SITE BYTE
                 _____________PRATIK KANJILAL

Stop Surfing, Start Spying

Search engines happen to be the most clued-in entities because they have a host of intelligent agents at their beck and call to go out on the Net and bring back information on what’s new out there. Now, thanks to XML, the same technology is available to everyone. At Spyonit.com, you can either sign up to be notified by their regular range of agents or you can build one from scratch, using their tools. Like the best of the Net, this service is for free. An agent (often called a ‘spider’ because it goes out on the web) basically notifies you whenever an element on the Internet changes in a specified way. Older personalised agents — like the one from Mindit.com — could let you know when a web page you were interested in was updated. Contemporary spiders have been empowered further by recent advances in search technology. Spyonit’s market agent, for instance, will bring you headline news on stocks you specify through the day. Specify airports of origin and destination and the fare you’re paying and the farefinder agent will tip you off when someone offers a better price. Most intriguing of all is the vanity agent, which lets you know how many times your name crops up on the search engines. A related feature alerts you whenever someone refers to you on Usenet.

This is also something you need on your side if you enjoy an abusive relationship with lots of people all over the world. Spyonit’s agents can inform you through a variety of devices. Other than your personalised pa-ge, there’s mail, mail-capable pagers, Internet phones, ICQ and AOL instant messenger. Any combination of these can be used and, of course, it’s Palm VII-friendly. It’s great for people who don’t want to spend a couple of hours on the search engines every time they need to catch up on their area of interest.

Jughead, By Mail
This will come as news to most people, but it is possible to use almost all the services of the Internet through e-mail if you go to the right gateways and follow the instructions. The most complete set of such instructions is at Gerald Boyd’s Expita.com. It is a treasured resource for the estimated 10 million netizens who have access to the Internet only through mail and primitive browsers. In fact, even in the US, a surprisingly large number of people do not have direct access to the Net, but go though disarmingly archaic bulletin boards and Fidonet nodes.

Boyd is a retired IBM mainframe man, from back in the days when computers were large and had matt surfaces. It makes sense to pay heed to an older man when it comes to mail. It is, after all, the oldest tool on the Internet. Boyd’s resources begin with the predictable e-mail to web gateways. Using these, you can ask any server to mail a page to you. There are similar services for Usenet, through which you can interact with newsgroups through your standard mail interface. And there are listings of servers for whois and finger, though these will be of interest only to old-timers and techies. However, the interfaces to FTP servers and gopherspace will fascinate even the new-est of newbies. This is where the Net used to store its most valuable documents and program files. Most of these servers linger on, even though almost all users have migrated to the web.

In fact, they remain the substratum of the web. Look out for what your browser is doing when you download software or an academic or Government document. Chances are that it will call up an FTP or gopher server. Mail gives users access to the oldest search tools, which predate Yahoo! In a nod to the comics era in which they were written, they are called Archie (for FTP searches), Jughead and Veronica (for gophers). And let’s not be ageist out here: in a lot of ways, they were better value for phone time than a lot of contemporary engines.

Censor Trouble
In a strange case that verges on the incredible, censorware at a website is preventing a woman from signing up until she changes her name. Sherrill Babcock, a Los Angeles-based lawyer, had her name thrown back at her by the censorware installed by Blackplanet.com, a black community in New York. No go, said the software, come back with a less offensive name. Babcock called up the site’s number and explained that she had inherited her name from her father, who was a pretty regular individual. No dice, said the site’s managers, we got children in here. Babcock has not sued, despite being a law-yer, out of sheer humanity.

The case has reminded many of the days when cyber-correctness was at its peak, when America Online had banned the use of the word ‘breast’ in its chatrooms. Interactive poetry online swiftly became a dying art. America’s biggest breast cancer support group complained of inhuman cruelty. The plug-uglies quickly invented a surrogate word and carried on with their lives. The bottomline is that censorware achieves nothing. The nasties are unaffected and decent people find their lives being made increasingly difficult for them.

( The writer can be reached on pratik@crosswinds.net)

Next - Science Monitor