Note 57: Our Teletype

Rubric: Our networks

Our television tie

Anton Nosik

Today we promised to talk about relevants - about topics in the focus of the Internet of the Internet public these days. Those of these, despite the holiday season, could have been enough for a weighty volume. Let's try to look at them briefly, running through the headlines.

Two premieres on Mondays

On Monday, August 19, tens of thousands of NTSKAIP users around the world, received the opportunity to unload the long -awaited official realization of the third version of their beloved peepers to their computers. A week earlier, fans of a competing company - users of the Explorer of the company Microsoft received the same opportunity. The protracted (last winter) era of beta versions ended, and we can evaluate the successes of two universally recognized leaders in the field of Internet software over the past six months. In the next issue of our column, we will do this.

This is their last

The American Ministry of Justice is busy preparing for demonstrative flogging. Moreover, the Clinton administration will flog. Having lost in the Philadelphia and New York District Courts the case of the unconstitutional nature of the "Act on Computer Personality" (CDA), the American authorities did not leave the intention to defend their hopeless case in the Supreme Court, which this fall has to drive the last nails into the coffin of a shameful legislative act. It is useful to note that under the pressure of a mass protest campaign unleashed by Internet human rights organizations in the USA and around the world after the adoption of CDA Clinton on February 8, many of the congressmen voted for this act were already ashamed of their involvement in this matter and renounced. However, Clinton and his state prosecutor intend to go to the end. He, fortunately, is close. Network censorship will not pass.

Revenge of hackers

Without waiting for the verdict of the Supreme Court, American hackers found a gap in the system of access to the WWW server of the US Department of Justice at http://www.usdoj.gov/. Unlike many hacker attacks of previous years, when hacked systems were subjected to truly vandalistic corruption, the crackers of the home page of the American Ministry of Justice chose not to disable, but to creatively process the conquered server. They edited the official home page of the Department of Justice, including swastikas, pornographic pictures and non -normative vocabulary. You can imagine the amazement of visitors to the home page of the US Ministry of Justice, when, going to the official server, they saw all the hard -working hackers that was composed by hardworking hackers.

19 hours in vacuum

A couple of weeks ago, the world's largest Internet provider - American On Line - fell victim to the imperfection of its spare lines and was turned off for 19 hours from cyberspace. Six million subscribers of this service were cut off from the Internet for almost a day. The consequences of this accident can only be compared with the racial unrest of 1992 in Los Angeles: angry subscribers almost torn to pieces of technical personnel and the administration of the company. “This once again confirms that the Internet and our service have become necessary for the American people,” said the president of America on Line, Mr. Case, commenting on the shameful failure of his company with inimitable cynicism, “I would like to take advantage of this opportunity to promise our clients that this will never happen again, but I can’t do this.”

And if Java dies?

The company "Sun Microsystems", which not so long ago released the Yava language on the market, designed to radically change the face of the WWW, the Internet and inhabited sushi, recently informed humanity of its last new product. It became connected modules in the TCL/TK language. According to experts to whom we will certainly provide the stands in one of the future issues, TCL/TK can completely supplant the Java on the entire front from the market, because it is much better adapted to solve all the tasks that we have foolishly fooling us with the help of Java for so long. Wait for the details.

WWW - priority direction

13 new academic grants, 350,000 dollars each, established the US National Scientific Fund (NSF) last week - an unsubstantial state organization that stood at the source of the Internet in its current form. In previous years, the NSF development was a network infrastructure, architecture and planning of inter -grid ties. Today, the NSF switched to financing projects for the development of documents and means of the wrecking web - www (the Russian term belongs to Roman Leibov). New grants allocated to the workers of American science for the development of the "Internet of the Future" are designed to finance almost exclusively the development of tools and modules for the web. Whether this investment will be justified as clearly as all the previous NSF development events for the development of the Internet - we will not undertake to judge yet. We note only with satisfaction and some inner joy that the priority of the "spider" direction for the development of the Internet of the future is no longer doubtful.

The joy here is not even that the creative craft of the webmaster becomes in the eyelids with the technical work of Sisadmin according to the degree of prospect in the computer world. The thing is different: the Internet in its development has passed a full cycle. For decades, the Internet strategists have thought about how all the huge wealth of human knowledge and ideas to put on network infrastructure. And now, when this infrastructure has reached very high degrees of development, it is time to think: how would this technological miracle be filled with useful and meaningful contents? And the people responsible for the information "filling" of the network are doomed in the new conditions to become no less important Internet architects than those who are responsible for the technical aspects of his life.

In the next issue, a review of the battle of the Titans between the third Rizes of Netskayip and Explorer, the story of the USENET groups and the note about Scott Pakin, the author of the "Idiot" will follow.