EVERYBODY'S INTERNET UPDATE ==================== Number 5 - August, 1994 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ An online publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. Finding people, places and things on the Internet 1.1 People 1.2 Places 1.3 Things 1.4 FYI 2. The virtual Chevrolet makes a couple more stops 2.1 California 2.2 Michigan 2.3 South Dakota 3. Services of the Month 3.1 Consumer protection 3.2 Crime 3.2 Education 3.3 Games 3.4 Government 3.5 Nature 3.6 News 3.7 Television 4. Public-access sites 5. Errata/updates 6. Contact info ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. FINDING MORE PEOPLE, PLACES AND THINGS ON THE INTERNET It's probably one of the most common questions you find in Usenet newsgroups such as news.newusers.questions: How do I find such-and-such? Unlike, oh, CompuServe or America Online, there's no one central directory for finding stuff on the Internet. The original EFF Guide to the Internet provides some techniques for finding things on the Internet (for example, information on using veronica). Here are some additional resources for mining the Net. 1.1 PEOPLE How do you find somebody's e-mail address? The absolute best answer remains the same: ask the person by phone or (postal) mail. But if you want to look up long lost friends (or enemies) to see if they're on the Net, there are several places to look. You can find most of them via Gopher. Connect to ds.internic.net. At the main menu, select 4 - InterNIC Directory and Database Services (AT&T) (there are other interesting things on this site, which we'll return to in the "Things" area below). Oh, InterNIC is the Internet Network Information Center and is a joint project of several companies, one of them being ol' Ma Bell herself, AT&T. At the next menu that pops up, select InterNIC Directory Services. And now you'll see several different ways to search for somebody. Each works basically the same as a gopher -- you type in a name and see if anything pops up -- although each searches different "White Pages" databases and performs its searches in different ways. So if you try one and don't get any results, try one of the others. NetFind, one of the options, has become a very popular system on the Net, but it's really only effective if you have some idea of where the person you're looking for works or has an account. To use this one, select NetFind and then the search option (it ends with a ). You'll get a keyword field to fill in. Type in the person's last name and any other information you think might be useful (for example: "smith ibm new york"). X.500 directories are more experimental than anything else at this point, but given that X.500 is an international standard for computer directory services, we can probably expect to see more and more information stored in these directories in the future. If you decide to do an X.500 search, you can decide to search either by country or by company. One group of people you probably won't find in any of these services is college students. You may actually be able to find addresses for them, as well as their professors, although it may take some more digging. Many colleges now maintain online directories for their staff and students, typically in Gopher format. So assuming you know where somebody is studying or working, you may be able to find their e-mail address (and often phone number and postal address as well). Call up Gopher. Select "Other Gophers and Information Servers" or the nearest equivalent. Pick the continent the college is in, followed by country and then, if appropriate, state or province and search for the particular school. Here's where it can get a little confusing, because each college seems to hide their directories in a different place. Some will put it on the first page; others will tuck it away under "Campus Life" or "Student Affairs" or some such, so it might take some rooting around. Once you find it, though, chances are you'll see an entry with a at the end. This means it's a database you can search by typing in the person's last name (on some systems, you'll get an entire form on your screen). 1.2 PLACES As we saw last month in our little trek around the U.S., there is a growing number of resources devoted to specific cities and states. But a number of other countries have gateways to resources in and about themselves. Here's a small sampling of World-Wide Web services that will link you to information about other places: The International Centre for Antarctic Information and Research has a World-Wide Web page at http://icair.iac.org.nz/ Point your Web browser at http://mistral.enst.fr/~pioch/louvre/ for WebLouvre, an online museum that currently features a virtual tour of Paris, in addition to downloadable reproductions of French art. Point your WWW browser at http://edb518ea.edb.utexas.edu/html/LatinAmerica.html for links to services in Latin America and Spain. The Slovakia Document Store will probably tell you more than you thought you needed to know about what used to be the eastern end of Czechoslovakia. This includes basic tourism information (the whats and wheres), exchange rates, the location of automatic teller machines and the like. There's even a short Slovak-English dictionary. The URL is http://www.eunet.sk. 1.3 THINGS Let's return to our Gopher friend ds.internic.net. Only this time, at the main menu, we'll pick InterNIC Information Services (General Atomics). InterNIC supports two great resources for finding new things on the Internet, both of which you'll find here. The Scout Report is a weekly compendium of interesting new services. Net-happenings is similar, but consists of a daily stream of reports on useful and fun new resources that moderator Gleason Sackman runs across. In both cases, the InterNIC Gopher lets you do a keyword search, which returns a Gopher menu with any "hits." Don't be put off by the awful looking menu items -- most of which consists of the directory path on the InterNIC machine, apparently. Concentrate on the first few words of each resulting entry and then select the ones that look interesting. CARL, Inc. runs a nifty database called UnCover that lets you scan through a database of keywords from several thousand journals and magazines. OK, it's not really a way to find resources on the Internet per se, but it is a good way to find, well, information on things in general. The database itself is free; if you want a copy of any articles, however, you'll have to pay a fee that ranges from 95 cents to $15 (which gets you a faxed copy, not one via e-mail). Still, it can save you a trip to the local library, or get you more prepared for one. The collection tends toward the academic, but includes everything from Arizona Highways to the New Republic. Using the system is easy. Use telnet to connect to pac.carl.org. Log on as PAC and select a terminal emulation (in most cases, that will be number 5 - VT100). At the main menu, select Current Article Indexes and Access (which will be number 2) and then UnCover (which as of this writing is number 50; CARL sometimes changes the numbers on its menu items). You'll be prompted a couple of times about setting up a "profile" (basically a file with your credit-card number in it if you frequently order from the database). Just hit enter at these points, and eventually, you'll be prompted for the type of search you want to do (for example, by word, title, etc.). Choose one, then type in the search words. You'll be told how many matches there are and asked if you want to see the results or modify your search. Assuming you decide to look at the results, you'll get a synopsis of the article, the periodical, the date and page, etc. (as well as the option to order a faxed copy of the entire article). 1.4 FYI David Lamb maintains an FAQ on ways to find people's E-mail addresses. You can find it in Usenet newsgroups such as news.newusers.questions, news.answers and soc.net-people. Look in comp.sources.wanted or news answers for Kent Landfield's "How to find sources'" ("sources" being net.speak for "computer programs"). You can also get a copy by sending an e-mail message (doesn't matter what it says) to send-finding-sources-faq@sparky.sterling.com. 2. THE VIRTUAL CHEVROLET MAKES A COUPLE OF MORE STOPS Guess I, and some loyal readers, haven't quite shaken off the wanderlust that made us drive virtually across the U.S. last month, because here are some additions to the road map: 2.1 CALIFORNIA Net.surfer Phil Agre reports being taken aback by the failure to include a pointer to live San Diego traffic reports in the Virtual Tour. Learn which roads to avoid as you head that way by using the World-Wide Web to connect to http://www.scubed.com:8001/caltrans/transnet.html. 2.2 MICHIGAN And net.roamer Gary Price reports that tourists to northern Michigan can bone up before they go on a Gopher server in, of all places, Huntsville, Ala. Use Gopher to connect to vespucci.iquest.com. From the main menu, select Internet Services, then Northern Michigan for information on golf courses, resorts, wineries and more (one caveat: some of the areas are still under construction and so have no actual info in them). 2.3 SOUTH DAKOTA The State of South Dakota now has its very own World-Wide Web page, where you can find tourist information, as well as stuff of interest more directly to South Dakotans, such as links to legislative resources. The URL is http://www.state.sd.us. 3. SERVICES OF THE MONTH First, I'm going to try a different way to organize these. In the original guide, services were broken down according to the method you'd use to connect to them (Gopher, say, or FTP). But is it safe to assume that if you've gotten this far, you know how to use these various Net methods? If so, it might make more sense to organize this section by topic, rather than network protocol. But if you disagree, look below for the address at which you can rant at me. 3.1 CONSUMER PROTECTION The U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission now has a Gopher site on which you can learn which products are being recalled. Take, for example, the girl's "romper garment sets that have necklaces with a stuffed doll hanging at the end,'' wherein said dolls could "become caught on an object or twisted while around a child's neck and choke the child." A recall for that was issued Aug. 16. Use Gopher to connect to cpsc.gov and look under Press Releases. 3.2 CRIME The Tulsa (Oklahoma) County Sheriff's office is now online, with a Gopher that lets you download images (both GIF and JPEG) of wanted criminals, see how many people are locked up in the county jail and find out the addresses of properties about to be sold at auction. You can even get an application for a job with the sheriff's office. 3.3 EDUCATION AP-L is a mailing list for teachers of Advanced Placement courses. To get on the list, send a message to listserv@gitvm1.gatech.edu Leave the subject line blank and, as your message, write subscribe ap-l Your Name substituting your first and last name. 3.4 GAMES The Games Domain is a World-Wide Web service that has some 140 links to various game-related resources on the Internet, everything from "walkthroughs" (hints to getting through computer adventure games) to an online games magazine. The URL is http://wcl-rs.bham.ac.uk/GamesDomain. 3.5 GOVERNMENT FedWorld is a gateway to dozens of federal information services, some free, some requiring a fee to use. It's now accessible via the Web at http://www.fedworld.gov. 3.6 NATURE You can look up information about endangered species in the U.S. on an e- mail server run by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. This includes both text files and maps of the ranges of these species. To get a file that explains how to retrieve files, write to r9irmlib@mail.fws.gov. In your subject line, write: SEND HELP. Leave the actual message blank. 3.7 NEWS John Higgins's Net-Letter Guide is a guide and review of "newsy periodicals" available over the Net. You can get on the list by writing higgins@dorsai.dorsai.org, with a message of: SUBSCRIBE NET-LETTER. He also posts the guide periodically in the alt.zines, alt.etext and misc.writing, among other Usenet newsgroups. 3.8 TELEVISION Don FitzPatrick is a major media maven and provides an e-newsletter on happenings in the television industry. To get on the list, write shoptalk-request@gremlin.clark.net. As your message, write: subscribe your-address where "your-address" is your e-mail address. 4. PUBLIC-ACCESS SITES ONTARIO Toronto. The Wire. Graphical interface. Call (416) 214-WIRE for rates and dial-in number. 5. ERRATA/UPDATES In version 3.89 and above of Pine, messages stored with the Save to Folder function are marked for deletion, but messages marked for Export to a file are not, reports Dean Martineau. The modem number for CapAccess, Washington, D.C. is (202) 785-1523. National Capital Free-Net in Ottawa recently changed its dial-in number to (613) 564-3600. When you connect, log in as: guest. As Joseph Norton found out, the Oregon State University's Almanac e-mail server no longer runs a "fortune cookie" service. The correction telnet address for FedWorld is fedworld.gov. 6. CONTACT INFO Everybody's Internet Update is published monthly by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Current and back copies are available by anonymous ftp at ftp.eff.org in the pub/Net_info/EFF_Net_Guide/Updates directory; by gopher at gopher.eff.org (select Net Info, then EFF Net Guide, then Updates); and by WWW at http://www.eff.org/pub/Net_info/EFF_Net_Guide/Updates/ If you want to receive the Update automatically via e-mail, write to listserv@eff.org. Leave the subject line blank, and as your message, write: subscribe net-update To obtain a copy of the entire EFF Guide to the Internet, use anonymous ftp or ncftp to connect to ftp.eff.org and look in the /pub/Net_info/EFF_Net_Guide directory, or use gopher to connect to gopher.eff.org and then select Net Info and then EFF Net Guide. You'll find several versions for different types of computers. The file netguide.eff is the generic ASCII version. To reach Update Editor Adam Gaffin, write adamg@world.std.com. For general information on the Electronic Frontier Foundation, send an e- mail message to info@eff.org. To ask a specific question, write ask@eff.org. Everybody's Internet Update is copyright 1994 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Washington, D.C.