Less than 48 hours after TWA Flight 800 exploded off Long Island, the FBI's toll-free telephone number was joined on the nation's TV screens by a more contemporary way to contact investigators: newyork@fbi.gov. In this day of mushrooming Web sites, an e-mail tip line may hardly surprise, but to the FBI, the Net is more than good PR. In the first week after the crash, about 100 messages a day poured into the New York field office's e-mailbox—some helpful, some just encouraging agents to hang in there.
E-mail tip lines, also created for the Unabomber and Oklahoma City bombing investigations, represent only half of the FBI's cyberspace face. Its Web site, the spare but information-dense http://www.fbi.gov (launched in June 1995), receives 3.6 million hits a month and made its mark this June when a 14-year-old boy surfing the Web from Guatemala pegged his neighbor as Leslie Isben Rogge of the site's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. "We're now in the computer age," says FBI spokesman Bill Carter. "It's another means for getting the information out."
WHOLE LOTTA QUAKIN' GOIN' ON
A bad game with a great story is still a bad game," declares id Software co-owner Jay Wilbur. "A great game with no story is a great game."
That's the philosophy behind the tiny Mesquite, Texas, game-maker, whose 1993 run-'n'-gun juggernaut Doom introduced 15 million players to a new kind of motion sickness. Now, with the long-anticipated Quake, id takes its trademark ultraviolence into true 3-D and adds options for multiplayer "deathmatches" over the Net. Summarizes id designer Tim Willits: "Quake is Doom on steroids."
Twitchy-fingered fans have already downloaded preview "shareware" levels free from the Net (the full version will cost $45) and are getting busy axmurdering, grenading and Nine Inch Nail-gunning its mix of medieval monsters and futuristic baddies. No story, you say? "What," Willits asks, "was the story behind Pac-Man?"
>PERSONALITY-PLUS
SOME MIGHT CLASSIFY DO-IT-YOURSELF psychology tests as little more than Ph.D.-certified Cosmo quizzes, but Keith Harary has set out to change all that. "I always hated personality tests," says the research psychologist who developed the Berkeley Personality Profile used in the CD-ROM Who Do You Think You Are? (HarperCollins Interactive, $39.95), not to mention his 1994 book of the same title. "I can't stand anything that typecasts people just by asking them a few questions."
Instead, Harary came up with a battery of questions that lets users separately evaluate their relationships with friends, significant others, even coworkers—as well as solicit their opinions of the users. But talk about typecasting: Not only does the disc challenge users to guess the personality types of real people, based on 30-second video interviews with them, its big payoff is a feature that matches users' own personalities with those of 50 celebrities.
Sounds like good, albeit fluffy, fun, right? Actually, it's downright disturbing. The oddball list is booby-trapped with famous folk not exactly noted for congeniality (Richard Nixon, Margaret Thatcher), levelheadedness (Salvador Dali) or long, happy lives (Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jack Kerouac). It's enough to send the most unflappable user scurrying to the nearest online shrink.
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