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April 1, 2001
Dan Bricklin: The "Computer as Assistant" Fallacy.
This type of thinking strikes me as strange. We don't ask for our automobiles to be more natural and intelligent, nor do we call for the next generation of cars to be like chauffeurs. With cars, we talk about responsiveness, comfort, power, cargo size, and safety.
Useit.Com: Corporate Websites Get a 'D' in PR.
Corporations spend millions on PR, and yet the press sections of their websites often fail to meet journalists' most basic information needs. In our recent usability study, journalists found answers to only 60% of their questions across a range of corporate sites.
April 2, 2001
AskTog: Replay TV.
The Replay TV incident is different: users never requested a sharp reduction in the functionality of their machines, no notice was given that the machines would be downgraded in this way, and the users had no way of avoiding the damage that was done.
Industry Standard: Patent Reform Pending.
A year later, the agency is issuing fewer patents. But that hasn't satisfied detractors in industry and Congress, who will hold hearings on patent reform this month. Since last year, the patent office has slowed down the examination process by adding a second level of review...
News.Com: Will the "refresh" button become obsolete?
A surfer on Excite, for example, would load a full page from the original source, but then the site would establish a direct connection between Bang's network and her browser. This would remain open as long as she is on the site, updating changes in the page as they're made.
Network World: Faster 'Net growth rate raises fears about routers.
Nobody knows how big or how active the routing table can get before the Internet's core routers start crashing. But current projections show that if the growth goes unchecked, the Internet could face a router processing-power crunch in as soon as 18 months.
NY Times: Borders Returning to the Internet.
Online advertising companies, too, are increasingly desperate to use geographic targeting tools to reinforce their clients' faith in Internet marketing. In short, for a growing number of companies, this will be the year when the borderless Internet economy becomes an outmoded concept.
Marketing Computers: IPMapper Literally Targets Online Users.
Online marketers can know exactly where their customers are, says Daniel Westrick, director of Caimis Geo. "Right now people have crude web logging applications," he adds, which only identify obvious foreign codes on domain names.
Upside: RealNetworks grabs largest share of MusicNet.
But CEO Rob Glaser, who has long complained about how hard it is to purchase music protected with rights management schemes, said the technology will take a "guardrails approach, not a Fort Knox approach … We want products that are easy to use."
News.Com: Anti-piracy plans for hardware fail.
It is possible, but unlikely, that another similar proposal could be introduced before the current set of standards is finalized later this year, an NCITS representative said. The standards are likely to be approved in August, providing little time to submit, discuss, and vote on any new pieces.
April 3, 2001
Interactive Week: Cerf Says Telephone Will Be Vital To Net's Future.
And Cerf worries that DSL service, which is being pushed as a solution to high-speed access needs, will eventually disappoint both consumers and providers. "DSL may eventually turn out to be more expensive to maintain as a physical plant than optical fiber," he says.
Interactive Week: New Players Pull Fiber Into Neighborhoods.
With the promise of the high-speed Internet dashed by poky copper wires in most homes, new efforts are being made to lay optical fiber closer to customers. The regional Bells have been slow to push fiber into neighborhoods because it's expensive.
NY Times: Flaw in Popular Wireless Standard.
In a draft of a paper titled "Your 802.11 Wireless Network Has No Clothes," the researchers describe how the access control systems that are designed to protect wireless networks against hostile users can, in fact, be easily deceived.
InfoWorld: Mobile security flaw delivers yet another blow to IPv6.
The discovery of security flaws in the proposed Mobile IPv6 protocol means the Internet Engineering Task Force will have to develop a new method for authenticating roaming devices that use IPv6 addresses. This development means delays of months for Mobile IPv6...
Computerworld: ICANN approves contract changes with VeriSign.
The board of directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers approved a hotly debated new agreement with VeriSign Inc. to give the company continued oversight of the lucrative .com Internet domain name registry through 2007.
Business 2.0: eBay Updates Privacy Policy.
The new privacy policy, which takes effect May 15 but is already updated on the site, reflects a growing awareness among online retailers that they need to address possible future scenarios, and let customers know what will happen to their information.
MIT Technology Review: Fiber Crosses the 10-Trillion-Bit Barrier.
Developers traditionally report record-setting "hero experiments" at the annual show. Typically, the maximum capacity of commercial systems lags behind the record-setting pace by only a few years. On March 13, Siemens A.G. announced it had transmitted 3.2 trillion bits per second...
April 4, 2001
NY Times: Auditing Classes at M.I.T., on the Web and Free.
M.I.T. plans on Wednesday to announce a 10-year initiative, apparently the biggest of its kind, that intends to create public Web sites for almost all of its 2,000 courses and to post materials like lecture notes, problem sets, syllabuses, exams, simulations, even video lectures.
- Industry Standard: From October 22, 1999; Ivy Online
Seattle Times: People-friendly computers are researchers' goal.
They'll discuss improving keyboards, screen layouts and mice, but there's far more at stake at the CHI 2001 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, which continues through Thursday. Participants believe that if they can improve the machines, they'll improve the world.
News.Com: Microsoft's big thinker.
Q&A with Jack Breese, assistant director of Microsoft Research. We'd like to be able to interact with a computer just like you interact with another human being. And we've used that expression to combine various aspects of our research program...
Editor & Publisher: Mining Your Site For Multiple Revenue Streams.
Steve Outing. We're definitely in a phase where online news executives are assessing all options, and looking at new potential revenue streams. For this week's column, I'll examine some of the more innovative approaches that news sites are taking or thinking about...
ZDNN: Is P2P plunging off the deep end?
Now, with technology funding in a funk after the bursting of the Internet bubble, those problems suddenly don't seem so small anymore. And the P2P party, which once looked like an exception to the dot-com downturn, seems more like a wake.
NY Times: Wireless Companies Ask Suppliers to Share the Costs.
Short of cash after spending billions to win high- speed digital wireless licenses, Europe's mobile phone companies are asking the companies that sell them equipment to share the cost of building the new networks.
eWEEK: MSN Music Service one of many new services to come.
On the heels of an announcement by rivals RealNetworks and AOL Time Warner to create a paid, online music-subscription service, Microsoft Corp. has launched, as anticipated, its own MSN Music Service.
Forbes: PocketPC Phone.
The latest entrant in this trendy class of products comes from Siemens, the German electronics conglomerate that is aiming to compete head-to-head with Sweden's Ericsson, as well as Motorola in the U.S., for their share of the mobile-phone market.
April 5, 2001
Dan Bricklin: Metaphors, Not Conversations.
A good metaphor aids in developing trust between the program and the user. Its strengths and weaknesses are apparent. It is a tool that the user can work "with". It provides a "space" of some sort that can be explored and manipulated for the user's purpose.
Seattle Times: Better times ahead for man, machine.
Computers that sing out when messages arrive, surf the Internet from a car dashboard and enable the disabled to scroll through text by waving their arms were among the technologies showcased yesterday in Seattle at the world's largest gathering of computer-usability designers.
Web Techniques: Click to Accept.
When I first launched the program, I was greeted by a grey dialog box containing a copy of Adobe's "click-wrap" license, a long, tedious document filled with legal terms and phrases. Usually I just scroll to the bottom of these things, but this time I read it all the way through.
Wired News: MS and Its Terms of Embarrassment.
Rosenberg's column seems to mark the first time anyone bothered to take a look at the terms of service -- including the people at Microsoft, apparently. There's reason to believe that Microsoft's defense -- that the terms haven't been updated in a while -- is true...
Red Herring: Let's play with Microsoft.
Microsoft is showing a more playful side these days, with Xbox, the game platform that wowed game enthusiasts and technologists alike, and new software tools that will provide consumers with the ability to create their own games and animations.
NY Times: New Rules for Net Searches: Location, Location, Location.
In SRI's proposed .geo system, the world would be carved into "cells," each represented by a local Internet server or servers, called georegistries. These cells would vary in size, depending on how much information was available for a particular geographic area.
Mappa.Mundi Magazine: What Does the Internet Look Like, Jellyfish Perhaps?
The Internet is often likened to an organic entity and this analogy seems particularly appropriate in the light of some striking new visualizations of the complex mesh of Internet pathways. The images are results of a new graph visualization tool, code-named Walrus...
April 6, 2001
Salon: Personalize me, baby.
Like Firefly, Media Unbound is offering a personalized recommendation system that will suggest bands you might enjoy, based on ones that you already like. Unlike Firefly, Media Unbound does what it promises to do: introduce new, obscure bands you'll actually like.
Publish: Labor of love.
Christopher Locke. The real difference between USA Today and Joe’s page is not the inflated notion of "objectivity," but production budget and ROI. Joe doesn’t have a business plan. He doesn’t need one. With Web entry costs so low, return on investment is immaterial.
Wired News: Fine Print Not Necessarily in Ink.
And that's the problem with terms of service agreements. The ubiquitous, legalistic documents posted on every big site are rarely read by anyone, yet they often grant sweeping rights to companies. Or do they? Legal experts say the soundness of such terms is shaky at best.
Webmonkey: IE 6 Switches to Standards.
Jeffrey Veen. The new version is essentially two browsers: one that faithfully does things the old way, bugs and all, and one that follows Netscape's lead and gets the standards right. As a result, you get to decide which way your page should be displayed.
Glenn Fleishman: A Billion Conflicts a Second.
The groups representing each standard are talking, but the results of conversations won’t affect currently deployed equipment; it may be until 2002 until new standards that allow better co-existence find their way into shipping equipment.
ZDNN: Start-up builds around alternative wireless standard.
Chipmaking start-up Atheros is tuning in to 802.11a, a standard that promises both higher performance and lower power consumption. This summer, the company will begin selling its new wireless kit, called the AR500.
Network World: High-speed wireless LANs are coming.
Net executives face a range of problems - and opportunities - with the faster radio technology. These include installing many more wireless access points than today's wireless LANs need, higher power consumption for laptop interface cards, security, and remote administration and network management.
April 7, 2001
Lighthouse: Let me write that down: the genius of documentation.
When the players in a project take up the written statement of the project's needs, update it, read it, play with it, pick holes in it, then the project will more likely than not succeed. If such "requirements" documentation languishes, or doesn't exist, the project risks foundering.
Wired News: Germany's Net Idea: Electricity.
Internet users in Germany will soon have a shockingly innovative way to access the Net, when RWE Powerline rolls out Internet services over a small part of its power grid in July. The technology is called Power Line Communications, and it could change the way many people get online.
PC Magazine: WAP Usability: What's Holding it Back?
Q&A with Jakob Nielsen. Right now, my favorite device is the Blackberry. And I say 'right now' because I don't necessarily think it's going to be the long-term solution either. [The long term solution] could be the Palm Pilot. It could be the Pocket PC. It could be the BlackBerry.
Fortune: The Buzz on Tablet PCs.
As a journalist who constantly uses pen and paper to take notes, I have to admit I am intrigued by the Tablet PC, a notebook computer that is supposed to combine the power of a desktop with the convenience of a handheld.
NY Times: Innovative Webmasters Chase Fame at Browserday.
This was the fourth annual Browserday and the first held in the United States. Mieke Gerritzen, a graphic designer in Amsterdam, helped found the contest in 1998 to encourage students in the visual, performing and graphic arts to participate in the future of computing.
April 8, 2001
SJ Mercury: Copyright laws out of balance.
Dan Gillmor. The Virginia Democrat plans to sponsor legislation to change a 1998 law that grossly altered the balance between holders and users of copyrighted material. He's up against one of the most ruthless and best financed opponents in town: the entertainment industry.
Upside: Gigabit Ethernet: Better, faster, cheaper bandwidth.
Gigabit Ethernet's could also be used in the home as a potential alternative to DSL and cable modem service. A recent Forrester Research report said local phone companies could be offering Gigabit Ethernet services to homes by the end of this year.
eWEEK: History repeats itself at Microsoft.
As in the case of the Internet vs. Windows battle, Microsoft's powers-that-be have come down on the side of proprietary platforms, instead of on standards-based ones. And, according to a story in Friday's Wall Street Journal, the NetDocs team has been shifted to Office...
April 9, 2001
O'Reilly Network: Backlash!
Clay Shirky. The unspoken premise of both articles is this: if peer-to-peer is neither a technology or a business model, then it must just be hot air. There is, however a third possibility besides "technology" and "business." The third way is simply this: Peer-to-peer is an idea.
Wired News: Online Newsies Gather, Weep.
Forget about spring, it's now the dead of winter in the new media world. At last weekend's fourth annual New Media Conference at the University of California at Berkeley, organizers handed out purple programs with a photograph of a barren forest on the front.
NY Times: Critics Say VeriSign Still Has Advantage.
But the deal, which extends VeriSign's control of the .com database at least through 2007, is raising concerns among the company's competitors and critics, who say VeriSign may have an unfair advantage in the increasingly lucrative market for reselling Internet addresses.
Wired News: Is U.S. History Becoming History?
Records management experts say the problem started around 1985, when U.S. government agencies began using e-mail and word-processing programs as they changed the way they conducted business. But they did it without a system for preserving electronic files.
Internet World: What Happened to the Fuss over Patents?
And then the talk died down. Speaking at this week's Internet and Intellectual Property Oversight Hearing on Business Method Patents, Rep. Howard Coble said there had been "considerable hype" over business-method patents, but "the excitement exceeds the reality."
Computerworld: 3G wireless speeds fail to match claims.
Carriers acknowledged last week that the average throughput on third-generation mobile wireless networks will be in the range of only one-third to one-half of the peak speeds they hyped in announcements at the recent annual CTIA conference in Las Vegas...
Wired News: Europe Approves Copyright Law.
The new regulations adapt outmoded EU laws to the digital environment, allowing rights holders to prevent the illegal copying of music, films and books protected by copyright. The ministers' adoption follows the European Parliament's approval of the regulations in February.
MIT Technology Review: Remaking the Meeting-Cam.
Apart from cost, the presence of a cameraperson—usually an outsider—has a psychological impact that tends to change the dynamics of group meetings or lectures. The researchers attacked both problems by designing a system that mimics the actions of human camera operators.
April 10, 2001
Scientific American: The Semantic Web.
Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila. The Semantic Web will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users.
Internet World: Innovation Is Alive at PC Forum.
Jakob Nielsen. Esther Dyson's recent PC Forum conference vividly showed that innovation is still alive despite the current downturn in the stock market. Several new technologies addressed the Internet's persistent usability problems. Here are two.
MIT Technology Review: Corporation, Know Thyself.
Lotus Development's Discovery Server targets that very problem. Discovery's biggest promise is not that it can dredge up an obsolete document written by a long-departed corporate drone, but that it can connect you with the people in your company who are most likely to help you...
News.Com: Windows XP won't support USB 2.0.
Microsoft said it will not include support for USB 2.0, the latest iteration of the universal serial bus connection technology, in Windows XP. Microsoft will instead throw its support behind IEEE 1394, also known as FireWire, which was developed by Apple.
Forbes: NBCi: The Proud Peacock's Folly.
NBC's decision to buy back what's left of NBCi seems, at this point, painfully obvious. But NBCi is a virtual museum of Internet nuttiness--a company so rife with folly that it's worth revisiting.
Interactive Week: Motorola: Handhelds, Cell Phones Get Cozy.
A press release on the device appeared prematurely on the Motorola Web site Friday, revealing unannounced details for the U.S. version of the device. The cell phone giant wasn't ready to announce the U.S. version yet but, because of the Web glitch, decided to fill in the blanks.
April 11, 2001
Business 2.0: The Real Wireless Innovators.
Clay Shirky. Wireless telcos would like you to believe that these are all just growing pains, but there is another explanation for the current difficulties of the wireless sector: Telephone companies are not very good at producing anything but telephones.
NY Times: Humor Is at Center of Microsoft's New Campaign.
Although the campaign is likely to be greeted warmly by many white- collar office workers who have long grumbled about the paper clip, it has worried at least one Microsoft researcher who is most closely credited with being the father of the technology underlying the paper clip.
Industry Standard: Just Compensation.
Lawrence Lessig. Congress, from both sides of the aisle, are beginning to wonder whether these laws make sense. We didn't deliver control over FedEx into the hands of the Post Office; should we deliver control over Internet distribution into the hands of the labels?
Business Week: Schools Are Joining the Digital Copyright Battle.
should online colleges be held to a different standard, wonder educators looking to kick-start online programs. Hence, UMUC, which has one of the largest online student bodies in the country, is now leading a charge on Capitol Hill to rewrite copyright law.
USA Today: Internet sites offer their visitors real sense of place.
Several start-ups and tech researchers are betting the Internet is a place, and the future is in treating it that way. In recent weeks, I've talked with two such companies, ViOS and Antarcti.ca. There are lots of others, including start-up UBUBU and researchers in corporate labs...
Publish: Interstitials in the balance.
Usability and profitability are locked in a head-on collision course, giving rise to a basic question: Have surfers convinced advertisers and ad-supported sites that pop-up ads aren’t worth the annoyance they cause?
InfoWorld: E Ink demos first active-matrix electronic ink display.
The new active-matrix electronic ink display provides greater readability, uses less power, and is thinner and lighter than traditional LCDs, CRTs, LEDs, and OLEDs, E Ink said. The technology will be 30 percent thinner and lighter than traditional LCD displays...
April 12, 2001
Computerworld: Truste offers privacy guidelines on mergers, bankruptcies.
Specifically the guidelines call for a third party to oversee any transfer of personal information; recommend that companies give consumers notice about the transfer of their personal data and allow them to decide whether to allow that information to be transferred...
Business Week: Watch Out for This HailStorm.
But even Microsoft can't guarantee total security. Hackers have their ways, and they can be diabolically ingenious. "The more valuable the information, the harder people will try to break in and get it. And, ultimately, anything can be hacked," says Joel Spolsky...
ZDNN: Tech giants out to ambush MP3.
These companies, which have the music industry's blessing, are encouraging those who download music to use new proprietary software formats that make the audio sound significantly better but also make it harder to share copyright-protected songs.
MSNBC: As Microsoft’s Xbox debut nears, fan sites get cocky, rivals wary.
The episode illustrates the tenuous relationship between fan sites and the products they promote. Sites run by zealous video-game fans — often in their free time with their own money — are becoming a strategic link between manufacturers and potential customers.
Business 2.0: Intranets Save Time- But for Whom?
Jakob Nielsen. Thinking about the intranet as a productivity tool can prevent such mishaps. For every service or application you put on the intranet, estimate the impact on users around the company. If usability is low, then training time goes up and productivity goes down.
Wired News: Short Life, Long Death of NBCi.
For those who have followed NBC's Internet strategy from the very beginning, the mixed signals come as no surprise. The network has a history of changing course midstream, which is what analysts and people inside the industry say ultimately led it astray.
April 13, 2001
NY Times: Law Professor Sees Hazard in Personalized News.
Those who applaud the rise of the Daily Me say it increases personal freedom saves wasted time. But in "Republic.com," an alarming new book that explores the relationship between new technologies and democratic self-government, Sunstein distances himself from the cheering crowd.
The Economist: Design Darwinism.
Mr Nielsen and his colleagues of the Nielsen Norman Group are on to something. If use of the web is to become ubiquitous, “user interfaces” have to get a whole lot better. The slow adoption of the wireless Internet in Europe and America so far should be seen as a bright red warning light.
Industry Standard: Minitel – the Beta Internet Breaks Out.
Seizing this opportunity, France Telecom has started to let companies replicate their Web content on Minitel. One such firm, Job Finance, a Web recruitment site for the banking and finance industries, joined Minitel in February and is already making money.
FEED Magazine: What Is It Like to Be a Bat Listening to Santana?
Steven Johnson. Music videos have been wrapping themselves around pop songs since the days of "Video Killed the Radio Star," but that wrapping was an extra layer that required sentient humans to individually "interpret" each song. G-Force does its interpretations on the fly.
The Register: Motorola to axe Palm smartphone.
Motorola's axe continues to swing, with its PalmOS-based smartphone the latest casualty. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Motorola executive told The Register that the Palm collaboration was "extremely unlikely" ever to reach market...
InfoWorld: Anti-UCITA sentiment growing.
Legislators in the states of Iowa, New York, North Dakota, and Oregon have introduced anti-Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act bomb shelter legislation, designed to negate the effects of the software licensing law on residents of those states.
April 14, 2001
Internet World: The Standards Industry.
The rise of fast-moving consortia may not sound the death knell for organizations like ANSI and ISO, but it clearly indicates a decline in their influence. In a world where product life cycles run less than 18 months, a standards process that takes years is doomed to diminished relevance.
Interactive Week: Windows XP To Access Xdrive.
Windows XP is the upcoming consumer version of the operating system that was formerly code named Whistler. The Web Publishing Wizard that is part of Whistler appears when the user chooses to "publish this file to the Web" in the task file pane on the left-hand side of the window.
Internet World: Deconstructing RadioShack.com.
Kara Coyne and Mark Hurst. Search is adequate when you have an idea of what you want, but terrible when you know exactly what you want. A query for “gain mobile antenna” yields no more specific results than one for “antenna.”
EE Times: Windows XP will support USB 2.0, somehow.
Reports claiming that Microsoft favors Apple's 1394 technology over the Universal Serial Bus, or that Windows XP will be entirely devoid of USB 2.0 support, have begun to surface but appear to be misleading. Both Microsoft and Intel have reaffirmed that USB 2.0 drivers are ready to go...
InfoWorld: Microsoft faces Bluetooth dilemma.
The dilemma now for Microsoft is whether or not the company can ensure that Bluetooth-enabled CE devices will have Windows XP-based PC and laptop units with which to synchronize data when the CE devices begin to arrive in 2002, said Stacy Wu, an analyst at Mobile Insights...
April 15, 2001
Useit.Com: The 3Cs of Critical Web Use: Collect, Compare, Choose.
Researchers from Xerox PARC recently presented the mother of all critical incident studies. The big question: What are the important things people do on the Web as a whole? Although individual websites may not generate good critical incidents, the totality of users' online experience surely does.
EE Times: Code technique tunes in Internet broadcasts.
Startup Digital Fountain will launch software coding techniques Monday to deliver broadcast video over IP networks. The approach claims to address one of the Internet's thorniest problems: how to deliver content to a TV-scale audience without throwing the network into gridlock.
SJ Mercury: E-commerce firms gain from unfair taxation.
Dan Gillmor. Forcing local companies to collect sales taxes while exempting out-of-state retailers undermines local businesses. Ultimately, this policy undermines the tax bases of states and local communities that rely, to differing degrees, on sales-tax revenue.
EE Times: MobileStar taps IBM for Starbucks wireless deal.
To help meet an agreement with Starbucks to have 2,000 coffee shops enabled with high-speed wireless connections by yearend, MobileStar Network Corp. has announced its selection of IBM to take care of the site surveys, wireline networks and backbone connectivity.
April 16, 2001
LA Times: Lone Guns Set Sites on Spam.
But spam has inspired dozens of self-appointed spam-busters. In the absence of an effective public [Internet] sheriff, you will have these private ones," says Jonathan Zittrain, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.
digitalMASS: Preserving privacy.
Data privacy has always been a topic that left me completely cold. Honestly, I just couldn't get my bile riled over the notion that someone was tracking what I do online, where I buy gas with my Mobil Speedpass, or what I listen to with my RealNetworks software. Then I met Richard M. Smith.
Internet World: Deconstructing Citibank.com.
Louis Rosenfeld and John Shiple. Lots has changed since the web exploded, but one of the few remaining constants is that large, multifactional organizations will play out their political tensions on their most visible and valuable real estate, the main page.
Online Journalism Review: After the Fall: Late Notes From the Online Journalism Conference.
And through this non-interactive interlude, I was reminded that community-generated comments and no-employee content sites will never replace a cub reporter sitting through a city council meeting and diluting four hours of gibberish into eight inches of copy...
NY Times: TV-Web Link Succeeds in Shopping.
Like its larger competitor, QVC, Home Shopping had an advantage over entertainment television companies in that it was a merchant from the start. But for many entertainment executives, that seemed irrelevant just two years ago.
Industry Standard: Disappearing Act.
Ad killers may be on the verge of critical mass. Makers of ad-erasing software are striking deals with PC and modem manufacturers to include ad-blockers right in the box. Boston-based InterMute expects AdSubtract to be packaged with 70 percent of modems shipped in the U.S. by June.
April 17, 2001
MSNBC: American Airline forbids employee from responding to online queries.
At first, her supervisors were supportive of her efforts, and Ms. Griffin developed a loyal following in cyberspace. But as the months wore on, American became increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of an employee responding to questions without official authorization.
- CIO: From April 1, 2000; End Game.
Q&A with David Weinberger.
Fast Company: Jazzed About Work.
Ozzie offered several lessons on how people can use technology to work together well -- and on how they can work together to create great technology. Every interview is a kind of collaboration. This interview, involving a master of collaboration, was no exception.
DaveNet: The Web is a Writing Environment.
The Web is a conversation too. Some people say, still, that the Web will coalesce to a few big brands. Hah. The Web is at the intersection of publishing and the telephone. How many brands of phone conversation are there? Can you call Sandy to talk with Allison?
eWEEK: Compaq banks on rickety Ricochet for mobile.
Compaq Computer Corp.'s decision to extend mobile Internet services on foundering Metricom Inc.'s Ricochet wireless network is raising questions about the offering and fueling speculation that Metricom may be ripe for a takeover.
eCompany: Some Domain-Name Cases Just Aren't Worth Fighting Over.
So far this year, Canadian Tire has already brought at least two legal actions against websites for infringing on its trademarks, and those two cases are pretty good examples of when you should call the lawyers, and when you should simply "ignore it."
EE Times: Startup aims to encrypt all Web traffic.
Andes announced recently at the RSA Conference 2001 that it is sampling an SSL accelerator system, a box designed to sit in Internet data centers and whose sole function is to decode encrypted traffic as it comes in, and add encryption to traffic on the way out.
Red Herring: Big appliances sell on the Web.
The appliance maker finally seems to have locked onto an Internet strategy that makes sense. Only a year ago, such old-industry companies struggled with the Web amid a dot-com boom that threatened to overcome them and render many of their practices obsolete.
April 18, 2001
Fast Company: Hard Cell.
Those maneuvers took place in early 2000. A little more than a year later, Gary Koerper has found vindication. His company, Kyocera Wireless Corp., has embraced his project -- a highly advanced "Smartphone" -- and is now manufacturing and shipping it by the truckload.
Industry Standard: Smart Call.
While the market's getting crowded with handheld devices that are the digital equivalent of the Swiss Army Knife, the unimaginatively named QCP 6035 is first-to-market with the industry's true killer app: a mobile phone and a Palm combined.
NY Times: Last Boom in Town: Demand Still Grows for Online Security.
But computer security has changed drastically in recent years, and thanks to the boom in computer attacks, security is burgeoning, too: investors have rewarded companies that try to ease the burdens that businesses face.
Economist: The human touch.
For these tasks, which require judgment, expertise and experience that cannot be easily captured in software, some firms have adopted the unusual tactic of using people as part of their network infrastructure. Such “cyborg” companies use computers as levers for the mind...
Computerworld: New Tools Address Denial-of-Service Threat.
Concerns about denial-of-service attacks are resulting in a growing number of products and services aimed at helping companies detect, trace and block the threat. But most of the technologies do little to prevent such attacks outright, users said.
Editor & Publisher: Seattle Gets Afternoon Web Update.
Seattlep-i.com, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Web site, has added an afternoon edition that includes fresh news, stocks, sports, weather, and that evening's events. The 4 O'Clock News update will also include links to updated traffic reports and restaurant reviews.
Wired News: Minitel: The Old New Thing.
Nevertheless, even its most ardent proponents recognize that Minitel can’t hold out forever against the onslaught of the Internet. The momentum behind the Net is simply too great for this enduring symbol of l’exception française to survive in the long term.
April 19, 2001
Wired News: MS Office Helper Not Dead Yet.
Clippy won't automatically show up in Office XP. But a Microsoft researcher working on the logic behind Clippy said that, although the implementation may be off, the technology it is based on is one the company's cornerstones for future products.
Industry Standard: There Must Be a Better Way ...
The problem, Gelernter notes, is that most PC-related advances of the past decade have focused on the Internet; the 25-year-old desktop, meanwhile, has been ignored. Inboxes are overstuffed, desktops are cluttered with icons, and files vanish. The typical PC is a study in disarray.
Interactive Week: Filters Face Free-Speech Test.
The law, called the Children's Internet Protection Act, forces schools and libraries that receive government money to block Web images deemed harmful to minors. San Francisco is taking a stand against what officials there see as censorship by refusing to filter content.
Business Week: IM Vulnerable.
But treating IM as a spoken conversation is a no-no, say some security experts. And using it for sensitive topics is even worse. Why? IM conversations are anything but intimate. Since IM messages are rarely encrypted, they could easily be converted into a potentially damaging record...
InfoWorld: Jabber eyes the enterprise, sets out to encrypt IMs.
Encryption will offer companies a greater degree of security and control of their instant messaging, the company said, adding that the new version of Jabber now supports SSL encryption, a common encryption method used on the Web.
KMWorld: Transforming information retrieval on the Web: a new direction.
This situation has produced two trends in consumer and corporate portals: the increased use of taxonomies where previously reliance had been placed solely on search engines, and the rise of vertical portals devoted to a specific topic or domain.
ZDNN: CERT group to sell cyber-threat warnings.
The effort, to be announced here Thursday, would distribute up-to-the-minute warnings to international corporations about cyber-threats, offer security advice and ultimately establish a seal program to certify the security of companies’ computer networks.
Internet World: VeriSign Stifles the Dot-Competition.
The deal makers at VeriSign demonstrated their shrewdness again in March when they shook hands on an agreement with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers that will extend the VeriSign monopoly over .com domains for at least seven years.
April 20, 2001
Business 2.0: Five Questions with Pamela Samuelson.
It's as though the choices are to have no copyright whatsoever or for copyright owners to have the right to control absolutely everything--and for them to have the power to burden any provider of information or even Internet access provider with making sure that no copyright is ever infringed.
ZDNN: Marketers: Don't play games with us.
It turns out that customers want plainer sites that let them rate brands and product features, according to market research firm Information Resources Inc. Currently, many sites for top brands in beauty care, food and household supplies post games and chats of little interest...
Salon: The stat junkie's perfect high.
For the stat-hungry fan -- and baseball breeds stat-hungry fans like wrestling breeds bloodthirsty ones -- Sean Forman's ludicrously informative, lightning-fast site, all of a year old, has already become as much a part of the season as sunshine, natural grass and the infield fly rule.
News.Com: Ruling seen as victory for online speech.
The decision will make it harder to obtain the identities of people who post messages on the Net unless they are directly named in a lawsuit or are essential to a claim. The ruling comes at a time when it's increasingly common for companies to try to silence critics on Internet message boards...
eCompany: Fiber Is Coming Home -- But Not Soon.
Local telecommunications companies already own extensive copper networks that weave from home to home across the country. Naturally, they'd rather provide new high-speed services on a system that they own than sink dollars into enormous new infrastructure investments.
EE Times: Partners seek to improve efficiency in organic EL displays.
Eyeing applications in TV sets and other large displays, Sony Corp. and Universal Display Corp. will jointly develop an active-matrix organic light-emitting device display based on a novel electrophosphorescent technology.
April 21, 2001
Wired: The Future Will Be Fast But Not Free.
As for pricing, here, too, broadband will change the picture radically. Flat-rate billing isn't commercially viable in an era when some users consume 1,000 times as much data as others. If you're downloading a million bits per second, the cost of those bits isn't trivial anymore...
eWEEK: Protection policies: food for thought.
There's a long list of failed anti-piracy technologies that didn't do much to stop piracy but did succeed at alienating customers. Even the federal government couldn't force-feed consumers lousy encryption technologies while they had better alternatives freely available.
IBM developerWorks: How not to make your site accessible.
In general, accessibility problems fall into several basic categories. Browser requirements, user requirements, bandwidth requirements, and simple usability. It's no accident that most of these are about requirements; the chief accessibility problem is that sites start making demands of their users.
Industry Standard: Room Service Providers.
But few guests are taking advantage of in-room broadband - either because they don't know it's there or because, like DePalma, they can't get it to work. Most estimates peg the percentage of guests using these services in the low single-digits...
April 22, 2001
NY Times: Inescapably Connected: Life in the Wireless Age.
Pervasive computing is both a buzzword and a new field of study within computer science. It means computers in the walls, in tables and chairs, in your clothing. Computers in the air, when engineers can figure that one out. Computers fading into the environment.
Washington Post: Showdown at the Digital Corral.
That simple idea has won the endorsement of an influential advisory panel that is responsible for reviewing Internet standards, and it has become part of an international tug of war over who might one day run a merged communications network.
eCompany: Analyzing Chat.
If you've ever aired your views in an online forum, there's a good chance Opion Inc. knows who you are. Opion is a new market research company that's trying to spot online trends before they actually happen. To do so, it analyzes online discussion areas...
April 23, 2001
Business Week: A Penny-Ante Business Worth Billions.
The major roadblock for micropayments is that people don't like them. Simply put, they're a pain. If something costs so little, such as a song that goes for 50 cents, is it really worth your time and effort to pay for it? Clay Shirky argues that micropayments send conflicting signals to consumers.
NY Times: Record Labels Struggle With Napster Alternatives.
The announcements are about as far as the record companies have gone. The follow-up remarks betray the labels' lack of clarity about how to master new technology in a way that balances their business needs with the expectations of music consumers...
Business Week: Turning Surfers into Subscribers.
But most of these subscription initiatives are doomed to failure. "Ultimately, people are willing to pay for content only if it makes them money, saves them money, or it ties into their career or some other passionate, personal interest," says Rich Gordon, a professor at Northwestern University...
ZDNN: Start-up adds locks to media files.
In SigningStation's copy-protection method, which it calls Cryptocast, a music company would encode each digital-music file for a given user with his or her public key. The user's private key would be permanently stored in a "dongle..."
Industry Standard: CNBC.com to Merge With MSN MoneyCentral.
Its new approach stems from a hard lesson that NBC execs learned in the NBCi debacle: Stick with what you know. For NBC, that means providing content and doing the marketing. From now on, NBC officials say, they will partner with technology firms when it comes to the Web.
The Register: SDMI cracks revealed.
Felten declined to go through with the SDMI challenge because the terms of the click-through agreement participants were forced to accept would have prevented his team from publishing their results. So he withdrew, but continued the research independently, much to SDMI's embarrassment.
News.Com: Perlman's Rearden Steel raises $67 million.
But sources close to the company said it was devising a television set-top box that will receive and record a wide array of digital programming, allowing consumers to pause live programs and interact with televised content.
April 24, 2001
Salon: Time to buy a new computer -- but why?
Scott Rosenberg. This year, though, when the alarm went off, something strange happened: I woke up, took a look around at both my current computer of choice and the possible replacements, hit the snooze alarm and went back to sleep. Maybe next year.
Industry Standard: Faster, Baby, Faster!
So gearheads, being gearheads, started going under the hood, tuning and upgrading and making their machines faster and more powerful and clocking their monster beast machines and posting the results in public. Welcome to the world of Kustom Komputers.
USA Today: Ford sues over profane Web redirect.
Ford also alleges the confusing redirection "tarnishes the goodwill and reputation of Ford" and dilutes Ford's trademark. Ford said those affiliated with 2600 Enterprises are unassociated with the automaker "and have absolutely no right to point their domain name" to Ford's Web site.
InfoWorld: High-grade DSL gains momentum.
SHDSL promises data rates of 2.3Mbps over a single copper pair, as opposed to the 1.5Mbps speeds of conventional DSL lines. Moreover, the new standard can allegedly reach distances 30 percent further than regular DSL and latency for high-bandwidth applications is expected to be very low.
Business Week: Service with a Virtual Smile.
But thanks to a technology developed by San Francisco startup NativeMinds, Bell's phone has been ringing less. Ford uses NativeMinds software to create a vRep, an online version of Ernie that answers the questions most frequently asked by technicians.
News.Com: Commentary: Cell phones pack too many features.
Consumers won't soon suffer any cell phone feature fatigue. That's because with the industry having done a poor job of articulating the value of beyond-voice applications, consumers will likely take a pass on premium-priced products that deliver functions that meet no perceived need.
eWEEK: Still waiting for Bluetooth.
More than two years after the steady din began, Bluetooth continues to dawdle, hampered by disagreements over protocols, high component prices, interference problems and a dearth of real products to promote further testing and development.
EE Times: Design move cuts Wi-Fi radio costs.
Intersil's announcement last week comes at a time when pricing structures for 802.11b radios are facing extreme downward pressure, as traditional suppliers such as Intel and Agere face competition from low-cost, high-volume vendors like D-Link and Linksys.
April 25, 2001
MSNBC: Gadgets offering ‘convergence’ show whole can be less than sum of parts.
It is an old story that keeps getting retold. Bewitched by the promise of “convergence” — the blending of communications, entertainment and computing — and galvanized by the Internet, engineers and marketers are dreaming up a new class of high-tech Swiss Army knives.
News.Com: Compaq to wed PCs, TV.
Many major PC companies are reeling financially from the collapse of the consumer PC market in the United States. But Compaq, among others, believes the future for the home computer industry lies in consumer electronics. The change has come alongside the advent of digital media files.
News.Com: Sun to open "expanded Web" with Jxta.
Sun wants Jxta to power a new generation of services on the Internet. Jxta would provide a foundation for running programs across a host of "peers"--potentially every sort of computing device from desktops to tiny cell phones to mammoth servers.
Dallas Morning News: Microsoft engineers get help from real people.
Give Microsoft some credit for letting me watch a user stumble along, but it's all to prove a point. The software giant, based in Redmond, Wash., is known for constantly improving its products, and one of the ways that it gets there is through a rigorous regimen of usability tests.
Internet Week: A Built-To-Order Dotcom.
Reflect's value proposition--executed on the technology side by chief logistics officer Alex Zelikovsky, who also helped architect's Amazon's logistics strategy--is so-called "mass customization," or the ability for individual customers to design their own personalized beauty products.
Business 2.0: Spinning Out of Control?
This trend toward dressing (some would say disguising) advertising and public relations as news is driven by economics. A standard press release costs only a few hundred dollars to compose and distribute electronically, making the Net a low-cost distribution channel.
April 26, 2001
NY Times: Punching Holes in Internet Walls.
In six months of operation, SafeWeb has become one of the most popular privacy-protection services (often called anonymizer services), with word about it spreading mostly through e-mail or word of mouth. Its services have become especially popular among Falun Gong adherents in China.
SJ Mercury: Copyright tempest over `The Wind Done Gone' is outrageous.
Dan Gillmor. But the case should never have come to court. That only happened because Congress has twisted tradition and law beyond all recognition, and a book that should have long since entered the public domain remains protected by copyright.
News.Com: IM poised to become instant information tool.
The new buddy won't be real. It will be a "bot" created by New York company ActiveBuddy, which is developing technology that lets popular software for trading short text messages be used to grab information stored on Web sites and computer databases.
eWEEK: Foundation to promote Jabber IM.
Jabber.com and the Jabber open-source project have joined forces to establish the Jabber Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that will work toward developing a Jabber-based open-source Instant Messaging and Presence standard.
MSNBC: Online anthropology.
How’s this for an anthropology course for those who can’t wake up in time for class? “Virtual Communities” at Brandeis University meets three times a week — once offline, once online and once with students sitting at a lab at computers, chatting with another onscreen and off.
Wired News: Watermark Crackers Back Away.
"We, the authors, reached a collective decision not to expose ourselves, our employers, and the conference organizers to litigation at this time," Ed Felten, a computer science professor at Princeton, told a crowd of reporters who gathered in the lobby of the Holiday Inn...
Editor & Publisher: MSNBC.com Appoints Ombudsman.
Fisher was looking forward to spending quiet days at home as part of his retirement after working as editor in chief at MSN's MoneyCentral for several years. Instead he's putting retirement on hold to become MSNBC.com's ombudsman, a first for online news sites.
April 27, 2001
Salon: Is the RIAA running scared?
Felten's decision can be seen as eminently savvy -- and not because he chose to avoid litigation. His actions, along with the shortsighted bullying tactics of the RIAA, set a precedent that could potentially undermine the widely disparaged DMCA.
Washington Post: Uncopyable CD Strikes the Wrong Note.
Then you have to prove you own the CD -- in my case, by entering the last words in the eighth, ninth and 10th paragraphs of the liner notes. (I got this wrong the first time because the title, for some reason, was counted as a paragraph.)
NY Times: Does an Anti-Piracy Plan Quash the First Amendment?
Does fair use, which has its roots in the First Amendment, entitle the scholar, reporter or others to gain access to the copyrighted work in the first place -- -- especially when the material is guarded by a technological device designed to prevent digital piracy?
ZDNN: Many wireless networks open to attack.
Despite outward appearances, Messrs. Shipley and Peterson aren’t malevolent hackers. To the contrary, their aim is utterly benign: to expose one of the newest and potentially most dangerous security holes in U.S. business, in the form of wireless computer networks.
Internet World: AOL and Swatch Will Develop Web Watches.
While many observers see these kinds of devices as a joke, and many of the devices never get past the prototype stage, Swatch has already begun shipping one, the Net.Invader, and is developing another, the Syncro.Beat, which it expects to launch later this year.
The Economist: Scents and sensibility.
One such group is based at Xerox’s PARC in California, and is led by Ed Chi and Stuart Card. Dr Chi and Dr Card take their inspiration from the science of ecology. Dr Card reckons that a user “forages” through a website in search of a piece of information...
MIT Technology Review: The Router Stuff.
You love wireless, but you don't love the way today's wide-area service providers lock you into slow data rates and one-size-fits-all gadgets. A "personal router" project at the MIT promises to break your chains, opening up rich choices of attractive new devices and local-area wireless options.
April 28, 2001
InfoWorld: Twist in Intuit's crippleware techniques doubles the cost of its tax-table service.
Some QuickBooks users, particularly very small businesses with a handful of employees, felt the crippled payroll feature was intended to force them to sign up for a service they didn't need. Intuit officials argued it was all for customers' own good...
Wired News: How to Crack Open an E-Book.
A hacker claims he or she has cracked the code and can remove the encryption on e-books in the RocketBook format, allowing the extraction of the content as plain text. At the end of March, the hacker started making this information available publicly...
The Register: Google restores Usenet archive, plans posting.
Google overnight yanked the Deja backup tape out from under the Foosball table, where it had been propping up that wobbly leg, and now much of Deja's historic Usenet archive is online again. Google also plans to add the ability to post Usenet message by mid-May...
Wired News: Optical's Fast Track to Networks.
A new wireless networking technology has been developed by Texas Instruments that could lead to extremely fast broadband networks for homes and offices. TI has developed a new form of wireless Ethernet based on infrared lasers and miniature mirrors.
April 29, 2001
Useit.Com: Japanese Products Map the Mobile Road Ahead.
Instead of a roller, the P503i uses a small joystick, similar to the trackpoint on an IBM laptop. The result is two-dimensional freedom of movement. Furthermore, when you move the joystick over something on the screen, the item enlarges, making your focus of interest easier to see.
Lighthouse: "Don't Make Me Think": Classics Illustrated does Web Usability.
It makes itself useful to designers by powerfully reinforcing a handful of key ideas that most designers already use. It makes itself useful to the designer's non-designer colleagues by teaching those ideas in a concise but highly engaging style.
Internet Week: Free-PC Programs: Where's The Payback?
Delta Air Lines, Ford Motor and Intel are about halfway through their PC giveaway programs, conceived a year ago not only as an employee perk, but also to groom a tech-savvy workforce and create commerce portals among captive users.
April 30, 2001
Inside: Digital Copyright Law, Reviled by Scholars and Techies Alike, Looks Safe on Appeal.
These scholars claim that the DMCA radically upsets the delicate balance that the copyright law was designed to achieve between the rights of copyright holders to exploit their works and the public's right to use, share and enjoy those works.
Industry Standard: Wireless Remorse.
To date, European governments have been anything but accommodating. In Germany the government has rebuffed all requests for refunds. The United Kingdom shot down BT, saying that a refund could provoke losing bidders to sue the government.
Interactive Week: E-Sales Taxes Coming.
After months of discussions, a pair of U.S. senators with different approaches to electronic commerce taxation are poised to hammer out a compromise that could ultimately lead to businesses and consumers paying sales taxes for most of their online purchases.
NY Times: Let the Stories Go.
Lawrence Lessig. The Constitution gives Congress the power to hand out monopolies over speech for "limited times." The first copyright act, in 1790, gave authors 14 years. Under the current law, the term is the life of the author — plus 70 years.
Editor & Publisher: KnightRidder.com Drops Free E-mail.
KnightRidder.com was a little late to the free e-mail game, which was first offered by sites such as Yahoo! and Hotmail. "We view free e-mail as a ubiquitous technology," Casillas said. "We were among the later adopters." The company introduced its free e-mail service in July 1999.
NY Times: 4 Partners Sign On to Support Wireless Data Standard.
The technology operates in a newly licensed and relatively untrammeled swath of the radio frequency band, at 5 gigahertz. And Atheros is hoping that the promise of blinding speed - up to 72 megabits per second - will attract laptop users and office networkers.
Adweek: Web Site Launches Drink.
Minute Maid has opted for a more streamlined approach to marketing its newest product online. Minute Maid kicks off the first part of its integrated marketing campaign with a Web site for its new not-from-concentrate product line, called Simply Orange.
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