Hello cg@gulker.com/editor@gulker.com,

I was browsing around a while back and came across your webpage at http://www.gulker.com/ra/hack/ that talks about the Mitnick-Shimomura hack. Nice work on compiling all this info!

However, I believe there are two small mistakes on that webpage. It incorrectly references "ariel.ucsd.edu" and "osiris.ucsd.edu" as Tsutomu Shimomura's computers and also lists telnet:// URL links to them.

I believe the correct computers that were involved in the actual Mitnick-Shimomura hack are named "ariel.sdsc.edu" and "osiris.not.sdsc.edu".

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is an organized research unit of UCSD but actually maintains a different domain name (sdsc.edu) and research network that is separate from the main UCSD campus one (ucsd.edu).

Additional references:

1) See http://hpgx.net/willday/mitnick/fbi.affidavit.feb17.html

2) See [this Google groups link]

3) Search Google Groups for "ariel.sdsc.edu" and there are various old postings from Shimomura with the address "tsutomu@ariel.sdsc.edu".

I just wanted to be sure you had the correct info so that your webpage can be accurate. Thank you!

Wilson Cheung (One of the sysadmins for osiris.ucsd.edu -- which is definitely NOT one of Shimomura's computers.)

OK, Wilson, on the to-do list...
Comments 8:12:45 PM    

Doc writes:

"Anyway, I don't think "celebrity," "popularity," "traffic," "audience" and "power curves" have much to do with what makes blogs worth reading, which is the same as what make blogs attract links.

"Hence the headline. Blogs are branchy. They fan out toward everyone else's light. No one blog shades any other. On the contrary, there are some blogs (like this one, for instance) that go out of their way to link to new blogs and strangers, to spread the linklove, as Tony Pierce puts it.

"Anyway, it's fun to do the math and the numbers, but that's not what blogging is about. We're talking here. Not broadcasting."

Well, Doc, we are talking here, aren't we? We're talking in the asynchronous way that suits busy people for whom everything from day jobs to family life to social calendars to pet-grooming appointments to configuring Beowulf clusters keep us from easily speaking face-to-face.

At least as importantly, these asynchronous conversations support an arbitrarily large community of others who share an interest. In my mind, the rise of Weblogs parallels events in the 16th Century when one of the first networks - reliable postal service - appeared. Shortly after people like Locke and Galileo and Descartes began writing each other about their discoveries, and then scientific academies formed, where these letters would be read aloud to others who shared an interest. The world has never looked back, since. Think 'Renaissance'. Think 'Industrial Revolution'.

I make no claim to be on a par with Galileo, or Locke, or even Doc, for that matter, but I do believe that the global network and easy-to-use Weblog tools, RSS feeds etc. have fundamentally changed authorship. It has been democratized, and pushed down from the small, theoretically-highly-expert, professional cadre that were the norm in broadcast media to include a wider group of both amateur and professional authors who are the norm in peer networks like Weblog communities.

This is a good thing, and you saw it operating last Saturday morning, when the Columbia foam-strikes-wing theory emerged on numerous Weblogs, hours before NASA and big media outlets made mention. That theory was stitched together through Weblogs talking, and branching, and picking up informed opinion, eyewitness acounts and media clips. The theory just emerged as interested, thoughtful people put the pieces together: it was like a human parallel processing machine.

I gotta run for a haircut, and there really is something to be learned from looking at the math of what happens on Web sites, but Doc makes a very good point: Weblogs largely succeed by being interesting, however it is they manage to get there. More when I get back...
Comments 12:53:38 PM    

It took a whole century for the printed book to develop a form of its own that was no longer dominated by the aesthetic traditions of the medieval manuscript. It was in the 16th century Italy that the format of the printed book emerged from the experimental and transitional phase and found a basic stability of form that lasted for the next three centuries. Yup: and also look at what's happened to print publishing recently. It's completely digital (just like the Web), right up to the ink-on-paper step... and self-publishing is flourishing, not unlike the sudden rise in Weblogs... authorship is changing, democratizing and pushing down to everyone...
Comments 11:17:29 AM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures