Nastic Gryzunova. Seine: issue 33

Seine , issue 33: Yugoslav sketches, when we were fools, categories in Top100 and OSKOMina

Nastic Gryzunova
nastik@unclear.rinet.ru

Review of current online events and publications

But, as usual, circumstances intervened and the light bulb burned out.

M.I. Mukhin,
"Migratory Flies" #7

It is much easier to confront your interlocutor with a fact than to timidly make excuses, so I will omit the colorful description of my worries about the failure of the next “Net” last week. Suffice it to say that such a seemingly obsolete phenomenon as a twin telephone, upon closer examination turns out to be a curse comparable in cruelty to Egyptian executions, and I do not wish such a gift of fate even to my worst enemies, because it inevitably leads to sleep disorders , digestion and nervous system, and after that - to the painful death of the subscriber, and in the death certificate the description of its causes will be extremely unclear. The symptoms described above are typical only for pacifist-minded representatives of the human race, because aggressive citizens, after a month of living in an apartment with a dual telephone, risk going to jail, since the hour of vengeance will certainly come, which they will use to kill their talkative neighbors.

A paired telephone and talkative neighbors (with whom, however, it turned out to be quite possible to discuss the quality of the local telephone exchange and the likelihood of a modem connection at a speed of 26.4 kbps) canceled my outside world for almost a week. Now it has been restored for the period from one in the morning to seven in the morning, and at three in the morning I am slightly amazed to discover how much has happened during my enforced absence. True, some events are already covered with a dusty coating of nostalgia, but the reader, I hope, will forgive me for my not always appropriate pedantry in reflecting these events.

Yugoslav sketches

Residents of Kosovo, as well as those who returned to impressionable newspaper readers the half-forgotten image of the “American aggressor,” do not take into account the fact that war is too tiresome and quickly boring a topic for those who do not fight. In short, the problem of the war in Yugoslavia is no less relevant, and even more so for Russia, than it was a week and a half ago. Life goes on and, alas, military actions and political turmoil continue. Commenting on events in real life is the business of Polit.Ru and Gazeta.Ru, and we will turn to the network reflection of what is happening. The collection, however, turned out to be quite eclectic.

The "Association of Boylovers of Russia", which has not yet really opened as an independent project, managed to launch the campaign "Stop NATO!!!".

The Ehonet mailing list, to which I personally subscribed at one time in the hope of receiving news one way or another related to this program, has turned into a place for discussions about the Yugoslav events. I’m afraid to think about what titanic work fell on the shoulders of moderator Gleb Setkin. I don’t want to think about what relation Kosovo has to the Echoneta competitions and other theoretically intuitively calculated topics on the list, because I know that it has nothing.

Hacktivism continues to flourish as a means of self-expression and the illusion of having clear political opinions. For a story about the difficult life of Russian hackers by conviction, I refer you to Roman Leibov’s article “Our Brothers Hackers.” With a slight delay, Serbian leaders also adopted hacking as an additional means of combating NATO states, not a very effective means, but, in any case, quite annoying. Some Yugoslav fighters for everything possible flood NATO servers with thousands of emails, periodically attaching viruses to them.

A Yugoslav monk joined the spontaneous online campaign against the bombing in Kosovo. Messages about this are published with due speed, but for some reason they become known to the general public after a week.

Everyone around is shouting that “radio is for World War II, television is for Vietnam (optionally for the Gulf War), the Internet is for the war in Yugoslavia.” They shout loudly and with poorly hidden pride at the enormous potential of the new media, which we are all creating and shaping with ant-like tenacity. We found something to think about. Online life is no longer separable from life with an idiot, and not just one, or even two, but at least a couple of tens of millions.

When we were fools

April 1st was a long time ago - almost two weeks ago. That is, the “Net-culture” section at the time of writing these lines is already a year and thirteen days old. The first round anniversary was celebrated with the proper amount of absurdity (not to say chaos) in the “Gift” gallery. Several people have already shared their impressions, including Andrey Travin , who somehow knows how to not leave a feeling of idiocy in his descriptions of online social events. I abdicate responsibility for the belated story about this anniversary and give the floor to Andrei Alekseev. Now his text has, perhaps, only general historical value (“time, time, temp and tempo, zeit and time”) , you understand), but I hope that from this point of view it will be useful to the reader. The characters mentioned are not all who graced the festival with their presence, but we will leave detailed lists indicating who was wearing what until the gossip column appears. I pay special attention to Wiesel’s photographs, which fully reflect the spirit of a holiday that has passed into the darkness of centuries.

G.K. Chesterton used to say that all stupid things in the world are done with stone-serious faces. Since the “No-culture” section of “RJ” is obviously not the best place to expand on the meaning of “No-culture” in understanding the Network as a cultural phenomenon, we only note that it is obviously not stupidity, and therefore the anniversary of her appearance, celebrated not just anywhere, but in the gallery of naive art “Dar” exactly on April 1, did not suffer from excessive seriousness.

To begin with, such an important and solemn event as an anniversary turned out to be diluted with such a frivolous event as a presentation - a presentation of the domain www.willy.msk.ru , on which most of the works of the illustrious Willy P, previously scattered across various virtual and non-virtual places. It is probably no coincidence that the site was opened almost simultaneously with the publication of the novel Generation "P": so as not to confuse who is who.

After a small official part, at which the leader of the "Dar" gallery S. Tarabanov, the editor of "Net-culture" E. Gorny, for the sake of such an occasion, once again shaved his head and put on deaf black glasses (which made him look like he had grown a lot - physically and intellectually - a ninja turtle), and a man, as they say now, similar to Willie P., named Oleg Pshenichny, once again reminded the audience how good they are, a cultural and cultural program was launched. E. Gorny soulfully performed a couple of medieval Breton ballads, framing them with strange Tibetan-like howls, to the accompaniment of the best harmonica player in Moscow, Vovka Kozhekin, and an unknown girl who played the jew's harp; the darling of the online post-intelligentsia, Psoy Korolenko, delighted the audience with a prayer to the Great Chthonic Principle and rhymes like “Derrida - manda” (here is a softened version), and O. Pshenichny’s group “Pure Love” - with completely student skit fun, unexpected in such mature men.

When the cultural program was exhausted, dances were naturally announced. The only one of its kind (see official page) group "386DX" led by A. Shulgin ( http://www.zhurnal.ru/netart/ ) subtly captured the tastes of those gathered, performing nostalgic hits in purely computer processing, so Robert Plant suddenly began to sing in a solid baritone, and the classic guitar chop turned almost into a trance.

An audience in which many familiar (mostly, of course, virtually) faces flashed: online artists O. Lyalina and M. Leypunsky , the malicious graphomaniac Vika and the famous networker-paddling pool A. Andreev , creator of a huge site dedicated to archaic blues, Mike the Mellow , IP-club librarian A. Kovalev , Gleb Setkin from Echo of Moscow and Norwegian Forester himself - was delighted. It is not surprising: the majority of those gathered belonged precisely to that category of people who had thoroughly trampled the path of traditional culture with one foot, and plunged the other head-over-heels into computer science and the Internet.

Andrey Alekseev
Photo by M. Wiesel .

Gorny: There is always a place for meditation in life
Dog Korolenko, great and terrible
Vika and Gorny: dance - without sabers yet
Pure love in full swing
Alexey Shulgin, 386DX
Kozhekin, Gorny, Masha: the busy life of the creative team
Willie P., Gorny, Sergey Tarabanov talk about how good they are

Note ed.: By the way, during the year of the existence of the Net-culture, 40 authors spoke in it, who together wrote 71 articles (not counting the weekly columns - Seine , Perpetual Link and the early deceased Digitized World ). So we’re not just drinking vodka and beating tambourines here, as some impressionable readers might think.

Categories in Top100: floor eight, level fifteen

There are no limits to perfection, and the main thing that should ensure at least some self-control for developers of useful but complex systems is the idea that the best is not the enemy of the good, but a parody of it, and this parody is not always smart. When Rambler's Top 100 introduced site categories at one time, it was an improvement of the system. The main thing now is not to bring the process to the point of absurdity. Now the Top 100 administration plans to reorganize the flat category structure and introduce a hierarchy dividing each category into subgroups. Which should lead to the following obvious consequences. Happy will be those whose page “Hamsters that lived in my apartment throughout my life” jumps from 256th position in the “Other” category to 35th position in the “Other: Animal Pages” category. But what a joy for the radio station "Echo of Moscow" from seventh position in the "Media/Periodicals" category to rise to first, but in the subgroup "Media/Periodicals: Radio Stations", where it will not have to compete with six hundred twenty-nine sites (and in this case the seventh position honorable, firstly, and adds extra visitors, secondly), but only with twenty, which is simply unsporting - I don’t understand. The webmaster of Echo of Moscow, I think, will also not appreciate this rosy prospect. Not to mention the confusion that will begin in the rating, which already has 50 categories. On the other hand, it is not obvious why the rating administration should be guided by the interests of those who are in the top twenty in each category, and not those whose position is much more modest. In general, a controversial project, which has not yet been implemented. In addition, Top100 plans to continue to fight against cheating, for which it is planned to introduce a calculation of the probability of how reliable the data of each individual participant is. The theory of probability and employees of Moscow State University are involved here, and this is also just a project, although it is already in work.

OSKOMina

Copyright notice: using the word "OSKOMina" in this context was invented by Leonid Delitsyn.

So, our old friends are stirring again. I mean the organizers of OSKOM. Every time I hear this word, I think that the next time will be the last. I'll probably just die next time. My teeth are already aching. But no, the fourth letter arrives, the fifth, the sixth, to one mailing list, to the second, and I’m still alive. Simply amazing.

The office that deals with OSKOM is called the “public organization “Russian Network Community”. They also support the Net Support Yugoslavia project I mentioned earlier. But no, now - not about Yugoslavia. And I want to talk even less about the name of the public organization. Because if They are the Russian online community, then who are everyone else, you ask?

This time OSCOM will last for three days - in the last week of May. That is, to immediately cut off the majority of students. There is such a special student curse - a birthday during the test or examination session. And OSKOM during the test session is three times longer than a birthday. I don’t know what kind of staunch tin soldiers will withstand this action for three days, if after the one-day second OSKOM those who were there were still spitting a month later. But the organizers, as always, are optimistic. Or they pretend to be talented. They mysteriously mention some general sponsor. Without mentioning his name. We invite you to cooperate. Without going into details. Enthusiasm overflowing. Eyes are burning, a victorious smile, hello, a young tribe, unfortunately, already familiar. "Girl, where did I see you?" - "In a horror film." Maybe it's just snobbery? But, on the other hand, how long can you console yourself with the thought that active youth will now move mountains, and as a result only have a rockfall on a scale sufficient to kill a young elephant? And the most unpleasant thing is that by the end of May something will definitely happen on this oskom.ru. And we need to write about this. News, after all. Life, you know, is networked.

Usa. No time for jokes

I, of course, greatly overestimated USA.Net's desire to continue to give gifts to users by maintaining a cloudlessly free lifetime email address. Judging by the subtle changes on the NetAddress website, this system has indeed removed POP3 access and email forwarding from the list of its main (read: free) services. They are now listed as "Premium" and require an annual fee of $12. Until May 2, @usa.net users need to decide whether to pay this ridiculous money, or proudly turn around and leave, for example, on Hotmail.com. Those with an American Express credit card don't have to worry - both options remain free for them.

After in the last issue I carelessly announced information about this innovation as a not very successful joke or, frankly speaking, an outright lie, I received a pile of sad letters, the authors of which intended to rip off my rose-colored glasses. I take this opportunity to thank everyone who wrote. The struggle for the immaculate purity and authenticity of every semicolon in “The Seine” is my common cause with the readers.

From the life of the Edupage editors

In the list of publications that you cannot help but subscribe to if you want to keep abreast of events, Edupage occupies one of the first positions. This, of course, is far from Newslinx with its hundreds of headlines from thirty different publications every day. No overload of information. Eight to ten texts about the latest advances in information technology three times a week. An extremely intelligent publication. But on April 3, something very strange began to happen there.

Edupage is a publication of the American EDUCAUSE Association, a joint project of CAUSE and Educom. The Association deals with the problems of using information technologies in the field of higher education. Edupage has been published since 1992, and was written by two people - John Gehl and Susan Douglas. In addition to just computer news, they maintained a regular column, “Honorary Subscriber.” Their honorary subscribers were quite unexpected - from Sholom Aleichem to Euclid. The column usually contained some biographical information about who was announced as an honorary subscriber to the issue, and a couple of links. So, on April 3, the Edupage issue contained only the “Honorary Subscriber” section, and the residents of Kosovo were declared as such. The restrained comment was accompanied by a list of thirty links to the websites of organizations providing humanitarian assistance to those who suffered from NATO aggression.

And then everything was quite mundane compared to this pathos. In the very next issue (dated April 6), John Gehl and Susan Douglas announced their departure from the Edupage project. After April 20, Edupage will be written by other people, and the former authors will move on to their own project, NewsScan Publishing Inc. There would, of course, be nothing terribly surprising in their change of activity if this departure did not immediately follow the expression of such obvious sympathy for the Kosovar residents. They probably fired him for political reasons. Sad.

More about the copyright issue

Roger Ibert at Yahoo! Internet Life published a commentary on whether online language units may be subject to copyright protection. The author's attempts to maintain some kind of middle line between prohibiting anyone from uttering the phrase "You've got mail!" (the exclusive right to which is the subject of America OnLine's claims) and permission to use it in any context, from software titles to graffiti exercises, naturally led to Ibert proclaiming the first-ground context. That is, according to the author, AOL cannot achieve a ban on the use in everyday life of the phrases “you've got mail”, “instant message” and “buddy list” (the last two were born from the depths of AOL Instant Messenger), but may claim the exclusive right to use them on the web, in software products, etc. After Barlow's Selling Wine Without Bottles, this all looks ridiculous. Why not, in this case, make the word “Runet” (unloved by me personally, but very common, coined at one time, if I’m not mistaken, by the Great Uncle) an object of copyright? The phrase "browser is unable to locate the server"? Or "File has been changed"? Barlow is, of course, a utopian. But trying to pretend that the information environment is the same as it was before the advent of the Internet seems especially pointless.

CeBIT'99 participants are impressed

April 19 is inexorably approaching, and with it Comtek-99. But the Russian participants of Cebit'99, which ended on March 24, still continue to depart from it, and what they will be to the comtex is not yet clear. It seems that they have not been able to switch to them yet. I bring a couple of sketches.

The company Medialingva, more or less pleased with the results of the exhibition (contracts, sales volume, German fans of the Rastype 2.0 and dictionaries of Multilex), after it announced its "reorientation to the European corporate market." In Europe, multilingual software seems to be in demand, but at the same time there is an acute lack of it.

Epsylon Technologies also regards its participation in the exhibition as a successful one. Since, according to the observations of representatives of the company, the technology of working with remote Internet resources felt clearly increased demand, the proposals of Epsylon Technologies were quite popular.

The question of the impression of the rest (sixty) Russian participants of CEBIT'99 about their demand remains open - I still have no data on this topic. It is good that computer support manufacturers are companies, that is, organisms, not lonely personalities. Because if they were personalities, they probably would not have passed the diagnosis of "high self -esteem."

News in brief