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Re: hack?



On Sat, 10 May 1997, Nir Soffer wrote:

> > > This might be a silly question - but were you using backweb at the time?
> > nope... what's backweb? (sheepish look) some HTTP mirror util?
> 
> Backweb is some new invention (http://www.backweb.com) by an Israeli 
> company (yay!), and if I understand it correctly, it allows you to create 
> 'Web Channels' so people could actually 'zap' and receive channels 
> (passively) instead of looking for web pages (actively). But then again, 
> I probably have it wrong. I wasn't even sure there's a Unix client. There 
> might be though. I've heard that it uses UDP ports 194 and 193 or 
> something like that by default, hence the question.

BackWeb is indeed an implementation of the "push" technology, but last
time I checked there was no client for Linux. Generally this thing closely
relates to Windows because the channels distribute among other things
Windows screensavers. If you really want to try "push", take a closer look
at Marimba. Their technology is by far cooler and more portable. The
channels in Marimba are actually Java applications, and that's why any
platform that has Java and has the port of the Castanet Tuner (which is
not a Java application by itself) can "listen" to those channels. You can
download Tuner for Linux at Marimba's site.

Anyway, regarding "push", John Dvorak wrote a very interesting article
about it in PCMagazine some time ago. He claims that this "new invention"
is just a new way for advertisers to push ads to your desktop, and that
there's no real breakthrough in what claims to be THE big revolution,
started by PointCast in 1995 (?). He sounds very reasonable, try to search
the archives at www.pcmag.com for it.

I'm getting off-topic...


> Well:
> psychodad:~/tmp/gimp-0.99.9/app> telnet becker1.u.washington.edu 6667
> Trying 140.142.12.67...
> telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: No route to host
> psychodad:~/tmp/gimp-0.99.9/app>

But that's because of HUJI's firewalls which block IRC activity to abroad.
As you saw yourself, though, they don't block all the ports that can be
used, so they're not really effective.



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    Alex Shnitman <alexsh@linux.org.il>  //  http://alexs.home.ml.org
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