Harvard hosted a conference on the future of the Net at which Bill Gates
spoke (he also spoke for free at MIT the next day). I saw little news
coverage from this conference; it was quite upstaged by the two events
reported below.
Sun Microsystems sponsored the JavaOne Developers Conference in San Jose
with featured speaker James Gosling, the father of Java. On Wednesday Sun
gave details of JavaOS, a design for implementing the
architecture-independent Java virtual machine in silicon, and announced licensing deals for
manufacture with Mitsubishi, NEC, and Samsung. Chips should be available
by fall of this year for incorporation into network PCs, telephones, pagers,
or doorknobs. JavaOne's most quotable quote, overheard at the first-night
party at the Museum of Modern Art: "If your development tools don't suck,
you're not on the bleeding edge of technology."
 |
Cryptography export policy
See also TBTF for
2000-02-06,
1999-10-05,
08-30,
08-23,
08-16,
07-26,
05-22,
05-08,
04-21,
03-01,
01-26,
more...
|
On May 30 the U.S. National Acadamy of Sciences' Committee to Study
National Cryptography Policy released its breathlessly awaited report
[1];
see the overview at [2]
and a summary of the recommendations on the TBTF archive at
[3]. Bottom line: the
committee suggests allowing U.S.
corporations to export without restriction encryption products incorporating keys
up to 56 bits in length. Corporations wishing to export stronger crypto may
be required to escrow their keys. But the government is advised to "eat its
own dogfood" on key escrow -- to test such a scheme extensively for its own
communications needs before imposing it on others. No legal restrictions
should be placed on U.S. citizens communicating within U.S. borders. Crypto
policy should be developed in the open, i.e. in Congress and without
classification or secrecy. Phil Zimmermann, author of PGP, opines that the
recommendations don't go nearly far enough. (Anyone seriously interested in key
escrow should see the review
[4]
of all such systems extant, published by
the pro-escrow cryptographer Dorothy Denning.)
[1] <http://www2.nas.edu/cstbweb/28e2.html>
[2] <http://www2.nas.edu/cstbweb/2646.html>
[3] <http://www.tbtf.com/resource/nas-recom.html>
[4] <http://guru.cosc.georgetown.edu/~denning/crypto/Appendix.html>
Tired of coding HTML tables?
Visit Two Clicks Instant Tables
[5],
a free Web service that automatically
converts tab-delimited data, such as that from an MS Excel spreadsheet,
into HTML tables. The form interface offers lots of table formatting
options -- including those supported only by the latest beta versions of the
Netscape and/or Microsoft browsers. To use it you can simply copy a range
of cells from an Excel spreadsheet and paste into the form on the Two
Clicks page. When your table is returned you can use your browser's View
Source function to capture the HTML coding.
The author, Drasko Markovic <drasko at twoclicks dot com>, offers Instant Tables
for sale to install on your own Web site (for Unix or Windows 95/NT
servers only). The site also offers a free version you can download and
install, but why bother? Its functionality is quite limited and the free
Two Clicks server is speedy (so far) and versatile. I personally think
Markovic has overpriced the commercial version at $500 -- the only
advantage I can see to running it on my own server is the ability to develop
templates for different styles of tables, a feature that the free service
doesn't support. I couldn't develop a paying business of formatting tables
over the Web, as the author is already doing it for free.
[5] <http://www.twoclicks.com/cgi-bin/tabdemo.pl>
Over the transom
Transoms are the little horizontal rectangular windows above office doors
in many pre-WW-II office buildings. The story goes that desperate authors
would clandestinly visit publishing houses and toss their usually
unreadable manuscripts through the publisher's transom window. The publisher of
a Net newsletter gets a large and ever-increasing volume
of over-the-email-transom PR announcements and other loosely targeted semi-spam
generated by freelance website developers and publicists. Herewith a sampling
from this week's arrivals in TBTF's Eudora folder named "OTT."
These guys
[9] are
serious about low-impact pages; the site is a tutorial
and a resource center for the bit-stingy. Unclear when to use GIF and when
JPEG? Don't know how to reduce the bit-depth of a GIF? Ever heard of CRLI
(Consecutive Run Length Insertion), a way to reduce GIF sizes even further?
Visit and learn.
[9] <http://www.infohiway.com/faster/index.html>
Too many hits
Beginning in the afternoon of Saturday 1996-05-19, traffic on the TBTF Web
site suddenly jumped three- or fourfold from its historical levels, and
held at these levels for the next several days. I'd been accustomed to
seeing over a hundred hits per day on average, representing perhaps 80
to 100 visitors, trending upward with the growing subscriber base (which
recently crossed the 1000 mark). Suddenly the hit count soared above 400
each day. I wondered whether TBTF had gotten a favorable mention and a
link from some high-traffic site. But a quick scan of the server logfile
revealed the true picture: all of the excess hits were requests for one
particular file, banned-newsgroups.txt. This was the list of 251 Usenet
newsgroups that Compuserve censored in reponse to pressure from German
prosecutors (see TBTF for 1995-12-31
[10]). The log revealed that those
visitors who downloaded this file rarely if ever touched any other pages
on the site. With the help of Alta Vista I quickly discovered several
"sex on the Net" pages that linked my list. Judging from the suddenness
of the traffic increase I assume that the list's URL was distributed
Saturday morning on some mailing list or newsgroup.
I renamed the list on the TBTF site and repointed the internal links to
it, then created a file named "banned-newsgroups.txt" consisting of a
single space, to assure that the the actions of the world's adolescents
would not balloon my site's error log.
[10] <http://www.tbtf.com/archive/1995-12-31.html>
People know you're a dog
The famous George Steiner New Yorker cartoon
[11]
nonwithstanding, the
Internet privacy provider Community Connexion has opened a public beta
trial for the Anonymizer
[12], a free service
that lets anyone surf the Web anonymously. To try it visit
[13] and type
any URL. Alternatively,
prepend <http://www.anonymizer.com:8080/>" to any URL in your
browser's Go To URL dialog. Either way, you will thereafter leave no footprints
on the Web. The Anonymizer works like a proxy server, with the added
feature that you can prepend its URL to another; you need not configure
it as a proxy in the browser's options (but this works too). Sites that
you visit via the Anonymizer will log a request from "atropos.c2.org."
The service strips out all the other personal information normally
retrievable from your Web visit -- your ip address, browser type, computer
type, referring URL, and email address -- before contacting the desired
URL's server. (For a graphic demonstration of the information a server
normally receives about you, visit
[14] or
[15].) The service
anonymizes http, ftp, news, and gopher requests. For other types of requests,
such as https (secure HTTP), the user is warned that anonymity cannot
be maintained. Code for the Anonymizer was developed in 1995 by Justin
Boyan <jab at cs dot cmu dot edu>; it has been in wide use on the CMU campus.
[11] <http://ryker.itech.cup.edu/~jsumey/humor/dogs.htm>
[12] <http://www.anonymizer.com/>
[13] <http://www.anonymizer.com/open.html>
[14] <http://www.anonymizer.com/cgi/snoop.pl>
[15] <http://www.patents.com/status.cgi>
>>Notes: I'll be travelling on business for a week. It's conceivable but
unlikely that I'll be able to publish an issue of TBTF over that time;
look for the next one on 1996-06-16. If you come to Comdex in Chicago, stop
by the Atria booth (# W-1603) and say hello.
TBTF alerts you weekly to bellwethers in computer and communications tech-
nology, with special attention to commerce on the Internet. See the archive
at <http://www.tbtf.com/>. To subscribe send the message
"subscribe" to tbtf-request@world.std.com. Commercial use prohibited. For
non-commercial purposes please forward and post as you see fit.
______________________________________________________
Keith Dawson dawson at world dot std dot com dawson@atria.com
Layer of ash separates morning and evening milk.