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Bonker asks: "Hurricane Isabel has been categorized as a Class 4 hurricane by the the National Hurricane Center. It's expected to grind somewhere into the U.S. East Coast sometime this evening. The Carolinas, Virginias, and even Maryland are in states of high tension. If you live in an area threatened by Isabel, what are you doing to protect your own or your company's data and computer hardware from Isabel?"

Slashback this evening brings updates on social networks, Audioscrobbler, the Social Security-number security breach at the University of Texas at Austin, and more. Read on for the details.

Why meet people in real life? Roland Piquepaille writes "I wrote [Saturday] a column about social-network mapping tools mentioned by Slashdot. Slashdot readers sent me many comments and e-mails about other visualization tools. Here are these new tools, in no particular order: email constellations, Apache Agora, NetVis Module, EtherApe, inGridX, NameBase's Proximity Search, Surf3D Pro and the dazzling KartOO. Finally, a reader talked about another kind of tools, the Visual Thesaurus. This web tool is not about social mapping, but it shows graphical connections between words. In this previous column, "The Visual Thesaurus: What Does it Show About Thanksgiving?," I already explored this very funny tool. Check this new story for more the details about all these tools."

Update: 03/19 00:34 GMT by T : Directly related: Josh Tyler writes "Related to a recent Slashdot posting on social networks is this paper on automatically discovering communities based on email data, just published by our group at HP Labs. We find that simple communication data is enough to identify communities, both formal and informal, and possibly even to identify the leaders of these groups."

Speaking of online community ... TGK writes "Audioscrobbler (which many of us visited the first time it was posted here) has a new site up, and most importantly, new plugins for XMMS and Winamp 3."

From the site, a capsule description of what Audioscrobbler does: "It grows to know what music you like by monitoring what songs you play on your computer. From this information you can discover other users that share some or all of your taste in music."

Feedback is always cool. An anonymous reader writes: "Sudhakar Govindavajhala, co-author of the paper referenced by the Saturday Slashdot article 'Using Memory Errors to Attack a Virtual Machine,' has responded to many of your [Slashdot readers'] questions and comments. His commentary is located at his Princeton CS website."

Another reason that Social Security isn't. GregAllen writes "Remember the recent case of SSN data theft at The University of Texas? A student has turned himself in. In his confession he says that he acted alone, and had no intention to disseminate the information. Maybe this will convince them to stop using SSNs for student IDs." Bonker also points out that "Salon is carrying an AP article that's a followup to the story a few days ago about the mass of Social Security Numbers stolen from University of Texas. Christopher Andrew Phillips is described as a 'fine young man who has never before been in trouble with the law'. Apparently he wrote a program 'to access a university Web site that tracks employees who attend training classes'. Whether or not this was done for illegitimate purposes remains to be seen. As a former UTA student, I'm glad my SSN is no longer in danger!"

What's the state of the device? An anonymous reader writes "N-Philes.com did another State of the GBA Industry Article and Roundtable. Here is the Industry Article, and here is the Roundtable"

Update: 03/19 00:34 GMT by T : And one more presroi writes "Just one week after even slashdot has noticed the new 2.2.24 linux kernel, Alan Cox has announced a new version due to a security issue found in 2.2 as well as in the 2.4 branch. I hope that we all were to lazy to upgrade from 2.2.X to .24 until now :)"

Bonker writes "According to this USAToday article two companies, AirCell, and Verizon, are developing technology to let airline passengers safely use cellphones while in flight. The system would block frequencies normally used by cellphones and force cell customers to 'roam' on the new network. Saftey concerns aside, I thought that a plane cabin was the one place I would never have to deal with people who won't quit talking on the phone."

Bonker writes: "When I first picked up 'ChronoSpace', parts of which were published earlier in 'Asimov's Science Fiction', it initially looked like an interesting time-travel thriller-- something we've seen many of, but not a story that gets old due to its variations. Indeed, the story starts out revolving around the central premise that the small percentage of UFO's sighted that can't be explained away as airplanes, comets, or blimps, are in actuality time-travelling ships from the future sent to investigate the past." Read on for Bonker's thoughts on how the book progresses from there. ChronoSpace author Allen Steele pages 320 publisher Ace Books rating 1/10 Boo! Hiss! reviewer Bonker ISBN 0441008321 summary A promising time-travel concept with a flawed and disappointing execution.

It's an intriguing concept and one that the author explores with relish. Indeed, one of the two main characters in the story spends a great deal of his time exploring the social climate of pre-World War II Germany during Hitler's rise to power. After the initial concept is explained, however, the story starts to break down.

The author seems infinitely more interested in name-dropping other, more successful sci-fi authors and scientists. Steele has done his research on obscure historical persona, but he can't seem to fix the holes in his own story.

A good example in terms of broken plot is the fictional scientific principle the author uses to drive his time-travel ships. It's called the 'Morris-Thorne' principle in the story, obviously named after the scientists who discovered it. Since this *is* a time-travel story, when a character named Morris is introduced, the observant reader would think that the author is stitching his story together, trying to subtly explain things to the reader. The observant reader would be wrong, because this angle is never touched again. In fact, the author rather absent-mindedly contradicts the possibility later in the story.

Another good example is the date scheme that Steele uses to identify his chapters. After the inevitable 'uhoh, we caused a paradox' event in the middle of the story, one of the dates listed mysteriously jumps from Monday, January 14th, 1998 to Thursday, January 15th, 1998. (The latter is correct. Monday was the 12th in 1998.) In any other kind of story, this kind of discrepancy could be easily dismissed as an editorial oversight. In a time-travel story, it's *supposed* to be a dead giveaway, just like the next date problem, when it jumps from a correct day in 1998 to an incorrect day in 1997. It's not any kind of giveaway. It's an editing mistake, and a painful one at that.

What's really amusing about this is that, earlier in the story, one of the characters makes the case for having to know the exact time and date in order to time-travel correctly. Apparently having the wrong date doesn't make much of a difference to their calculations when they use it to time-travel because it's never mentioned again. Neither are the other limitations on time-travel the author introduces, such as the inability of time-travellers to breach the first millennium or earlier.

The book is ridden with inconsistencies like this. I'm not sure if it's laziness or incompetence on the part of the author or if Mr. Steele was stuck with a rhesus monkey for an editor, but in a story where incidental details matter so much, these otherwise trivial errors are hard to forgive.

The climax of the book is a first-degree act of Deus Ex Machina, perpetrated by judgmental aliens who are super-intelligent and somehow immune to paradox. It's hard to swallow by the time you've already waded through the rest of the story's problems. The cautionary ending is bitter and disappointing. Steele successfully deviates from formula in this respect, but only at the cost of making his painfully static, flat characters seem even more depressive and uninteresting.

I have to conclude that 'ChronoSpace' is simply not worth the time it takes to read, even for the most adamant of sci-fi or time-travel fans. Even if you completely dismiss the amount of smugness the author shows dropping modern and historical names, the story is rife with inconsistencies, errors, and writing blunders. The characters are flat and uninteresting. Any chance they have to grow is brutally crushed by this steam-roller of a plot that Steele's trying to push. The one thing that could redeem a story like this was if it were inspiring or offered some new insight on the philosophy of time travel. Instead, Steele tries to be cautionary. It's hard to convincingly cautionary when the moral of your story is, "Don't mess with time travel, or easily angered super-aliens will destroy your planet's civilization." In fact, if Steele has anything to say about inspiration in ChronoSpace, it's that inspiration is dangerous. Even carefully controlled forward advancement is harmful and should be avoided. I'm not sure if that's what he was trying to accomplish, but it's a major theme in the book nonetheless.

The hell of all this is that even up against the super-cautionary tone of the book, Steele could have easily done a better job with his story, even if it was just a quick read-through of his own work to correct some of the screaming errors he's made. He didn't, and it shows.

Don't waste your time with 'ChronoSpace'.

You can purchase ChronoSpace from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Bonker writes: "This article at Salon indicates that Yahoo, as part of a larger pledge to 'purge the Web of content that China's communist government deems subversive', has agreed to censor 'pernicious information that may jeopardize state security and disrupt social stability' from its Chinese portal. Yahoo is one of about 300 other ISPs and websites who have signed the 'Public Pledge on Self-discipline for China Internet Industry'."

Bonker writes "Neat news from the Beeb. It turns out that data collected from observation of quasars indicates that the fine structure constant of the universe, aka 'Alpha', may have changed since the universe began. It may have been very slightly smaller than it is right now. The article hints that other constants we're familiar with, such as high, holy 'c', may also vary over time. Of course values can't have changed dramatically, because that would mean that low-weight atoms such as carbon would be unstable, and without carbon, there wouldn't be anyone around to measure the fine structure constant anyway." We ran a story about this last year. It looks like the team has continued to check their work for errors and hasn't found any yet.

Bonker writes "Anime News Network is featuring an interview with Jason Demarco, senior writer and producer for Cartoon Network's 'Toonami' block. Mr. Demarco explains why and how the editing process for several anime shown on Toonami, Midnight Run, and Adult Swim happen, as well as the pressure they're under to produce a product acceptable not only to fans but to parents as well. " Gives an interesting perspective on what CN goes through to get certain anime on US TV. I've said it before, but I'd still love a Toonami channel that didn't need to edit (or maybe just less). I watch more Toonami then any channel.

Bonker writes: "Anime News Network Says: The Tenchi Muyo! Galaxy Police TV/OVA series (also known as Tenchi Muyo! GXP) as well as the first episode of the third Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki OVA series are scheduled to be released in Spring, 2002 in Japan." Both very exciting bits of news for anyone who happens to be a fan of Tenchi and the gals. I'm especially excited to see another OVA since those are far superior to the television shows.

Bonker writes: "This article at Salon indicates that scientists in Norway are setting up an experiment to inject massive amounts of C02 into the deep ocean near the Artic circle. They hope that they can prove that C02 can be stored in the ocean rather than in the atmosphere where it contributes to global warming, but the question remains -- can fishies swim in club soda?"

Bonker writes: "Fox News is printing an expose on 'Web Bugs' used in concerto with HTML-mail spam. Along with outlining the dangers and the methods that Web bugs use to gather information, CERT's Jeff Havrilla is quoted as saying that these are pretty much ripe for illegally malicious activities, such as virus propagation. Harvilla says that Web Bugs would allow malicious virus creators to 'target' systems. Scary, wot?" *sigh* I can't even begin to describe how much the story irritates me - yes, there's truth to it. But it's more then just simple Web bugs - it's any sort of URL, given that you could create a unique URL for each spam. Take out the scare portion of the article, and just use the bottom line - don't click on spam URLs.