August 1, 2000
Darwin: Scaredy Pants. At what point does careful consideration verge on utter paralysis? How many times can someone steal your lunch money before you starve to death? I'm thinking about those questions because I've been researching the Internet initiatives of Levi Strauss.

• Business 2.0: From January 1, 2000; 501 Blues

USA Today: E-tailers violate own privacy policies. A security and privacy firm that does risk assessments for Internet retailers says that four such sites have forwarded personally identifiable information to the marketing company, Coremetrics, despite the retailers' privacy policies.

Darwin: Get Real. David Weinberger. Combine fear and aggression and you end up with companies literally afraid to speak like human beings. It's easier, after all, to plan an attack than to communicate on the fly and—gasp!—listen.

Computerworld: Pollster sues over placement on spam list. Harris Interactive Inc. has filed suit in U.S. District Court in Rochester, N.Y., against more than a dozen Internet companies and an antispam organization for improperly identifying the market-research firm as a spammer and blocking its e-mail to users.

• O'Reilly Network: From June 9, 2000; Shining Light Into the Realtime Blackhole List. David Strom.

MSNBC: Humbled, the megastar backers of Pop.com rethink Web site. Chief among the factors slowing Pop.com down has been the founders’ collective realization that their original plan — to Webcast animated and live-action entertainment shorts, or “pops,” created by top Hollywood talent — would not be nearly enough to create a viable online business.

LA Times: Hollywood's Pop.com Showing Very Little Fizz. Nine months after five of Hollywood's most powerful players combined to create an online entertainment site, Pop.com is foundering so badly that certain partners are seeking a graceful way out before it has aired a single show, according to sources familiar with the venture.

• Forbes: From November 11, 1999; Spielberg, Howard "Pop" onto the web

Industry Standard: Digital Publishing: An Open E-Book. But behind the stories of big-name authors and slick new e-book gadgets, there's competition between multibillion-dollar companies vying to control the way online books will be formatted, distributed and displayed.

Wired News: Let the Games Be Streamed. An International Olympic Committee spokesman confirmed this week that webcasting sports action from Sydney will be prohibited because the normal national boundaries that cover broadcast rights do not apply in cyberspace.

• Salon: From February 28, 2000; Do they know where you live?

LA Times: Is a Stitch Online a Crime? Legal experts are just starting to wrestle with the implications of new technologies that will permit the instant distribution of information. Business people are trembling at the prospect that file-swapping won't stop at music, videos and needlepoint.

August 2, 2000
Red Herring: Hype on demand. Blockbuster's announcement added more fuel to the raging hype machine surrounding VOD. Since Time Warner's Full Service Network experiment in 1993, the VOD business has been marked by a procession of pronouncements, all pipe dreams that have been flowing for close to a decade now.

SJ Mercury: Net coverage takes conventional approach. Dan Gillmor. For spoon-fed PR we need a zillion Web sites? Maybe the big television networks, whose abandonment of convention coverage has been said to have spurred many of the Web efforts, were right to all but ditch the conventions in the first place.

Boston Globe: Pseudo mixes chat with gonzo and wacko. Kuntzman adds that the pseudo package poses no threat to reporting. ''We will never affect serious journalism,'' he said. ''We're the window dressing around it. Fortunately for us, there is so little real reporting going on here that the question for us is, did we book good guests?''

Boston Globe: Fortunetelling. Companies that sell technical research to other companies spending billions of dollars buying equipment and even turning business models on their heads are reporting dramatic surges in revenues and profits this year.

• Salon: From September 2, 1999; Jupiter shoots for the moon

Computerworld: ICANN closes at-large member sign-up. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers closed as scheduled the registration period for its at-large membership yesterday, despite calls for the registration period to be extended because of problems with access to the registration Web site.

ZDNN: Will wireless vanish into thin air? With an explosion in wireless communications under way, U.S. firms and government regulators are growing increasingly concerned that there won't be enough airwaves to satisfy the huge demand.

The Economist: Battle of the airwaves. The problem is that it has run out of room to grow: many of the frequencies most appropriate for new voice and data services are already being used by anybody from military-communications to security-alarm firms, a legacy of America’s over-generous spectrum allocation in the past.

News.Com: Amazon glitch spurs shopping spree. Beginning Friday night and continuing through Saturday, many customers found and ordered items that were marked down 50 percent or more off Amazon's regular prices. Some customers posted the discounts on message boards such as those on MyCoupons.com, which led to more orders.

• ZDNN: From December 14, 1999; E-tailers learn a lesson -- the hard way

Forbes: Octopus.com Hooks Media Partners. Octopus.com wants to get its arms around Hollywood. On Tuesday the content aggregator got, well, a hand from Lynx Technology Group, the investment firm headed up by über-agent Michael Ovitz.

August 3, 2000
MSNBC: MAPS can be a roadblock to e-mail access, ‘spam’ or not. Should one organization hold the power to determine whether millions of Internet messages get through to their destinations? Such power seems to exist in Mail Abuse Prevention Systems LLC, known as MAPS, a not-for-profit organization based in Redwood City, Calif.

• Industry Standard: From December 31, 1998; The Spam Wars. Lawrence Lessig.

Internet World: Stupid Wireless Tricks. Rather, it's the brain-dead-on-arrival uses pitched by WAP-hyping marketers that's got what little hair I have in knots. The basic scenario - which I've run across in so many wireless Web pitches that I can no longer pin down a source - is one that only an idiot would find compelling.

Internet Week: Agents Critique Delta's Site. When Delta Air Lines redesigned its Web site earlier this year, it decided that it needed a better critique of its site than it was getting from focus groups. So the airline turned to developer WebCriteria to scour the site with its agent-based software to find out where improvements could be made.

• Useit.Com: From December 12, 1999; Voodoo Usability

InfoWorld: AOL out of instant messaging standard bake-off. The three proposals -- developed by Cisco, Microsoft, Fujitsu, and others -- were selected from a field of 10 proposals. AOL's last-minute submission was a general framework for instant messaging interoperability rather than a full-fledged protocol, so it was not chosen for further consideration.

News.Com: FCC gives cautious thumbs-up to broadband market. That conclusion bolsters Kennard's pursuit of a largely hands-off Net regulatory policy during the past few years, for which he has drawn considerable heat from consumer groups and some Internet service providers that believe the cable and telephone giants have acted unfairly.

Red Herring: Maybe TVs should just stay dumb. Wouldn't it be funny if the television industry threw a party and nobody tuned in? Wouldn't it be sad if the fanciful dream of interactive television proved, despite all of its technical capabilities, to be a commercial dud?

Internet World: Deconstructing Staples.com. Joseph Squier and John Shiple. Don't throw away that Staples catalog just yet. For functionality and ease of use, the print version wins, hands down. Not that Staples.com is a particularly bad online catalog, but there's nothing about it that's more useful or convenient than the paper version.

• Computerworld: From June 12, 2000; Sharper Staples

Wired News: CNN Slices Jerusalem from Israel. But on Thursday, CNN "restored" Jerusalem's status as a city in Israel after the American Jewish Congress complained that the news organization was making a political statement by failing to list the city as part of the country on its online weather map...

Map of the Month: TeleGeography's Traffic Flow Maps. Staple is happy that after ten years of work and development, telecommunications flow maps are at last beginning to be included in mainstream atlases, although, they only provide a partial view of the totality of information flows using the multitude of media available today.

August 4, 2000
Wired News: Registrar Sues for Whois Spam. In a dispute that could test the legal limits for how of personal information stored on publicly available websites is used, a domain name registrar has filed suit against a firm it claims illegally used its customer contact information in an aggressive marketing campaign...

NY Times: Privacy Plan Likely to Kick Off Debate. The Clinton administration appears to believe that applying the Cable Act to cable-based e-mails would deal a death blow to the ability of agents to secretly monitor communications over cable platforms, thus hampering law enforcement.

Business Week: The Web's Still-Unfulfilled Personalization Promise. Bezos usually likes to show he's "one of the guys" by using himself as an example to illustrate everyday consumer behavior. In this instance, the topic was personalization -- "the key to the future of the E-commerce revolution," according to Bezos -- and one of his favorite subjects.

Online Journalism Review: Hack, Flack or Journalist? But are these Internet companies staffed with journalists? And what qualifies someone as a journalist anyway? Do the Web firms covering the GOP see this as a real news story, or just a great chance to hype their URL?

Industry Standard: Deconstructing the Web. If you focus your efforts entirely on today's Web-based architecture, you'll cut yourself off from an explosion of new devices, interfaces and software technologies that are proliferating at an accelerating pace.

• Useit.Com: From May 31, 1998; Micro-Containers: An Example of Strategic Web Thinking

The Register: WAP Forum CEO responds to Reg. Scott Goldman, CEO of WAP Forum. It's always easier if one company sets the policy for the rest of the world than it is for a democratic process to occur. In the final analysis, however, a democratic, consensus-driven process will benefit consumers, carriers and content developers...

Inside: All I Really Need to Know About Print-Web Convergence I Learned in the Supermarket. At least, that's the theory. There are a whole bunch of obstacles to overcome before this nirvana of technological convergence is attained. The technology even sounds gimmicky, the digital equivalent of 3-D glasses for magazine and newspaper audiences.

News.Com: Will consumers warm up to CATs? The company calls such linking of the offline and online worlds the next operating system because it gives people instant access to the Internet without forcing them to remember Web addresses or sift through lists of search results.

Computerworld: Amazon restructures investment deals with other online retailers. In a sign of the times for e-commerce ventures that are struggling to become profitable, Amazon.com Inc. this week disclosed that financial agreements with some other online retailers in which it has invested are being restructured after the companies asked for changes...

• News.Com: From April 16, 1999; Why portal deals are falling flat

ZDNN: Netscape to kill SmartDownload feature. The feature at issue is on Netscape's SmartDownload product, which is used to download files. A class action lawsuit filed by a New Jersey photographer in July alleged the feature could be used for the surveillance of file transfers between Web sites and Internet users.

August 5, 2000
Business 2.0: Five Questions With John Patrick. And in many ways the Internet is all about a really massive transfer of power from institutions to people, and I'm not talking about anarchy or about people marching in the streets. I'm talking about the power of a click, whether it's a mouse on a PC or button on a cell phone.

Business 2.0: Five Questions With Mike Mulligan, CEO of MapQuest. And while they've got a brand that people know, it's a brand that's not relevant online. It's like Brillo. Everybody recognizes the brand Brillo, but it doesn't do you any good online. And everybody recognizes the brand Rand McNally, but it doesn't do them any good online.

• Industry Standard: From June 5, 2000; A Rough Road Trip to the Net

Business 2.0: The Perfect PR App. The other day, I received a routine press release. It wasn't time sensitive. It wasn't interesting. There was absolutely no way I or anyone else here would've written about the contents of the release. Yet, it came in a FedEx envelope sent via the highest, and most expensive, priority.

Computerworld: States formally object to proposed settlement between Toysmart and the FTC. The objection was submitted by Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly, who said in the filing that the effort to sell the customer data "is a breach of Toysmart's promise and constitutes deception pursuant to the Consumer Protection Act of Massachusetts"...

August 6, 2000
Useit.Com: Why Doc Searls Doesn't Sell Anything. Reputation managers will make users feel as safe doing business with a small, unknown company as with the largest corporation. In fact, since small companies usually offer better customer service, they will benefit the most from the shift from branding to reputation.

SJ Mercury: Issues aside, how Napster works is what really matters. Dan Gillmor. What matters more about Napster is its architecture, the way it works. Although Napster's implications certainly include troubling questions about the future of intellectual property, the software is doing something even more profound.

NY Times: Online Davids vs. Corporate Goliaths. Depending on who you believe, these are either tales of David vs. Goliath or of irresponsible hackers taking aim at the establishment. But no matter which side you're on, both cases have underscored the unprecedented ability of individuals armed with digital technology to upset the status quo.

August 7, 2000
Salon: But isn't it against the law? Scott Rosenberg. These questions share some unspoken assumptions that are worth noting -- like a belief that the law is always unambiguous and unchangeable, and a notion that the interests of "artists" (creators) and record companies (distributors) are identically aligned.

Industry Standard: The Piano-Scroll Precedent. Technology, then and now, takes unexpected twists and turns, and copyright law struggles to keep up. Today, as the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ponders the RIAA's complaint against Napster, people trying to cope with the fast-changing Internet might draw some lessons from history.

• The Atlantic Monthly: From September 10, 1998; Roundtable: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Copyright?

Industry Standard: Not Wedded to WAP. Nevertheless, Rossmann – who last year predicted WAP would become as ubiquitous as DOS, the original language of personal computers – now says the fate of his company is not bound to the fortunes of WAP. Phone.com, he says, will adapt to whatever standard emerges.

ZDNN: ICANN election a little too popular. More than 158,000 Internet users have registered to vote in an ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) online election that will choose the five people to serve as ICANN at-large board members.

Marketing Computers: Gender Gap. Women.com last June filled a conference room at the W Hotel in San Francisco with about 200 marketing and advertising executives at 8:30 a.m. to hear what the San Mateo-based firm promised to unearth: How to turn online women shoppers into buyers.

• Web Informant: From July 6, 2000; eCommerce for her, another dumb idea

NY Times: E-Mail Is Sparking Interest in Inventing Accessory Products. Electronic mail has become ubiquitous, so it comes as no surprise that independent inventors as well as advertisers and consumer electronics and telecommunications companies are working on new ways to exploit this form of communication.

LA Times: Saving Bits and Bytes for History. Over just the last 50 years, some of the most famous pieces of computing history--devices as revolutionary in their time as Gutenberg's printing press or James Watt's steam engine--have been heaped into landfills across the world.

August 8, 2000
Inside: Nasdaq Shakeout May Force Subscription Models on the Web. Jason Chervokas and Tom Watson. Neither hard-line position in the ongoing content war will win out; information does not ''want to be free'' if it's created by talented professionals, but iron-clad copyright laws are also poor protection in the Internet age.

Fast Company: Why the Long Wait? That's a question that David P. Reed has been asking for some time. Now he's championing some provocative answers and hoping that some influential companies will adopt them. Reed, 48, a self-proclaimed "digitalist" and the former chief scientist at Lotus, is on something of a crusade to change how telecom companies and ISPs think about "latency"...

• Useit.Com: From March 1, 1997; The Need for Speed

Upside: Olympics snippets to be streamed in U.S. The Octane network, in a nutshell, consists of Axient's partnership with more than 100 Internet service providers across the country. These ISPs have agreed to verify that all their customers are within the United States, where NBC holds exclusive broadcast rights...

USA Today: Content: The Net's once and future king? Content sites, the Internet sites that provide news and information as their main business, have been in the dot-com doghouse since April, when the market for online stocks plunged. But ask whether content is dead, and you'll likely get a forceful response from Merrill Brown.

Radio Free Europe: The Internet And Common Law. At a minimum, the new technology the Internet represents will force national governments to modify their positive law on copyright and other issues as these regimes seek to enforce the principles contained in longstanding legislation.

Dan Bricklin: The Cornucopia of the Commons: How to get volunteer labor. What we see here is that increasing the value of the database by adding more information is a natural by-product of using the tool for your own benefit. No altruistic sharing motives need be present, especially since sharing is the default.

Industry Standard: It's Not Dead Yet. Kevin Werbach. Rather than delaying a resolution of the major issues surrounding online music distribution, the Napster injunction has accelerated it. The injunction raised the stakes and also brought Napster tremendous mainstream publicity.

USA Today: Polling firm drops AOL from spam suit. The publisher of the Harris poll said Tuesday that AOL had restored e-mail links to Harris panelists by switching to another Internet service provider not affiliated with Mail Abuse Prevention System.

News.Com: Amazon customers turn to FTC after pricing glitch. The glitch, which happened late last month, gave buyers deep discounts on dozens of items in Amazon's toy store. Amazon has since contacted customers who ordered the discounted goods, asking them to pay the regular price for the items or cancel their orders.

News.Com: Staples.com nailed again by its own Net coupons. In the latest gaffe, the codes for several discount coupons, intended for a select group of Staples.com shoppers, were posted on a Web message board Friday afternoon and circulated to a host of online shoppers, the company confirmed today.

• News.Com: From October 13, 1999; Staples' Web promotion a victim of its own success

August 9, 2000
SJ Mercury: Putting Napster's technology to other uses. Dan Gillmor. Copyright protection as we know it is going to change in huge ways, whether we like it or not. Napster is a killer application in more ways than one. The bigger question is how we will adapt to the new world. What intrigues me is what's possible.

Computerworld: Pollster loses restraining-order request in spamming case. Mail Abuse Prevention System LLC, which maintains a list of spammers that's distributed to Internet and e-mail service providers such as America Online Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s Hotmail, called the decision by Judge David G. Larimer "an important first-round victory for us" in the case.

SF Chronicle: S.F.'s NBC Internet Slashing Staff by 170. In the past, NBC Internet has suffered an identity crisis with its disparate Web sites, including Xoom.com, a Web page building service, and Snap.com, an Internet portal. The company is trying to address the confusion by combining those sites under the portal NBCi.com. this fall.

• Salon: From May 4, 1999; Pathfinder, we hardly knew ye. Scott Rosenberg.

Industry Standard: Judging an E-Book by Its Typeface. And it appears as if the Clear Type software might affect a lot more than the nascent field of e-books. The software will be available as soon as next year for all Microsoft applications, improving the experience of reading e-mail and looking at pages on the Web...

USA Today: Chinese govt. seeks control of Web. Highlighting the government's determination to weed out opposition on the Web, police are hunting for organizers of a dissident Web site that state security officials closed down last week, the company that hosted the site confirmed Tuesday.

• FEED Magazine: From August 11, 1999; Why China's Internet Problem Is A Lot Like South Carolina's. Clay Shirky.

Computerworld: UCITA group backs off provision in software licensing law -- somewhat. The group that drafted the UCITA has backed off slightly from one of the more controversial measures in the proposed software-licensing law -- a so-called self-help provision that allows vendors to remotely disable the software they sell to users.

The Chronicle of Higher Education: New Software-Licensing Legislation Said to Imperil Academic Freedom. Among the groups most vocal in their opposition to UCITA are the American Library Association and the Association of Research Libraries. The groups argue that the law is an assault on federal copyright provisions that allow for fair use, first sale, and preservation of information.

Washington Post: Chasing Hollywood 'Pirates'. The court battles represent the first big test of a new law that gives broad privileges to copyright holders, allowing them not only to protect their works but also to control the digital technology that would allow them to be copied.

USA Today: NFL's Web site links teams. The Bengals have gotten the attention of other NFL teams by finding a creative, and somewhat controversial, alternative to the sanitized written content commonly found on team-produced sites...

August 10, 2000
FEED Magazine: RE: Ian Clarke. What you must do is take a step back, and say, "How can we adapt to this new technology?" Because, you know, even if the RIAA succeeded in stifling a particular technology in America, they're going to have a very hard time stifling it in the rest of the world.

NY Times: Choosing Quick Hits Over the Card Catalog. One problem with this strategy is that many students are not well versed in advanced searching techniques so a simple search for, say, information about the planet Saturn can yield tens of thousands of hits. Yet students persevere with this hit-or-miss approach...

• Useit.Com: From July 15, 1997; Search and You May Find

NY Times: Printed Page Beats PC Screen For Reading, Study Finds. The articles had the same formats in print as they did on the computer screen, but the students who read the paper versions found the articles more interesting and persuasive than the students who read the articles on computers.

• Ohio State College of Education: Persuasion online or on paper: A new take on an old issue. Word Document.

Wired News: Rule Reversal: Blame It on RIAA. Last year the music labels successfully lobbied to insert in unrelated legislation a clause that prevents copyrights from reverting to their authors. Now, they've agreed with artists to recommend rescinding the change to copyright law.

Computerworld: Bankers group tries to increase use of Web site seal. But according to analyst George Barto, an online banking expert at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Group Inc., spoofers who want to mimic a banking Web site to con consumers could just as easily mimic the SiteCertain button.

EE Times: Designers consider the disappearing computer. Computer design's next big trick, researchers say, will make today's keyboards and monitors disappear into a world of ubiquitous computing, in which everyday objects like walls, tables and chairs have embedded intelligence.

Business Week: 3-D That Could Transform the Web. "Geometry is poised to become the fourth wave of digital-multimedia communication," says Wim Sweldens of Bell Labs' Mathematical Sciences Research Center. "The first three waves were sound in the 1970s, images in the '80s, and video in the '90s."

Red Herring: Lab Rat: Graphics guru goes retro. With an innate sensitivity, Mr. Salesin has become a pioneer in the area of non-photorealistic rendering, a pointy-headed phrase that refers to creating images that are reminiscent of those created by hand.

News.Com: Amazon-Toysrus.com deal signals strategy shift. Today's agreement represents a fundamental shift in Amazon's strategy, with the e-tailing giant handing off much of the inventory risk to Toysrus.com while continuing to focus on its strength in drawing customers.

USA Today: News firms sue Net company. The New York Times, The Washington Post and other news companies are suing an Internet company that takes news articles from their Web sites and transmits them to wireless telephone users.

• Salon: From November 10, 1999; "Fair use" vs. foul play

August 11, 2000
NY Times: French Nazi Memorabilia Case Presents Jurisdiction Dilemma. In this case, which began in May, the question is posed in even starker terms. Should Yahoo Inc. bow to a French law condemning the trivialization of the Nazi era, or should France yield to Yahoo's rights of freedom of expression as embodied in the United States Constitution?

USA Today: Court seeks help in Yahoo!-Nazi case. A French court asked that Yahoo! Inc. and anti-racist groups help appoint an expert panel to determine whether the company can block French Web users from accessing its U.S. auction sites where Nazi objects are sold.

Upside: Corporate coders confined. What those numbers mean in real terms is that programmers can easily walk away from jobs where they don't have freedom to innovate, along the lines of Nullsoft. And anecdotal evidence suggests that caps on innovation are common.

Business 2.0: AOL's Acquisition Nightmare. Chalk it up to the perils of acquisition: You aren't merely acquiring a company, but also people with thoughts, feelings, and an unyielding sense of identity. Did AOL know what it was getting into when it acquired a company of street-cred-heavy geeks?

Good Experience: Invest in the Customer Experience, Not a New Name. The customer experience is the single most important aspect of a company's strategy. If the customer experience isn't good, don't bother shining up the marketing. Customers will figure out the truth soon enough anyway.

• Internet World: From May 10, 1999; What Do You Name a Net Firm? Hurry, the Choices Are Dwindling

Computerworld: Visa issues 10 'commandments' for online merchants. In an attempt to reduce online credit-card fraud, Visa U.S.A. in San Francisco announced 10 "commandments" for online merchants to guard its cardholders' information. And, next week, Visa will follow up by releasing the details of a broad online security program.

Industry Standard: Geographic Domains on Shaky Ground. The World Intellectual Property Organization, or WIPO, in Geneva, Switzerland, ruled Wednesday that the City Council had "better rights" to the name than the company, but the decision creates uncertainty for thousands of geographic domain-name owners.

Inside: Classy FT.com and Newsweek Vets Go All Webby With New International News and Business Site. While eCountries considers itself a media company, the business plan calls for generating as little breaking news in-house as possible. It's happy to rip that coverage right off the Reuters and AP wires, and focus its attention on analysis pieces and the marketplace section...

August 12, 2000
InfoWorld: Whackaflack.com: A case of permission marketing that gets just plain sneaky. For the nonbuzzword-compliant: e-tractions' online games gather demographic data about you. It's a clever, innovative, and ultimately unsettling concept. A bit of harmless entertainment becomes a vehicle for targeted marketing.

SJ Mercury: Forget the hype, e-books still hard on the eyes. E-book technology is just not ready. It's too hard to read on the screen. Think of this as the opposite of what's going on with the music industry and Napster: With Napster, the public is clamoring for file-sharing technology but the big companies are trying to ignore it.

News.Com: Sony to offer online video content service. Japanese entertainment giant Sony today said it will launch a service in October to produce and distribute video content such as commercials and online shopping programs over the Internet. Sony's Mega-Channel Web site will initially enable customers to receive video content from 30 companies.

• The Economist: From February 26, 2000; In their dreams

August 13, 2000
SJ Mercury: Internet in your pocket. But how well do these gizmos actually work? For some things, they're surprisingly . . . adequate. But don't let the hype carry you away. Going wireless means you'll be making some compromises, and the compromise isn't always over an issue you'd expect.

• Business 2.0: From August 8, 2000; It’s the Communication, Stupid. Clay Shirky.

Financial Times: I-mode glitches cast doubt. For most users of i-mode, the world's most successful mobile internet service to date, this lack of access may be just a temporary nuisance. But for the service operator, DoCoMo, Japan's dominant mobile phone operator, it comes just as the company is set to embark on an ambitious global expansion.

Wired News: Seeing Volcanoes in 3-D. In the August 10 issue of Nature, Scripps Institute researchers reported they used sonar, computer, and graphic imaging systems normally used by the oil industry to create vivid, 3-D maps of magma chambers in an area off the Mexican coast.

News.Com: Saudis block Yahoo's clubs site. "The decision to block the clubs.yahoo.com site is irreversible. Matters have gone beyond what is acceptable, and pornographic and other offensive sites are mushrooming," said Khalil al-Jadaan, an official with the King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology, the kingdom's sole Internet provider.

August 14, 2000
NY Times: TV´s Monoliths Learn That the Web Is a Fragmented World. But after great effort and hundreds of millions of dollars of promotion, the networks are still also-rans on the Web. Traffic to their various sites badly lags behind the big portals like Yahoo, America Online and Microsoft's MSN, which are the closest thing the Web has to major networks.

• Salon: From May 4, 1999; Pathfinder, we hardly knew ye. Scott Rosenberg.

NY Times: Wacky, Fake Web Sites Grab Attention. The trend is meant to capitalize on the growing use of and fascination with the Internet as well as to take advantage of the capabilities of the Web to produce content at a low cost that appears to be genuine. In other words, on the World Wide Web, it can always be April Fool's Day.

• Washington Post: From June 30, 2000; Chatting in The Company Town Square

InfoWorld: Compaq adds 'push' to handheld e-mail device. Compaq on Tuesday is set to announce the arrival of a wireless handheld device that will be branded as part of the company's iPaq family, according to a source close to the Houston-based company.

Computerworld: Web vigilantes. Yes, vigilantes are out there. These aren't anonymous crackers vandalizing Web sites they don't like. But they're also not government bureaucrats enforcing the law. They're something in between the two.

Industry Standard: Hello, And Welcome to Our Redesign! Q&A with Alex Weil, designer at Charlex. What I tried to do was raise the quality of the Web site to match the brand and culture it created through the phone. The first thing we did was add its well-known slogan to the top of the Web site. "Hello, and welcome to Moviefone!" can also be downloaded as an audio file.

• Adweek: From July 3, 2000; Sneak Previews

Computerworld: VeriSign launches flat-fee, fraud-screening software. VeriSign's Payflow Fraud Screen service is based on the eFalcon fraud-scoring technology developed by HNC Software Inc. in San Diego. The eFalcon technology has been used for 10 years to protect credit-card holders when making off-line purchases.

News.Com: Toysrus.com drops tracking service amid pressure. Following two class-action lawsuits filed against Toysrus.com, the site posted a revised privacy policy late last week to address its relationship with Coremetrics, a 5-month-old marketing company that analyses customer habits on the Web.

USA Today: Report: Web convention coverage fails. A companion report found that while 35 Internet sites covered the Republican convention and hundreds of others provided news about the gathering, there was very little demand for the material they were producing.

August 15, 2000
NewMedia: Q&A with Christopher Locke, Part 1. They showed that it was a huge deal and that Intel was lying. Intel came across as a bully and had to do a $400-million recall on top of that. It cost them goodwill and the money anyway. The more they tried to resist, the more the Net wouldn't let them get away with it.

MSNBC: Empowering voters via the Net. The Internet enables that to happen, Dyson said, by allowing people to participate on their own terms and enabling them them to demand power. It is a way, she said, of making demands without money.

National Journal: Internet Avenue: Boulevard Of Broken Sewers. It was the greatest political cyber-party of all time, but there was just one tiny glitch: nobody came. During GOP convention week, there was a 14 percent drop in traffic at the four most popular online news sites...

• Freedom Forum: From June 21, 2000; Convention coverage goes 'dot-com'

Upside: RealNetworks' odd buffet. But Chez RealNetworks' latest creation, GoldPass, doesn't look too yummy. It's missing key ingredients -- music from major-label bands and video from top movie studios, for example. What's left is a funky content casserole. And the grub doesn't come cheap.

The Economist: Son of Netscape. But although this week’s $6.4-billion merger between two of Silicon Valley’s highest-flying software communications firms, Phone.com and Software.com, inevitably prompted such talk, the reality is that Phone.com already looks rather more like the next Netscape—Microsoft’s erstwhile victim.

Business 2.0: What Microsoft’s .NET Doesn't Get. Clay Shirky. With .NET, Microsoft has outlined a vision of interoperability that leaves the PC behind. If they are serious about that bet-the-company line, the big choice for them over the next three years is how completely they want to participate in the future they have now described.

TechWeb: Omaha Steaks Puts Meat On The Online Bone. The revamped Net destination will still market filet mignons, sirloins, and boneless strips, but Omaha Steaks is betting that a more direct connection between the site and the company's order fulfillment system will make that job easier.

Editor & Publisher: Online Polls Proliferate, But Critics Object. But some newspaper officials say it's clear that their polls are only provided as entertainment. "We're just having fun with the readers," says Ken Riddick, director of interactive media at The Fresno (Calif.) Bee. "We're not trying to be scientific about anything."

• Editor & Publisher: From May 28, 1999; Internet Decreasing Polls' Credibility. Steve Outing.

Strange Connections: Educating the Information Architect. Peter Morville. From consulting firms like Argus and Scient to e-businesses like LookSmart to Fortune 500's like Cisco, everyone is desperately seeking information architects. The bad news is that there's no established educational degree program geared specifically to meet the needs of aspiring information architects.

USA Today: Vikings do end-around with Webcast. Minneapolis radio station WCCO broadcasts the Vikings' games, but its parent company, Infinity, doesn't allow the station to put its broadcasts on the Web. So the Vikings are letting a competing station, KFAN, produce a separate radio style broadcast that is available only on the Web...

August 16, 2000
Fortune: 'Let Them Sell T-Shirts'. What is the reaction of the industry? It is to answer the contempt that fans and musicians feel for it with more of the same. As the Napster litigation makes clear, the music industry thinks of its customers almost as thieves, or, at best, as wannabe thieves.

Forbes: Comcast To Customers: Use, Don't Abuse. Cable operator Comcast is selling high-speed Internet access, but the company, with a market capitalization of $31 billion, sure is fussy about how customers use it. The cable operator issued a warning last week aimed at preventing its @Home Internet subscribers from using the network for business applications...

• Business 2.0: From February 1, 2000; The Cable Cartel

Red Herring: Content companies issue reality check to AOL. To that end, three companies -- Bigstep.com, Zeeks.com, and PcOrder.com -- all announced content agreements with AOL on Tuesday that were far more tentative than Drkoop.com's. Most of the arrangements involve revenue-sharing instead of huge sums of cash to be paid to AOL.

ZDNN: Firestone flap: Web in eye of storm. The two chief litigation research firms at the center of the issue have made the Internet the center of their strategy. Chat rooms are clogged with consumers asking each other questions. Ford and Firestone, a unit of Japan’s Bridgestone Corp., have used their Web sites extensively to reassure customers.

Business Week: Getting Old Economy Advertisers to Ante Up Online. Procter & Gamble says the most effective forms of online marketing it has tried include providing content for a site. One example: an article on hair care on a Web site for women sponsored by P&G's Physique hair-care products.

• Business Week: From April 17, 2000; From One-Way Marketing to Cyber Dialogue

PC World: Surf for Money? Better Hurry. Then FreeWebStuff.com's officials decided to drop the relatively sparse prize catalog and offer something people really wanted: 50 cents an hour of the popular online currency Flooz, accepted by a growing number of Web merchants. "It was like the lamb entering the wolf's den," Johnson says.

• Fortune: From June 19, 2000; The Dumbest Dot-Com

August 17, 2000
New Republic: End Game. Lawrence Lessig. An administration that did nothing to create the original architecture of the Internet (but that has enjoyed the extraordinary prosperity that original architecture has produced) will now do nothing as that architecture is corrupted and the innovation of the original Net is threatened.

Atlantic Monthly: The Heavenly Jukebox. Charles C. Mann. The legal and social precedents set by Metallica v. Napster -- and half a dozen other e-music lawsuits -- are likely to ramify into film and video as these, too, move online. When true electronic books, e-magazines, and e-newspapers become readily available, their rules of operation may well be shaped by the creation of the heavenly jukebox.

InfoWorld: DVD ruling may have profound implications. Those claims were denied across the board by Kaplan, who, at various times throughout the written decision, compared the posting of the code to a political assassination, robbing a bank, and spreading a disease. Kaplan held that linking was the "functional equivalent" of providing the DeCSS code.

Internet World: Q&A with Stuart Moore and Jerry Greenberg of Sapient. One is just thinking of the Web. The Web is the first few baby steps of this whole thing. It's a billion people connecting all the time, everywhere, to everyone. Start thinking about that. It's not about the browser, it's not about the mouse; that's not where the action is.

Computerworld: Travel vendors push to placate frustrated flyers. Online travel agency Expedia Inc. in Bellevue, Wash., earlier this month started dedicating an entire section of its Web site to tracking delayed flights and giving travelers tips on how to survive the delays.

• USA Today: From September 27, 1999; Web sites promise better storm info

LA Times: Judge Says Tickets.com May Collect, Use Information From Ticketmaster Online. U.S. District Judge Harry Hupp concluded that Ticketmaster Online, which is majority owned by Barry Diller's USA Networks Inc., has no right to exclude Tickets.com from using Ticketmaster Online's information on the price, time, date, and location of events.

News.Com: Wireless Web privacy hole still wide open. Five months later, little has changed. Sprint and AT&T Wireless say they're just weeks away from changing their technology to preserve their callers' privacy, but privacy advocates say the wireless companies aren't taking the issue seriously enough.

• SF Chronicle: From March 8, 2000; Sprint to Hide Web Surfers' Phone Numbers

August 18, 2000
SJ Mercury: Digital Copyright Act comes back to haunt consumers. Dan Gillmor. There's little doubt at this point that the courts will continue to rule in favor of the entertainment industry in these kinds of cases. The DMCA, which has some temporary exceptions that the industry wants to eliminate, is one of the most anti-consumer acts of recent times.

• Freedom Forum: From March 8, 2000; Corporatists fire back at Net freedom. Jon Katz.

The Economist: The failure of new media. But the Internet has not lived up to these hopes. Other entertainment groups’ experience has been similar to NBC’s. “To date,” says Ted Leonsis, president of the Interactive Properties Group at AOL, “digital entertainment has been a failure.”

• FEED Magazine: From April 20, 1999; The Hit Parade. Clay Shirky.

CIO WebBusiness: New Economy, Old World. Q&A with Esther Dyson. Now, anybody with their PC can be extraordinarily productive. That doesn't mean that everyone with a PC can be Rupert Murdoch, but it does mean that it's a flatter marketplace, so you can find your market.

Salon: When magazines lose their charm. Scott Rosenberg. The trees, alas, are not quite out of the woods. With the eclipse of the old-line computer magazines now well underway, a whole wave of new-economy business magazines is arriving on the scene to consume mass quantities of pulp.

• The Economist: From May 6, 2000; Heavy reading

A List Apart: Experience Design. Experience Design is an emerging paradigm, a call for inclusion: it calls for an integrative practice of design that can benefit all designers, including those who work in the new, interactive media.

Industry Standard: IOC May Let Dot-Coms Cover Games in... 2002. In June it established a sports-news feed for journalists on its site to help them stay on top of the latest international sports news. More than 1,500 have already signed up. But when it comes to access to the Games themselves, the organization intends to take it slow.

NY Times: $50 Billion for German Wireless Licenses. The most expensive auction in history ended here today, when six companies bid nearly $50 billion for licenses to offer a new generation of wireless communications in Germany, the largest economy in Europe.

• The Economist: From July 8, 2000; Waves of the future

Newsbytes: Domain Arbitrator Blows Away More 'Sucks' Addresses. Rulings that will likely separate Internet-address claim-jumpers from domain names that add the word "sucks" to well- known corporate monikers are piling up under a speedy arbitration process designed to help rid the Web of "cybersquatters."

August 19, 2000
Advertising Age: Cybercritique of Procter & Gamble. The heart of the site will be, as traffic grows, a series of bulletin boards where girls can talk to each other--in the trusting, P&G-sponsored, warm and caring nest. And every time they get good advice from their peers, they'll remember their new friends in P&G-land. But it's possible to take a good idea too far.

• Wired News: From July 1, 1999; Yahoo Gets Fat on Pringles

NY Times: Online Coverage Fell Short of the Hype. Part of the reason for low traffic was the product: despite claims by many Internet Web sites that they could jazz up convention coverage with offbeat stories, chat rooms and nifty camera shots, the online coverage proved to be no more exciting than that of regular television...

• Freedom Forum: From September 21, 1999; Is 2000 the Net's big election year? Don't believe it. Jon Katz.

Washington Post: DoCoMo Deal Would Test Wireless Web. The Japanese telecommunications giant, known for its advanced mobile Internet technology, is in preliminary discussions to tie up with a wireless joint venture between SBC Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. to gain a foothold in the United States, a source familiar with the matter said today.

August 20, 2000
Useit.Com: Mailing List Usability. Mailing lists allow you to extend the footprint of your website. In the literal sense (get space in the user's inbox and not just in the browser). And in the more interesting metaphorical sense: More services become possible when you can reach out to users and provide them with time-dependent information.

Internet Week: Movie Industry Could Undermine Your Business--And Free Speech. The MPAA is trying to force into case law a principle that copyright holders not only can prohibit copying, but also any discussion, communication or research into the means of making copies, or of using material in a way copyright holders don't approve in advance.

SJ Mercury: New Internet protocol packs punch. Dan Gillmor. But in that new world, we won't have nearly enough Internet addresses to go around. The question is when, not if, we run out. The next-generation Internet needs a next-generation addressing scheme. It's coming. Haltingly, to be sure, but it does appear to be on the way.

August 21, 2000
SJ Mercury: Online companies violate our privacy because we let them. Dan Gillmor. They lobby for what's hilariously called self-regulation, and create utterly toothless privacy-watchdog organizations that barely even bark at the worst violations. We are not people to these businesses. We are data, and we are fair game.

Salon: Leggo my data! It's easy for those with more tech savvy to raise an eyebrow at such cookie cluelessness. But really, it's a sad example of how the current environment of industry "self-regulation" only works if we're prepared to be our own privacy police.

NY Times: Marketers Get Help From E-Mail Experts. Not surprisingly, an industry has emerged to help marketers manage their e-mail strategy, from companies that function as application service providers, housing the infrastructure to deliver and track e-mail campaigns, to those that license or sell software to run e-mail campaigns.

EE Times: OEMs ready to roll on jukeboxes for Net audio. The OEMs are queuing up their first products in this new category, despite the climate of deep uncertainty surrounding copy protection for digital audio files "ripped" from compact disks or downloaded from the Net.

LA Times: Napster Forcing Music Industry to Change Its Money-Making Tune. Esther Dyson. Yes, it’s wrong to steal, and yes, the music companies have legally binding copyrights. But the reality is that it’s not good business to annoy both your customers and your suppliers--especially if you’re an intermediary whose added value is questionable.

NY Times: More Taking Than Giving on the Web. Two scientists at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center have surveyed the behavior of anonymous music downloaders on the Internet and have found that, rather than demonstrating a "from each, to each" ethos, most Internet users are only taking files and not giving any back to their electronic community.

• Xeroc PARC: Free Riding on Gnutella

digitalMASS: What lurks inside that shareware you just downloaded? Well, you do have to pay a small price -- a persistent trickle of advertisements flashing on your screen whenever you run one of the programs. Well, you do have to pay a small price -- a persistent trickle of advertisements flashing on your screen whenever you run one of the programs.

NY Times: Dictionary Publishers Going Digital. Houghton Mifflin is not alone. Its major rivals are all stepping up their digital dictionary efforts to tap an increasingly lucrative market, setting up a business contest that philologists say will also affect the way Americans use English.

• ZDNN: From October 19, 1999; Encyclopaedia Britannica goes free

August 22, 2000
Business 2.0: Resist the Lure of Simplified History. Clay Shirky. Someday the Internet will be just another industry, with predictable revenue streams, where the fifth year of a five-year projection plan will be useful for something other than scrap paper. In the meantime, the AOL game plan is the only one that works...

• Salon: From January 7, 2000; The wrong stuff

Inside: Interactive TV: You Can Make It Hard or You Can Make It Easy. Jason Chervokas and Tom Watson. But interactive TV as we continue to conceive it, is not that kind of revolutionary beast. Instead it is an evolutionary, incremental change in an information and entertainment platform. It's surprising then how much focus there has been on force-feeding consumers products they have shown no inclination for.

Business 2.0: Groping Toward Content. One NewGate service consists of finding a target user list or email group that narrowly fits a client's audience and then recruiting the moderator and top posters to get the message out. Another service establishes shadow Websites, free of particular commercial messages but designed to serve the client's communications strategies.

• Washington Post: From June 30, 2000; Chatting in The Company Town Square

USA Today: Magazines debut embedded Web links. Forbes is mailing out free handheld digital readers to all 810,000 of its subscribers to see if they'll take to the idea of jumping around the Net by scanning little bar codes in ads and stories. No typing required here. The bars are embedded with specific Web addresses.

InfoWorld: Web addresses go multilingual. NSI, in Herndon, Va., said Tuesday it will start a test program that allows registration of multilingual domain names in 55 languages and character sets through the 60 or more registrars accredited by ICANN.

Industry Standard: BBC to Start Net Firm. The new company will capitalize on its linkage with the venerable BBC, one of the most trusted brands in Britain. Beeb.com was launched in 1997 as a for-profit content site associated with the not-for-profit BBC Online.

• Freedom Forum: From December 9, 1998; BBC Online plans to succeed by surviving while other new Web sites fail

August 23, 2000
Wired News: Only News That's Fit to Link. Kaplan's ruling, legal experts say, appears to be an unprecedented expansion of traditional copyright law. No longer is it merely illegal to distribute a potentially infringing computer program -- but now even linking to someone else's copy could be verboten.

American Journalism Review: Surviving in Cyberspace. Surely, it's the end of one era (perhaps just the age of journalistic naiveté) and the beginning of a new, more mature phase. Either way, the question is, what now? If anything, what Internet news veterans say they've learned so far is that the early conventional wisdom about online news was wrong.

Salon: Are British bobbies reading your e-mail? For Americans, RIP should serve as a warning. Don't get too comfortable just because Carnivore failed in the courts. The United States and the United Kingdom have traveled in lock step on restricting cryptography and other Net freedoms...

News.Com: Akamai caught in Net filtering cross fire. Akamai, which uses a network of computers to store Internet content closer to consumers to speed delivery, acknowledged today that the technique is effective. But the company said the responsibility for fixing the problem lies with filtering software companies and not Akamai.

• InfoWorld: From December 13, 1999; Content adaptation protocol in the works

SJ Mercury: Microsoft to unveil a chip for Net, TV. The Solo2 chip -- named after Solo, WebTV founder Steve Perlman's dog -- will be unveiled this fall in WebTV's set-top boxes for its new Ultimate TV service. The chip lets viewers surf the Web on a television set and watch or record two different programs simultaneously.

News.Com: Has Staples finally solved its coupon caper? This week, the big office-supply chain switched to a "serialization coding system," which sends customers an individual code number that prevents a coupon from being used more than once and helps ensure that the coupon is used by the customer Staples intended it for...

• ZDNN: From December 14, 1999; E-tailers learn a lesson -- the hard way

Forbes: Connecting The Dots. High Tower's code can monitor hundreds of thousands of changing data points simultaneously. Complex algorithms transform tables of figures into colorful, multidimensional graphs that the human brain can easily grasp.

Industry Standard: Big Blue Bids the Olympics Adieu. Defining what the Internet means to the Games is at the heart of the dispute. Is it a medium or an advertising sponsorship category? Like broadcast rights, Internet rights could bring the IOC and the host cities big bucks from major media companies.

August 24, 2000
The Guardian: Shanghai Noon. The thrust of the argument was almost military in style. The internet, said the People's Daily, has become a new arena for struggle between the "correct propaganda" of the government and the "reactionary, superstitious and pornographic" content of China's enemies.

• FEED Magazine: From August 11, 1999; Why China's Internet Problem Is A Lot Like South Carolina's. Clay Shirky.

Financial Times: Papers lose copyright case. The company said this bypassed the main home page of its titles, which were the most lucrative for advertising revenue. A Rotterdam court found, however, that PCM could just as easily place advertisements next to individual news items, and that external links only brought it extra traffic.

Editor & Publisher: Dutch Newspapers Lose Attempt To Ban Links. PCM, publisher of several national dailies, tried to prevent Kranten.com from linking to stories posted on the newspapers' Web sites. Kranten.com, a recently established site, runs headlines that link to where the original story was posted.

Industry Standard: Pretty Good Privacy Not Good Enough. Schneier and a group of other cryptographers predicted the exact type of problem that PGP now faces in a paper they wrote in 1997, when the U.S. government was pushing for key escrow, raising the ire of civil libertarians and many software firms in the process.

• Wired News: From November 12, 1998; NAI Back in Key Recovery Group
• World Wide Web Journal: From Summer 1997; The Risks of Key Recovery, Key Escrow, and Trusted Third-Party Encryption

Washington Post: Regulators Can't Force End to Instant-Messaging Conflict. Yahoo Inc.'s Brian Park, who oversees the firm's instant-messaging service, said the integration required for those types of services is why some companies have rejected offers to license AOL's messaging software and instead are working on their own versions.

NY Times: Online Commerce Creates Strange Competition. Hal R. Varian. What does economics have to say about these rosy scenarios? Will online markets really result in lower prices in the long run? The answer is somewhat ambiguous: there are good reasons why prices should go down, but there are also some good reasons why they might go up.

New York Post: Sony Exec Rips Napster in Student Newspaper. Heckler could not be reached for comment, but a spokesman for Sony Pictures quickly downplayed the comments. "The story is inaccurate. The statements were taken out of context," the spokesman said. The reporter for the "Forty-Niner," however, told The Post he stood by his story.

• U-Wire: From August 17, 2000; Sony exec: We will beat Napster

August 25, 2000
Wired News: Pretty Good Bug Found in PGP. The bug appeared in controversial features that the company included to satisfy government and corporate demands for key recovery, a technology that allows a third party to read encrypted communications.

Business Week: Hollywood vs. the Hackers vs. Free Speech. By posting the code, Corley cried "Fire!" in a crowded theater. But by hyperlinking to DeCSS sites, he merely acknowledged information already on the Internet. That's a subtle but important difference.

USA Today: DVD suit defendant pushes legal envelope. The site removed its hyperlinks to DeCSS sites. But it left the addresses of the sites themselves up, meaning anyone who types one of the addresses into his Web browser — or simply copies the address and pastes it into their browser — will still be transported directly to the site.

Business 2.0: Chat Spats. But legal experts say the New Jersey ruling marks the first time a court has decided a case of corporate cybersmear on its merits. While it's clear where the plaintiffs and defendants are positioned in these lawsuits, do the Websites that host these message boards need to mend their ways?

News.Com: Tech giants slam Napster injunction. A broad coalition of technology and Internet companies are filing legal briefs today that are bitterly critical of last month's court decision against Napster, saying it could threaten the future of much of the technology industry.

USA Today: Net privacy firm tracked site visitors. TRUSTe, a privacy advocate organization that runs a privacy seal-of-approval program for retail Web sites and shows companies how to write effective privacy policies, itself has tracked users with means not mentioned in its own privacy policy, a security group says.

Industry Standard: Cracks in Inktomi's Content Bridge? But outsiders wonder if this coalition can hold itself together. Inktomi is borrowing its model from the early days of ISPs, when providers would exchange traffic with one another to decrease network congestion. But squabbles soon broke out over whether or how to charge for the service.

Computerworld: Analyst: Sprint PCS 'overhyped' fast wireless connections. Dulaney, in a "first take" analysis for Gartner, described the new, high-speed Sprint PC service as "not a giant leap of wireless technology over wire line. It may however, be a giant leap in compression technology for all connections, something which still must be verified."

ZDNN: Server shutdown: Incident or hiccup? Engineers at Network Solutions Inc., which runs the primary "A" root server from its offices in northern Virginia, worked to determine why four root servers -- one in Tokyo, one in California and two elsewhere in Virginia -- briefly stopped responding to requests for links to Web sites ending in "com."

August 26, 2000
Industry Standard: Industry Groups Knock Napster Ruling. While noncommittal on whether Napster should be held liable for infringing on the copyrights of the major record labels, several Internet industry coalitions and trade groups, representing companies such as America Online, Yahoo and Intel, are taking issue with a federal judge's ruling...

Upside: Time Warner posts a link it had banned. Time Warner's CNN.com linked to download sites for DeCSS, the controversial DVD-cracking program, even after Time Warner won a ban on such links in court. The case is the latest example of a large media company contradicting its legal arguments with its own actions.

AtNewYork: Security Company Sets Crosshairs on TRUSTe. "Privacy is as much about perception as it is about technicalities," said Dave Steer, a spokesperson for TRUSTe. "Interhack came out with a report making a bunch of allegations that are not based on fact. They are based on possibilities of what could be happening."

SJ Mercury: U.S. online users shun `.us' names. Even the U.S. Postal Service doesn't want it anymore. Though the post office once considered claiming ``.us'' for customers, postal spokeswoman Sue Brennan said the agency will now concentrate on assigning e-mail addresses through ``usps.com.''

• Wired News: From June 19, 1998; Postal Service Eyes .us Domain

Industry Standard: Liberty Buys Into Sony's Game Show Network. AT&T subsidiary Liberty Digital will purchase a 50 percent stake in Sony Pictures Entertainment's Game Show Network in the hopes of developing interactive TV offerings based on shows such as Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!

August 27, 2000
SJ Mercury: Restoring balance in the battle over free expression on the Net. Dan Gillmor. It's about property rights -- intellectual property rights, which increasingly are gaining supremacy over traditional values and liberties in an epic struggle for economic primacy in the new century. Free speech, among the most precious rights, is under attack these days...

BBC News: China tackles cybersquatters. China has introduced tough new measures to stop people from cybersquatting following legal wrangles involving companies such as Microsoft. The aim of new rules, said the China Daily newspaper, was to stop "vicious domain name registering."

USA Today: Profiteers get squat for Web names. The World Intellectual Property Organization, the United Nations' Geneva-based dispute-resolution center for intellectual property, has sided with plaintiffs about 80% of the time since it began hearing cases in December.

SJ Mercury: Internet needs users who think more as citizens than customers. Indeed, it's a confirmation of what we knew intuitively -- 90 percent of a public network's users spend 100 percent of their online time chowing down at the data trough. You can see this pattern on the Web, where the ratio of readers to publishers is probably even worse than 9:1.

Interactive Week: Google's Ad Program Stresses Simplicity. Indeed, many of Google's potential customers ask to use attention-grabbing tools such as video. The Google team won't do it, though, because such ads would slow the site down, and the company has prided itself on speed and simplicity.

PC World: Broadband Alternative Debuts. Start-up World Wide Packets is beta testing its Subscriber Distribution Unit, which will enable carriers and other service providers to supply up to 1-gigabit data speeds to homes, apartment buildings, and small businesses, using the popular Ethernet protocol.

• Wired News: From March 21, 2000; Net Speed Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet

August 28, 2000
NY Times: Wireless Auction Uncovers Fissures in European Telecommunications. Yet ever since the bidding ended 11 days ago in Germany's auction of wireless licenses for so-called third-generation mobile networks, even devoted market enthusiasts have started to wonder if this is really the most rational way to go.

digitalMASS: A privacy-puncturing flaw. To Schneier, obsessing over the perfect security program, the encryption system that no cracker can beat, is a chump’s game. "We've been doing computer security for 40 years, as long as we've had computers," says Schneier. "Why isn't it getting any better?"

ZDNN: The next era for Internet security. A milestone in the history of technology is set to occur next month when RSA Security Inc. patents, fundamental to most Internet security, expire. What happens after that will be nothing short of a watershed for the security industry.

MSNBC: Patent application could evolve into trouble for e-commerce. When and if Mr. Pool’s patent becomes final, lawyers hired by his company, DE Technologies LLC, say anyone conducting computer-to-computer international trades over the Internet without the permission of DE Technology will infringe on the company’s intellectual property.

• Business Week: From June 28, 2000; Cutting Through a World of Red Tape

Salon: Information just wants to be Freenet. Q&A with Rob Kramer and Ian Clarke of Uprizer. We believe this could be an alternative, better, synergistic Akamai. It's a multi-level network. Akamai has 4,000 servers; we could have millions of servers, servers being a euphemism for computers.

NewMedia: Ideas As Objects. Scott McCloud. Yet, even though my profession (cartooning) grew out of paper and ink, I'm not a print loyalist. I'm prepared to switch as soon as print's strengths are improved upon by other technologies, and that threshold is approaching fast.

• Useit.Com: From February 1995; The Future of Hypertext

USA Today: Instant messaging could change. But the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Net's standards body, which also is working on IM interoperability, is running a far more significant and painstaking effort, likely to be completed sometime after 2002.

Washington Times: BBB takes its mark of reliability on line with self-regulation. Q&A with Russell T. Bodoff, COO of BBBOnline. If we're going to have a global marketplace, consumers are never going to understand 50 different logos or seals. If we don't have strong programs, then we're going to face regulation.

• USA Today: From July 24, 2000; Online privacy still a hot-button issue

NY Times: Internet Companies Learn How to Personalize Service. That said, the industry is gradually catching up to the hype surrounding personalization, as a growing number of companies have installed tools enabling them to present customized Web pages -- if not to a single individual, then at least to groups that have been identified as having a similar profile.

August 29, 2000
Industry Standard: The New Masters of Domains. But a growing number of free-speech advocates, academics and consumer representatives allege that some of the arbitrators – WIPO first among them – are expanding the definition of what constitutes trademark in cyberspace.

Newsbytes: Webmaster Granted Benefit Of The Doubt In Domain Dispute. An arbitrator umpiring a dispute over rights to the Internet domain name Easy-Jet.com has decided that a British discount airline should have had more damning evidence on hand if it expected to take the address away from a UK-based Web developer.

Industry Standard: Searching for Revenue. That is, they would begin charging fees to sites that want first-rate coverage in their directories and indexes of Web content. This represents at least the start of a huge shift toward "normal" economic principles for Internet companies, and also the emergence of a new power base.

eCompany: A Flawed Connection Between Printed Text and Hypertext. Ever find yourself wishing you could click on the pages of a book or magazine the same way you can on a webpage? Me neither. But the folks at Digimarc Corp. must figure there's someone out there who wants to do just that.

Computerworld: Circuit City seeks e-mail help for training program. Electronics retailer Circuit City Stores Inc. today said it has signed a deal to outsource e-mail for the training of sales associates at its 600-plus stores, becoming the latest user to join a small group of companies that are moving to Web-based services for some of their messaging needs.

• Salon: From September 1, 1999; Holey Hotmail. Scott Rosenberg.

Industry Standard: Olympics to Police Internet Broadcasting. Antonucci and other Internet company officials will have an opportunity to raise issues about Olympics broadcasts at a conference on "new" media and the Games to be hosted by the IOC in December in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Forbes ASAP: The Coming Light Years. Hence the sudden and even frantic push for all-optical networks. Those who succeed in developing such a network will reap enormous riches and define the technologies that will carry our voices, video, music, and Web sites for at least the first half of the 21st century.

TechWeb: Next Generation Data Compression Is At Hand. Jeffrey R. Harrow. Indeed, even when we do get fiber to our desks, we're still going to want to make the best possible use of the available bandwidth. We're still going to want to compress the data we send out.

• Lucent Press Release: From July 26, 2000; Compression algorithm opens the door to widespread 3-D applications

Business Week: Supercharging Web Access for Cell Phones. Now, with partners such as Nokia and Ericsson, Wi-LAN is lobbying for a single, global standard in 4G, based on OFDM. That way, makers of computers, media players, and other gadgets could all design their devices around the same set of low-cost wireless chips.

August 30, 2000
Computerworld: Intellectual property: Does anyone care? Dan Gillmor. Under the current system, enshrined in new laws and court rulings, tradition and the public interest have been abandoned. The winners in this landgrab are the companies, mostly large, that control intellectual property and persuade Congress to do their bidding on large and small matters.

Business Week: An Epidemic of "Viral Marketing". This dirt-cheap method of promotion, in which online customers pass company information along to their friends, is experiencing something of a boomlet again. And in an era when dot-coms are scrambling for cash, many say it deserves a second look.

• Business 2.0: From July 25, 2000; The Toughest Virus of All. Clay Shirky.

Computerworld: Home Depot goes online in Las Vegas. "All of our e-commerce will revolve around our stores," Shields said. "Our stores are our fulfillment vehicles." For example, Home Depot has built the online sales portion of its www.homedepot.com Web site to track each store's current inventory in real time to ensure that products ordered online will be available for customers to pick up.

Inside: Will IFilm Get Popped? Web Site in Talks With Pop.com. Insiders at both companies say the two have been in talks for a few weeks, outlining a plan to fold Pop's assets (hardware and content created and/or acquired for the unlaunched site) into IFilm, which would apparently then manage and operate the site.

• MSNBC: From August 1, 2000; Humbled, the megastar backers of Pop.com rethink Web site

Wired News: WAP or I-Mode: Which Is Better? Officials from NTT DoCoMo and the WAP Forum adamantly deny the two technologies compete with each other. In fact, NTT DoCoMo is a member of the WAP Forum. But the two groups still took jabs at each other.

InfoWorld: Bank of America goes wireless. Reflecting a trend instigated by online banking and bill-paying services, a Bank of America official said the wireless component was added to satisfy customer demand for banking and brokerage services "on one site and anywhere they are," said Linda Mueller, a BofA vice president...

Editor & Publisher: NewsWatch.org Is Back In Business. NewsWatch.org, the acclaimed media criticism site that lost its funding earlier this summer, is back. The small online operation has been purchased by BigEye.com, a small Web portal based in Sarasota, Fla...

August 31, 2000
digitalMASS: Attention, fad-happy designers: Comfortable old Bose gets it right. ...I decided to find out how a bookish, engineering-driven company like Bose approaches the faddish world of e-commerce. Not surprisingly, a lot of Web sites could learn a lot from Bose. Executive summary: Start with your customers’ needs and work backwards.

eCompany: The Wireless Web's Wasted Billions. So there you have it: Huge market + limited supply = excellent reason to spend billions on spectrum and companies that have it. But there's a problem with this equation. Yes, recent history shows that the wireless Web can be successful. But how big will it really be?

• The Economist: From July 8, 2000; Waves of the future

eCompany: BlackBerry Preserve. Other companies provide users with their core computing and communications needs; RIM's job, he says, is simply to help its customers use the computers and e-mail accounts they already have. "We don't want to become the center of your life," he says.

• Business 2.0: From August 8, 2000; It’s the Communication, Stupid. Clay Shirky.

Business 2.0: Five Questions With… Richard Pethia of CERT. One of the things we see often is that people do look for an easy solution. They try to grab for the silver bullet, so they invest in firewalls thinking that the firewall is the only thing they need to have in place to protect themselves. Or they invest in encryption technology.

TechWeb: Can Watermarking Save Others From Emulex Hoax? It may be too late for Emulex Corp. to benefit from electronic watermarking. But other companies may take advantage of the technology for authenticating documents that's expected to hit the market soon.

• Salon: From May 14, 1998; Hacker heaven, editors' hell. Scott Rosenberg.
• Salon: From May 5, 1999; The April Fools' stock hoax and the FBI

NewMedia: In Depth: 3G Wireless Networks. Although there are at least 10 3G standards under consideration by international standards bodies, the one most likely to succeed is built on a combination of EDGE technology and GSM and TDMA.

Business 2.0: Five Questions With... George Conrades Akamai. We leveraged this knowledge through our EdgeScape service, which gives our customers--the content providers--information about where their users are at this moment, and how they are accessing the Internet at this moment. But it does not track information about the users themselves.

Computerworld: California may pass state Internet sales tax. While a majority of U.S. governors advocate some form of Internet sales tax, Davis is the exception and has said in the past that the Internet is creating wealth for his state without the imposition of an Internet tax.