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March 1, 2001
Internet World: Thinking Wireless.
Rather, it will hinge entirely on how intelligently corporate America embraces the technology and uses it to extend its core services, both internally and externally, in a way that gives a given company a true strategic advantage in what it does.
eCompany Now: Personalization Without Popularity.
Fast-forward to today. Azer Bestavros, a professor of computer science at Boston University and chief scientific adviser to Allaire, is currently exporting Zipf's linguistic principle into a retail setting. Bestavros's work and ideas might also offer a breakthrough in how we use personalization technologies...
Computer User: WIPO sends message to AOL in ICQ domain-name dispute.
Petter Rindforth, an arbitrator assigned by WIPO's Arbitration and Mediation Center to handle the ICQPlus.org dispute, ruled this month that Russian programmer Vadim Eremeev can keep the domain because he doesn't charge for the popular software he promotes on a Web site at that address.
ZDNN: VeriSign to give up .org, .net.
Executives involved in the talks say the agreement was driven by VeriSign's falling market share for sales of new Web addresses. VeriSign currently sells fewer than half the world's 28.2 million Web addresses ending in "com," "net" or "org" -- a big shift from its monopoly until June 1999.
EE Times: Bluetooth readies spec for 2, 10 Mbit/s data rates.
The Bluetooth Special Interest Group is drafting high-speed versions of the short-range wireless specification that will run at 2 and 10 Mbits/second and could be released by the end of the year, the group's chairman said at the Intel Developer Forum Wednesday.
TechWeb: Do Wireless Numbers Really Add Up?
If it seems like there's more analysis than action in the wireless space, you're not alone in noticing it. Research firm EMarketer has been analyzing the analysts and concludes that the industry is crowded with smoke, mirrors, and random mathematics.
Mappa.Mundi Magazine: The Victorian Internet.
Throughout the book are fascinating nuggets of information. Though the parallels to our modern times are evident, Standage doesn't club the reader over the head with the parallels. Some parallels may seem obscure, but will hit home for those that work on the Internet.
Industry Standard: Olympic Committee Opens Up Games to Net Journalists.
The IOC made the decision to grant the press credentials yesterday. According to David Aikman, a member of the IOC's Internet task force, the organization has accredited 15 sports sites, including Sportal Network and Sports.com in the U.K. and Sport24.com in France.
Internet World: Deconstructing Contentville.com.
John Shiple and Peter Merholz. Contentville labors under the common misconception that a search box solves all problems. The site serves unique Web content, and in such a situation, folks tend not to search: Because they don’t know what’s available, they don’t know what to look for.
March 2, 2001
NY Times: Professor Finds Her Legacy in Internet Law.
A leading cyberlaw expert and intellectual property scholar at the University of California at Berkeley, she is using her personal wealth to promote the public interest in the Internet legal battles now being waged in courts, legislatures and administrative agencies across the country.
Wired News: Napster Clone's Curious Terms.
The new TOS agreement requires users to store files to designated folders on their hard drives, which are then made available to other users on the Aimster network to download. However, by terms of the contract, users agree not to actually open the files they download.
Internet World: Has VeriSign Hoodwinked Competitors?
Critics of the proposed agreement complain that VeriSign and ICANN have been holding secret discussions on the deal since last summer. The proposed deal is being considered at a time when ICANN and its activities are already under intense scrutiny by federal lawmakers.
USA Today: Web develops amazing new tangles.
But on the horizon, there's a new wave of the Internet beginning to break. It's been building even while the industry trudges through these rough times. For typical users, the Internet experience will change drastically over the next year or two. The hope is that the developments will reignite the industry.
EE Times: High-res LCDs chase high-end systems, notebooks.
Among the current crop of amorphous-silicon active-matrix LCDs, medium and large screens are being pitched at challenging image-analysis applications, video editing, graphic design, electronic publishing and miscellaneous apps such as air traffic control.
Business 2.0: Priced to Perfection.
That's the tantalizing theory, at least. The Internet allows a merchant to once again know the customer, know what merchandise he has bought before, what other sites he has visited (and how much they charge), and how eager he is to get the lowest price.
Computerworld: Committee to vote on controversial data copying standard.
Paper ballots were sent out today to all 24 members of a technical committee that's working on a controversial standard for preventing the copying and unauthorized distribution of protected data stored on removable media devices.
March 3, 2001
Fast Company: Beyond the Wireless Bubble.
That's why Hirschhorn and his team of futurologists are on the hot seat. Sure, his job is to conjure bold visions for the next 10 or 20 years -- and to generate unorthodox ideas about how his company can prosper. But those visions and those ideas must remain tethered to hard-core business realities.
Marketing Computers: MobileStar to Land in Starbucks.
Starbucks customers can get wired and wireless now. MobileStar Network will install broadband wireless infrastructure in 70 percent of Starbucks outlets, beginning this spring. MobileStar, then, can piggyback Starbucks' saturating presence in malls, airports, supermarkets and what seems like every street corner.
Wired News: Idealab Creates Alternate Domains.
Idealab founder Bill Gross isn't happy with the Internet's newest top level domains, so he's decided to fight the system. New.net, a spinoff of Idealab, is challenging the authority of the Internet's primary ruling body by preparing to sell up to a dozen unsanctioned TLDs that it plans to administer on its own.
Inside: Multiplayer Games Quietly Amass Legions of Subscribers and Millions in Revenue.
Big Web sites may boast larger numbers of simultaneous viewers, but how many attract paying visitors, for such long stretches of time, on such a regular basis, and in rich media environments where advertising can potentially take far more interesting forms than mere banners?
March 4, 2001
Lighthouse: Hard numbers on the working environment.
Most people take a pretty conspiratorial view of Microsoft's success. Joel Spolsky, a talented programmer and writer who left Microsoft to form his own software firm, sees things differently. He puts at least some of Microsoft's success down to a book.
Useit.Com: Retaining Key Staff: What High-Tech Employees Say versus What They Do.
The most important finding in the study was that what employees say will keep them in the company is quite different from those factors that actually determine whether they quit. We have seen similar findings in many other studies of very different issues...
NY Times: I Scream, You Scream: Consumers Vent Over the Net.
There is a way to vent those frustrations, and perhaps to get some results. Disgruntled consumers are a hot commodity on the Internet, where a dozen or more sites have been competing to become the virtual soapbox of choice for tens of thousands of angry customers.
Fast Company: We Won't Take a Backseat.
American Airlines responded with a similar offer in order to discourage its elite road warriors from defecting. But the snag came when American tried to limit eligibility to people in certain cities... Were it not for the FlyerTalk community, American might have gotten away with it.
InfoWorld: Some new shrink-wrap license terms seem tailor-made for UCITA.
As we know, UCITA can cause plenty of problems just by validating the most common shrink-wrap terms, such as warranty disclaimers and so on. Eagle-eyed readers, however, have spotted language in many EULAs that appears tailor-made to take advantage of some of UCITA's worst provisions.
Internet Week: PGP's Vulnerabilities Reveal The Truth About Security.
Bruce Schneier. We toss about phrases like "2,048-bit RSA" and "trillions of years to break," and we believe them. We're defending ourselves by planting a huge stake in the ground, instead of by building a wall, and hoping the attacker will take only the path that runs into the stake.
March 5, 2001
Darwin: Get Over It!
David Weinberger. Now, of course, it's all different. You get your information electronically, not on glossy paper. You hunt it down yourself, rather than waiting for it to be delivered to you. But the biggest change is deeper than that: The Web has broken the corporate monopoly on information.
SJ Mercury: Hollywood putting the squeeze on consumers.
Dan Gillmor. In the name of preventing piracy, the entertainment moguls are treating every customer like a thief. They are herding us all into a pay-per-view system where we have no rights at all to use the material we buy as we see fit.
Dylan Tweney: The real Slim Shady.
The fact is, Napster's just a symptom of a larger issue: online copying. Whether it's Napster, Gnutella, or what have you, there will always be some technology giving copyright lawyers fits, because like it or not, the Internet is all about copying stuff.
Darwin: Creative Tension.
As you will learn below, some leading lights of the Web development world question whether his advocacy has given usability more prominence than it deserves. Should it really be the driving force in Web design? While usability disciples abound, a lot of designers say no.
ZDNN: AOL sides with anonymous posters.
AOL argues that the legal threshold for these lawsuits and for unmasking the identities of the posters who are being sued should be raised to protect their First Amendment rights. The company made its point in a friend-of-the-court brief filed last Monday in a so-called cybersmear case...
NY Times: Companies in No Hurry to Buy Over the Internet.
Moreover, purchasing managers are reluctant to learn how to use the various intranet and Internet sites peddling everything from manufacturing supplies to printer cartridges, and they do not necessarily trust those sites to deliver critically important goods on time and at the right quality.
Interactive Week: Fixed Wireless Offers Alternative.
In lands that cable or fiber forgot, or where installing state-of-the-art broadband infrastructure might prove prohibitively costly or time-consuming, fixed wireless is increasingly the solution of choice for telecommunications companies worldwide.
digitalMASS: Speed Demon.
The Broadband2Wireless service itself isn't designed for cars; it's targeted to home offices and small businesses where broadband via cable modem isn't available, and where DSL either isn't an option or people are fed up with the companies that provide it.
NY Times: Beyond Hypertext: Novels With Interactive Animation.
The last traditional book Erik Loyer read was "Cosmicomics," a short-story collection by Italo Calvino. It will not be the last book he reads, he said, but for publishing his own literary efforts, Mr. Loyer has forsaken the printed page for the computer screen.
March 6, 2001
USA Today: Copyright fight might narrow TV, music options.
These cyberspace copyright battles are likely to radically affect what can be done in one's own home with movies, music (and soon, books) already purchased and paid for. In the future, what you own might not be a disc or a tape, but rather, the limited right to listen or watch.
Wired News: Napster Fallout: Privacy Loses?
Nevertheless, privacy and legal experts predict that the Napster decision will place increased pressure on ISPs to play a role in stopping illegal file sharing. At the least, they may face a new deluge of requests to identify users accused of copyright violation.
Internet World: Testing Goes Against Japanese Culture.
Jakob Nielsen. The designers told us that Japanese clients don't want to hear what's not working well with their designs, especially in front of all of their colleagues. Problems in designs are dismissed as failures, and the way to regain face is to invent an entirely new direction.
Atlantic Monthly: The Reinvention of Privacy.
Entrepreneurs are realizing that privacy and technology are not fundamentally at odds—and that, in fact, expectations of privacy have in large measure always been created or broadened by the arrival of new technologies.
Darwin: Under the Influence.
But in an industry that touts objectivity as its primary value and sales tool, research companies do little to encourage or police the objectivity of their analysts. These organizations quietly profit from the same technology vendors their analysts cover...
ZDNN: Fee-based services considered for MSN.
As the Redmond, Wash.-based company has done in the past when it starts planning for an operating system upgrade, Microsoft has been surveying consumers about the kind of MSN services they would like and how much they would be willing to pay.
Computerworld: Hack of Amazon.com’s Bibliofind compromises customer data.
Bibliofind.com, an online marketplace for rare and hard-to-find books that's owned by Amazon.com Inc., yesterday disclosed that a malicious hacker had broken into its Web site, compromising the security of the customer credit-card information processed on its servers between October and February.
Darwin: Freedom to Roam.
OK, so ubiquitous computing is gonna be big. But what does it really change about consumer and employee behavior? And how can a company shape an intelligent wireless strategy that's based more on ROI than hype and hopefulness?
March 7, 2001
Industry Standard Europe: The English empire.
Nikolayev's slightly verbose efforts to put Sakha on the map are further evidence of the power of English. Hastened by the Internet, the language has achieved a dominance that the empire-builders of yesteryear would have recognised with awe.
Salon: When two gadgets become one.
Simson Garfinkel. The combination of the Visor PDA and phone does a better job than all of these other attempts -- it's even better than the ill-fated pdQ. And in a curious twist, the Visor duo makes a more usable cellphone than most stand-alone cellphones.
Industry Standard Europe: Pioneer in the Wilderness.
What do you do with a prize-winning Web editor who brings in almost a billion page views per month? You get rid of him. At least you do if you are in charge of the newly merged AOL Time Warner. Scott Woelfel left the company in January when it closed CNN Interactive...
Business 2.0: Wireless Internet Hits Airports.
American Airlines and TWA were the first airlines to bring the technology to airports, last year signing deals with service providers to install wireless networks in their premium lounges. Each chose a different wireless networking technology...
Computerworld: Airports ground use of wireless.
Airport operators already control the airspace in their regions. Now they want the airwaves, too. Their concern: wireless interference with other systems, but also a decline in pay-phone revenue that has prompted some airports to look for ways to seek income from wireless technology.
US News: Ads that just don't click–no, literally.
They include longer, thinner ads called "skyscrapers" and larger pop-up boxes. Giving advertisers a bit more creative leeway, they hope, will drive up spending. Nice try. The new ads may look funky, but new shapes alone are unlikely to turn things around.
March 8, 2001
Internet Week: Cut The Cord.
The future is wireless, or so we're told. While vendors work out the formula for devices and services that will put wireless clients into every consumer's hands, at least one wireless networking technology has moved out of the early-adopter stage.
eWEEK: Microsoft's Hailstorm to hit.
The Hailstorm design preview, restricted to a group of developers and content providers, ties into Microsoft's .Net strategy to have computers, devices and services collaborate directly with each other in a peer-to-peer format.
Computerworld: Users, vendors face off over UCITA law in Texas.
A titanic struggle over the proposed new Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act -- one that pits large corporate users against a group of major technology vendors -- is under way in Texas and could become a key showdown for the controversial software licensing measure.
Wired News: The Grid: The Next-Gen Internet?
Though distributed computing evokes associations with populist initiatives like SETI@home, where individuals donate their spare computing power to worthy projects, the Grid will link PCs to each other and the scientific community like never before.
Interactive Week: DeCSS 2? DVD code broken again.
Last week, a Web site published the pair's seven-line program, which unscrambles the protection around a DVD so quickly that a movie can play at the same time, although the film appears choppy. It's the shortest program to break DVD defenses to date.
News.Com: Inktomi gives Web sites control--for a price.
The introduction Wednesday of Inktomi's Index Connect lets large Web sites pay to make sure they're included in the company's search index. The service gives sites control over how often their sites are indexed and what specific pages are included.
NY Times: Forget Net Taxes. Forget Sales Taxes Altogether.
Hal R. Varian. But allow me to propose a more radical solution: states should drop the sales tax entirely and substitute other ways of raising revenue. The sales tax is one of the worst taxes we have, and no amount of chewing gum and bailing wire will fix it.
Red Herring: Software agents get smart.
How do businesses and consumers protect their computer systems from being abused or destroyed? Dr. Steven Goldsmith, a former research scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, believes he has the solution. It involves using a team of autonomous software agents...
March 9, 2001
MSNBC: Tiny TechSearch wields patents against giant-sized competitors.
TechSearch has made its patents pay through clever pricing and aggressive lawsuits. When companies such as Audible Inc., Britannica.com owner Encyclopaedia Britannica Holding SA, Spiegel Inc. and others didn’t make the requested payment for licensing the file-transfer patent...
NY Times: The Dreams of Webzines Fizzle Out.
Five years ago, Slate and Salon arrived amid proclamations that "Webzines" would become a multibillion-dollar business and displace print publications by stealing their readers and sucking their advertising dry. Many people, including not a few print publishers, believed it. But none of it happened.
Online Journalism Review: Behind Closed Dot-com Doors.
The long-running debate about corporate control of content sites and the discussions about separation of church and state online rarely get into the nitty-gritty of what really goes on behind closed doors at these places. I'll take you behind the doors of one content site in a moment.
MSNBC: Frays, both small and big, emerge after AOL, Time Warner merger.
In the Time Inc. division, which is the largest magazine outfit in the U.S., concerns are multiplying faster than staffers initially imagined. Some at Time Inc. are increasingly wary that the magazine business could be threatened by AOL’s lack of journalistic savvy...
EE Times: FCC decision opens door to high-rate wireless LANs.
The FCC may change its definition of spread spectrum to enable higher-rate wireless LANs. Prompted by pressure from wireless-LAN proponents, the potential changes end months of speculation about the legality of three possible paths to 22-Mbit/ second wireless LAN radios in the 2.45-GHz band.
Industry Standard: Serenading Capitol Hill.
As the recording industry prevails in its court, the battleground is shifting to Washington. Digital music lobbyists like Pitts are trying to persuade Congress and some federal agencies to change the law to allow for the legal downloading of copyrighted music.
USA Today: Europe's music-piracy solution: taxes.
The legislation, which takes effect in each of the 15 EU nations after being ratified by the national parliaments, allows countries to add fees for each blank CD or CD burner sold — mirroring existing laws in Italy and Germany, where additional charges of between 5% and 10% are already being assessed.
March 10, 2001
NY Times: How Dot-Coms Joined the Old Economy.
Clay Shirky. But despite the collapse in value of dot-com companies, the Internet itself is still a growing force in the business world. The gloom about its prospects has distracted us from a simple reality: The Internet isn't a business sector, it's a technology...
Industry Standard: Child Net Protection Act Will Be Put to Legal Test.
Two broad coalitions of civil liberties groups, library associations, Web sites and individual library patrons are planning to challenge a new federal law that mandates the use of filtering software in schools and libraries receiving federal grants for computers or Internet access.
Wired News: Stumping for Fair Use.
Democratic Congressman Rick Boucher of Virginia, a senior member of the Courts, Internet and Intellectual Property Subcommittee, made a major policy speech on Tuesday in which he advocated changes in current copyright law to reaffirm the fair use doctrine in the Internet age.
Industry Standard: More Delays for Ultrawideband.
Proponents of ultrawideband, a new technology for wireless transmissions, face a longer wait for government approval after the Department of Commerce on Friday revealed that it will need an additional three months to finish critical interference tests.
Information Week: Proxim Sues 14, Claiming Patent Infringement.
Wireless networking product vendor Proxim Inc. Friday sued Acer, D-Link, Linksys, and five other companies it claims are shipping products that have been built with Proxim's patented direct sequence spread wireless local area networking technology.
March 11, 2001
SJ Mercury: The Internet is only getting started on huge innovations.
Dan Gillmor. Now that the Internet bubble has deflated, we can get on with what makes the technology world so fascinating and its prospects so limitless. Smart people are getting back to the basics -- coming up with great new ideas that may, just may, change the world.
IBM Ease of Use: Putting it to the test.
At the Fidelity laboratory, there have been over 120 usability tests of web sites or applications in the past three years. The new state-of-the-art lab doubles the testing capacity of the original one, which Tullis helped establish, and employs a wide range of new evaluation techniques.
Dan Bricklin: How the Napster injunction affect directories on the Internet.
In most cases so far, the actual details are such that the legal burdens on the technology will not slow its adoption in other areas. This is not an endorsement of those decisions, but a call to other judges to make sure their decisions don't inadvertently kill off whole areas of possible innovation.
March 12, 2001
Salon: Do you kick Yahoo?
Scott Rosenberg. All of which raises the obvious question: Plainly, the market's pundits were way off a year ago, at the pinnacle of Net stock mania; so why should we put any more stock in them now? Their downside is looking just as insane as their upside.
Boston Globe: Rated X, for Xtra Insight.
On this graph, the adoption of client-server computing in the 1980s and the commercialization of the World Wide Web, in 1994 and 1995, are mere twitches. What really rattles the line up the Richter scale, in 2001, is something the Oracle, better known as George Colony, founder of Forrester Research, has dubbed X Internet.
Web Reference: Interview with Dave Winer.
Radio is a personal Web application server. It comes with a nice app that gets news via RSS and publishes a blog and RSS channels as output. But the app is just there as a bootstrap, to give developers ideas, and to give users a way to get started.
Inside: Copy This! Can 'Military' Technology Beat Digital Piracy?
A small Austin start-up run by intelligence community alums is parachuting into the burgeoning, post-Napster, copy-protection market with a remarkably thin, invisible software product that claims to offer nearly invincible armor for music, video, film and e-books alike.
Wired News: E-Mail Privacy Remains Elusive.
Fewer than 10 million people use PGP, the most popular method for encrypting e-mail. That's out of a worldwide Internet population approaching 400 million. "We've had trouble getting PGP employed across the breadth of society," lamented Philip Zimmermann, the inventor of PGP.
Interactive Week: VeriSign Critics Press For Investigation.
Companies that compete with domain name registration giant VeriSign lined up Monday to rail against a proposed agreement that would give the one-time monopoly continued dominance of the coveted .com name space, with some calling for a new antitrust investigation by the EC.
NY Times: Pushing Ahead With Online Education.
Beyond the obvious hurdle of getting consumers to pay for information they think they can get free elsewhere on the Web, online education companies have failed to dispel the image of e-learning as a feeble alternative to the real thing.
March 13, 2001
Industry Standard: The Advertising Slump.
Now I have never, ever been accused of being a Pollyanna, and Yahoo's announcement is certainly not very comforting for companies that are building businesses on the Net. But I have to say that the Merc's apocalyptic characterization of the situation is more than a little hysterical.
Business Week: Google's Larry Page: Good Ideas Still Get Funded.
But you don't need a huge company, just a computer and a part-time person. So you don't need to have a 100-person company to develop that idea. You can do it in your spare time, you can really work on ideas and see if they take off...
Internet World: Dumb Pipes Are Golden.
Jakob Nielsen. Most Internet analyses view data transport as the worst possible business. After all, moving bits around is the blandest of commodities and is often referred to dismissively as being a "dumb pipe." In real life, good connectivity is far from being a commodity.
ZDNN: High-tech titans put the squeeze on privacy regs.
Aiming to halt the advance of dozens of privacy bills in Congress and in state legislatures across the country, the group Monday went public with four industry-funded studies asserting that privacy legislation would cost consumers billions of dollars annually.
TechWeb: Microsoft Shows Digital Message Filtering.
In a pair of short software demos during a speech to the quadrennial convention of the Association of Computing Machinery by Microsoft president and CEO Steve Ballmer, the company demonstrated an application that serves as "an intuitive secretary" for computer users...
SJ Mercury: Tech future is still bright at ACM conference.
The Nasdaq may have plummeted Monday, but the dream of a high-tech future soared as technologists, creators, researchers and scientists gathered for the quadrennial celebration of computing that has transformed the San Jose McEnery Convention Center into a Geek's World's Fair.
March 14, 2001
Slashdot: Clay Shirky Explains Internet Evolution.
Once email arrives, people have very little patience for walled gardens, and less for mapping arbitrary technological distinctions onto live human relationships. "What do you mean I can't send a message to my mother because she has a Sony Interactive TV and I have a Panasonic?!"
FEED Magazine: You Own Your Own Metadata.
Will Kreth. A company that continues to cling to a business model that refuses to offer its customers the data collected on them is vulnerable to the process of disintermediation -- that is, it risks being cut out of part of the direct relationship it currently enjoys with customers.
IBM developerWorks: Debunking the myths of UI design.
Software development would benefit greatly from extensive study by sociologists, anthropologists, and clinical psychologists. As we await such analyses, let's document some beliefs embedded in the culture of software development, specifically about user interface design.
Inside: Cash Begins Trickling in at Web Sites, as Amazon Honor System Slowly Takes Hold.
Touted as the first fast, easy and elegant way for Web sites to receive much-appreciated financial support from readers, the Amazon Honor System has so far shaped up to be a boon for one already established name but a bust for many other media-world participants.
News.Com: Britannica.com cuts U.S. staff, adds fees.
Britannica.com said it decided to switch to a subscription-based model in response to recent changes in the Internet industry and in an attempt to reach profitability quickly. It has also seen its popularity with Web surfers slip slightly--both at home and at work.
ZDNN: Microsoft nabs scheduling service for .Net.
The start-up's WebAppoint service was launched in the fall of 1999. It allows people to schedule appointments over the Internet. WebAppoint links consumers and companies, and it provides extra capabilities, such as confirmation of appointments via phone or fax.
Salon: A Web of Babel.
Q&A with Esther Dyson. As I said, New.net does not open up the root; it simply overlays it. Anyone is free to do what New.net is doing, but it will create a mess, since the site you reach will start to depend on what ISP you use. At that point, more people may well see the value of ICANN...
March 15, 2001
NY Times: Welcome to the World Wide Web. Passport, Please?
The imposition of jurisdictional laws could mean that online publishers decide either to keep some material off the Internet entirely, for fear of criminal and civil charges filed in different countries or even different states, or to install online gates and checkpoints around their sites...
Business 2.0: The Porn Law That Won't Die.
COPA, aimed at preventing children from accessing "harmful" material on the Internet, spawns arguments typical of any pornography debate. But the Internet factor adds a new spin, and could force the Supreme Court--if it takes the case--to tackle the concept of "community" in the digital age.
Computerworld: New information could play role in Amazon patent dispute.
But it remains unclear whether the newly uncovered information, which is said to point to the possible existence of an earlier patent similar to the one held by Amazon, will actually be useful to New York-based Barnesandnoble when the infringement suit goes to trial later this year.
eCompany: Computing's Unfinished Revolution.
But perhaps the most radical vision came from Michael L. Dertouzos, director of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. In his speech, Dertouzos pointed out that, for all the advantages computer technology has brought us during the past 40 years, automation is still not simple, intuitive, and efficient.
NY Times: Putting Palm and Phone in One Hand, or Pocket.
This isn't one of those trendy microscopic phones by any means. But you won't resent its size for long — the Smartphone is a superbly designed, inventive and versatile gadget that demonstrates, once again, the Microsoftian motto: "If at first your product flops, refine, refine again."
Upside: The wireless Web will come to the U.S. -- eventually.
As vice president of portal development at AT&T Wireless, Tom Trinneer is the point man for bringing a promising wireless service to the U.S. -- one that could finally deliver the Web to cell phones. His partner? NTT DoCoMo, the wireless spin-off of Japanese phone giant NTT.
LA Times: Demand for 3G Spectrum Pits Education, Military in Battle.
Educators and the military are lobbying furiously to keep from being dislodged. The wireless industry worries that the controversy could significantly postpone its access to new airwaves for the next generation of wireless services. That could put the U.S. further behind Asia and Europe...
USA Today: Consumer group, Web site spar over link.
The Better Business Bureau is demanding that an Israeli company's website take down its link to the consumer protection organization. The demand raises new intellectual property questions about how companies protect their names and logos online.
March 16, 2001
O'Reilly Network: Interoperability, Not Standards.
Clay Shirky. To have standards, you need a standards body. To have interoperability, you just need software and conversations, which is good news, since that's all we have right now. The bad news is that the conversations are still so fragmented and so dispersed.
Business 2.0: The Accidental Activist.
Lessig, who had expected the discussion of his ideas to be confined to the usual academic circles, was overwhelmed. Fate, he concluded, had handed him an irresistible opportunity to educate the masses about the corruption of cyberspace.
The Register: Sony buys PlayStation emulator.
After all the legal action, Sony has finally decided that it's cheaper to buy Connectix off than pursue the case. Given how Sony has always maintained that Connectix was in the wrong, the deal effectively says Sony doesn't care any more.
NY Times: Virginia Court's Decision in Online 'John Doe' Case Hailed by Free-Speech Advocates.
In its decision, the Virginia court said that an anonymous plaintiff could be given subpoena power only if it would suffer exceptional harm, such as a social stigma or extraordinary economic retaliation, as a result of revealing its identity.
Crypto-Gram: The Security Patch Treadmill.
Bruce Schneier. The series of high-profile credit card thefts in January 2000, including the CD Universe incident, were also the result of uninstalled patches. A patch issued eighteen months previously would have protected these companies. What's going on here?
Internet World: Opening the Books.
Though many in the tier-one community, including MCI WorldCom senior vice president Vint Cerf, claim that the move toward openness is an altruistic desire to make the Internet run more efficiently, the real reason is a far more pragmatic one.
The Register: Verio gags EFF founder over spam.
Gilmore believes anti-spam efforts have gone too far, and impact the rights of innocent people. "Verio is filtering me because they were pressured by a pressure group, and they don't have enough intelligence to stand up against that pressure."
March 17, 2001
Glenn Fleishman: Gilmore and Censorship.
I'm sick and tired of people crying censorship when a business enforces contractual rights that happen to involve data flowing. Gilmore's desire to run an open relay is technically pointless and unsophisticated, and a ridiculous necessity in this day and age...
ZDNN: The prerogatives of innovation.
Bob Frankston. Pundits, who tell us they know better and can point to one or two examples of things that should be better, admonish those of us who create products for a living. After all, why do we make people use keyboards when they can just talk to their computers.
NY Times: Web Site Ads, Holding Sway, Start to Blare.
Now, as even the biggest Internet sites struggle with a sharp decline in ad revenue, sites are letting their remaining advertisers occupy a much larger portion of their pages, as well as create ads that move, make noise and otherwise do whatever it takes to attract attention.
eWeek: Gates to shed more light on Microsoft's TabletPC.
Sources close to the company said Gates will offer considerable detail on his plans for the TabletPC, and how it slots into Microsoft's vision going forward, in his March 26 keynote address at the Anaheim, Calif., conference, which looks at the future of computing.
ZDNN: Digital TV snowed in by 'Napster factor'.
Cable and satellite companies have a proposal in place with content providers that would allow severe restrictions to be placed on the recording of digital programming. Besides setting copy limits, the proposal requires cable operators and broadcasters to "down resolution" of specified digital programming...
Wired News: Publish, Perish or Pay Up?
Now, scholars are attempting to reclaim control by creating alternatives to leading commercial publications that have triggered this "journal crisis." A new, nonprofit, online venture, The Electronic Society for Social Scientists, is offering journals that are at least 50 percent cheaper...
March 18, 2001
Industry Standard: Microsoft Moves to Turn .Net Into a Reality.
On Monday, Bill Gates will announce a blitzkrieg campaign to transform Microsoft's much-ballyhooed .Net Web services initiative from an abstract technical notion into a concrete business idea. According to a source familiar with the project it is enormously ambitious...
Useit.Com: Stationary Mobility.
One of the mobile Internet's greatest benefits may well come from devices that rarely move at all. Once cellular Internet connectivity becomes ubiquitous and cheap, many devices will connect to the net without wires. Take it out of the box and feed it power, and it is connected.
SJ Mercury: There's no free lunch on the Internet.
Dan Gillmor. We've just about finished dessert at the Internet's free lunch. Mmmm, such a tasty meal. Sooner or later, though, we'll have to start paying for what we consume. The free lunch came courtesy of investors, many of whom turned out to be classic suckers
Computer User: End of the free ride.
With a slowed stock market and dot-coms going under, many are considering what was once a Net heresy: charging consumers for Internet content. But the burning question is whether consumers will actually open their wallets.
Lighthouse: What price feedback email?
Customers expect more and better service. But now that the easy money of the dot-com boom has evaporated, many Web site operators want tighter cost control. And hiring people to write coherent and intelligent answers to feedback email costs real money.
Web Review: The Myth of 800x600.
Developing fixed-size Web pages is a fundamentally flawed practice. Not only does it result in Web pages that remain at a constant size regardless of the user's browser size, but it fails to take advantage of the medium's flexibility. Nonetheless, Web site creators continue to develop fixed pages.
Good Experience: Bits as Art.
I'm excited to see bits explored as art, since it will help us understand this new form of matter in a new way. Yet I see the limitations that (as always) bits bring to the issue. For example, how does one collect bit-based art?
NY Times: Bit by Bit, the Digital Age Comes Into Artistic Focus.
Like Mr. Blake, who trained as a painter but now employs techniques more closely allied with filmmaking, photography, installation or digital design, the artists pioneering these new combinatory forms are producing work that thwarts conventional categorization.
March 19, 2001
Business 2.0: The Internet Revolution Rages On.
Clay Shirky. We have most of the important aspects of the paperless office-speed and convenience-while still having paper. Twenty-five years from now we will have the most important aspects of the next economy-reach and transparency-while still having the corner store.
Interactive Week: Robo Cop-Out.
Lay the blame for the collapse of the Internet economy on poorly designed computers and applications that lack a human focus. That's the message put forth by the handful of big-picture information technology visionaries who gathered for the ACM's Beyond Cyberspace conference...
Washington Post: Thinking Outside the Box.
Now a line has been crossed. With gizmos mutating at wild rates, engineers love the endless stomach-churning ride of creating the firstest with the newest. They've dragged us along with them. We're climbing a slope of interlocking innovations so steep as to seem more like a cliff...
The Register: Pay-to-Play: Microsoft erects .NET tollgate.
But almost unnoticed in the rush to discuss the usage (or abusage) of SOAP, XML and other technology specs is the more significant story. Microsoft promises to make Hailstorm a "business center", piped through the Passport hub. In other words, it's pay-to-play.
Microsoft: Building the User-centric Experience.
By putting the user in control, HailStorm makes it possible for the technology in your life to work together on your behalf, rather than the current situation in which you have to adapt to the technology and act as the human bridge between different technologies in your life.
CIO: The Invisible Ball and Chain.
Q&A with Michael Dertouzos. Wireless' best attributes match the human ability to move and can convey information, regardless of where and when. And that's important. Wherever you are and whenever you need to be reached, information can be conveyed to you.
NY Times: Taking Customer Service Seriously.
Beyond the obvious benefit of helping customers find answers to their questions without hitting the "help" button or typing key words into a search box, these technologies can help create much more user-friendly sites, so customers do not have problems in the first place...
MIT Technology Review: A Bright Future for Displays.
Organic light-emitting diodes are shaping up as a superdisplay: brighter, thinner, lighter and faster than LCDs. They also take less power to run, offer higher contrast, look equally bright from all angles and have the potential to be much cheaper than their conventional counterparts.
EE Times: HomeRF 2.0 wireless LAN spec loses Intel.
Intel Corp. will use IEEE 802.11b in its next-generation AnyPoint wireless-LAN products, due out in the third quarter, instead of the HomeRF 2.0 wireless-LAN standard, in a move that some analysts said could threaten the future of HomeRF.
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.
March 21, 2001
Industry Standard: Adobe in Wonderland.
Lawrence Lessig. Many companies are developing technologies to make it easy to deliver content and easier to control the content that's delivered. The crunch comes when the means of control in cyberspace become more powerful than the means of control in real space.
MIT Technology Review: The Net Effect: Internet on a Chip.
Simson Garfinkel. That barrier is starting to crumble, thanks largely to a bit of tchnical wizardry by iReady. This company has reduced the Internet Protocol circuitry onto a silicon chip. The device lets companies connect dumb machines to the Internet without using expensive microprocessors.
MSNBC: As Congress mulls Web privacy, Microsoft pushes its own solution.
Microsoft is working overtime to drum up support, sending its chief privacy officer, Richard Purcell, up and down Capitol Hill to preview P3P for lawmakers. This week, the software maker also is demonstrating P3P to the FTC and the Washington community of privacy activists.
Builder.Com: The Church of Usability.
In the quest for effective sites, designers seek enlightened individuals--sages--to guide them to a truer path. These gurus of the GUI are respected; their books are sold out, and their lectures and seminars become standing-room-only love-ins.
Networld World: Changes afoot at the IETF.
The Internet Engineering Task Force enters the post-Internet-bubble era with a new leader, an evolving set of protocol development projects and a shrinking pool of attendees. These shifts in the Internet's premier standards-setting body are evident at a meeting this week.
digitalMASS: New economy spin on old crime of identity theft.
Instead, security experts say Abdallah, who was arrested last month, apparently used ''identity theft'' tactics well known to private investigators and con artists. With some old-fashioned trickery, he obtained vital information about prominent people...
Salon: Patents are your friends.
Specifically, the joint venture will give open-source and free-software developers the chance to "defensively publish." For a fee of $20 per document, software inventors will be able to place their innovations in a searchable software database.
NY Times: Cryptologists Discover Flaw in E-Mail Security Program.
According to a statement issued yesterday by ICZ, an information technology company in Prague with about 500 employees, the cryptologists, Vlastimil Klima and Tomas Rosa, found the problem while doing research on secure communications for the Czech government.
Industry Standard: A Fly in PGP's Ointment?
PGP creator Phil Zimmermann reconstructed the type of attack detailed in the press release and learned that a breach as described by ICZ would not compromise encrypted messages, but could enable an attacker to tamper with digital signatures...
March 22, 2001
MIT Technology Review: Remembrance of Things Past.
Simson Garfinkel. And yet more than three decades into the "Information Age," data is something that we still don't quite understand how to steward. Data is not physical, not something that you can lock away today and hope you'll be able to access in 10 or 20 years.
Business Week: Someone Has to Pay the Freight.
The romantic notion of the early Web as open-to-all cybermarket for ideas and goods has been eclipsed. In large part, that's because the ads that were supposed to foot the bill for the democratic digital bazaar simply aren't delivering.
InfoWorld: VeriSign issues false Microsoft digital certificates.
Microsoft on Thursday began to warn users that VeriSign erroneously issued two digital certificates to someone masquerading as a Microsoft representative in January, potentially giving the fraudulent party the means to trick users into running malicious programs...
Christian Science Monitor: 'Trust, but encrypt' is new theme for Internet.
Yet for all the good sessions offered, one of the best was Phil Zimmermann's. In the online privacy community, Mr. Zimmermann is a legitimate hero, an individual who literally took on the US government and some of its most shadowy intelligence operations ... and won.
Fast Company: "But Wait, You Promised ...".
One of the promises of the new economy was that the customer would finally be in charge. We weren't supposed to need to call customer care -- but if we did, then someone would take our call quickly. Everyone believes in delighting the customer.
AtNewYork: Europe's RealMapping Brings IP Tracking to US.
Want to know whether to serve up a Flash-enabled site or other high-speed geegaws? RealMapping says its line speed detector helps a site decide how quickly the viewer can view its products based on whether the connection is ISDN, DSL, T1 or T3 for example.
USA Today: 'Audrey' first casualty of Internet appliance collapse.
But something's happened on the way to the Next Big Thing in technology: Not many people have bought the idea — or the gadgets. On Wednesday, 3Com announced it is discontinuing its Internet appliances, including the Audrey and the planned Kerbango Internet radio.
NY Times: Faster Data Connection Waits Impatiently in Line.
Like other forms of DSL technology, VDSL sends signals along standard twisted-pair copper telephone lines. It has been installed from Phoenix to Toronto by Next Level Communications. Fewer than 100,000 houses in the United States have VDSL connections through Next Level.
March 23, 2001
Internet World: Ask Jeeves Mixes Ads with Content.
Called Branded Response, the format provides a few inches of text space, plus an advertiser logo and graphic, that appears just after Jeeves's list of questions that he is able to answer, but before the standard list of search engine results.
NY Times: When Linking Isn't Better Business.
The Better Business Bureau did not say it was contemplating a lawsuit to enforce its request. Nevertheless, the letter raises an interesting question that courts are just beginning to grapple with: Is there ever a time when a link is unlawful?
SF Chronicle: The Wireless Underground.
The price of creating an 802.11b network -- a satisfyingly fast protocol for wireless ethernet -- has come down so much over the past several months that over-eager consumers are setting them up at work and at home with very little regard for security.
Wired News: Flat Rate a Fat Bust in Europe.
The main reason for the failure of flat-rate Internet is that there is no flat-rate phone. The ex-monopoly telcos have a steady stream of cash flowing in from metered local calls, and prying this easy revenue away has met with very limited success.
eCompany: Would You Buy a Patent License From This Man?
Of course, if you talk to those who follow the PTO closely, they'll tell you that the TechSearches of the world are symptomatic of a larger problem: an overworked, underfunded PTO issuing hundreds -- if not thousands -- of ill-advised patents.
NY Times: 'BitStreams' and 'Data Dynamics': Creativity, Digitally Remastered.
And there is no denying the inevitability and multiple implications of the big message here, which we discount at the risk of sheer stupidity: Technology is changing how artists, especially young ones, make all types of art and, in turn, how we experience it.
Industry Standard: Reuters/Microsoft Product Could Bring IM Stock Trading.
The information group announced Thursday that Reuters.Net messaging was under development with Microsoft and 25 leading financial institutions. It is expected to be available later this year and will provide secure, encrypted real-time messaging both within and between major organisations.
Forbes: More PDA Phones.
The latest entrants in the increasingly crowded product niche come from overseas. Samsung of South Korea used the CTIA Wireless 2001 trade show to display working models of the SPH-1300, which will join the chorus of phones that wear a second hat as PalmPilot.
March 24, 2001
Industry Standard: Showdown at the Lexis-Nexis Corral.
The central issue: whether the Times and other publications are obligated to pay freelance authors for electronically redistributing, via a computerized database, such as Nexis.com, or on CD-ROM, work that was originally published in newspapers and magazines.
InfoWorld: Antarcti.ca aims to map the Web.
The technology, dubbed Visual Net, works much like a paper-based map in that users click on a region, such as Literature, and that leads them to a map containing more options within the category. From there, a user might drill into Russian Literature, then eventually to a specific author...
Business Week: Who Needs 3G Anyway?
Now that the frenzy has died down and the winners grasp how much 3G mobile services will cost, Blu isn't feeling so blue. It's banking instead on something called 2.5G, a long-planned upgrade to the existing Europeanwide wireless-phone system.
Industry Standard: Bringing the Desktop Into the Net Age.
Scopeware, the name of Gelernter's software, translates the file-folder metaphor into "streams" of information that combine e-mail, Web pages, Word documents, spreadsheets and any other type of information into a chronological database represented by cascading index cards.
March 25, 2001
SJ Mercury: With deception everywhere, Net calls for hierarchy of trust.
Dan Gillmor. Sometimes I want to tell you about information I've garnered from such a forum. If the fact in question didn't come from a source I trust, I check it out. Consumers of online information need to develop that same sort of policy. We need a hierarchy of trust.
Glenn Fleishman: Trust Me. Or, trust but encryptify.
A change like this could be implemented in months. It would spread like wildfire. And, within a year or so, eliminate the vast majority of spam, which is sent through unsecured open relays and unscrupulous providers who would be shut out of this new system. By choice, not by law.
NY Times: Microsoft Relies Again on an Inner Circle.
But as Microsoft sets off to jump beyond the desktop PC, the men closest to Mr. Gates — veteran technologists and rising stars — are no monolith. Each brings a personality and perspective that diversifies the technological mix.
Lighthouse: Web project? Buy this book.
Yes, he makes the standard noises about Web project management's unique challenges. But he also borrows extensively from the wisdom and rigour which software project managers have developed over the past third of a century.
March 26, 2001
Business 2.0: Hawkins Talks.
Q&A with Jeff Hawkins. I've got a long-term hat on here. We're going to be around for 20 years. Ten years from now it's going to be awesome. It's going to be like having a T1 line in your pocket for no cost. What do you do with that? What do you do with a persistent server in your pocket?
InfoWorld: Transmeta finds a home in Microsoft's Tablet PC.
Microsoft is working with Transmeta to incorporate Transmeta's Crusoe processor in the software maker's Tablet PC, a portable computer due next year that will allow users to jot down handwritten notes using a touch-screen pen, Transmeta announced Monday.
NY Times: Hyperbole Still Outruns Reality on the Wireless Web.
Out of fashion are grandiose visions of consumers wearing goggles fitted with three-dimensional maps of cityscapes. Instead, many of the industry's small companies are focusing on relatively more mundane services, like sending short text messages over mobile phones.
EE Times: Ethernet begins sprint to bring broadband home.
A technical study group has taken the first steps toward bringing Ethernet into the home to challenge digital subscriber lines and cable modems as the predominant means for supplying broadband access to consumers.
Business Week: A Cracked Cornerstone of Net Security.
The good news is there's no evidence the phony certificates were used to trick consumers into downloading malicious software. But the ease with which an impostor could obtain a high-level certificate calls into question one of the major pillars of security for electronic commerce.
Network World: Patent flap slows multilingual domain name plan.
The IETF's Internationalized Domain Name working group recently discovered that an Ann Arbor, Mich., start-up named Walid received a patent on Jan. 30 that appears to cover many aspects of the technical solution developed by the working group.
News.Com: Adobe to unveil 3D software.
An auto dealership, for instance, could have a Web site where visitors walk into a virtual showroom. A visitor--in an animated icon form--could look at cars in different rooms, talk to other shoppers, and step up to a kiosk where a salesman stands by, eager to answer questions.
SF Chronicle: Beyond the Banner.
Other new marketing techniques include selling advertisements in the previously commercial-free zone of instant messaging windows. Companies are also emphasizing pop-up windows -- extra browsers that appear out of nowhere to offer product information.
March 27, 2001
Internet World: All Hail HailStorm, Savior of the Web.
Jakob Nielsen. So far, Microsoft has not been particularly successful in getting developers to ship significantly more Internet solutions for Windows than for other platforms. But HailStorm could change that, since it presents a simple choice: launch a service for HailStorm and get paid money...
MSDN Online: Critical Thinking in Web and Interface Design.
Developers and designers should all have some awareness of what good critical thinking looks like and the process used to generate it. Critical thinking surfaces in three places in a Web or software development effort: planning, idea generation, and project management.
News.Com: Post-Napster policing reopens ISP wounds.
But in a peer-to-peer model, songs and other copyrighted material are located on individual computers, not the host's servers. This has prompted some ISPs to say that the record industry and copyright holders are overstepping their bounds.
Salon: Who is spying on your downloads?
The newest tactic is surveillance. Increasingly, the recording industry is watching individual users on any given peer-to-peer network, using programs like Copyright Agent and Media Tracker to discern who is downloading what and when.
Inside: Wireless Lessons, The Hard Way.
Tom Watson and Jason Chervokas. Ask consumers with broadband access what they do with their fat pipes, and you'll find out it's the same thing they did with their narrow pipes-the No. 1 activity is e-mail. They just do more of it, more quickly.
ZDNN: Bush opposes Euro privacy rules.
At issue are proposed "standard clauses" for contracts between U.S. and European firms regarding exchanges of customer data. The clauses would obligate U.S. firms to operate under European Union privacy standards, which are much stricter than U.S. law.
Internet Week: Sprint Offers Wireless Broadband in Chicago.
Sprint's fixed-wireless high-speed Internet service, Sprint Broadband Direct, is now available in Chicago. The two-way wireless technology features an "always-on" broadband connection with download speeds ranging from 512 Kbps to 1.5 Kbps and upstream rates up to 256 Kbps.
March 28, 2001
Salon: Microsoft storm warning.
Scott Rosenberg. HailStorm purports to give us more control. But there is no escaping the simple fact that Microsoft is asking us all to move our data from its current home on our desktops into a paid service on a server inside a Microsoft data center -- Bill Gates' Control Room.
NY Times: A Turf Fight for the Airwaves.
Later this week the Bush administration and the staff of the Federal Communications Commission will issue the latest two reports in a continuing review. That rule making will set the course of telecommunications policy and spectrum management for the next generation.
Computerworld: Where Humans and Machines Meet.
The conference drew national news coverage and attention with a lineup of 15 provocative speakers and an exposition of head-turning technology fresh from university and corporate research labs. ACM1 was an exploration of how IT is changing the way we live and gather data.
Business 2.0: Paradise Lost?
But NEC researchers are facing more than simple belt-tightening: Like their colleagues at California's Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and New Jersey's Bell Labs, they are being asked to shift their focus to areas where payoffs are less than light years away.
FEED Magazine: Bell Curves and Bitstreams.
Bitstreams, an exhibition of digital art that opened at the Whitney Museum last week, is emblematic of the peaking curve, and so it's not surprising that it suffers from a blinding, irrational exuberance.
NY Times: Corporate Sites Seem to Skimp on the Facts.
A new study indicates that corporate Web sites often fail at what might seem most important: getting out the corporate message. It found that in many cases, reporters could not use the sites to get information as basic as a company's phone number.
Business 2.0: HomeRF On the Ropes.
The longtime standards fight in the home-networking market appears to be reaching an endgame. Intel announced last week it will scale back support for HomeRF and shift the focus of its development efforts to 802.11b--also known as Wi-Fi.
March 29, 2001
EE Times: IBM to spring Roentgen hi-res LCD monitor.
While academicians and human-factor researchers working in industry testified to the increased productivity that high-resolution displays can bring, executives questioned whether the displays' higher costs would have perceived value in mainstream markets.
Fortune: The Dot-Com That Time Forgot.
Eventually, he arrives at the nondescript space he shares with a new colleague, Jennifer Erdmann. Working back to back, the two put their classic liberal arts educations to work by "optimizing" the ads Google sells to companies looking for a highly targeted audience.
ZDNN: Sony puts a new spin on Net Appliances.
The eVilla, a device with a 15-inch monitor and built-in speakers will allow people to browse the Web through a dial-up or broadband connection. First shown at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, Sony is positioning eVilla as an entertainment portal for the home.
USA Today: Study: Sites still violating kids' privacy.
The researchers spent 14 minutes reading the Applejacks.com policy, and were still confused by some portions. But the Chevroncars.com policy took about 16 minutes to read but featured pictures of "Wally the Warning Squirrel" cautioning children that their personal information would be used.
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Internet Studies 1.0: a Discipline Is Born.
It has been a year since Black April, when the air started going out of the dot-com bubble, at a cost to investors and businesses of many billions. You might assume there could not be a worse time for a field calling itself "Internet studies." You would be wrong.
March 30, 2001
Interactive Week: Sony vs. Sony.
The media behemoth is the umbrella for both Sony Music Entertainment and Sony Electronics — and their increasingly conflicted copyright policies. Copyright has always been a point of friction between content and consumer electronics companies.
Web Review: Transmedia Pioneers: The Future According to Nielsen and Laurel.
According to Web usability gurus Jakob Nielsen and Brenda Laurel of the Nielsen Norman Group, these and other unlikely pioneers are connecting experience, technology, and content in ways that put them years ahead of the fold.
Interactive Week: Beyond The Browser.
Bruce Tognazzini and Jakob Nielsen. Browsers kicked off the Web revolution, but it's time to retire them to their rightful place in the Computer Museum and get more powerful tools to support the hours of work and play we are all going to spend on the Internet every day in the future.
EE Times: Microsoft shuts Windows on Bluetooth support.
Microsoft Corp. will not support Bluetooth in the next major version of Windows, executives said this week, portraying the technology as not ready for prime time. Nor will Windows XP, a version of the operating system aimed broadly at consumer and business users...
ZDNN: Will Real's MusicNet play for pay?
In the latest step toward developing online music subscriptions, three big record companies are negotiating to license their music to RealNetworks Inc. for use in its planned subscription service, tentatively called MusicNet.
Inside: New York Times Digital Sees Subscriptions as Key to Its Future.
The New York Times is climbing aboard the online subscription bandwagon, sort of. Its online unit, the New York Times Digital, is prepping an array of new, paid products for its 15 million registered users. But the core news of its sites, which include NYTimes.com and Boston.com, will remain free.
Interactive Week: AltaVista Adds Asian Languages To BabelFish.
BabelFish, which can be found at world.altavista.com, already performs more than a million translations per day, and is the first translation service to support traditional Asian characters in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
NY Times: Movie Industry Frowns on Professor's Software Gallery.
Meanwhile the gallery continues to grow. Programmers have been competing to come up with the shortest possible code for descrambling DVD encryption. The record-holder is now just 434 bytes long, small enough to fit on a business card.
March 31, 2001
MSNBC: Congress asks Commerce Dept. to probe domain-name contracts.
If ICANN’s board accepts the contracts, which most believe it will do, the deal still past muster with the Commerce Department. Now the House Commerce Committee wants the Commerce Secretary Don Evans to take a closer look at the validity of those contracts.
InfoWorld: Is Network Solutions exploiting the rules or just aggressively marketing?
You'd think, now that Network Solutions has lost its domain registration monopoly, it might be a little less arrogant and a little more customer-sensitive than in the past. But reports to The Gripe Line indicate that would be wishful thinking.
eWEEK: Adobe, Macromedia enter new dimension.
Adobe Systems Inc. released a beta version of its new Atmosphere software, designed to help developers build and deploy virtual worlds. Chief rival Macromedia Inc. isn't likely to be far behind, with a company official saying the debut of its 3-D-enabled Shockwave player is only weeks away.
SJ Mercury: The future of Web design from one who knows it.
Q&A with Jakob Nielsen. The current metaphors are publishing-based or, even worse, television-based. They're not very empowering and they're not oriented toward solving people's problems. They're more oriented toward just throwing things at you.
NY Times: Studies Find Scant Availability of Spectrum for Wireless Internet.
But the studies of military, other governmental and commercial users of the airwaves concluded in effect that the spectrum had become overcrowded real estate with little room for coexistence between the current tenants who refuse to give up space to the competing claims of outsiders.
The Economist: Whodunnit?
Fifteen years later, computer forensics is a growing commercial and legal activity. It even has its own academic literature. Computer forensics refers to the set of tools and techniques that is needed to find, preserve and analyse fragile digital evidence...
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