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TidBITS#333/17-Jun-96
=====================

This TidBITS issue reports on the new preliminary injunction
   against the Communication Decency Act, a new version of the
   LaserWriter driver, and a new product - Claris Home Page. We also
   have articles about the importance of a good index in technical
   books and utilities that generate the HTML for colored text or
   background on a Web page. Rounding out the issue, we have an
   article that looks as an Internet newcomer's reactions to large
   Web search engines.

This issue of TidBITS sponsored in part by:
* APS Technologies -- 800/443-4199 -- <[e-mail]>
   Makers of hard drives, tape drives, and neat SCSI accessories.
   For APS price lists, email: <[e-mail]>
* Northwest Nexus -- 206/455-3505 -- <http://www.halcyon.com/>
   Providing access to the global Internet. <[e-mail]>
* Power Computing -- 800/375-7693 -- <[e-mail]>
   PowerTower 180 MHz - the fastest Mac OS system ever made.
   Win a PowerCenter 120! <http://www.powercc.com/>
* America Online -- 800/827-6364 -- <http://www.aol.com/>
   The world's largest provider of online services.
   Give Back to the Net -- <http://www.aol.com/give/>
* EarthLink Network -- 800/395-8425 -- <[e-mail]>
   Providers of direct Internet access for Macintosh users.
   For eWorld refugees: no setup fee! <http://www.earthlink.net/>
* DealBITS: Great prices on Macs, memory, and more! <-------- NEW!
   <http://www.tidbits.com/dealbits/> -- <[e-mail]>

Copyright 1990-1996 Adam & Tonya Engst. Details at end of issue.
   Information: <[e-mail]> Comments: <[e-mail]>
   ---------------------------------------------------------------

Topics:
    MailBITS/17-Jun-96
    CDA Challenge Upheld
    The All-Important Index
    Loma Prieta Finds a Home at Claris
    Caught Between a Hexadecimal and a Hard Place
    UberVista is Watching You!

<ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/issues/1996/TidBITS#333_17-Jun-96.etx>


MailBITS/17-Jun-96
------------------

**Buster Busts PowerBook Disappointment** -- In response to our
  article about the 7.5.3 Update Revision 2.0 (codenamed Buster),
  Zac Imboden <[e-mail]> wrote in with this happy ending:
  "Upgrading my 520 with the 5300 100 MHz daughtercard was probably
  the biggest disappointment of my life. The ensuing dispute between
  myself and my favorite local Mac repair shop ended in a bitter
  separation. They wouldn't take the card back, despite its dismal
  performance. However, one of their technicians called recently to
  announce the impending release of System 7.5.3 Revision 2.0.
  Overall performance has very noticeably improved, especially the
  access speed of our 4D client/server configuration. Zowie!"


**Apple Tester for PowerPC Performas** - As part of its repair
  extension program for 5200, 5300, 6200, and 6300-series Macintosh
  Performa and LC models (see TidBITS-331_), Apple has released a
  utility that identifies machines with known logic board issues.
  Previously, logic board problems in these machines were only
  characterized by frequent system freezes, which can be caused by
  any number of things not covered by Apple. This utility should let
  owners of affected machines accurately identify known problems
  and, if necessary, contact an Apple dealer for free repairs.
  Please note the information this utility provides is only relevant
  to specific Macs; check Apple's summary for details. [GD]

<http://product.info.apple.com/pr/press.releases/1996/q3/
960510.pr.rel.repair.html>
<ftp://ftp.support.apple.com/pub/apple_sw_updates/US/mac/utils/
5xxx-6xxx_Tester_1.0.hqx>


**LaserWriter 8.3.4 Unleashed** -- Last week, Apple released
  LaserWriter 8.3.4, a version that has been anxiously awaited by
  many PCI Power Mac users who have been plagued with crashing
  problems when trying to print, particularly when using print
  spoolers or third-party printers, such as GCC's XL 808. Although
  it remains to be seen whether this driver solves all such
  problems, early reports that I've seen have been encouraging.
  Although Apple recommends that anyone running a PCI Power Mac or
  running System 7.5.3 use the new version of the driver, it also
  says that people using older Macintoshes or system versions
  shouldn't upgrade.

  If you download and expand LaserWriter 8.3.4 , you'll end up with
  a disk image, which you can use with the help of a utility such as
  DiskCopy or ShrinkWrap. The download consumes about 450K of disk
  space. [TJE]

<ftp://ftp.info.apple.com/Apple.Support.Area/Apple.Software.Updates/US/
Macintosh/Printing/LaserWriter/LW_8.3.4.sea.hqx>
<ftp://mirror.aol.com/pub/info-mac/disk/shrink-wrap-201.hqx>


**Put RAM on Your Shopping List** -- If you'd wanted to purchase a
  32 MB DIMM four months ago, around Valentine's Day, you probably
  would have paid around $900. Last week that same DIMM would have
  cost you around $320, maybe lower if you shopped carefully. Memory
  prices have plummeted across the board. These prices should still
  be low when this issue of TidBITS goes out, but the word on the
  street suggests they won't go much lower or stay low for all that
  much longer. If you wish, check out DealBITS for RAM deals and
  links to several hardware vendors. [TJE]

<http://www.tidbits.com/dealbits/>


CDA Challenge Upheld
--------------------
  by Tonya Engst <[e-mail]>

  The Telecommunications Act of 1996 brought major changes to United
  States telecommunications law and included the Communications
  Decency Act (CDA), a series of provisions that - among other
  things - specifically prohibited but broadly defined indecency on
  the Internet. (See TidBITS-315_ for more details on the
  Telecommunications Act).

  President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act into law on
  08-Feb-96, and within five minutes of the signing the ACLU
  (American Civil Liberties Union) and a collection of other
  organizations and businesses immediately filed a challenge to the
  CDA portion of the legislation, arguing it unconstitutionally
  violated freedom of speech and was too vague to be reasonably
  enforced.

  By 15-Feb-96, a limited, temporary restraining order against the
  CDA had been granted. Just last week, on 12-Jun-96, a three-judge
  panel for the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia ruled on the
  case and granted a preliminary injunction against the indecency
  provisions in the CDA, meaning that such provisions cannot be
  enforced unless a higher court of law overturns the injunction.

  TidBITS doesn't try to report on political news in an unbiased
  fashion (everyone has biases, no matter what they say), and I'm
  not trying to here; in fact, I'm delighted with the ruling, not
  just because the ACLU won, but also because of its content.

  The District Court's ruling has an extensive section about the
  facts behind the Internet, including how the Internet works, who
  uses the Internet, services available on the Internet, and more.
  This section makes for interesting reading for anyone trying to
  learn about the Internet. Those legislating or pontificating about
  the Internet should include this ruling on their required reading
  lists.

<http://www.eff.org/Alerts/HTML/960612_aclu_v_reno_decision.html>

  The ruling states that the court has no problem with existing laws
  against pornography and obscenity, but that the CDA goes too far.
  The court denounced the CDA for vagueness, for the high cost of
  successfully barring minors from a site that might be considered
  indecent, and for not offering a sufficiently strong reason to
  restrict freedom of speech. The ruling also noted several other
  ways minors could be cut off from inappropriate material on the
  Internet, including the PICS proposal (where sites would be rated)
  and various software lockout products such as SurfWatch and
  CyberPatrol.

<http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/PICS/>
<http://www.surfwatch.com/>
<http://www.cyberpatrol.com/>

  Portions of Judge Stewart Dalzell's opinion in the ruling have
  been widely quoted, and I include here an excerpt from his
  comments. Such language from our legal system gives me hope that
  the Internet will be treated as an open forum where many people
  may easily give and receive information, and not as a broadcast
  medium dominated by large businesses.

  "If the Government is going to intrude upon the sacred ground of
  the First Amendment and tell its citizens that their exercise of
  protected speech could land them in jail, the law imposing such a
  penalty must clearly define the prohibited speech not only for the
  potential offender but also for the potential enforcer. As the
  most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet
  deserves the highest protection from governmental intrusion.

  "True it is that many find some of the speech on the Internet to
  be offensive, and amid the din of cyberspace many hear discordant
  voices that they regard as indecent. The absence of governmental
  regulation of Internet content has unquestionably produced a kind
  of chaos, but as one of plaintiffs' experts put it with such
  resonance at the hearing: 'What achieved success was the very
  chaos that the Internet is. The strength of the Internet is that
  chaos.' Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the
  strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of
  the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects."

  Interestingly, a footnote in the ruling notes that the ACLU
  withdrew its challenge to language that restricts discussions of
  abortion on the Internet. Apparently, the ACLU withdrew because
  both President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno have made
  it clear that "no one will be prosecuted under the abortion-
  related provision.... In view of this 'longstanding policy,' the
  Government contends there is no realistic fear of prosecution and,
  so the argument goes, no need or equitable relief."

  Whether the government will take its case to the Supreme Court
  remains to be seen. Should they do so, I hope the Supreme Court
  seriously considers the facts and opinions presented in the ruling
  for a preliminary injunction.

  For additional information and commentary on this issue, check out
  the following URLs.

<http://www.cnet.com/Content/News/Files/0,16,1541,00.html>
<http://www.hotwired.com/special/indecent/>
<http://www.eff.org/pub/Alerts/960612_eff_cda_decision.statement>


The All-Important Index
-----------------------
  by David Holzgang <[e-mail]>

  The index is an essential ingredient in having a successful
  computer book, and the article in TidBITS-332_, The Process of
  Publishing, completely omitted that topic. A book needs a good
  index for many reasons, not the least of which is that potential
  purchasers, while browsing in a book store, use the table of
  contents and the index as tools for deciding whether or not to
  purchase the book.

  I have written 14 books, mostly on PostScript and other high-end
  graphics subjects. In my experience, publishers handle index
  preparation in three ways. Some publishers farm it out to
  professionals and charge the author's royalty account. Some allow
  or require the author to prepare the index (or have it prepared)
  themselves. And finally, some publishers permit the author to
  choose a professional to prepare the index and, in some cases,
  even share the cost. [Another possibility is that the publisher
  generates the index with no charge to the author and with little
  or no control given to the author, which is the case with Hayden
  Books. -Adam]

  The index for a book is one of the most important features that
  the book has. As a reader, I find a good index makes using a book
  a pleasure and a poor index makes finding anything a real chore.
  As a result, I usually ask publishers to let me pick a
  professional indexer and pay for the index out of my royalty
  account. This gives me some control over the index quality and
  ensures that I end up with an index that contributes to the book.
  Also, by choosing my own indexer, I know what the cost will be
  before the indexer starts work. Unfortunately, this doesn't always
  work; some publishers won't let the author participate at all.

  Generally, in my experience, the worst indices are those prepared
  by authors. Indexing is a specialized skill, and deserves respect.
  (And, if you think authors work under deadline pressures, consider
  the indexer who generally has no more than a few days to index the
  book completely.) There is a society of professional indexers and
  I have found that these folks do the best work. I'd point out two
  main issues to a fledgling author. First, someone has to prepare
  the index for your book, and there's a good chance that you'll be
  expected to pay for it - out of royalties, true, but it's still
  your money. Second, don't do it yourself - a professional will do
  a better job and make your book more successful.

  [For more information about professional indexing, check out the
  Web site for the American Society of Indexers. -Adam]

<http://www.well.com/user/asi/>


Loma Prieta Finds a Home at Claris
----------------------------------
  by Tonya Engst <[e-mail]>

  Careful MacWEEK readers might have noticed an article a few weeks
  ago about Loma Prieta, an up-and-coming Web authoring tool
  positioned to give Adobe's PageMill some serious competition.
  Created by San Andreas Systems, Loma Prieta is not in public beta,
  and beta testers have been tight-lipped about the program.

  Additional information became available for public consumption
  last week, in the form of a press release stating that Claris has
  acquired Loma Prieta, and plans to release the program as Claris
  Home Page. According to the press release, Claris Home Page will
  be a cross-platform product with versions coming out for the Mac
  OS, Windows 95, and Windows NT. The program will help users create
  a variety of high-end elements, including tables and frames, in
  either an HTML view or a visual view. Helpfully, Claris Home Page
  should also offer libraries, in which users can store commonly
  repeated chunks of HTML. The press release included numerous
  quotes lauding Claris for its emphasis on creating easy-to-use
  software and emphasizing that Claris Home Page would make it easy
  to create high-end Web pages. Not surprisingly, the press release
  said nothing about Claris's miserable attempts to include HTML
  conversion in ClarisWorks (see TidBITS-295_). I'm pleased to see
  Claris stepping into the Web authoring arena as a serious player.

  Claris hasn't yet decided what to charge for Claris Home Page, but
  they have decided to run a public beta, and beta versions of Home
  Page should be available for downloading from the Claris Web site
  by the end of this month. In an effort to avoid commenting
  extensively on new products before they enter final release,
  TidBITS probably won't review Claris Home Page until it actually
  ships, much as we won't review the pre-release PageMill 2.0,
  should Adobe decide to make it a public beta.

<http://www.claris.com/press/hotnews/rel-homepage.html>
<http://www.zdnet.com/macweek/mw_1018/news_loma.html>


Caught Between a Hexadecimal and a Hard Place
---------------------------------------------
  by Tonya Engst <[e-mail]>

  If you do any coding of HTML documents, you've probably
  encountered situations where you need to enter a six-digit
  hexadecimal number in order to tag for a particular color, perhaps
  for a page's background or for items of text.

  For those of you who have a fuzzy idea of what I'm talking about
  but don't know the exact HTML, here's how it works. To color your
  entire document's background and text in a multi-hued, rainbow
  sort of way, you might use this HTML for your opening <body> tag:

 <BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFF05" TEXT="#00FF00" LINK="#0000FF"
 ALINK="#FF00FF" VLINK="#FF0000">

  This body tag sets the background color to yellow, regular text to
  light green, unvisited link text to blue, visited link text to
  red, and link text as you click it to purple. In a browser that
  doesn't understand this HTML (or that is set for the user's colors
  to override those in a visited page), the background and text will
  remain at the default color.

  To learn additional details about coloring text, check out the
  Internet draft of the HTML 3.2 specification, though be aware that
  many browsers don't yet support the additional coloring options
  proposed in that draft. (I leave such trial and error to the
  discretion of enterprising readers.)

<http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/Wilbur/features.html>

  Human brains don't come wired to realize that colors like violet
  are represented in hex with numbers like 9717FF, and I've yet to
  read anything sensible that provides an easy way to convert colors
  into such numbers. Instead, I've discovered the world of color-to-
  hex converters, and I thought I'd share some summaries of how a
  few of the different converters operate. Some Web authoring
  programs also offer such features, but if your program does not
  (or offers only limited features), you may want to use one of
  these programs.

  Before I talk about the utilities, I should mention that some of
  them also help you create a <body> tag that includes the
  background attribute, which you use to specify a graphic that will
  function as a tiling background. (Web pages with tiling
  backgrounds often look as though their text is on top of a
  lightly-colored image, such as a chunk of marble. You can also use
  tiling backgrounds in a variety of clever ways to spruce up Web
  pages, though modem users will thank you enormously if you keep
  graphic file sizes as small as possible.)

  If you are looking for something in the freeware department, check
  out HTML ColorMeister 1.3.5. Written by John Cope of ParticleFlux
  Software, this utility makes it easy to set up color and tiling
  attributes that go in the opening <body> tag. After you pick your
  attributes, click the Generate button to see the complete tag. You
  can then copy and paste the tag (or portions of it) into an HTML
  document, or you can click the Output Page button and HTML
  ColorMeister creates a skeleton HTML document that includes the
  custom <body> tag.

<http://wizlink.iserver.com/conner/ParticleFlux/index.html>

  The shareware category offers a few additional choices. Web Color
  2.0, a $5 program by Patrick Bores, works much like HTML
  ColorMeister, but has a more polished appearance.

<http://users.aol.com/wcolorinfo/>

  HTML ColorPicker 2.0.3 costs $5 and was written by David
  Christiansen at Vector Development. HTML ColorPicker lets you type
  in numerical values and see the colors to which they relate (if
  your brain works that way or if you have some specialized reason).
  It also can display numerical values that match colors you choose
  visually. Although you can copy any one hexadecimal value from
  HTML ColorPicker, the utility doesn't help you generate an actual
  <body> tag.

<ftp://mirrors.aol.com/pub/info-mac/text/html/html-color-picker-203.hqx>

  Janice Arakaki's $5 HTML ColorSelect 1.3 takes a slightly
  different tactic to the feature set it offers. Although it enables
  you to choose a color and then see the hexadecimal equivalent, it
  unfortunately doesn't permit you to copy the number; instead you
  must retype it into your HTML document. You can, however, open a
  PICT image and then click a pixel in that image to get its
  hexadecimal equivalent.

<ftp://mirrors.aol.com/pub/info-mac/text/html/html-color-select-13.hqx>

  HTML ColourTool costs $10 and offers a preview feature that
  enables you to see how the colors you choose interact. The program
  shows the current <body> tag, complete with attributes as you
  choose your colors. It does not offer a way to include a
  background attribute for a tiled background image - a feature that
  would be especially nifty if it also worked in the preview,
  showing how text colors interact with the image. If you like the
  program and pay the $10 shareware fee, you'll be able to copy the
  <body> tag and then paste it into your HTML document. If you don't
  pay, you must retype the tag. HTML ColourTool was developed by
  Brock Gunter-Smith of Finger In The Eye Productions.

<ftp://mirrors.aol.com/pub/info-mac/text/html/html-colour-tool-201.hqx>

  I hope this article has given you an idea of what features you
  might find in these sort of utilities and an idea of which utility
  would be most useful to you. Even if you use a Web authoring
  program that helps with coloring text and backgrounds, it may not
  offer the color picker aspect of HTML ColorSelect, or the color
  visualization features in HTML ColourTool.


UberVista is Watching You!
--------------------------
   Kirk McElhearn <[e-mail]>

  I was recently attracted by yet another spider crawling around the
  Web, called AltaVista. Since a big problem on the Internet is
  finding what one is looking for, it is always a plus to find a
  big, fast search engine. AltaVista is such a search engine,
  another of the many like InfoSeek, Lycos, Excite and all the rest.
  The difference with AltaVista is its power, and the claim that it
  covers more than thirty million Web pages. I tried it out.

<http://www.altavista.digital.com/>

  At the time, I had only been prowling around on the net for about
  two months. I had my own home page, and some other work present at
  different sites. I wanted to see how much of a trace I had left,
  and was curious if there were other people with my name out there.
  What I found surprised me. My family is small, and my last name,
  McElhearn, is uncommon. So I started by entering my name into
  AltaVista's search form, and prepared myself for about 30 seconds
  of waiting.

  First surprise: It did not take 30 seconds, more like 5.

  Second surprise: There were 32 occurrences of my name. If you have
  been leaving tracks on the Web for years, you may think 32
  occurrences isn't that many. After I posted a message about this
  to the Future Culture mailing list, some other people on the list
  tried it, and came up with numbers far higher than mine: hundreds,
  even thousands. But, as a net novice, I was surprised by my 32
  occurrences.

<http://futurec.xtc.net/>

  Out of the 32 occurrences, 30 were about me, and two were about
  other people with the same last name (maybe cousins?), one of whom
  won a high school shot put championship. The rest pointed to me,
  all right, from a letter of mine published in the second issue of
  Wired, to posts to the Info-Mac digest, to my home page, to my
  essay for the 24 Hours of Democracy project, and more.

  Well, at first I though that was pretty cool. After all, don't our
  genes want to makes sure we leave our marks on the planet? But the
  more I think about it, the more I think that a Pandora's box is
  being opened. The best way to describe AltaVista is by using the
  words of the company behind it:

  "AltaVista is the result of a research project started in the
  summer of 1995 at Digital's Research Laboratories in Palo Alto,
  California. By combining a fast Web crawler with scalable indexing
  software, the team was able to build a large index of the Web in
  the Fall of 1995.

  "After two months of internal testing, we produced an even larger
  index consisting of the full text of over 16,000,000 pages. We
  made the site public on the 15th of December 1995. Within three
  weeks of launch, we were handling over two million HTTP requests
  per day."

  The Web Indexer, the most powerful part of the setup, is an
  AlphaServer 8400 5/300, with 6 GB of memory, and 10 processors.
  Digital claims that the server handles most requests in less than
  a second.

  This is only a part of the picture. Another server handles the
  hits and requests, and a news server maintains a current news
  spool for the News Indexer, which dynamically updates the database
  of newsgroup articles. So, AltaVista is trying to be a repository
  of, more or less, everything that goes through the Web and Usenet,
  which means a lot of email is there because their robots index
  archived mailing lists.

  The whole thing has awesome power. Given the growth of the
  Internet and available processing power, AltaVista should be able
  to keep up with the traffic and provide this service for a long
  time.

  I say, "mind your own business."

  I mentioned my experiment to fellow members of a Mac users' group.
  One of them, a techie with pocket protectors, expressed awe at the
  power. Another was amazed at the nosiness of the machine, the fact
  that it didn't respect privacy. What about privacy?

  When I subscribe to a mailing list, no one asks if I have given up
  the rights to use my posts for any reason. Although my words are
  public (but only in a limited sense; that is, to those who are
  also subscribed) I might not want them to be at the disposition of
  any robot around. After all, Digital never asked if they could use
  my material to show off their computers (because the goal of the
  operation strikes me as just that: advertising for the powerful
  computers Digital makes). And what about my rights? Here in
  France, everyone has a legal right to verify and modify any
  information concerning them that is kept in any database. I wonder
  how Digital would react if I asked them to remove some of my posts
  from its database? Or if I wanted to exercise my right to the
  copyrights on those words?

  Many people contrast electronic information and communication with
  books, saying that books are permanent, but electronic information
  is not. I think AltaVista exemplifies just how permanent such
  information can be. Not only does it float around in the
  Internet's ether, but it is also indexed in a database where
  someone can easily fish for it.

  The danger of this is obvious. Let us say that I have been posting
  to the alt.sex.minerals newsgroup, talking about how I like to do
  it with pumice. In ten years, if my wife wants a divorce, she can
  hire a bot to snoop around and find that post, along with others,
  and get child support, keep me away from the kids - the whole nine
  yards.

  Or what about a young hacker, who later grows up and runs for
  political office? Another party may find it useful to learn he was
  spouting anarchist ideas in his youth. He will not be able to say
  he did not inhale.

  Many of us have ideas that we later renounce, but when the words
  are there in black and bits, it is hard to place the necessary
  distance between the us-then and the us-now.

  What to do about it?

  It seems difficult to control this kind of snooping. Companies
  will make money from our words just as they always have. And the
  search engine is useful to those seeking information. But the
  danger is real, and it is right around the corner. I am not a
  Luddite clamoring for a return to the dark ages; I think the
  Internet will change the way our future happens. But we must be
  aware of the dangers, and react accordingly.

  The first thing is to demand that we be able to strike from the
  record anything that we no longer want available. We should have
  the right to filter what is made available in this manner. No one
  has the right to exploit our words without our permission. While
  AltaVista is not financially exploiting them, it is using them to
  advertise, which I see as being much the same thing.

  [Over a month ago, I sent email to AltaVista inquiring about their
  policy for removing people from its database, but I have not
  received a response. Kirk has also sent a draft of this article to
  Digital, and he has received no response. AltaVista has an
  extensive disclaimer which states in part: "In general, Digital
  believes that persons who make information available on the World
  Wide Web or in newsgroups do so with the expectation that such
  information will be publicly and widely available. Digital further
  believes that its making newsgroup postings and links to publicly
  accessible Web pages available at this site is legally permissible
  and consistent with the common, customary expectations of those
  who make use of the Web and Usenet communications media." -Tonya]

  The second thing is to be aware that someone is listening, and
  that whatever we say publicly on the Net will be stored. Even in
  private email, encryption is perhaps the only way to keep our
  communications safe from wandering eyes. Of course, this is not
  possible in every part of the world. Countries such as Iran and
  France can put you in jail for using encryption.

  Don't forget, the walls have ears.

  P.S.: When I wrote this text, in March, I found 32 occurrences of
  my name. The last time I checked, there were 78.


$$

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