try to draw its consumers down into rampant consumption? I haven't figured out a model for this, yet.

If you're into debates about filtering software, there's an article in Salon Magazine about the Scientology filter , provided to Scientology members. The "think for yourself" religion (isn't that an oxymoron to begin with?) asks that members:

"agree to use the specific Internet Filter Program that CSI has provided to you which allows you freedom to view other sites on Dianetics, Scientology or its principals without threat of accessing sites deemed to be using the Marks or Works in an unauthorized fashion or deemed to be improper or discreditable to the Scientology religion."

Sig file of the day:

Merijn Broeren    | Running Windows NT as a server because it's easy
Rover & Newton    | to use is like hiring Miss America to run your
Lunatech Research | payroll because she's cute.

Someone's got a cool page up on the Bug's Life Mall Tour

Media spoofing can be fun. For instance, check out this gem: Ocean Fund International Hires Stephen Michael Cohen to Run Sex.com . Continuing from the press release as published in CNN:

ROAD TOWN, Tortola, British Virgin Islands, July 15 /PRNewswire/-- Ocean Fund International, a British Virgin Island International Corporation announces today the appointment of Stephen Michael Cohen at a record salary of 17,000,000.00 a year and $100,000,000 in stock options to run its' wholly owned subsidiaries SEX .COM and Sand Man Internacional in Tijuana, Mexico.

Ummmm... 17 million what? Pesetas? One hundred million in stock options? Gimme a break, perhaps "stock options valued at...", but I didn't see any ticker symbols anywhere in it. It'll be fun to see how far this one goes.

A coworker mentioned that Steve Jobs was able to wander through the Bug's Life mall show at the Pleasanton mall unrecognized, but this? Time magazine reports that he was denied entrance to Mac World by a security guard who noticed that he didn't have a badge...

Somehow Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet got dropped from yesterday.

Cloning Jesus Christ from DNA samples found on the shroud of Turin? That and more in Topping the News at the Spectator site.

Pat Califia has a new Quickies , among other things mentioning that U.S. District Judge Gene Carter found the 1996 law faux child porn unconstitutional, and Carol Queen a new Queen On-line on the HIV scare in the porn industry at Good Vibrations.

It's time for more Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet .

Marylaine's My Word's Worth this morning on summer reading.

If there's anyone you'd expect to luck into a couple of million bucks, it's Mark Pesce, but the poor guy doesn't seem to be much on coherent thoughts. His piece in Salon today bears that out:

Hardly a single graphics-heavy blockbuster has been produced without Softimage

And then he goes on to talk about "the look" of Softimage as a primarily visual thing.

A new NETFUTURE .

It's funny that I should find your NETFUTURE newsletter now, when I'm hitting my head against the overwhelming emptiness of my career connecting people with computers. I find here eloquent expression of what have been formless and nagging doubts .... So what is a person to do when all her skills are tied to computers? Start over at McDonalds?
-- Joan Cole

Perhaps a good portion of our enjoyment comes with the challenge of trying something new. One of the things that amazed me nearly 15 years ago was the evolution of programming techniques on a signle platform; the difference between the first Apple ][ games and the last ones was huge. Now those of us intrigued by software can't possibly keep up with what hardware is doing every year. When much of the new has been discovered is the challenge gone? I think there's still unknown territory, but I see glimmerings of the borders occasionally.

"It's one of those recurring nightmares. You're supposed to be giving a MACWORLD NEW YORK keynote but you haven't got anything to announce, your wife is due to give birth any minute - AND YOU'RE STILL CEO OF APPLE!!" --- So begins this week's Need To Know .

Date: Thu, 9 Jul 1998 17:09:26 -0700 (PDT)
From: Tom Lokovic 
To: Dan Lyke 
Subject: wisdom

If you collect random bits of wisdom for your web page, I humbly offer one of my own:

The insides of pecans look like little brains. I wonder what they think about. -- Tom Lokovic

AOL has partnered with the White House on a new anti-(some)drug campaign, news.com reports.

It's Thursday, that means a Rumor Mill .

Reuters reports that Beate Uhse, Germany's largest sex merchandise firm, is planning an IPO. Count me in.

If you haven't checked out Nerve Magazine 's "literate smut" recently, they've got new essays, stories, and pictures.

Just in case you think that wire tapping and publicity should take precedence over friendship and common decency, Linda Tripp has a web site and is begging for money for her legal defense fund.

And there's a new Mouth Organ , looking for feedback, a face to give their readers.

Further evidence that the revolution is history, in Wired, Jon Katz writes about the ascension of the geek . Great, now we're a targetable demographic. I've got a mildly negative review of Commodify Your Dissent written that I'll post soon, but they're right: Pretty much any sub-group will eventually be identified as a potential market and assimilated.

Julie points us to this critique of the science in Armageddon . It ends with:

Disclaimer: Armageddon was made by Touchstone Pictures, a part of Disney. ABCNEWS is also a division of Disney. But that doesn't mean we have to say anything nice about Armageddon.

I'm really out of it, I missed My Word's Worth on Monday.

Silly me, forgetting that not everyone in the world takes July 4th off. Like Need To Know , for instance.

Susie Bright in Salon: Submit to me, Trent!

http://www.microsoft.com/security/bulletins/ms98-003.htm is a note from Microsoft on the security problem I posted about Wednesday. Thanks, Robert!

I'm gonna give it a rest for the long weekend. Have a good one! And I just thought I'd share this sign I saw in Berkeley with you:

"Zero Tolerance 4th of July"

(with crossed out fireworks and alcohol icons). Let Freedom Ring!

Salon Magazine bemoans the loss of summer from air conditioning.

And Mouth Organ has a new piece on the web staring back.

Let's see how long this url continues to give you the source code to Microsoft's default script. Giggle.

Let's see how long this url continues to give you the source code to Microsoft's default script. Giggle.

The holes in Windowstm web servers open much, much wider . If you run a Windowstm hosted server that uses scripts of any sort, shut it down now, then wait for the fallout. To those of us who write code for that platform, this is a wakeup call: If we do any decisions based on the content of the name, we must verify that the file exists on the disk with that name, there are no guarantees that there's any sort of easily mapped relationship between the filename we give it and what it opens.

A variation on an old theme:

THE PENGUIN:
A vacationing penguin is driving through Arizona when he notices that the oil-pressure light is on. He gets out to look and sees oil dripping out of the motor. He drives to the nearest town and stops at the first gas station.
After dropping the car off, the penguin goes for a walk around town. He sees an ice-cream shop and, being a penguin in Arizona, decides that something cold would really hit the spot. He gets a big dish of vanilla ice cream and sits down to eat. Having no hands, he makes a real mess trying to eat with his little flippers. After finishing his ice cream, he goes back to the gas station and asks the mechanic if he's found the problem.
The mechanic looks up and says, "It looks like you blew a seal."
"No, no," the penguin replies, "it's just ice cream."

Once again, if you're interested in security, L0pht Heavy Industries is a resource you can't afford to be without:

"That vulnerability is completely theoretical."
-- Microsoft
L0pht, Making the theoretical practical since 1992.

Dave Winer has an explanation of the Windows security hole that's been plaguing various servers recently.


Archives of neat sites posted to Flutterby , notes to webmaster@flutterby.com