by Peter H. Salus
<peter@pedant.com>

Peter H. Salus is a member of ACM, the Early English Text Society, the Trollope Society, and is a life member of the American Oriental Society. He has held no regular job in the past lustrum. He owns neither a dog nor a cat.

These last few months there have been several new publications that I considered really outstanding. It may be that books for the thoughtful are being published as an antidote to VMS for Dummies. I don't know the reason, but I'm thankful for it.

I was a speaker at a bar meeting in Phoenix last November. I had thought that the legal community would be interested in porn on the Net, etc. They weren't. They were interested in privacy and in jurisdiction. This last is a clear problem where we're dealing in a many-to-many universe, unlike publishing, radio, or TV, where there is an obvious single source.

Privacy

In the many-to-many world, firewalls can prevent intrusion, and encryption can hinder perusal. But the issue of personal privacy is a much more difficult one. We all know how much information (misinformation?) about every one of us is out there: banking, credit history, motor vehicle, birth-death-marriage-offspring-adoption, property, wills and deeds, etc. ­ all are among the data available. With a suitable computer, it's easy to suck up stuff and construct a rather elaborate sketch of an individual. Is this new db an invasion of privacy or not? In Europe, it apparently is.

Bruce Schneier and David Banisar have put together a splendid volume on the encryption/public key/Clipper chip debates. This is a very large (and heavy) collection of papers, statements, congressional bills and reports, and newspaper and magazine articles about "the battle for privacy in the age of surveillance." The documents range from Harry Truman's executive order of October 24, 1952, to the present: 45 years of governmental intrusion, rationalized first as national security and more recently as a fight against organized crime. (Our modern Elliot Nesses sit in front of keyboards reading messages like "The cash is in the hollow tree.")

There are flashes of humor here, too: Matt Blaze's tale of taking a SecurePhone to Europe is advertent; the FBI's Sensitive Electronic Surveillance Techniques document, four pages of backed-out lines, is inadvertent.

It will take many hours to read all of Schneier and Banisar. Do it. This is an important book. My compliments to the compilers.

Routing

For a long time, I've felt that routing was the neglected child of the Internet. Internet Routing Architectures may not be the end-all of publishing, but it is a very fine beginning. Published by Cisco, this is an excellent presentation of the design considerations of interdomain routing. There is a good deal of space devoted to BGP4 (the Border Gateway Protocol). I may actually have come away with a good understanding. Halabi's opus will be of value in teaching folks about data routing manipulation.

More Programming

The third edition of Knuth's Art, Vol. 2, Seminumerical Algorithms, has plopped itself on my desk. Because I have written earlier that I'm going to wait till all three volumes are out before I devote space to them, this announcement will have to serve for the nonce.

Java

Addison Wesley should get an award for binding the two volumes of The Java Class Libraries: over 1,700 pages each! Chan and Lee have served up a detailed, annotated, alphabetic reference with thousands of lines of code examples. This is useful, but at 1,712 pages, volume 2 is not "handy" ­ nor, at over 2,000 pages, is volume 1. Nonetheless, I consider these indispensable references.

Internet

If you can recall when the Net was free and there were only a few hundred or a few thousand hosts on it, Coordinating the Internet may upset you a great deal. Personally, I feel that the chaotic nature of the Internet and the benign anarchy that prevails on it are wonderful. But it has become clear over the past decade that we need coordination, if not governance. The handling of domain names is the least of this. In September 1996, there was a conference at the JFK School of Government at Harvard. This volume represents rewriting the papers delivered there. If public policy and the economics of the Internet interest you, I think you will have to read this. The political and economic future of the Net will depend on these views.

The Net for Managers

Over the years, I've reviewed several books by Jeroen Vanheste, because I consider it important to take note of what's published in languages other than English ­ or at least those I can read or puzzle my way through. This Internet Handbook for Network Administrators is a first-rate job. I hope that the publisher has it translated into English with alacrity. Every aspect of the Net that's of interest to a manager is covered here: DNS, BIND, TCP/IP, Web servers, etc., etc. The exposition is lucid: I especially enjoyed the descriptions of SLIP and PPP. The final chapters (on firewalls and secure communication) are excellent. The bibliography is extremely brief and should be expanded in the translation or next edition.

Software

When I received WebSite Professional V2.0, I wasn't quite sure what to do with it. I run UNIX and Linux and nothing from Microsoft. But I know websters who run NT. So I asked Steven Katz for his thoughts and sent him the CD-ROM and the docs. He wrote:

My general impression of WebSite is that it is for beginners or administrators of small to medium-sized sites. It has always been and is still easy to get started with. The documentation, support, and interface are very good. The default and unenhanced abilities and configuration of WebSite are probably more than adequate, possibly ideal for most.

I noticed that O'Reilly had dumped Cold Fusion and replaced it with iHTML. This is probably because O'Reilly Allaire isn't distributing Cold Fusion 1.0 anymore and O'Reilly had a significant hand in developing iHTML. If you've looked at WebSite Pro, you may be surprised at the many other changes. The most visible is an increase in speed. The biggest drawback is that WebSite Pro has no remote administration capability. But it is vastly superior to Microsoft's IIS if you're involved with commercial public access. If you are creating Web sites that are meant for general public use and you aren't looking to put massive amounts of security on the system, WebSite Pro is it. If you are looking for control and security and a limited number of people accessing the site, then IIS may be the one to use.

One problem is that IIS takes over completely separate server application permissions as well. When running O'Reilly's WebBoard as a separate service, IIS decided that it'll take over some of its permissions as well. It's quite a nightmare.

ZD Internet Magazine had an article comparing Web servers, and remarked:

One thing to note when viewing our performance data: WebSite Pro's performance suffers due to the fact that the product does not cache its pages. However, there's a trade-off: WebSite Pro developers have more control over the site.

Katz also noted:

No one has really hit the nntp server for NT market very hard yet. As I have no experience with news servers, this is the sort of thing I'd want to buy from O'Reilly and hope that it had as nice an interface as WebSite and is as easy to get started with.

I hate the notion of an alien program grabbing permissions; I like the notion of having control; I like having robust software. It's a clear win for WebSite Pro V2.0.

Books reviewed in this column:

Bruce Schneier & David Banisar
The Electronic Privacy Papers
New York: John Wiley, 1997. ISBN 0-471-12297-1. Pp. 747.

Bassam Halabi
Internet Routing Architectures
Indianapolis: Cisco Press/New Riders, 1997.
ISBN 1-56205-652-2. Pp. 477.

Donald E. Knuth
The Art of Computer Programming
Vol. 2: Seminumerical Algorithms
3rd. ed. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1998.
ISBN 0-201-89684-2. Pp. 762.

Patrick Chan & Rosanna Lee
The Java Class Libraries
2 vols., 2nd ed. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1998. ISBN 0-201-31002-3 & 0-201-31003-1. Pp. 2016 + 1712.

Brian Kahin & James H. Keller, eds.
Coordinating the Internet
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.
ISBN 0-262-61136-8. Pp. 491.

Jeroen Vanheste
Het Internet Handboek voor Netwerkbeheerders
[Internet Handbook for Network Administrators]
Amsterdam, NL: Addison Wesley Longman Nederland, 1997. ISBN 90-6789-919-4. Pp. 374.

S.B. Peck, et al.
WebSite Professional V2.0
Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates, 1997. CD-ROM and documentation [for Windows NT 4.0 and higher or Windows 95]. ISBN 1-56592-327-8; UPC 9-781565-923270.