TidBITS#871/19-Mar-07
=====================
  Issue link: <http://db.tidbits.com/issue/871>

  Remember Gopher? The Internet protocol for retrieving files that 
  preceded the World Wide Web isn't dead, writes Cameron Kaiser, but 
  surviving (where else?) underground. Glenn Fleishman notes new 
  capabilities for the Pando file-sharing service that drastically cut 
  the costs of hosting large, popular files such as podcasts. Also in 
  this issue, Adam notes a New York Times program that gives free 
  TimesSelect access to higher-education faculty and students and 
  points to interesting new research about why hard drives fail; Andy 
  J. W. Affleck records the praises of Freeverse's Sound Studio 3.5 
  update; and Jeff Carlson passes on news of Mark/Space's public beta 
  of The Missing Sync for BlackBerry. Finally, Apple last week 
  released Mac OS X 10.4.9 and Security Update 2007-003, as well as 
  bug-fix updates iTunes 7.1.1 and iPod Reset Utility 1.0.

Articles
    Grab Bag of Security Fixes and Patches for Mac OS X
    Mark/Space Adds BlackBerry Sync
    iTunes 7.1.1 and iPod Reset Utility 1.0 Fix Bugs
    TimesSelect Free for Higher Ed
    Sound Studio 3.5 Adds Numerous Features
    Hard Drive Failures and Contributory Storage
    Pando Further Eases Big File Distribution
    Down the Gopher Hole
    Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/19-Mar-07


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Grab Bag of Security Fixes and Patches for Mac OS X
---------------------------------------------------
  by Glenn Fleishman <glenn@tidbits.com>
  article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/8907>

  Last week Apple updated Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger to version 10.4.9 and 
  provided a security update for Mac OS X 10.3.9 Panther. The security 
  update is incorporated into the Tiger update, and could have been 
  labeled "Fixes for the Month of Apple Bugs," a project we have 
  written about before (see "MoAB Is My Washpot," 2007-02-19).

<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304821>
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305214>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/8869>

  Security Update 2007-003 and the related code in Mac OS X 10.4.9 fix 
  dozens of problems reported in the Month of Apple Bugs, including 
  what was the most serious remaining problem, a way to exploit a flaw 
  in Software Update by "enticing a user to download and open a 
  Software Update Catalog file." We haven't seen reports of this - or 
  any of the rest of the bugs - in the wild. Most of the non-MoAB 
  exploits fixed by the security update require local users with 
  access to an account and software that isn't enabled by default in 
  Mac OS X.

  There's no simple way to summarize 10.4.9's general enhancements. 
  Like the last few updates to Tiger, this one is a grab bag of fixes 
  for numerous individual problems, and it's likely the last big 
  hurrah for Tiger, as Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard's ostensible ship date 
  moves ever closer. Although Apple could release a 10.4.10, history 
  shows us they prefer the numerical purity of single digits. (Jaguar 
  ended its run with 10.2.8 and Panther with 10.3.9.)

  Notable among the general changes are improvements to .Mac 
  synchronization. As a regular .Mac sync user, I have seen lots of 
  inconsistent behavior and long delays. I'm hoping 10.4.9 eliminates 
  these problems. Another fix related to USB modems I have to call out 
  as "I fax in your general direction": the note says that the update 
  improves reliability in faxing in France or Belgium when using the 
  Apple USB Modem.

  Apple has made available separate incremental and combo updates for 
  PowerPC and Intel systems running both Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server; 
  you can use Software Update to download the best updater for your 
  system or view all eight updates from the Apple downloads page. The 
  combo updates work for 10.4.0 and later; the incremental releases 
  work for 10.4.8. Set aside some download time, since the size of the 
  updates runs from 72 MB (PowerPC incremental) to 350 MB (Mac OS X 
  Server Intel combo). Panther's Security Update 2007-003 is also 
  available both via Software Update and as standalone downloads for 
  both Mac OS X (36 MB) and Mac OS X Server (49.5 MB).

<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/>

  As always, if you experience any unusual problems after updating, 
  particularly with applications not launching, download and install 
  the combo updater for your Mac, since it can provide a cleaner 
  installation.

  Apple also released iPhoto 6.0.6, which "addresses issues with EXIF 
  data compatibility and photocasting." The photocasting fix is in 
  response to another Month of Apple Bugs report. It's also available 
  via Software Update or as an 8 MB standalone download.

<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/iphoto606.html>


Mark/Space Adds BlackBerry Sync
-------------------------------
  by Jeff Carlson <jeffc@tidbits.com>
  article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/8912>

  A few months ago, Glenn Fleishman and I wrote a feature article for 
  Macworld about using smartphones with the Mac (see "Get in Sync" in 
  the January 2007 issue). When we tested BlackBerry devices, 
  PocketMac for BlackBerry, which TidBITS also covered a year ago in 
  "Putting BlackBerries in Your PocketMac" (2006-02-06), was the only 
  method of synchronizing data between RIM's smartphones and the Mac.

<http://www.macworld.com/2006/12/features/sync_main/>
<http://www.blackberry.com/>
<http://www.pocketmac.com/products/pmblackberry/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/8413>

  Recently, a new contender has emerged. Mark/Space is currently 
  offering a fully functional public preview of The Missing Sync for 
  BlackBerry as a 9.2 MB download. Like other versions of The Missing 
  Sync, this one uses Mac OS X's Sync Services to synchronize data 
  between the BlackBerry and Address Book, iCal, or other programs 
  that also use Sync Services. It also features photo and music 
  transfers from iPhoto and iTunes on the BlackBerry Pearl. Remember 
  that this is still beta software; Mark/Space has posted a list of 
  known issues. It requires Mac OS X 10.4.8 or later, and a BlackBerry 
  device running version 4.0 or later of the operating system. The 
  completed version of the program is expected to ship by the end of 
  this quarter; pricing has not been announced.

<http://www.markspace.com/missingsync_blackberry.php>
<http://www.markspace.com/missingsync_bb_issues.html>


iTunes 7.1.1 and iPod Reset Utility 1.0 Fix Bugs
------------------------------------------------
  by Jeff Carlson <jeffc@tidbits.com>
  article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/8913>

  Apple has released iTunes 7.1.1, an update that "addresses a 
  stability issue and minor compatibility problems in iTunes 7.1," 
  according to Apple. The update is available via Software Update or 
  as a 28 MB stand-alone download. A 36.1 MB download for Windows is 
  also available.

<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/itunes711formac.html>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/itunes711forwindows.html>

  The company also released iPod Reset Utility 1.0 for Mac (3.4 MB) 
  and Windows (2.2 MB), which is designed to reset either generation 
  of iPod shuffle if iTunes is unable to reset it.

<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/ipodresetutility10formac.html>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/ipodresetutility10forwindows.html>


TimesSelect Free for Higher Ed
------------------------------
  by Adam C. Engst <ace@tidbits.com>
  article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/8910>

  After all my puzzling over how to create permanent links to articles 
  in the New York Times (see "Easier New York Times Linking," 
  2007-02-26), I was amused to hear from a friend that the New York 
  Times is now making TimesSelect free to any student or faculty 
  member with a valid college or university email address. TimesSelect 
  includes access to articles from the New York Times Op-Ed and news 
  columnists in both text and podcast forms, along with up to 100 
  articles per month from the full New York Times Archive, which 
  contains content back to 1851. 

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/8881>
<http://www.nytimes.com/gst/ts_university_email_verify.html>


Sound Studio 3.5 Adds Numerous Features
---------------------------------------
  by Andy J. Williams Affleck <andyjw@raggedcastle.com>
  article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/8914>

  Freeverse has released Sound Studio 3.5, which adds many new 
  features of interest to all users of this excellent audio editor and 
  recorder. Sound Studio has long been my favorite tool for editing 
  audio files, whether I'm producing a podcast, trimming a file in my 
  iTunes library, or recording my son's funny snore one night (and 
  later removing the laptop fan noise from the recording - it's 
  important to have high quality embarrassment material for when he's 
  a teenager).

<http://www.freeverse.com/soundstudio/>

  Among Sound Studio 3.5's many new features are the addition of new 
  audio formats for opening and saving, including Apple Lossless, ADTS 
  AAC, NeXT/Sun Audio, and Ogg Vorbis. In addition, Sound Studio now 
  supports 8-, 16-, and 24-Kbps bit rates when saving MP3 format 
  files.

<http://forum.freeverse.com/viewtopic.php?pid=3387>

  For podcasters, Sound Studio has added the capability to manage all 
  iTunes-supported tags, including the podcast bit that determines 
  whether a file appears in the Podcasts section of iTunes or in the 
  regular Music section. This is a major boon to me, since I would 
  like to move podcasts I want to keep into my music collection and 
  let all others automatically delete themselves after listening, 
  something that's been difficult to accomplish so far. Now I can open 
  the file in Sound Studio, toggle the appropriate checkbox and 
  re-import the file into iTunes where it appears in my Music section 
  rather than in the Podcasts section. The reverse approach enables 
  you to move spoken audio files from the Music section into the 
  Podcasts section, if you so desire.

  Podcasters will also appreciate the fact that markers set by Sound 
  Studio within audio files are now automatically saved as chapters in 
  podcasts. In other words, when playing back in iTunes, the marker 
  titles are listed within the Chapters menu and enable one to jump 
  directly to that spot in the playback. (For more information on how 
  to use Sound Studio for podcasting, see my ebook, "Take Control of 
  Podcasting on the Mac.")

<http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/podcasting-mac.html?14@@!pt=TB871>

  Other enhancements in Sound Studio 3.5 include new preferences for 
  how scrolling occurs during playback, the capability to loop sound 
  in filter previews (rather than requiring you to play the sound over 
  and over as you make adjustments), and new AppleScript support for 
  referencing individual tracks and changing the pan and volume of 
  each track.

  Finally, Sound Studio now provides an innovative way to set the 
  beats per minute (BPM) of a track. BPM is a piece of metadata that 
  appears in the iTunes tag editor and as part of the display grid of 
  the main Sound Studio window; it can be useful for generating smart 
  playlists of slow or fast music in iTunes. All you have to do to set 
  the beats per minute is click a button in time with the rhythm of 
  the music.

  Sound Studio 3.5 costs $80, and upgrades are free to registered 
  owners of 3.0 or higher. Special upgrade pricing for users of 
  earlier versions is available as well, as is a free demo (a 10.2 MB 
  download) for anyone who hasn't yet tried Sound Studio.

<http://www.freeverse.com/download/select.php?name=soundstudio&platform=osx>
<http://dev.freeverse.com:16080/faq/index.php?action=artikel&cat=394881&id=84>


  [Andy J. Williams Affleck built Dartmouth College's first Web site 
  in 1993, created the original Web site for the sitcom Friends, and 
  started a virtual community that's still around a decade later. When 
  he's not producing his Podcrumbs podcast or working on "Take Control 
  of Podcasting on the Mac," he's a senior project manager and 
  accessible Web design expert.]

<http://www.podcrumbs.com/>


Hard Drive Failures and Contributory Storage
--------------------------------------------
  by Adam C. Engst <ace@tidbits.com>
  article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/8911>

  At last month's 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage 
  Technologies, two academic papers - one from Bianca Schroeder and 
  Garth A. Gibson of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and the other by 
  Eduardo Pinheiro, Wolf-Dietrich Weber, and Luiz André Barroso of 
  Google - looked at the reliability of hard drives in large-scale 
  installations. Among other conclusions, the CMU team found that 
  real-world replacement rates were much higher than would have been 
  expected from vendor-provided mean time to failure (MTTF) estimates, 
  and Google's researchers concluded that there was little correlation 
  between failure and either elevated temperature or activity levels. 
  The papers weren't written for the lay audience and aren't easy 
  reading, but they are worth a look if you're interested in when and 
  why hard disk mechanisms fail.

<http://www.usenix.org/events/byname/fast.html>
<http://www.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/>
<http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf>

  Also interesting is the paper by James Cipar, Mark D. Corner, and 
  Emery D. Berger of the University of Massachusetts Amherst on the 
  Transparent File System (TFS). The goal of TFS is to create a 
  contributory storage system in which multiple people could 
  contribute unused disk space to a shared pool, much as the SETI@home 
  project enables users to contribute unused CPU cycles to the shared 
  task of analyzing radio telescope data. (And yes, there is still an 
  active TidBITS team for SETI@home.) Apparently, TFS can contribute 
  all of the unused space on a disk while imposing only a negligible 
  performance drag on the contributor. Prototype source code is 
  available; I'll be curious to see if anyone cleans it up and ports 
  it to MacFUSE (see "MacFUSE Explodes Options for Mac File Systems," 
  2007-01-29).

<http://www.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/cipar/cipar_html/>
<http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/>
<http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/team_display.php?teamid=30293>
<http://prisms.cs.umass.edu/tcsm/TFS.html>
<http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/8835>


Pando Further Eases Big File Distribution
-----------------------------------------
  by Glenn Fleishman <glenn@tidbits.com>
  article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/8908>

  The file-distribution system run by Pando has opened itself up to 
  developers and podcasters (for more information about Pando and 
  related services, see "Secure Transfer Using Civil Netizen and 
  Pando," 2006-08-21). Instead of managing your own bandwidth and 
  dealing with your service provider's limits or their overage charges 
  on busy months, you can now employ Pando's combination of 
  centralized and distributed downloading at no cost at all for files 
  of up to 1 GB in size. Larger files can be distributed with Pando's 
  paid levels of service.

<http://pando.com/>
<http://developers.pando.com/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/8649>

  With Pando, you upload an individual file or set of files (a 
  "package") via a free application that incorporates advertising into 
  its display. When you upload the package, you can provide email 
  notification, where up to 10 people per transmission (for free 
  publisher accounts) initially receive a Pando link to download the 
  package or file. You can also receive a special link that you can 
  send separately and some HTML to post on a Web site for download. In 
  essence, Pando's client application works like a combination of an 
  email application and a file manager. It's available for Mac OS X 
  10.3.9 and later, along with Windows 2000 SP4, XP, and Vista.

<http://www.tidbits.com/resources/2007-03/Pando-interface.jpg>
<http://pando.com/download>

  The copy of Pando running on your computer is also a "peer," or a 
  potential uploading server, in a peer-to-peer network that Pando 
  uses to connect anyone who has downloaded or wants to download the 
  package in question. For files you want to distribute as broadly as 
  possible - like a podcast, software download, or white paper PDF - 
  the more people running Pando with a downloaded copy of that item, 
  the greater the distribution network.

  This method is what has driven the popularity of BitTorrent, but the 
  addition of central servers to prime the pump and ensure a minimum 
  level of bandwidth gives Pando some advantages. Pando requires 
  accounts, and with a premium subscription as a publisher, you can 
  even control who can download and use files.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent>

  With the addition of a developer site and associated toolkits and 
  recipes for distributing files, you can bypass using the Pando 
  program to upload files as a publisher. Anyone wanting to download 
  files must first install Pando, but if you have sufficiently 
  compelling content or if Pando really takes off - especially if they 
  can get their software bundled by computer makers - that will be no 
  bar. For anyone whose audience has no interest in using a separate 
  application to retrieve files, Pando isn't yet a solution. But as a 
  measure of their current popularity, Pando says they push 60 
  terabytes of downloads a day across their network.

  For instance, you can convert your existing podcast RSS feed to work 
  via Pando, and any audio or video enclosures are automatically 
  retrieved by Pando and converted into retrievable packages. 
  Currently, you need to request that Pando (the company) enable this 
  option for your feed. But you can also use the Pando program to 
  create URLs for uploaded files that you can embed in a Web page and 
  that work in RSS feeds. A recent upgrade to the Pando application 
  lets the program subscribe to Pando-compatible RSS feeds; for 
  instance, they have a sample high-definition video channel that lets 
  you download specific videos directly within Pando from that 
  channel.

<http://developers.pando.com/rss-feed-converter>

  A software developer could offload some of the distribution burden 
  for new files by using Pando's application programming interface 
  (API), the programmer's toolkit, to create a package for files 
  uploaded to the developer's Web site. Adding peers increases the 
  efficiency of peer-to-peer networks; thus, a popular new application 
  or update would have an extremely efficient Pando profile.

  Pando uses advertising to defray the costs of its free service. The 
  company also recently added three tiers of paid service; if you pay, 
  you can transfer larger files to larger initial distribution lists, 
  and your files can remain on Pando's central servers for longer 
  periods of time. Right now, the free service allows packages of up 
  to 1 GB each to be transferred, and it keeps the files active on 
  Pando's servers for either 7 days (for Pando-emailed or 
  IM-distributed files) and 30 days (for Web posted files) after the 
  most recent download or message forward through their system.

<http://www.pando.com/premium>

  All three higher level services - Plus, Pro, and Publisher - allow 
  password protection of packages, weekday 24-hour technical support, 
  and no advertising. They also let you send messages from within 
  Pando to 100 people at a time rather than 10.

  The Plus ($5 per month) and Pro ($20 per month) service increase 
  maximum package sizes to 3 GB and 5 GB, respectively, and both allow 
  Pando-distributed and IM-distributed packages to remain for 30 days 
  without any downloads or forwards, rather than 7. The Publisher 
  package allows packages up to 50 GB, and unlimited persistence on 
  Pando's servers.


**Pando versus Other Services** -- Let's compare these offerings with 
  other typical bandwidth charges. Amazon's Simple Storage System (S3) 
  costs 20 cents per GB transferred, plus 15 cents per GB stored each 
  month. Many co-location firms charge $1 to $2 per GB transferred 
  with some monthly included amount. And some ISPs offer truly insane 
  transfer amounts, notably DreamHost, which includes 2 TB per month 
  in its $10 per month accounts.

<http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261>
<http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting.html>

  At those prices, delivering, say, 10,000 one-megabyte files each 
  month, or 10 GB of data, costs me nothing with Pando, $10 with 
  DreamHost, $0 to $10 with a co-location host (if I'm under or over 
  my allotment, respectively), and $2 with Amazon. Scale that up to 1 
  TB a month of smaller-than-1 GB packages, and it's free with Pando, 
  $10 with DreamHost (unless they decide my usage is abusive), at 
  least $800 and as much as $1,800 with a co-location host (assuming 
  100 GB to 200 GB of included usage), and $200 with Amazon (plus a 
  few dollars for storage).

  I'm particularly interested in this subject because of the potential 
  risk for average people as an increasing number of us host audio, 
  video, and other huge files, and thus face the peril of popularity. 
  Nearly four years ago, I ran into just this problem when I tried to 
  give away an electronic version of "Real World Adobe GoLive," a book 
  I co-authored with Jeff Carlson (for the full story see "Publish 
  (Electronically) and Perish?" 2003-03-24 and "The Boy Who Cried 
  Bandwidth," 2003-04-07). I wrote about how it all worked out in the 
  end in the New York Times, but I could have been on the hook for up 
  to $15,000. (In that case, an older method of sustained transfers 
  had ridiculous tiered levels of fees: one toe over the line, and 
  whammo!)

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/7115>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/7144>
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/24/technology/circuits/24band.html/partner/rssnyt>

  Most network service providers charge you for the bandwidth you use 
  over your monthly allotment; these companies tend to run co-location 
  facilities that house hundreds or thousands of servers. Many 
  Internet service providers, along with Apple and its .Mac service, 
  cut you off when you hit your limit; ISPs tend to provide bandwidth 
  to residential and business customers, and they try to preserve 
  bandwidth rather than serve hosting customers. It's annoying to be 
  taken offline, but at least you know that you're just out of luck, 
  but not out of pocket, when you hit the limit.

  I like the notion that Pando is bearing some of the risk for 
  popularity, but balancing that with fees for higher levels of use 
  and support. I also like the notion that bandwidth is such a 
  commodity that Pando can use advertising to offset the cost of most 
  file delivery. Pando needs to hit a mass audience to make the mental 
  cost of downloading its application approach zero - or get 
  pre-installed deals with computer makers - but this latest addition 
  makes it increasingly likely that "Pando me that file" could become 
  a common phrase.


Down the Gopher Hole
--------------------
  by Cameron Kaiser <ckaiser@floodgap.com>
  article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/8909>

  [Editor's Note: Some of the URLs in this article use the gopher:// 
  scheme rather than the familiar http:// scheme. These gopher URLs 
  can be viewed directly in Camino or Firefox, but if you are using 
  Safari, which does not support the Gopher protocol, view these pages 
  using the HTTP<->gopher proxy. For more information, check out this 
  document describing Gopher support in most Web browsers.]

<http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/>
<http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher/0/gopher/wbgopher>

  Back in the early 1990s, when I was an undergraduate at the 
  University of California camping out in the beat-up, 24-hour-a-day, 
  VT100 terminal lab under one of the lecture halls, the World Wide 
  Web was, well, not very wide and certainly didn't encompass much of 
  the world. Graphical interface to the Internet? Are you kidding? 
  Most of what the Internet had to offer then could be viewed on those 
  text screens. All my activity happened while logged in over a serial 
  port to one of the campus Unix servers.

  Still, that monochromatic interface was the gateway to an 
  interconnected world of computers very much like the Web - a world 
  accessible both to the people typing away on those ancient dumb 
  terminals, and to the lucky folks on the spanking new Mac IIci 
  computers in the Mac labs. It had weather, headline news, music, 
  search engines, and even video clips (if I could use one of the 
  Macs). This was Gopherspace, and it's still alive today.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)>
<gopher://gopher.floodgap.com:70/0/gopher/welcome>

  Back in 1991, Gopher sprang out of a University of Minnesota campus 
  information service project aimed at building a "friendly" method of 
  accessing university documents and services. (The University of 
  Minnesota's sports teams are the Golden Gophers.) In those days, 
  most campuses and corporations maintained their own walled-garden 
  services and access policies, and almost all of them operated in 
  unique and sometimes wildly different manners.

  In contrast, Gopher provided a unified, consistent hierarchical 
  interface to access everything. The approach translated well to both 
  text and graphical interfaces, and better still, it offered an easy 
  way to connect a varied set of hosts using simple links. This beat 
  the stuffing out of getting files via FTP, which usually required 
  using a command line. Gopher's method was a large improvement over 
  interacting with library and campus directory systems via Telnet and 
  trying to remember how to compose searches from system to system. 
  Thanks to Gopher, the public resources other servers offered weren't 
  merely accessible - they were usable.

  Within a year or two, many other campuses were using Gopher for 
  their own local operations, along with some private users and 
  corporations. Gopher servers and gateways pulled together many 
  disparate Internet resources, such as local directories and white 
  pages (using CSO), and access to FTP servers and WAIS (Wide Area 
  Information Servers - WAIS was an early standardized way to search 
  remote databases).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_information_server>

  At the same time that Gopher's purview expanded, point-and-click 
  Gopher clients appeared, including some for Macs - remember 
  TurboGopher, anyone? An increasing amount of information started to 
  pour into Gopherspace, including electronic books, email magazines, 
  pictures, programs, software and more.

<gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/gopher/clients/mac>
<http://www.bio.net/bionet/mm/bio-soft/1992-October/003180.html>

  Sorting through that growing mass of content required yet another 
  piece of software: a search engine called Veronica (its name was a 
  play on Archie, the search engine for FTP). No accounting tells us 
  exactly how many Gopher servers existing during Gopherspace's 
  heyday, but I remember all seven Veronica servers being busy during 
  the day. As the Web become more generally popular, Gopher links were 
  still rampant on Web pages because a lot of data was still in 
  Gopherspace.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(computer)>

  By 1995, Gopherspace had largely evaporated, thanks to a combination 
  of the University of Minnesota's restrictive and expensive licensing 
  policies (they eventually released Gopher under the open-source GPL 
  license, but years too late) and the wide availability of a better 
  technology. The new technology had the same interconnectedness of 
  resources, while offering a prettier interface and wider 
  possibilities for creative and informational communication. 
  Naturally, that was - and is - the Web.

<http://listserv.uh.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9303b&L=pacs-l&T=0&P=5660>
<http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html>

  The University of Minnesota tried to salvage Gopher, with neat 
  tricks like merging Gopherspace with virtual reality via the 
  GopherVR project, but the Web had already passed Gopher by. 
  Fascinated as I was with the Gopher world I used to inhabit, I threw 
  together my first bits of HTML and put up my own home page on the 
  Web in 1994, and Gopher became history to me, too.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GopherVR>

  Or was it? In 1998, while working as a programmer for Point Loma 
  Nazarene University in San Diego, I wondered what happened to the 
  old world down the Gopher hole. I brought up my own Gopher server 
  software on the Apple Network Server sitting in the office early in 
  1999 and told it to go find the other Gopher servers out there. 
  Surprisingly, a few answers came back.

  The University of Minnesota's Gopher pages still worked, and they 
  still had most of their links to former Gopher peers. Many of those 
  hosts had turned into Web sites, and some had utterly disappeared, 
  but a few were not only still operating but also still maintaining 
  their content. I started compiling a list and trying to index their 
  content, and eventually I put my database up for searching and 
  browsing as gopher.ptloma.edu (with the IT department's blessing), 
  the host that was the forerunner of Floodgap's Gopher server.

<gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/>

  Other people had been wondering what happened to Gopher, too, and 
  had erected their own servers independently. One day I got an email 
  message from a fellow named John Goerzen, who had also written his 
  own new Gopher software to run a service he whimsically called quux. 
  Better still, along with his new content, he had managed to preserve 
  a fair number of the archives of old Gopher sites that I thought had 
  disappeared without a trace.

<gopher://gopher.quux.org/>

  John was only the first of many people I would hear from who 
  remembered the quick simplicity of Gopherspace. It got to the point 
  where I started tracking all the new hobby and user servers that 
  were cropping up. I even received a letter from Mark McCahill, one 
  of Gopher's original architects, after he noticed the new Veronica 
  clone that I had thrown together out of the data the Gopher crawler 
  had acquired.

<gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/v2/>

  Gopherspace had never disappeared after all; it had just gone 
  underground. Even after the University of Minnesota finally turned 
  off gopher.tc.umn.edu a few years later, Gopher hobbyists live on, 
  writing new features (like the Gopher "phlog"), creating clients and 
  software, and adding new content to their own little worlds. Plus, 
  most of the old Gopherspace archives now have new homes, meaning 
  most of their content is still available today.

<gopher://hal3000.cx/1/Phlog>
<gopher://home.jumpjet.info/>
<gopher://gopher.quux.org/1/Archives>

  Nevertheless, Gopher remains more than just a living fossil. In a 
  world where flash (and sometimes Flash) is often more important than 
  substance, Gopher replaces all the trappings with a clean, sterile, 
  and consistent interface of folders and files. The Gopher sites that 
  people visit have real content and real function, so there's nothing 
  but a menu between you and gigabytes and gigabytes of data. You can 
  still access Gopherspace with a dumb terminal just as well as you 
  can with a Mac Pro. It loads quickly over a dial-up link, and it's 
  instantaneous over a broadband connection. You can still get weather 
  reports in Gopherspace, you can still read mailing lists and 
  headline news, there are still lots of files for downloading, and 
  heck, you can even read TidBITS! (Thanks to Adam Engst for granting 
  permission.)

<gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/groundhog/>
<gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/feeds/>
<gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/feeds/tidbits/>

  More people are discovering that there's an alternative to the World 
  Wide Web for many functions, and better still, an alternative that 
  can co-exist seamlessly with the Web - all the Mozilla-based Web 
  browsers work fine as Gopher clients too. Maybe it's for that reason 
  that the Power Mac 7300+G3 that runs gopher.floodgap.com today still 
  gets a few thousand hits daily.

  Yes, there are far fewer Gopher hosts than there used to be (86 
  hosts and 740,000 unique resources, as I glance at the robot 
  statistics file while I perform maintenance on the Veronica-2 
  index). But the world down the Gopher hole is still alive more than 
  15 years from its inception. If the Web seems to be a heavy or 
  fluffy distraction as you wait for your browser to grind through 
  another Flash animation and a pile of ads, perhaps it's time you 
  took a trip back underground for a glance at the simpler and cleaner 
  world that the Internet used to be.

  [Cameron Kaiser is a recovering database administrator and 
  programmer who unwisely got an MD instead and now works as a county 
  health physician in Southern California. He drives old United States 
  highways, maintains old Commodore and Apple computers, and 
  relentlessly implements old information technologies on his "$50 
  Wal-Mart server rack" in his rapidly disappearing spare time. He has 
  used Macs since 1987 except for a brief stint we shall not talk 
  about.]

<http://www.floodgap.com/>


Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/19-Mar-07
------------------------------------
  by TidBITS Staff <editors@tidbits.com>
  article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/8916>

**Nike+iPod Only for Fitness Runners** -- Adam's article about the 
  running device elicits discussion of stride lengths and the 
  variation in the Nike+iPod's readings. (14 messages) 

<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/1178/>


**TidBITS 2007 Reader Survey Results: Who Are You?** Readers respond 
  to the first results of our reader survey, including readers under 
  the age of 21 and a question of how the data breaks down. (3 
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<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/1179/>


**I lived through Daylight Saving 2007 and survived!** Disaster 
  averted, readers note some of the side effects of this year's 
  adjusted Daylight Saving Time. (3 messages)

<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/1180/>


**Mac OS X update weirdness?** Mac OS X 10.4.9 causes some sporadic 
  problems, which seem to be solved by using the combo updater on 
  Intel-based Macs. Also, a new delay in ejecting discs appears to be 
  a feature, not a problem. (11 messages)

<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/1181/>


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