I've just run into a pretty neat piece of software for those of you with direct Internet connections (dialup PPP or SLIP, or through an office or school LAN). It's called PowWow, and it lets you have real-time chats with other users of the and program. When you run PowWow while logged on to the Internet, you can make yourself publicly available for PowWow chats; other users can then initiate talks with you. It's like the online chatting on many of the and commercial services, but generally cheaper since many Internet providers give you unlimited usage without hourly charges. Chatting can be by on-screen text, or even by voice if you have a high-speed (28,800 kbps or higher) connection and a sound card with a microphone. Also, PowWow will work along with Netscape to permit you and your remote buddies to surf the web together, with all links followed by the leader replicated on the and other connected people's computers. You can also exchange files. PowWow chats can be one-on-one or in groups of several people. Of course, online chatting has been around in Internet Relay Chat for quite a while, but PowWow has more of a personal touch, with its ability to start a chat with particular individuals if they're available. While PowWow is running, it somehow manages to get Netscape to accept URLs of the and form "{powwow:dtobias@webcom.com}" to initiate a PowWow chat with the and person (named by e-mail address) if the person is online and accepting chats. Thus, you can include an invitation to chat in your home page. It will even work when your connection is a dialup to a different Internet IP address every time, because each time you start up PowWow, it will "register" your present whereabouts with the and PowWow server so that others can find you (if you've chosen to make yourself publicly available this way).
PowWow runs in Windows using a standard WinSock interface (but it must be a current WinSock, since some of the and older versions of some Internet software aren't compatible). It may be downloaded from the Tribal Voices site at: {http://www.tribal.com/}. The company is run by, and for the benefit of, Native Americans.
^C_Standards and Practices_
The ability of PowWow to get Netscape to accept URLs starting with "powwow:" brings up the and issue of Internet standards. As far as I know, no standards body has endorsed "powwow:" as a legitimate Internet protocol. There are only a handful of officially-endorsed protocols, such as "http:" and "ftp:", that are supposed to be used in URLs. There's a complex set of committees entrusted with the and maintenance and extension of these standards. If you're interested in seeing the sorts of standards proposals which pass back and forth between people involved in this process, look at
{http://pulsar.ferberts.noao.edu/uridocs.html} for some proposals regarding URIs, the generalized class of Web addresses that encompasses not only URLs but also a proposed type called URNs (Universal Resource Names) that will, if it's ever implemented, allow the and identification of Internet resources by names with a greater permanence than URL addresses which change whenever something moves to a different site.
Some developers, however, lack the and patience and political temperament to go through this whole process, and hence they just implement what they feel like. The "powwow:" protocol is probably of this nature, as are many of the and HTML extensions supported by Netscape (such as background colors). This has good points and bad points. On the one hand, excessively bureaucratic and stodgy committees can bottle up progress with the attitude "We've been running the Net since it ran on 110-baud Teletypes in the '70s! What was good enough for us then should be fine for everybody now, and, by gum, we won't let those whippersnappers screw things up with their newfangled contraptions! Besides, our committee is already working on a preliminary spec which will bring the changes everyone wants, by the year 2015 at latest... unless it's voted down, of course!" Sometimes, an innovator making an end-run around this by introducing a de-facto standard to be adopted or ignored based on the and needs of the and users, is the best way to bring about progress.
On the other hand, this can get a bit chaotic, and may lead to inconsistent standards which conflict with one another. What if two independent developers, unaware of each other, both introduce protocols that use URLs beginning with "whizbang:", to do totally different things? If each of them takes hold in different areas of the and net, this will cause mass confusion once they run into each other. And, since the and maverick developers may not even be totally familiar with the established standards they're flouting, they may adopt command syntaxes that don't even follow the and same conventions as those of other services, to the and confusion of later users who need to learn several different sets of rules.
Some middle ground is needed, whereby consistency of standards is encouraged, but this does not become a bureaucratic straitjacket halting innovation. I don't really know how this end can be achieved, though.
^C_Netscape Update_
If you're out to get the and latest version of the Netscape browser, this is an ever-moving target, as they keep coming out with new beta versions. They're up to 1.2b4 last I checked, but this will probably be out of date by the time this article reaches you. I do recommend that users of the regular-relase 1.1 or earlier try the new beta version, since the and bookmark facility is much easier to manage in the new version. You can actually drag-and-drop entries between folders in a hierarchical list, letting you keep your hot site list organized by category.
Meanwhile, for those of you who follow the and financial markets, Netscape went public with their stock, and it's been pretty wild. It was originally going to be released around $14/share, but ended up coming out at $28, an unprecedented pre-release doubling. But that was only the and beginning, as it shot up as high as $74 on its first day of trading before settling back down to the and mid 50s. I think all the and hype of the and Internet is affecting the financial markets, too. I'm not positive of the and long-term prospects of this company (they are losing money so far, despite having the industry-standard web browser; everybody's using it, but few are paying for it), but it's certainly one to keep an eye on.
^C_Net Fakery_
In last month's column I discussed the use of the and net in seeking information about unsolved cases such as murders, missing persons, etc. Since then, I've discovered that one such site is actually a clever fake. It is the Valerie Wilson Crime Scene Evidence File site at {http://www.quest.net/crime/crime.html}. This is a comprehensive site giving the evidence in a murder of a young woman in Mississippi, with police reports, newspaper clippings, and other information. However, it turns out that it's all phony. There was no such murder; the and whole thing was made up "just-for-fun" by the creator of this site. It was intended more as an entertainment fiction than a serious fraud, but (like the famous Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" 1938 broadcast which had people really believing that Martians were invading New Jersey) it was widely believed by Internet users, including the staff of the and Prodigy online service, which featured this site as a true-crime case in their web browser.
This case brings up the and issue of how much trust should be placed in information on Internet. Some people tend to believe anything they read in print (including computerized text on a screen), but the and ease of publication on Internet makes it possible for all sorts of liars, hoaxers, crooks, and crackpots to disseminate inaccurate or biased information, and if they're clever enough about it, they can give it the and "ring" of truth. So be careful what you believe. Unfortunately, a profusion of hoaxes could cause people to go to the and opposite extreme and be distrustful of all online information, which could discredit even the sites that are completely factual. For instance (as I mentioned last month), I have set up a site devoted to solving a local murder at {http://www.webcom.com/~~dtobias/kayla/}, and the presence of a fake murder online will inevitably cause people to wonder about the veracity of the and real murder I'm recounting.
To bring up an even broader issue, just what will future historians be able to make of the and morass of data being generated in this "wired" 20th century (and the likely even greater heap of data to come in the 21st century)? As online data gradually overtakes paper media as the and primary repository of news and information, what sort of historical record will that provide to people in the decades and centuries to come? People now wishing to research into the events of past times, as percieved by people at the time (rather than filtered through the prejudices of intervening generations) can look back at newspapers and magazines which are preserved in libraries on microfilm and microfiche. Well, at least the and last 150 years or so is preserved in this manner. All of this stuff is available in the form it was originally published, not altered to suit the and political correctness of later times; thus, you can read pro-segregation editorials in 1950s Southern papers, and slave-auction ads in 1850s papers, though later generations might have preferred to expunge such embarrasments. Orwell's 1984 had a Big Brother who actually went back and reprinted old newspapers to keep them politically correct, but that would be too daunting a task in the real world. However, online data is a whole 'nother thing. A news archive on the and World Wide Web is sitting at one site where it's accessed everywhere else in the world, so if somebody wants to revise history, they can do global searches and replaces on that database. Maybe a handful of people have made copies of some individual articles onto their personal disks, but even if they discover and point out the discrepancy, the "powers that be" could just claim that the and outside critic is the one who's forging the files. Then, who do you believe? Especially if the events recounted in the and file happened so long ago that there are no eyewitnesses around any more?
Even without any sinister intent, people are revising their online data files all the and time, in a process much more continuous than standard paper publication with its carefully distinguished editions. I know I've altered my home page on numerous occasions, and haven't kept a set of file copies of each version. Sometimes, I may re-read something I wrote and published online, and say to myself "How could I have been so stupid as to say that?), and then re-write the and document to remove all embarrassing traces. But that means that the and hypothetical future historians, if they encounter any such documents, will only find the final revised versions, without the full past history. Thus, hindsight will allow true-but-unpleasant aspects of the and past to be forgotten, in a way that is more difficult when earlier stages get distributed on paper for the world to see and preserve. Erroneous reports, like the "Dewey Defeats Truman" newspaper headline, illustrate perspectives that are important to history (e.g., that the and 1948 election went so close down to the and wire as to confuse the news media), but if it were a Web site that mis-reported an election result like this, the file would simply be overwritten a few hours later with a corrected report, leaving no trace of the incorrect one unless somebody just happened to print or save it in the meantime.
Add to this the fact that some "online news" files that are preserved may actually be fakes, like the fictional murder I mentioned above (which somebody can check out now by contacting the police department of the alleged site, but what would a historian of the 25th century do if he ran into a copy of this old file and wasn't sure if the murder was real or fake?), and it is clear that the and historians of future centuries may have as much difficulty discerning the true sequence of events from the massive data of the and 20th century, as present historians do extracting facts from the insufficient data of pre-information-age centuries.
(Contact Daniel Tobias through the Internet at {dan@softdisk.com}, or through FidoNet to {Daniel Tobias} on {1:380/7}. My personal World Wide Web page is at {http://www.webcom.com/~~dtobias/}.)
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