It's News to Me

Keeping up with the Newest Virus Threats

Most of us have had the experience of a friend forwarding us an email they received that warns of a new virus or worm that would do something horrible to your computer and only later learning that the message we had gotten was a hoax. One way to avoid falling victim to such annoyances is to visit one of the AntiVirus makers' sites with some regularlity to see what is new.

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The Future of the Computer

An article in The Guardian's new magazine, Spark, which describes itself as «a new magazine about the good things that are going on all over the world, and the people working to create a brighter future for us all,» describes the computer in 2050. Such predictions are notoriously inaccurate, but they are interesting nonetheless.

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Shut off «Unneeded Services»

Almost every virus warning from the Anti-Virus companies contains this admonition -- «turn off unneeded services.» But ironically, they never link to an article about what those unneeded services are or how to turn them off. This morning I thought I'd search for how to do that, and I ran across the following article.

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More about RSS

From CNN.COM comes this article, Welcome to the 'new' Web, same as the 'old' Web - Mar 15, 2004: «Web pages are getting smarter than they used to be. More of your favorite sites are making content summaries and updates available for syndication, just like the syndicated advice columns in your newspaper. Only this kind of syndication is free and 'really simple.' It is called 'RSS' for 'really simple syndication.'

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Experimenting with RSS

For some time I've been hearing about RSS, «Really Simple Syndication,» at various BLOGS that I read regularly. I've decided to evaluate whether that provides a more efficient way to scan the news each day. I have downloaded NewzCrawler, a news reader, to evaluate for this purpose.

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NewzCrawler - web news aggregator, RSS reader, browser and blog client: «NewzCrawler is a web news reader & browser which provides access to the news content from different sources.»

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Refining Paperless News : «Overwhelmed by online news? Instead of wearing out your Web browser's 'refresh' command to check for the latest updates, a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) program can fetch the news for you. «

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How To Speed-Read the Net : «There's a way to keep track of the New York Times, the Washington Post, Talkingpointsmemo.com, most major newspapers and nearly all blogs in a lightweight, speed-readable format that lets you scan dozens, even hundreds, of fresh headlines a day without the time-wasting tedium of opening one Web site after another. All you need to do is download and install an RSS reader, which is no harder than installing Netscape's browser was in 1994. You can then scroll through cleanly organized headlines and story summaries. The result is an executive summary of what's new on the Net today. When you see a story you want to read, you click on it. «

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A Tribute to Paul on his 80th birthday

In the early 1990's, before the advent of the World Wide Web and the popularity of the Internet, some of us had already begun to experiment with communicating by computer with complete strangers by posting messages to our local Echo Bulletin Board Systems. The conversations weren't yet as instantaneous as they have since come to be, but they gave a foretaste of what lay ahead. We'd write a message and upload it (in my case at 1200 baud), and then in a day or two, through the magic of the relaying system those bulletin board systems used, a reply would find its way back to our computer screen when we downloaded a new packet of messages from our chosen forum. What a thrill it was to discover that someone had read and responded to the message we had posted, and a new kind of laborious conversation would have been initiated. After weeks of such exchanges, we began to experience a phenomenon that most people have now come to take for granted; we began to feel that we had established a friendship with someone we had never laid eyes on. Gradually we would flesh out a perception of the personalities of these «voices from the darkness» with whom we had been exchanging messages.

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