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August 1, 2001
EE Times: NTT launches 100-Mbit/s fiber-optic service.
NTT's pricing is almost a quarter as much as it had originally planned to charge for the service, but the company lowered its rates after a small company named Usen Corp. initiated a 100-Mbit/s fiber-optic service in a limited area of Tokyo this past March.
Darwin Magazine: Imagining Faster.
These new technologies—all geared to helping product designers, marketers, salespeople and CEOs imagine new offerings faster—seem as if they've been purloined from the sets of Star Wars or The Matrix. They tend to fall under the rubric "rapid prototyping."
SJ Mercury: ICANN's controversial crusader.
To some, Karl Auerbach is a cyber-Robin Hood, underdog crusader for the free and unfettered Internet. To others, he is an acid-tongued critic, a wannabe cult figure who advocates the overturn of law and order on the Web.
- Salon: From October 16, 2000; ICANN-oclast.
Q&A with Karl Auerbach.
AskTog: Good Lawyers, Bad Products.
Lawyers are destroying the usability of American products. It's bad enough in the paper world, where user manuals invariably start with an "idiot section" ("Do not use this toaster while taking a bath.") However, consumers soon learn to skip to section 2, and life goes on.
Financial Times: IBM joins push to construct next-generation internet.
The movement to build a new-generation internet through a global computer "grid" will receive a big boost on Thursday when International Business Machines, the world's largest computing company, commits itself to the new technology.
News.Com: Microsoft, Intel sign on with Wi-Fi standard.
Although still committed to a rival technology known as Bluetooth, Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. are putting their muscle behind 802.11b, or Wi-Fi, which also enables short-range wireless links between computers and other devices.
August 2, 2001
Winterspeak: Worse is better?
In my experience, customers have overwhelmingly preferred simple sites that let them do what they wanted to do. By using customer behavior to control scope, the technology could be kept simple and slim. This kept build and maintainance costs low.
Wired News: How French Pols Say Pork: Net.
Both Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and incumbent, right-wing President Jacques Chirac –- considered the two main contenders for the presidency -- have been eager to assert their credentials as progressive, Internet-savvy politicians.
Darwin: Privacy Backlash.
Well, because it's beginning to look as if the unregulated collection of consumer information is nearing an end. Experienced rabble-rousers such as Ralph Nader are joining the fray, and if he doesn't get to your customers, the government may.
PC World: Sharp Puts a Billion Colors on Display.
Recently, computer software developers such as Microsoft have been developing software with 10 to 12 bits per RGB level; but this level of color cannot be displayed on current LCDs, says Ochiai. With Sharp's new development, users will be able to see displays in full color.
August 3, 2001
Context Magazine: Mr. Coffee.
Q&A with Howard Schultz. The wireless capability will be a powerful tool to enhance the Starbucks experience for 15 million customers a week. We think that the network will drive a lot of traffic into our stores. We also will be able to create merchandising opportunities...
802.11b Networking: Starbucks Distortion Field.
He also gives insight into his own lack of understanding of the primary purpose of having high-speed wireless Internet access by saying, "this will be a different experience than just Internet access." That's what they all say.
Online Journalism Review: The Second Coming of Personalized News.
Stage one consisted of building elaborate, if unwieldy, news portals to attract a mass audience. This new stage involves forging deeper customer relationships with users to build customer intimacy, spurring more frequent visits and, eventually, enticing people to open their wallets.
Industry Standard: Metricom Turns Out the Lights.
Metricom will shut down its Ricochet network in all of its markets during the next week and lay off 282 employees, according to a statement released by the San Jose, Calif.-based company. Additionally, Metricom will place all of its assets on the auction block in two weeks.
Wired News: The Science of Selling Images.
To help brainstorm new ideas for imagery, researchers look at both demographics and visual trends in high-end advertising. They analyze sales data, website searches and client requests to find out what images are in demand and what are actually selling.
Washington Post: AOL's New Instant Message: Synergy.
AOL Time Warner Inc. has launched an expanded instant-messaging service, offering consumers a set of Web features that promote many of the company's vast media holdings while positioning the technology to become a broader communications platform.
August 4, 2001
SF Chronicle: Security flaw makes wireless networks vulnerable.
Since February, several teams of academic researchers have uncovered defects in that protocol. But proponents of the technology concede that the latest flaw, which will be described in detail at a security conference in Toronto on Aug. 16, is the most serious yet.
EE Times: Cipher attack delivers heavy blow to WLAN security.
A new report dashes any remaining illusions that 802.11-based wireless local-area networks are in any way secure. The paper, written by three of the world's foremost cryptographers, describes a devastating attack on the RC4 cipher, on which the WLAN WEP encryption scheme is based.
Computerworld: UCITA goes back to the drawing board.
The ABA, which is expected to be influential in the state-by-state battle over the proposed law, will instead form a task force to examine the strengths and weaknesses of the legislation. Its opposition to the measure has been building in recent months.
Washington Post: Bill Seeks to Keep Online Music Industry Competitive.
Two members of Congress hope to drum up competition in the fledgling online music business with a bill that would ensure smaller Internet companies can license songs under the same terms and conditions as the largest media conglomerates.
August 5, 2001
Useit.Com: First Rule of Usability? Don't Listen to Users.
The world is littered with failed businesses that banked on people's attitude toward hypothetical products and services. In speculative surveys, people are simply guessing how they might act or which features they'll like; it doesn't meant they'll actually use or like them in real life.
EE Times: Updated WAP standard speaks wired Web's language.
The WAP Forum has released version 2.0 of the Wireless Application Protocol standard, significantly reworking the specification to bring it more in line with core Internet technologies from the wired world. NTT Docomo Inc. in Japan was among the first to shower praise on those changes...
Knowlege@Wharton: How Companies Sponsor, Listen in and Learn From Chat Rooms.
Pure marketing lingo and breathless advertising would not go over well with a sophisticated Internet audience, the executives reasoned, so they decided to put up chat rooms and discussion boards on the Chrysler corporate website.
August 6, 2001
Context Magazine: Churning Out Ideas.
Then, as a means of boosting network traffic and revenue, Ellenberger invited a host of other companies to come see what they could do with all that speed. With Broadwing’s efforts as a starting point, a confluence of people and events has turned Cincinnati into a sort of corporate lab, writ large.
Internet Week: In Fidelity's Labs: Biometrics, Interactive TV And Other E-Business Futures.
Elterich credits the usability labs at the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology for coming up with a design that's more suitable for interactive TV. At FCAT's usability lab here, engineers monitor individuals brought in to test new designs for a variety of form factors...
Wired News: Adobe E-Book Hacker Released.
Dmitry Sklyarov is out on bail. A federal magistrate judge on Monday ordered that the Russian programmer -- whose arrest last on copyright infringement charges sparked worldwide protests -- be freed on $50,000 bail.
Network World: Messaging vendors rally around SIMPLE protocol.
An emerging communications protocol called SIMPLE is the front-runner to become the standard method for sharing online presence information and instant messages across the Internet, thanks to backing from market leaders AOL Time Warner and Microsoft.
Interactive Week: Hidden Pitfalls in .Net Open Source?
Open source critics of Microsoft said the company would have the opportunity to strangle an open source project by demanding a licensing fee and royalty payments each time an open source version of its patent was implemented.
LA Times: New Net Venture Aims to Eliminate Download Logjams.
Venture-funded Kontiki launches today, starting a business it says will enable owners of rich media content such as audio and video to lower the cost of distributing their wares while maintaining reliable connections to servers and added security.
NY Times: Bell Companies Blamed for D.S.L.'s Woes.
Small Internet service providers like aNet represent the last vestige of the Internet's original homespun character. Yet the aNets of the world are struggling, and many of them blame the regional Bell operating companies for their endangered status.
August 7, 2001
Context Magazine: Breaking the Bank.
In a new wrinkle on the old U.S. television game show Dialing for Dollars, European mobile telephone companies are setting themselves up to generate fees by invading the financial-services market and becoming providers of mobile banking services.
News.Com: McAfee wins Net subscription patent.
The patent, issued July 24 by the U.S. Patent Office, covers the technology behind McAfee.com's system, what co-inventor Srivats Sampath calls the company's "secret sauce," as well as its subscription-based business model, the company said Monday.
Network World: Faster wireless LANs may prove a bargain.
Surprised analysts and vendors are now saying that 54M bit/sec wireless products that support the 802.11a standard, which are scheduled to start shipping by year-end, are likely to be priced close to what existing 11M bit/sec, 802.11b LANs sell for today.
Context Magazine: Bluetoothless.
David Reed. Each networked device that hooks into the Internet makes the network more valuable, by creating a bigger audience for others to reach. With Bluetooth, though, each use removes just one wire; it does nothing to create a powerful network of Bluetooth users.
Internet Week: Content Management: Integrate To Dominate.
Today, much of the content management action is happening within mainstream businesses. These businesses understand that to deliver Web services that outflank those of the competition, they must integrate and synchronize legacy databases and applications across an enterprise network.
Interactive Week: New Non-English Domains Deal Criticized.
A plan to allow the Internet domain Name System to recognize languages other than English is being criticized as creating more problems than it solves, by either overloading existing routers or splitting sections off so they can't be reached by everyone.
August 8, 2001
Darwin: Libertarianism Good and Bad.
David Weinberger. If you want to derail a conversation with Internet engineers — the blessed geeks who built the thing and then built the things that run on the thing — mention as if it were obvious that libertarianism is the Net's embedded political value.
O'Reilly Network: The End of Innovation?
Q&A with Lawrence Lessig. But in this one case of copyright, there's been this race to protect it as quickly and strongly as possible. And it's that which I think is skewing this process in a way that is undermining the opportunity for innovation, especially in the context of peer-to-peer systems.
The Chronicle of Higher Education: 2 Scholars Face Off in Copyright Clash.
Debate is raging in academe and in the courts about how far to limit scholarship to accommodate copyright owners, and nowhere is the situation starker than at Carnegie Mellon, where these two stars of the university's computer-science department...
News.Com: Disappearing ink: E-book self-destructs.
The e-publisher is releasing the Agatha Christie classic "And Then There Were None" under what it's billing as the first "time-based permit." That is, readers who pay $1 to download the book will get to enjoy it for 10 hours before the content disappears.
Online Journalism Review: The Promise of the Daily Me.
How we think about news itself may be transformed, from a solid if predictably plodding product, scripted by a professional priesthood for a mass audience, to a more free-flowing fount of information that serves the individual needs of consumers.
Network World: Adobe, Xerox tiff slows Internet fax standard.
After five years of development, the IETF's Internet Fax working group was ready to publish a series of documents as draft standards. But the documents, which rely heavily on technology from Adobe and Xerox, were put on hold Monday pending a review of intellectual property claims.
August 9, 2001
Internet Week: Arrest Of Computer Researcher Is Arrest Of First Amendment Rights.
Bruce Schneier. Yet now here we are in 21st-century America, where the profits of the major record labels, movie houses and publishing companies are more important than First Amendment rights. In many ways, we're seeing the legacy of the NSA's long war against cryptographic information.
EE Times: Intern proves WLAN encryption protocol vulnerable.
Stubblefield, working as an intern at AT&T Labs with AT&T research staff members John Ioannidis and Aviel Rubin, used the $100 Prism II-based Linksys PC card and a Linux driver that could capture encrypted WEP packets to perform the attack.
PC World: Broadband: Beyond DSL and Cable.
Meanwhile, a number of relatively small and nimble companies have begun to find customers for "gigabit ethernet" services. These newcomers focus on building hookups from underground cables to their customers in the United States' 20 largest metropolitan areas.
News.Com: Worms prompt AT&T to unplug sites.
By blocking incoming traffic to Web servers, AT&T is effectively shutting down the Web sites, which residential customers are not supposed to be operating anyway, Eder said. "According to our official use policy, customers are not permitted to operate Web servers behind cable modems..."
Internet Week: Broadband Growth Swells.
High-speed subscribers swelled 118 percent from year-end 1999 to year-end 2000, the FCC said. Besides just being more numerous, subscribers were also more geographically dispersed. Of the total broadband lines, 5.2 million, or 73 percent, were residential and small business subscribers.
SJ Mercury: Revisiting isolation and its link to the Internet.
What is to account for this stunning turnabout? My guess is that what changed in the intervening years is the Net itself. It has more social tools, more avenues for personal connections, -- more of everything people need in order to thrive.
August 10, 2001
Wall Street Journal: Microsoft Doesn't Satisfy Critics With Changes to Passport System.
Microsoft also is reducing the amount of information gathered when users sign up for a Passport account, and shifting responsibility for payment authorization and a database of user's profiles to other parts of Microsoft, company officials said.
The Register: MS Passport security considered harmful.
The report was written by Aviel Rubin and Dave Kormann, a fellow AT&T Research Labs staffer. "Passport's attempt to retrofit the complex process of single sign-on to fit the limitations of existing browser technology leads to compromises that create real risks"
Web Techniques: The World's Information Desk.
Q&A with Craig Silverstein, Google's director of technology. Our goal is to make all the world's information available, not just that information that happens to be in HTML form. Supporting PDF was our first step towards expanding past HTML, and we plan to have others.
News.Com: Eric Schmidt's lucky search.
Let me give you an example: If you write a story and it goes up on the Web and gets onto Google in the next couple of days. Wouldn't you like it to be accessible right now? We'd like Google to be real time. You make a change (to the Web) and it goes up immediately.
Web Techniques: Project Management Simplified.
Project management tools and techniques were created to introduce order, but maintaining such systems often soaks up a lot of time. For all but the largest, most complicated Web projects, elaborate organizational systems are overkill.
NY Times: How Is Libel Different in Cyberspace?
But what happens when arguably libelous material is not re-published by a talebearer in a newspaper or magazine on terra firma but is "re-posted" in an Internet news group or bulletin board -- an interactive environment that tends to be chock full of re-postings, musings and hyperbolic statements.
August 11, 2001
EE Times: Artificial intelligence seeks natural interfaces.
The AI Gates demonstrated at IJCAI was of this "unrecognized" variety. That is, the AI was integrated into prototypes that solved real user problems, and thus will be judged by users for their problem-solving ability, rather than as AI.
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Web Portal Adds Free Course-Management Tools to Its Offerings.
Yahoo, the popular Web portal, has tossed its hat into the online-learning ring, opening Yahoo Education, a Web site that provides course-management tools and reference materials for college and grade-school classes. One noteworthy feature of the service is something it does not include: a charge.
Wired News: Stretching It Out at Siggraph.
A surprising number of industry types -– including Hollywood studio executives and video-game designers -– are joining the academics and graphics geeks, reflecting the rapid movement of many technologies into the industry mainstream.
August 12, 2001
Newsweek: Busted by the Copyright Cops.
Unfortunately, Dmitry Sklyarov has been entangled in the machinations of media giants trying to hold their power in the digital age. He must stay in northern California, halfway around the world from work and family, while he fights a potential five-year sentence.
Adobe: Style vs. Design.
When Style is a fetish, sites confuse visitors, hurting users and the companies that paid for the sites. When designers don't start by asking who will use the site, and what they will use it for, we get meaningless eye candy that gives beauty a bad name — at least, in some circles.
News.Com: Microsoft, Kodak settle XP dispute.
Kodak had accused Microsoft of foul play in how Windows XP handles digital photos. The photo products maker said Windows XP limited consumer choice in the default application for manipulating photos and steered consumers to Microsoft's preferred online photo processors.
August 13, 2001
Industry Standard: Visible Hand.
Lawrence Lessig. The harder issue - so far forgotten in this debate - is privacy. In real space, stores collect sales tax without necessarily collecting personal information. That's because there's "cash" in real space, and cash is a privacy-enhancing technology.
SJ Mercury: Living where the Net is a threat.
This startling admission from a senior technocrat doesn't mean it's curtains for Hanoi's Internet Iron Curtain. The ruling Communist Party here still takes many of its political and ideological lessons from China, and Beijing has recently reinforced its already draconian restrictions on Internet use.
MIT Technology Review: Reworking Online Work.
Q&A with Ray Ozzie. From a personal perspective, our goal has been to create an environment that securely brings together the right people, the relevant information, the appropriate tools to manipulate that information, at the right time—whether spontaneously or over a long period of time.
NY Times: Software Double Bind.
A question, of course, is how anyone would ever be able to obtain and use the tools that would legally allow them to circumvent copy-protection technology if the people that make and distribute them are thrown in jail or prosecuted in civil trials.
Computerworld: Tulane University launches $1.7M wireless initiative.
When students at Tulane University in New Orleans return to classes later this month, IT managers at the university hope they will have at least part of a new wireless LAN up and running. The LAN will ultimately employ up to 1,000 wireless access points from Enterasys Networks Inc.
Interactive Week: Fueling Bandwidth Trading.
But the energy giant and a few of its neighbors in downtown Houston believe that - regardless of the current wreckage - they are going to transform the telecommunications business and the way bandwidth is bought, sold and traded.
August 14, 2001
News.Com: Bye-bye, Bluetooth.
One should not be too surprised to see Bluetooth fail. The history of well-organized and heavily marketed standards taking over the world is fleeting. In fact, more often than not, the standards that really change the world sneak up on us from the outside.
DaveNet: Excerpt from Breaking Windows.
In Breaking Windows, however, a different picture emerges. The agony inside and around Microsoft is the theme of Bank's fantastic book. I believe it's the most illuminating and important book you can read in 2001 if you're part of the computer, software or Internet industry.
SJ Mercury: ICANN adviser brings diplomatic expertise to Net governance.
The ICANN board this spring charged Bildt, and an impressive array of international diplomats and Internet thinkers, with reviewing how many of ICANN's 19 board members should be elected to represent individual Net users -- and who can qualify to elect them.
Network World: Proposed Web protocol sparks tampering fears.
A proposal to create a standard communications protocol that would let Internet devices automatically personalize, translate or otherwise adapt Web pages in useful ways is generating strong criticism in the Internet engineering community because it also could be used to tamper with Web content.
LA Times: Computer Developers Aiming to Exterminate the Mouse.
Controlling a computer has been largely defined over the years by the humble keyboard and mouse. Now, researchers are turning their attention to new kinds of controllers, including eye movements, voice commands and even brain waves.
News.Com: Online anonymity wins again.
Pre-Paid said it needed to know the identities of the posters to determine whether they had revealed company trade secrets. However, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represented the posters, argued they were merely exercising their First Amendment right to criticize the company...
InfoWorld: Scientists to detail controversial research.
After being quelled by the SDMI organization and the Recording Industry Association of America earlier this year, a research paper on how to crack digital music encryption is due to be presented at the Usenix Security Conference in Washington on Wednesday.
August 15, 2001
InfoWorld: Cryptographer claims to have cracked Intel video encryption.
A Dutch cryptographer claims he has found a way to crack technology developed by Intel that protects digital video from pirates. However, he said he won't publish his findings because he is afraid he will be prosecuted or sued in the United States under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Washington Post: Governors Urge End to E-Tax Ban.
In a letter that will be sent to all House and Senate members this week, the governors will urge Congress not to extend a 1998 moratorium on other Internet taxes unless states are given the opportunity to come up with a system that would allow them to collect online sales taxes.
Editor & Publisher: Spam Fighters Block Legit E-mail.
Steve Outing. What is new is that e-newsletters that people ask for -- that they "opt in" to receive -- have more hurdles to get past on their way to recipients. You can thank spammers for making it more difficult for opt-in e-newsletters to reach their destinations.
Interactive Week: Cybercafe Crackdown.
Still, some governments are struggling to balance the knee-jerk urge to crack down on cybercafes - and the unfettered access to outside news and entertainment they offer - with a desire to harness the economic potential they see that comes with the Internet and other new technologies.
Web Techniques: Registration Revamp.
This experience taught me that registration systems are big chunks of code. So if you want to redesign one, you either need lots of authority, very persuasive arguments, or design strategies that minimally affect the code and account for business practicalities.
Computerworld: AOL, Lotus to conduct IM interoperability tests.
The developers of the two biggest consumer and corporate electronic messaging products today said they're conducting a joint interoperability test on their instant messaging systems using the SIMPLE protocol, one of three standards under study by the IETF.
August 16, 2001
MIT Technology Review: Taming the Web.
Charles C. Mann. The risk, of course, is overreaching—of using law and technology to make the Internet a locus of near absolute control, rather than near absolute freedom. Paradoxically, the myth of unfettered online liberty may help bring this undesirable prospect closer to reality.
The Economist: The Internet's new borders.
The Internet was a parallel universe of pure data, an exciting new frontier where a lawless freedom prevailed. But it now seems that this was simply a glorious illusion. For it turns out that governments do, in fact, have a great deal of sovereignty over cyberspace.
Network World: So much for secure e-mail.
Encrypted e-mail has flopped in the enterprise. More than five years after standards were created and vendors rushed to support them, virtually no one secures e-mail today, despite widespread concerns about prying eyes and corrupted data.
Mappa.Mundi Magazine: Show Me The Money.
It is probably the most useful exemplar of information mapping on the Web today and is well worth trying out if you've never used it. On one single map one can quickly gain a sense of the overall market conditions, yet still see many hundreds of individual data elements.
eWEEK: Making best of data center slowdown.
These days, enterprises looking for such services can turn to a new crop of smaller, nimbler providers touting price over brand. At the same time, those premium providers now cash-strapped, are cutting rates and finding creative ways to fill their unused capacity.
Wall Street Journal: A New Technology Spurs Epic Debate.
But while most companies now accept that they can no longer control who accesses meetings where material information is disclosed, few anticipated that they might also lose control of how company information is disseminated -- and for how long.
August 17, 2001
Web Review: Three Unconventional Sources for High-Bandwidth Internet Growth.
A massive demand for symmetric, high-bandwidth connections may foster an underground industry that can bypass the incumbent telecom network. I'll suggest three possibilities here; I'm sure others will emerge if people use their imaginations.
Village Voice: High Speed, Freed.
Along with some 30 other volunteers in a group called NYCwireless, Townsend's on a crusade to set up wireless Internet access zones: small areas, often called free networks, where people can tap into high-speed connections, without cables or phone lines, at no cost.
BBC News: Norwegian village in broadband trial.
A small village in western Norway has been chosen to pioneer an experiment to make it the most technologically-advanced region outside Silicon Valley. The idea is to make Modalen the world's first fully-connected wireless broadband community.
Darwin: Abuser Interface.
David Weinberger. Menus aren't things that exist in the world or even represent something that exists in the computer. It's all 100 percent artificial. That freedom from the literal is tough to get, but until you get it, you won't be able to work your computer.
BBC News: Chinese webmaster tried for subversion.
A Chinese website creator accused of posting subversive articles on the internet has been tried in secret in China. Huang Qi was tried on Tuesday by the Chengdu Intermediate Court in the southwestern province of Sichuan, but no verdict or sentencing date has been announced.
Industry Standard: The Industry Standard Suspends Publication.
The company will continue to publish its Web site, TheStandard.com, and will retain a small editorial team while it seeks a buyer. The company likely will file for bankruptcy protection, and most of its 180 employees will lose their jobs.
August 18, 2001
DaveNet: Google upgrades the Web.
I call it a JIT-SE or Just-In-Time-Search-Engine. The JIT-SE feature is particularly suited to weblogs, which are time-oriented websites. The Google crawler notices that I update my site every day, so it knows it should come back and re-index my site every day.
UP Magazine: When Larry met Sergey.
The answer is testing, testing and then more testing. Every innovation is checked on the site, on users and on the company to make sure that, as Page says: "we are making things better not worse". Indeed, they have no qualms about testing a product right down the line and then not releasing it.
The Economist: Putting it in its place.
What's more, just as there are situations where the Internet's physical geography is all too visible when it ought to be invisible, the opposite is also true. There is growing demand for the ability to determine the geographical locations of individual Internet users...
Interactive Week: AOL Invests In Internet-Mapping Technology Start-Up.
Founded in early 1999, Digital Envoy now has raised about $12 million, and its most recent funding will be used to further develop its software, for use in monitoring and customizing advertising, enforcing digital syndication rights, detecting fraud, and general online security controls.
InfoWorld: Passport 2.0 ready for a stamp.
The Redmond, Wash.-based software maker will release this month Passport 2.0, the follow-up to the single sign-on authentication service that is at the fore of Microsoft's set of Web services called Hailstorm, Microsoft said Thursday.
August 19, 2001
NY Times: As Wireless Networks Grow, So Do Security Fears.
Yet most do not even turn on the encryption system that is included in all network software to protect the broadcast data traffic from being picked up by electronic eavesdroppers. As businesses shore up their wireless security, consumers are likely to realize that they need to follow suit.
Useit.Com: Did Poor Usability Kill E-Commerce?
Did poor usability kill e-commerce? No. First off, despite the closure or dramatic downscaling of many sites, e-commerce is not dead. Second, sites have gone under because expenses were greater than revenues, and usability impacts only the second of these parameters.
NY Times: Hollywood Moves to Rent Movies Online.
A film will remain on a computer's hard drive for 30 days but will erase itself 24 hours after it is first run. In that 24 hours, consumers will be able to watch the film as many times as they wish — pause, fast forward and perform other functions typical of a videocassette or DVD.
August 20, 2001
MIT Technology Review: The Undefended Airwaves.
Simson Garfinkel. For more than a decade, cryptographers have possessed strong encryption techniques that could virtually guarantee that data falling into the wrong hands would be impossible to decode. Unfortunately, these techniques have not made it from the lab into the mainstream.
IBM DeveloperWorks: Sherlock users, Ur 0wn3d!
Peter Seebach. In a matter of 20 minutes or so, Apple has converted me from "Wow, this is an awesome toy, let me see if I can get other plug-ins for it" to "I can't believe the nerve of these people." The whole system revolves around making sure I see ads.
Networld World: Start-up EverNet to debut peer-to-peer software.
EverNet, which has been in stealth mode for almost two years, plans to announce its EverNet file delivery software this week. Basically EverNet uses a thin client that lets users on a corporate network - or on the Internet - act as content receivers and distributors.
News.Com: Windows XP rush bypasses Sun's Java.
But some PC makers said they simply can't wait for Sun to deliver an IE 6-compatible JVM. Naila Seif, director of software marketing for Compaq's Access Business Group, said the company on Friday finalized its decision to ship Microsoft's version of the JVM with Windows XP systems.
EE Times: Bluetooth a no-show as 802.11b clicks at Rawcon.
Rawcon is replete with state-of-the-art presentations on all the major wireless categories. From cellular to fixed broadband wireless access to WLANs and ultrawideband radio, the annual conference offers its usual "all you can eat" buffet of wireless design research and implementation strategies.
NY Times: Bluetooth Wireless Stumbles at the Starting Gate.
Supporters of both technologies say there is room for both in the marketplace. But if Wi-Fi succeeds in adopting Bluetooth's most attractive attributes — low power consumption and cost — it could be used in a wide range of small devices...
August 21, 2001
SJ Mercury: The bubble has burst, so it's back to the ideas.
Dan Gillmor. The worst may not be over for the tech industry, but Silicon Valley is beginning to feel again like it did in 1995. Amid the financial and human fallout from the Internet crash, people like Alpiri co-founders R.V. Guha and Rob McCool are getting back to the technology itself.
O'Reilly Network: The Great Rewiring.
Q&A with Clay Shirky. The argument I'm advancing is partly historical and partly rooted in recent changes in technology. The argument I want to make is that what we're seeing is the result of a bunch of forces that were put in place about 15 years ago.
Computerworld: Cell carriers eye wireless LANs.
Two of those carriers said their initial focus is on the enterprise—figuring out how to provide combined wireless LAN and cellular data and voice services to large corporations, which have solidly embraced industry standard 802.11b wireless LANs during the past two years.
Red Herring: Will wireless LANs doom cellular?
Opportunity lies in the technology that can bridge the gap between 802.11b WLANs and 3G cellular networks, providing an intelligent transition between the two. If the wireless carriers play their cards right, the advent of 802.11b networks could enhance their cellular networks.
Interactive Week: Network For Lease.
ArrayComm - perhaps best known for the ideas of Chairman and CEO Martin Cooper, who is credited with inventing the cell phone - is pitching the concept of using its technology to build a data-only wireless network that would sell capacity only to resellers.
NY Times: Audit Raises Hard Questions About Health of At Home.
In papers filed today with the SEC by Excite@Home, independent auditors reported that they had "substantial doubt" about the financial viability of the company, a once mighty Internet portal turned broadband provider, which has been battered by the downturn in online advertising.
August 22, 2001
Fast Company: Inside Job.
Such online brainstorming may be the digital economy's most important success story this year. If there is one area where Internet technology is actually delivering more than people expected it is in improving communications and collaboration within an enterprise.
Fortune: A Cure for E-mailsclerosis.
Anyway, Wells and I started by talking about some big, vague stuff that we don't need to get into here. But then he got into the details of the Netdecisions e-mail system, and I got really interested. It seems that Netdecisions, like a lot of big, spread-out organizations is suffering from e-mailsclerosis.
Fast Company: Who Owns Your Intranet?
In a world full of turf battles, it takes real courage to stand up and say, "Our intranet doesn't need an owner. It belongs to all of us -- and to none of us." Fortunately, that freewheeling approach is picking up surprising support from managers, consultants, and intranet users.
Seattle Weekly: The revolution may be wireless.
Matt and others have collected a few dozen geographically dispersed nodes in homes and places like Aurafice Cafe on Capitol Hill. They are nearing the point where they stitch these points into a sprawling, mostly seamless grid using cheap, off-the-shelf, and even homemade equipment.
Wired News: Heading MS Off at the Passport.
During a dinner speech Tuesday, Sun CEO Scott McNealy lambasted Passport's centralized structure as a security, privacy and competitive nightmare, saying Sun's own technology would give Internet users more options. "Stay tuned," McNealy said.
Boston Globe: FCC pushes plan on bandwidth.
Under the FCC's plan, it will look at five slices of spectrum, try to determine whether they are suited for 3G services, and consider the impact of relocating those bands' existing users, which include amateur radio operators and mobile satellite services.
August 23, 2001
Andrew Odlyzko: Talk, Talk, Talk.
But the story may have an accidentally happy ending. The unanticipated killer application of 3G is likely to be voice, the killer app of first- and second-generation systems. This will please both investors and those eager to see effective competition to the local phone monopolies.
The Guardian: A ninety billion dollar mistake.
For these reasons, and the indisputable fact that no one is buying much equipment from infrastructure companies, many in the telecommunications sector have declared that the net is, if not declining, then at least dormant. Network traffic is at a standstill. Or is it?
MIT Technology Review: Good News, Bad News.
These trends may well improve the overall quality of American journalism, offering deeper coverage of specific sectors. Readers will be able to cherry pick the most relevant or interesting information from multiple papers. I already do it every morning, but my choices could become better.
Inteactive Week: NSF's Research Network.
The National Science Foundation earlier this month announced the Distributed Terascale Facility, a $53 million, three-year project linking computing power at four major research institutions via 40-gigabit-per-second pipe provided by Qwest Communications International.
News.Com: Anti-spam group makes up with pollster.
The agreement comes after a lengthy dispute that brought MAPS and Harris Interactive into the center of the debate over spam control. Last year, Harris Interactive sued MAPS because it had listed the market research firm in its database. The lawsuit was later dismissed.
NY Times: Beaming Data Holds Promise, With Limits, for Networking.
Their goal is to use beams of infrared light, reflecting from all surfaces in a room, to create high-speed information networks. While local networks using radio waves have been getting the attention, scientists working on infrared say that in the long run, light might be a better and faster alternative.
August 24, 2001
Wired: Beam On.
Once that happens, bringing fiber directly to the home should cost carriers less than $1,000 per customer, positioning telecom carriers for a nice return on investment. So what will fiber to the curb mean, exactly? All the bandwidth you've ever dreamed of.
Paul Boutin: What Hollywood can learn from Microsoft.
In the spirit of the article itself, I offer this editorial from today's Wall Street Journal - and add that if you're only getting daily tech news from Web sites and the New York Times, you're missing the leading, well-reported, smart coverage in the Journal.
PC World: Do Search Engines Tell the Truth?
Some online search engines are yielding results that are less than you expect. The most prominent findings may surface not because they're the best fit, but because the subjects wrote the biggest checks to the search engine providers, industry participants acknowledge.
Glenn Fleishman: Pay for That Bat and Ball.
That data relation argues for increasing trust between search engines and "suppliers." Paid trust is an odd concept, but it allows both parties to agree to a contracted set of terms with a bar to entry for the party the search engine is going to trust.
BBC News: Broadband fines threat to BT.
The watchdog's move should cheer telecoms firms who have accused it of doing too little to stop BT dragging its feet in the final stages of opening up the UK's telecoms sector. Oftel has decided - following a host of complaints - that BT's level of service had not been satisfactory or reasonable...
Business Week: Photoworks: Lots of Negatives.
If I'm paying full price for developing and printing the photos, that ought to be business model enough. Trying to position a photo-development service as a filter for marketing offers I might actually want to receive strikes me as distinctly unpromising.
August 25, 2001
NY Times: Exploration of World Wide Web Tilts From Eclectic to Mundane.
The new utilitarian view of the Web marks a disappointment for cultural critics who had seen the medium as fundamentally more democratic than traditional media outlets like radio, television and newspapers, because the barriers to entry were so low.
IBM DeveloperWorks: Making URLs accessible.
Most of the time, users are quite happy to simply click on relevant links and navigate using the pointers you provide. However, experienced users may want to bypass some of this; anything you can do to make this easier for them makes your site friendly to both novices and experts.
InfoWorld: 'Parasitic grid' wireless movement may threaten telecom profits.
"It started as a community thing -- a network designed on the idea that you trust your neighbor to route your network and they trust you. It says a lot about your neighbors. I am going to point my antenna, and we can exchange traffic," he said.
August 26, 2001
SJ Mercury: Machines to talk intelligently on Web.
Dan Gillmor. Hype could once again outpace reality, as it seems to have done with artificial intelligence and ``software agents'' in recent years. But the potential seems huge, and the people who are planning Web development are pushing the notion hard.
Red Herring: The spectrum of wireless opportunity.
What do you do after you've invented the cell phone, touched off the wireless revolution, and created new markets where there were none before? Well, if you're Martin Cooper, the venerable father of the cell phone, you go into network optimization, the hottest little market under the airwaves.
August 27, 2001
Ask Tog: Core Decisions.
The 501 purports to be a Personal Video Recorder, one of the new generation of highly personalizable digital recorders, along with TiVo and ReplayTV. It is not. Evidence suggests that experienced and talented designers were a part of its creation.
Fortune: Smart Mover, Dumb Mover.
At the height of dot-com mania, first-mover advantage was a near-sacred mantra for VCs and entrepreneurs alike. E-commerce zealots argued that early success would compound even more quickly on the Web than in the dawdling old economy.
eWEEK: Speedy 802.11a gains momentum.
Hope for 802.11a is built largely on the foundation of 802.11b, which, despite security concerns, has become well-entrenched in the enterprise. As 802.11a prepares to take the mantle as the WLAN workhorse, 802.11b is evolving beyond laptops and PC Cards.
Internet Week: Security Flaw Isn't Death Knell For WLANs.
But instead of scrapping wireless networks, experts say, enterprises should extend authentication and encryption techniques used on wired networks, carefully examine access procedures and consider keeping sensitive data off the WLAN.
IBM Ease of Use: Democratizing Data.
When Marian Brady talks about "the newspaper metaphor," she's not launching into a discussion on journalism. She's referring to the U. S. Census Bureau's current practice of treating data as "news" to be made available to the public as soon as it becomes available to the bureau.
Business Week: Broadband Baloney.
And when are PC and network gear makers finally going to create seamless links between computers and entertainment equipment? The sooner the techies quit chasing broadband pipe dreams and work on these basics, the sooner we'll get jazzed again about the Internet.
Internet Week: New Spin On Affiliate Retailing.
Sharper Image, hoping to squeeze extra revenue from its Web site, has taken the unusual step of adding an online "mall" that links consumers to other merchants. The jury's out on whether the strategy will help or hinder the specialty retailer.
August 28, 2001
Internet Week: The Real Lesson Of Code Red: Insecurity Is A Way of Life.
Bruce Schneier. If we're going to make Internet security work, we need to think differently. I've put my effort into detection and response, instead of protection, because detection and response are resilient. I've put my effort into people instead of software because people are resilient.
SJ Mercury: City expands fiber-optic service.
Residents are expected to pay about $50 a month, depending on the service they choose. The city has so far received proposals for service from Pacific Bell, Streaming 21 and HeyerTech. Once the fiber is active, the city will evaluate the demand for the service and how much it costs to operate.
NY Times: Forecasts of an E-Book Era Were, It Seems, Premature.
A year later, however, the main advantage of electronic books appears to be that they gather no dust. Almost no one is buying. Publishers and online bookstores say only the very few best-selling electronic editions have sold more than a thousand copies, and most sell far fewer.
Network World: Public Bluetooth trials off to a shaky start in Tokyo.
A series of high-profile public trials of Bluetooth technology in Japan Tuesday got off to a shaky Tuesday with slower than expected transmission speeds, shorter than expected range and the absence of one of the trial backers.
SJ Mercury: Palm puts faith in Bluetooth over rival wireless technology.
The company has devoted time and money to figuring out how to make Bluetooth useful to consumers, and also committed to building Bluetooth into some of its devices that will come out next year, Cook said. The idea, he said, is for Bluetooth to be the reason for people to buy a new Palm device.
Interactive Week: The Internet Puzzle.
Don't give up on the Internet or the carriers jockeying for a piece of its traffic just yet. The Internet is growing faster now than it did in the halcyon days of 1998 and 1999, and the race to decide which company will carry the traffic is much closer and more crowded than most believe.
August 29, 2001
NY Times: In Capitol, AT&T and Bells Fight to Control Web Access.
The battle is over the two main technologies that give consumers high-speed, or broadband, Internet access: cable modem service offered by companies like AT&T and digital subscriber lines, or D.S.L., provided by phone companies. Both sides say they have consumers' interests at heart.
Editor & Publisher: Stopping Unauthorized Alterations Of Web Sites.
Steve Outing. And while unauthorized alterations would clearly be illegal in the print world, in the online world it may or may not be within the bounds of the law. Online publishers should be aware of this trend, for it's beginning to affect them. It may soon be time to get the lawyers involved.
Industry Standard: Ad Group Says Gator.com Bites into Business.
That's the dispute playing out now between Gator.com and the IAB. Gator, which provides software to let people automatically fill in forms online, remember passwords and do comparison shopping, last week added a feature that places banner ads over the existing ones at a Web site.
News.Com: Lawyer Lessig raps new copyright laws.
The DMCA is being used "to scare you away from innovating without permission" of entrenched companies, Lessig said. But the precedent is foolish; a more reasonable approach would be to prosecute those who misuse technology rather than those who create it, he said.
eWEEK: Lessig calls open-source community to arms.
But Lessig also took the open-source community to task for not being activist enough in the battle to maintain the openness of the Internet. Qualifying open-source backers as either disinterested or more interested in living in their own open-source utopia, Lessig said it's time to get involved.
PC World: AltaVista May Leave Users Searching.
No new Web pages have been added for months to the index behind the regional search sites, AltaVista confirmed on Tuesday. The local sites are supposed to generate search results relevant for Web users in a specific country. By default, all local sites search in the regional index.
August 30, 2001
MIT Technology Review: Breaking Microsoft's e-Book Code.
The companies naturally strive to make these systems as hacker-proof as possible. But Technology Review recently learned of a home-brewed decryption program that defeats the most advanced antipiracy features built into Microsoft Reader...
News.Com: Sony axes eVilla Web-surfing appliance.
Sony executives blamed the demise on "stability and usability" problems with the $499 desktop Web-browsing appliance, but did not offer specifics. "The product did not meet our expectations," Sony spokesman John Dolak said. "It did not operate as planned."
Winterspeak: Silicon Desert.
Dubai now has its own Internet City-- basically a tax-free clustered campus designed to lure technology firms to the region. Dreamt up by Sheikh Mohammed in the heady days of 1999, completed in less than one year, it stands ready just as the technology biz continues to collapse.
Wall Street Journal: Investment in Japan's eAccess Is Likely To Stimulate Competition in Broadband.
The company entered the market just before Japan's government forced NTT to open its lines to competing ADSL providers. That move helped spark a rapid expansion of the market. Japan now has about 400,000 ADSL subscribers, up from less than 3,000 a year ago.
NY Times: Michael L. Dertouzos, 64, Computer Visionary, Dies.
Under his leadership, the laboratory developed many of the technologies that underlie today's computers, including one of the best-known methods for scrambling data, the RSA encryption system, and innovations that helped bring the World Wide Web into popular use.
Washington Post: Keep Digital Copyright Law Intact, Agency Says.
The U.S. Copyright Office said yesterday that it sees no need to dramatically overhaul a controversial law intended to establish legal guidelines for how digital books, music and other materials should be lent, sold, given away or otherwise distributed.
NY Times: U.S. May Help Chinese Evade Net Censorship.
The agency is in advanced discussions with Safeweb, a small company based in Emeryville, Calif., which has received financing from the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, In-Q-Tel. The discussions were confirmed by parties on both sides.
August 31, 2001
Salon: Copywrong?
Just as the office's previous report -- focusing specifically on Section 1201 -- concluded that public anti-circumvention concerns were focused too far out in the future to warrant immediate legislative action, Wednesday's tome also argued against the call for reform.
Network World: Ultrafast wireless technology set to lift off.
Later this year, the Federal Communications Commission will decide whether to give the green light to so-called ultra-wideband transmission. If approved, UWB could have a dramatic impact on short-range wireless communications for the enterprise.
American Journalism Review: I Want My Breaking News.
What I found was more intriguing philosophically: a wide variation in frequency between sites. In a two-week period, Yahoo!-News sent 58 messages--an average of four a day. CNN and MSNBC put out one or two a day; ABCNews and the New York Times sent three messages each.
Networld World: To hell with proprietary encryption algorithms.
If your vendor uses a proprietary algorithm for anything you want to protect, such as data and passwords, run. If your vendor claims that the proprietary algorithm is secret, run. If your vendor won't show you or the cryptographic community the engine that makes its cryptography so great, run.
NY Times: 2 Groups Try to Involve Public In Internet Address Policy.
The goal of the committee was to make recommendations to Icann on how to involve the global Internet community in its activities, a task stipulated in its charter when Icann was created by the U.S. Department of Commerce to take over management of the address system.
eWEEK: IM for business takes off.
The airline, one of the first to sell tickets online and to promote Web-based check-in, in January made a move to improve online service by allowing customers to interact with agents using instant messaging. The response was sky-high—but not exactly what the airline intended.
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