March 20, 2001
SJ Mercury: Microsoft asks .Net customers to trust it with personal data.
Dan Gillmor. Leaving aside the unreliability of the big computer systems the company now runs -- think of the outages and problems with Hotmail, MSN and even Microsoft.com -- the idea of trusting Microsoft with my most personal information is, well, nutty.
NY Times: Microsoft Confronts Privacy Fears.
Microsoft officials today tried to defuse privacy and security concerns about its new .Net Internet strategy by saying the new technology would let computer users control how much personal information they make available for commercial use.
Industry Standard: Legal Storm Brewing Over Microsoft's HailStorm.
Even before Microsoft announced its new online services plan — dubbed Hailstorm — on Monday, some of the company's leading competitors were quietly registering complaints about the effort with government antitrust regulators.
Wired News: Salon Sans Ads: It'll Cost You.
The company announced Tuesday that their readers will have a choice: Either they continue to read for free, dodging new, bigger CNET-style ads, or they pay $30 a year to read Salon's daily news and views, plus bonus content, in a blissfully ad-free environment.
Internet World: Use New Banners While You Can.
Jakob Nielsen. History will repeat itself: Users will discover that these new design elements tend to be useless relative to the user's current goals, and they will develop the ability to ignore them and a bias against clicking on them.
NY Times: Internet Filters Used to Shield Minors Censor Speech, Critics Say.
In the cases to be filed on Tuesday, groups contend that even the best filtering programs are still rough tools that tend to block legitimate sites and let objectionable sites slip through. That means sites with constitutionally protected material hit a digital dead end.
Computerworld: Customer support moves overseas.
But representatives who answer questions via e-mail about digital photography from Shutterfly customers aren't just a state away. They sit in a 65,000-square-foot facility in Bangalore, India, halfway around the world from the firm's headquarters in Redwood City, California.
USA Today: AOL deletes EarthLink e-mail, by mistake.
Hundreds of thousands of e-mails sent by EarthLink customers to America Online accounts were rejected and lost over a period spanning at least 10 days. An AOL spokesman said software designed to restrict junk e-mail, or spam, was to blame.
NY Times: For Medical Journals, a New World Online.
The Internet has already altered how many journals operate, forcing most of them to put articles online. In the coming years, this could fundamentally change the face of the industry, with some midlevel publications facing the threat of extinction if they fail to adapt.
|
