gosh! textz.gnutenberg.net has an extraordinary collection of texts reaching from classic novels over politics to modern media theory: shakespeare, poe, kafka, wells, verne, adams, godard, foucault, baudrillard, adorno, meinhof, theweleit, blisset, grenzfurthner(!), barbrook, bey, lovink, kittler, etc. etc.
one also could say: <irony>all the important male theories (and some female poems)</irony>.
it's spam, bad and annoying and all that. but it's also smart shit: the urlgrey spam script.
comes into your mailbox and executes when you display it. a bloody mess to decrypt what it really does. at least sending some mails to a bunch of other people. and eventually you get the error receipts because they are undeliverable (the mails, not the people).
so better turn off the preview pane in microsoft's mail clients or even generally disable any script execution in your internet security settings (i won't write this twice).
or remember what john wayne used to say: no risk, no fun.
the langreitered news today: rebol goes java – or vice versa?
is it rebol loving month, or what?
klaus schallhorn omnisearch: "google gibt zwar vor, den robots.txt-standard zu beachten, ignoriert aber zumindest beim abruf von seiten über https genau das protokoll, das spidern den zugriff auf bestimmte server-bereiche verbietet".
by no means i am an expert in web security. i only fiddled around a little bit with ssl, certificates and public key encryption in the last weeks. but one thing i noticed: from the first results that you get by requesting google's indexed data originating from secure servers the documents from two thirds of the https servers were available via http as well, and one third of the servers returned self-signed, corrupted or expired certificates.
there's still a lot to do concerning these security issues. and still a lot of bad things will happen. it seems, they must.
btw. neither robots.txt nor secure server provide a general protection against third party access to a web server.
while the first one is imho only an agreement between server admins and robot creators, the https protocol in fact can reliably restrict access to confidential data (and therefor your data becomes somehow secret although not top secret), given that you are using client certificates.
i think "balkanization of news", if that's really a common term, is the best thing that happened to journalism in the last decade. at least the best thing that happened to me.
if i had the choice i would balkanize a lot more of things. always aware that – just like in politics – the balkans are just another temporary autonomous zone.
how the west | news | music lost the east | writers | musicians.
more interesting than stating the obvious while advertising bloatware is jon udell's general report about internet groupware for scientific collaboration.
because some search requests hit p3k looking for all that tomcat, mod_webapp, pass-through rewrite trouble i complained a lot about in the last weeks, i want to make up leeway for what i have forgotten to state here in my enthusiasm about finally turning p3k into an antville weblog.
with a newer version of tomcat (4.0.2 that is) and the corresponding mod_webapp connector everything that failed before now works fine. and that's why you can read this here.
some people say i tend to be too negative sometimes. i hope i have proven them wrong right now. <smile/>
however, i should publish a short turorial about setting up the boy kitten, soon. let's see.
bruce sterling: "information wants to be worthless".
found via this superb quote at langreiter.com: "what if it turned out that the net was just plain too much for business to handle? that it was downright toxic to free enterprise?"
heaven, hell and business plans.
argh! erst dieser geniale trailer und dann so eine bescheuerte handlung voll mit ontologisch-anthropozentrischem* quatsch: "vor dem hintergrund der nahenden eiszeit – einer welt voller wunder und gefahren – dreht sich das geschehen um drei pelzige charaktere: ein ruppiges, zotteliges mammut, ein ebenso respektloses wie ungehobeltes faultier und einen ziemlich durchtriebenen säbelzahntiger. dieser bunt zusammengewürfelte haufen nimmt einen eher unerwarteten passagier mit auf die größte reise aller zeiten: ein menschenbaby. auf ihrem gefährlichen weg werden aus den gefährten freunde, die das kind um jeden preis sicher nach hause bringen wollen".
verdirbt einem ja den ganzen film!
"wenn man den tag ohne jeglichen kontakt zur außenwelt verbringt, still und ganz für sich, dann fühlt man sich doch etwas verarscht, wenn das telefon genau in dem moment läutet, in dem man unter der dusche gerade eben das wasser aufgedreht hat." – aus der wortwerkstatt.