Book details of 'The Internet White Pages/1994'

Title	The Internet White Pages/1994
Author(s)	James S. McBride, Seth Godin
ISBN	1568843003
Language	English
Published	March 1994
Publisher	Hungry Minds, Inc

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The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'The Internet White Pages/1994':

Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
Gopher is fun. Mosaic is gorgeous. ftp can get you the most amazing stuff. But the real, hardcore "you'll-take-away-my-net-link-when-you-pry-my-cold-dead- hands-from-the-keyboard" application is mail. Useful for grabbing texts; accessing search tools; ftp, gopher, WAIS and even World Wide Web mail servers. The interesting information, however, comes from people. And for that, you need to know someone's address. This book claims to list one hundred thousand names and Internet addresses. An impressive number. Note, however, that this represents either 2, or 0.2, percent of actual network accounts, depending upon whose figures you believe for the total population of the Internet. The book has four sections. An initial set of "pink pages" lists a number of Internet access providers. The bulk of the book lists the promised 100K addresses, first alphabetically by surname, and then alphabetically by domain name. The domain name list is of very limited usefulness. It is amusing to note, for example, that Vancouver's MindLink apparently has more impact on the net than does the much vaunted WELL, in San Francisco. (Or even Delphi, for that matter.) However, as the listing is strictly alphabetical, you must know not only the subdomain, but also the actual logical machine name, if you want to find anything or anyone. This is even more restrictive than finger. The final section is actually in the middle of the book, and lists only email addresses (no names) for "Russian" accounts. Most of the entries are "Postmaster" accounts, some of the domains aren't from Russia, and I strongly suspect the list was cut off short. The introduction states that ninety percent of the original material for the book consisted of obviously spurious entries and duplications. Spot checks indicate that about four percent of the included entries are duplications, and an equal number are still spurious. Testing for duplication is always problematic, but the merest sanity checking should have found a number of the false entries. Favourite domain names are "nosubdomain.nodomain" and "problem_with_inews_gateway_file". (Bill Gates is one of those at this site.) (Then, there is a Mr., or Ms., Fried Neurons, posting from what@are.you.smoking.) Testing against the MIT usenet-addresses mail server still puts MIT ahead, but not by much. In addition, MIT was not responding for the three days prior to this review. Flipping the book open is a lot faster even than whois. On the other hand, the strict name/email address listing gives you few clues when confronted with a number of possible options. Most Internet users will develop contacts through mailing lists or newsgroups in their fields of interest. Effective use of the finger, whois, knowbot, and usenet-addresses server requires a fair amount of practice. For business people checking contacts, Internet resource desks, and the casual user looking for genealogical contacts, this provides a fast, easy to use first check. The authors have made provision for an update mechanism: anyone wanting to be listed can send mail to add@whitepages.com for listings in the promised quarterly updates and future editions. Messages do not need a subject or body, the address information is extracted from the header. Those into privacy can send mail to delete@whitepages.com. (Question: what happens if you send mail to both?) As no current universal address list exists, sending your address to the update server is a positive step towards the growth in value of the volume. Don't flood it, now. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994
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