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October 1, 2001
Ask Tog: The Airport Experience.
Like most interface issues, it would appear at first glance that the users of the system must necessarily accept significant inconvenience. Like most interface issues, a deeper analysis shows little, if any, inconvenience is really necessary.
Crypto-Gram: The Attacks.
Bruce Schneier. Rarely do you see an attack that changes the world's conception of attack, as these terrorist attacks changed the world's conception of what a terrorist attack can do. Nothing they did was novel, yet the attack was completely new. And our conception of defense must change as well.
The Register: The free Web's over, as W3C blesses Net patent taxes.
A belated storm of protest has greeted a move by the W3C to bless fee-bearing patents as official web standards. The proposal would allow patents, such as the notorious GIF image format, to become web standards, thus giving the patent owners the right to exploit them commercially.
Red Herring: Will telcos clean up after Exodus?
Now that Web-hosting powerhouse Exodus Communications has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, what lies ahead for the data center business? While Exodus restructures, the door is opened to all kinds of competitors, notably the companies that own the networks.
Technology Marketing: Affordable 802.11a Products to Debut.
Actiontec Electronics of Sunnyvale, Calif., has announced it will release 802.11a wireless networking equipment in November. Based on chipsets by Atheros Communications, the equipment will cost little more than today's wireless LAN gear -- yet it will run five times faster.
EE Times: Demos don't hide rough road faced by MPEG-7 spec.
A handful of Japanese companies have demonstrated their own versions of MPEG-7 applications software, but industry watchers caution that much work remains to be done to jumpstart the market for MPEG-7, which provides a standard method of describing digital multimedia content.
October 2, 2001
MIT Technology Review: Brave New World for Higher Education.
Michael Schrage. Anyone who cares about the future of software needs to understand market trends as much as digital design. Similarly, anyone who genuinely cares about the future of higher education must accept that market forces are now as critical as technological innovation.
Dan Bricklin: How Do You Do Thoughtful Discussion Post 9/11/01?
Flame-wars don't have to overwhelm others trying to use the same channels. Unlike threaded discussion groups and email lists, each person controls what's written in their web site/pamphlet. Without the uncontrolled mixing of voices, you don't end up with uncontrolled flaming if any party wants to stop.
The Economist: Safe keeping.
To see how expensive this would be and to solve some of the uncertainties associated with preserving digital documents for centuries, Brian Cooper, Arturo Crespo and Hector Garcia-Molina at Stanford University are building the grand-daddy of all digital warehouses, the Stanford Archival Vault.
NY Times: Salon, Magazine on the Web, Will Charge Readers of News.
The goal, said David Talbot, the editor of the six-year-old magazine, is to rely on circulation revenue for half of next year's $7.5 million budget. That goal, an ambitious one by the standard of any magazine, print or online, is an indication of the unremittingly sour climate for Web advertising.
PC World: HomeRF Wireless Networks Gain Speed.
HomeRF-based wireless networking technology, which is playing catch-up with archrival 802.11b standard, moves a key step forward with the announcement of the first shipping products to match 802.11b's 10-megabits per second speed.
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Abilene Network Expands Beyond Research Universities.
Abilene, the high-speed network backbone built for the Internet2 project by the nation's largest research universities, is being opened up for use by thousands of public and independent colleges, community colleges, libraries, museums, and elementary and secondary schools.
October 3, 2001
Wired News: A Cold Look at Chilled Speech.
His book, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity, presents a clear and historically based argument against the push to transform American intellectual property law into a new zone of zero tolerance.
St. Petersburg Times: Federal agencies pull Web content.
From the gigantic Environmental Protection Agency to the tiny National Imagery and Mapping Agency, information that was once freely available now is being curtailed -- although some of it remains accessible in other forms.
EE Times: Startup gets funding for ultra-wideband technology.
The company sees the format slipping neatly into a gap in the existing lineup of wireless networking, with lower costs than any Ethernet-based protocol and greater bandwidth than Bluetooth, and it could have silicon available as early as the first half of next year.
NY Times: F.T.C. Plans to Abandon New Bills on Privacy.
The Federal Trade Commission will abandon efforts, begun during the Clinton administration, to get new laws to enhance online consumer privacy and will concentrate its efforts instead on enforcing existing laws, according to sources close to the commission.
News.Com: Yahoo takes pulse of consumer demand.
A series of customer surveys making their way onto Yahoo sites in recent weeks suggest the company is readying what may be its most serious effort yet to cut its dependence on advertising, although it's unclear whether Yahoo will actually launch any of the services.
October 4, 2001
NY Times: Videoconferencing May Get Much-Needed Critical Mass.
Hal R. Varian. Mr. Rohlfs developed a model that showed that "network goods" would be successful only when they were able to achieve an initial critical mass of early users. If the initial number of purchasers exceeds this threshold, the market takes off. Otherwise, it falls back to failure.
Darwin: The Elements of E-mail Style.
The compendium of advice that follows is for people whose e-mails sometimes don't get the attention they deserve. Heed it, and you'll be writing more effective messages that get better results—faster.
NY Times: Securing the Lines of a Wired Nation.
Experts in the emerging field of cyberterrorism say that with such an inviting target, terrorists are bound to take up the hackers' wares. What will happen when an attacker with real resources and a deep desire to do harm grabs the keyboard.
EE Times: Ubiquitous network called cornerstone of new era.
Making structural changes to bring about a "ubiquitous network society" will help "create a new era" to pull industry out of its current recession, said Kunio Nakamura, president of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., in a keynote address at CEATEC, Japan's largest high-tech exhibition.
News.Com: Net users lose a secret-alias tool.
Although more than 70,000 people signed on to the free test of the service two years ago, the swell of interest didn't wash up more than a small number of paying subscribers, said Austin Hill, co-founder and vice president of the company.
PC World: Vendors Put Organic Technology on Display.
Organic electroluminescent displays, which many regard as a next-generation technology capable of replacing liquid crystal displays, made appearances in several mobile device prototypes at the CEATEC Japan 2001 exhibition and wowed attendees with their bright, rich colors.
October 5, 2001
DaveNet: What to do about the W3C?
The Web is not just technology, but a philosophy. Easy specs, open to everyone, no restrictions or royalties, a level playing field, and user choice. That led to freedom of speech and diversity of opinion. It's totally magic and it works, and both technological freedom and free speech are necessary for it to work.
Converge Magazine: Digital Visionary.
Q&A with Nicholas Negroponte. Computers are more like telephones. The killer app is chat and e-mail, as well as access to multiple points of view. The attitude is so different than TV. It is empowering and personalized. I matter. That is so different and powerful. From this difference comes a collective life, both real and virtual.
InfoWorld: Optimism runs high for residential broadband.
In a move to combat the dampening effects of an oversaturated enterprise market, many service providers, application developers, and equipment makers are turning to the residential broadband market as the next big source of revenue.
EE Times: Scramble to nail down the home network continues.
The 802.11b wireless networking format is gaining acceptance in the consumer market, but some vendors in the home gateway space, hoping to expand the home networking market, are already saying it isn't powerful enough to meet the demands of an converged data and entertainment network.
O'Reilly Network: Web Services: It's So Crazy, It Just Might Not Work.
Clay Shirky. The Web Services stack pushes this shared semantics problem into higher and higher layers without solving it. Humans often cannot create perfectly transparent descriptions even when they are trying to, and they simply won't try when there's an economic incentive to stretch the truth.
News.Com: Microsoft revs up alerts service.
Microsoft plans to say that it has signed 20 companies to a new Web-based service, called .Net Alerts, according to sources close to the company. The service will notify subscribers of everything from updated sports scores to the shipping status of goods they've bought online.
October 6, 2001
EE Times: Japan looks to claim home ground with e-platform.
A half-dozen of the biggest names in an industry groping for new business models, services and platforms lifted the lid this past week on "ep," with the lofty goal of ultimately turning the box into a platform for home gateway systems and home servers.
PC World: Company Shows Off Shrinking Screens.
The CyberDisplay has a diagonal width of just 9 millimeters and even with the plastic case attached is smaller than a small coin, so it can fit easily into small spaces. All that is needed is a magnifying lens to allow users to see the entire screen.
EE Times: Battle lines form over 2-inch video displays.
Though no established market yet exists for mini screens able to show full-motion video, leading suppliers showed prototypes at the CEATEC exhibition this week, each calling its product the best solution for the content-rich services of the 3G era.
eWEEK: Microsoft Begins Delivering the .Net Goods.
Microsoft Corp. is putting some meat on its .Net bones, delivering some of the first tangible .Net services on its own and its partners' Web properties. Last week, eBay Inc. announced internally the availability of both the Microsoft Alerts and Microsoft Passport services.
Computerworld: MAPS, Experian settle antispam lawsuit.
Mail Abuse Prevention System LLC, a private, antispam group, and Experian eMarketing Inc. have settled a lawsuit over Experian's listing on the Realtime Blackhole List. Both sides announced the settlement late Wednesday.
October 7, 2001
SJ Mercury: After the tragedy, don't forget key business, technology issues.
Dan Gillmor. Some are inevitably related to the horrors we've seen. Others will be manipulated by cynical opportunists to appear related. Still others, which genuinely have no relationship to terrorism, will simply escape our notice unless we pay attention -- and do something.
Financial Times: On the defensive about invention.
To avoid this, companies are increasingly adopting "defensive publishing" strategies. That is, by publishing information about their invention they create "prior art" to disqualify anyone else from patenting it, on the grounds that once details of an invention are made public it is no longer novel, and so cannot be patented.
NY Times: New Software Patent Law for Europe Looking Limited.
Competition officials at the European Commission met Wednesday with their colleagues in charge of drafting a new law for the union, to press their case for limiting its scope. Their concern is that overly protective patent regulation could hinder competition by helping large software manufacturers maintain their dominant positions.
October 8, 2001
First Monday: The Effects of September 11 on the Leading Search Engine.
Prior to September 11, Google devoted itself to a vision of "search is king." The user is tempted to do one thing: type a search phrase into the single form on screen, and hit Search. And the evidence is that millions of users did just that, beginning just moments after the attacks.
Wired News: Library: We Don't Want No Filters.
The latest reincarnation, the Children's Internet Protection Act has run into a quagmire as well. This week the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to ban filters at city libraries, becoming the first municipality to openly defy the federal mandate.
BBC News: Visionary lays into the web.
Q&A with Ted Nelson. The World Wide Web is not what we were trying to create. The links only go one way. There's no permanent publishing. There is no way you can write a marginal note that other people can see on what's in front of you. There is no way that you can quote freely.
NY Times: Intel Develops a New Way to Produce Silicon Chips.
Intel plans to announce today that its researchers have come up with a novel method for housing microprocessors that it hopes will speed development of high-performance microchips with more than a billion transistors. The company says such chips could be available in five or six years.
October 9, 2001
Computerworld: Technology Visionaries Scope the Future.
Jakob Nielsen, Donald Norman and others. Video games that transcend Hollywood movies and play roles in education and literature, golf balls with embedded tracking systems, computers that understand spoken language with 100% accuracy. What technological developments can we expect in five or 10 years?
NY Times: The New Meaning of New Economy.
An 18-month study, led by the Brookings Institution, concluded in September that the likely impact of Internet technology will be to add one-quarter to one-half percentage point annually to the productivity growth of the United States economy the next five years.
The Chronicle of Higher Education: MIT's Media Lab, a Media Darling, Seeks Global Role and New Missions.
The outposts are part of a two-pronged strategy that Media Lab officials talk about with a missionary zeal. The first goal: to spread the lab's model for conducting research. The second: to save the world -- or, at least, to explore ways that technology can be used to help developing nations.
LA Times: AOL Cookies, Web Bugs to Track Advertising.
America Online, the nation's largest Internet service provider, plans to begin using anonymous Web bugs and cookies for the first time to enable the company to better target advertisements to its members. The change was disclosed in a recent revision to AOL's privacy policy...
CIO: Don't Hang Up.
But a new generation of inexpensive Web-driven teleconferencing technologies, widely available low-price broadband connections and a renewed corporate interest in cost cutting have begun to push teleconferencing into the spotlight.
PC World: Sharp Shows Off a Chatty Search Agent.
When a user speaks to a video camera equipped PC through a microphone, a computer-generated character starts recognizing and responding to the user's voice and gestures by nodding. This nodding function acts as an important part of Sharp's multimodal agent interface.
October 10, 2001
Dan Bricklin: Copy Protection Robs The Future.
There are things happening that make me worry that the future may not be bright for preserving many of the works we create today. For example: Companies are preparing to produce music CDs that cannot be copied into many other formats (something allowed by law as "fair use").
Alan Cooper: Navigating isn't fun.
To the user, each successive screen is the equivalent of a new window or dialog in conventional software. My axiom is: "A window is another room. Have a good reason to go there." If the user is working on information on one screen, don't send her to another screen to work on that same information.
SF Gate: Microsoft's New Monopoly Play.
The high-tech industry hasn't stood still for the last two years, and neither has Microsoft. What's at stake now involves far more than just who has the winning Web browser, or whose operating system is found on the most desktops. Now they're playing for the whole ball of wax.
Web Reference: Making the World a Happier Place, One Web Site at a Time.
Q&A with Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir.Reviewing company websites and homepages is something we do a lot and we've discovered that there are many comments to make about it. We felt it would be a good idea to compile and publish information from our experiences for the world to see.
SJ Mercury: Software sought to expose terrorist cells.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is trying to design its own version of the software to uncover terrorist cells that are posing as legitimate groups and lying about such things as past employment, education and business affiliations.
News.Com: Amazon giving book browsers a peek inside.
Amazon.com now lets you do just that, at least to the extent that it is possible in cyberspace. The e-tailer, based here, introduced a "Look Inside the Book" feature on its site Wednesday that includes images of covers, flaps and actual pages for some 25,000 book titles.
October 11, 2001
Fortune: Awake From a Wireless Dream.
Stewart Alsop. I've been using wireless networks for about six months now and can report that WiFi deserves every bit of hype it has won. But this technology is not ready for prime time. And the bit of prime time that it is least ready for is the most exciting stuff, called public access wireless.
News.Com: MobileStar shutting down network.
A wireless Internet service provider for dozens of hotels and hundreds of Starbucks outlets has begun shutting down portions of its network, according to sources close to the company. The company, MobileStar Network, laid off 88 workers on Tuesday, which a source described as "everybody."
EE Times: Bell Labs says its software unifies wireless networks.
Researchers at Bell Labs have announced a software breakthrough that will take carriers and Internet service providers one step closer to offering global roaming across all wireless network technologies, including wireless LANs based on 802.11.
Craig Burton: Copy Protection Sucks. Microsoft Succumbs.
In 1984, I started a serious campaign at Novell to get rid of all software copy protection. We were actually using a physical card that went into a server slot with a serialized chip epoxied to a board. Every operating system had to be serialized to the key card, or it didn't work.
Business Week: Truth Could Be the Web's First Casualty.
Notice that they're not hacks that scream out: This site has been altered or defaced! Instead, experts dub these more subtle attacks as "semantic hacks." Through perverting trusted sources, electronic assaults aim to alter public perceptions by manipulating information in ways not immediately obvious to readers.
SF Chronicle: New encryption laws for e-mail unlikely.
After all, some reasoned, the policy makes it possible for anyone -- including possible terrorists -- to send secret e-mails cloaked by codes so strong the National Security Agency can't crack them. But now it appears that no crackdown on encryption programs is coming.
October 12, 2001
Fortune: From Wired to Wiretapped.
But putting aside any debate on civil liberties, a stronger case against the government's Internet surveillance attempts is that there may well be huge problems in both implementation and effectiveness. One predicament is just how much of the genie is already out of the bottle.
InfoWorld: Ashcroft to academics: DMCA is not your problem.
A group of scientists who filed a suit last June asking for their research to be protected from reprisals under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, received a blow this week when U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft filed a motion to dismiss their case, claiming that it was "not ripe."
News.Com: Apple, HP modify stance on patent plan.
Apple Computer and Hewlett-Packard have both submitted statements to the World Wide Web Consortium urging the organization not to adopt a policy that would permit the charging of royalties for technologies used in approved standards.
eWEEK: W3C to reconsider patents in standards.
The open source exemption was just one idea generated over 2,000 public comments--most of them negative--received in late September by the working group. The volume of criticism prompted the working group to extend the public comment period--originally due to expire Sept. 30--to Oct. 11.
eWEEK: Network Associates cuts PGP unit.
Network Associates Inc. on Thursday announced that it is eliminating its PGP Security division, a move that will result in 250 layoffs. The company also announced that it is discontinuing its PGP desktop encryption and Gauntlet firewall products and putting them up for sale.
NY Times: Researchers Bring Voice Recognition to Palmtops.
They are convinced that people will become frustrated with hand-held speech products that require wireless communication to operate, particularly given the lag time and access problems. They want to offer systems that are entirely embedded in devices so that they will always be ready for use.
October 13, 2001
The Economist: Looking for the pot of gold.
It should come as no surprise if the killer app for the mobile Internet, at least for consumers, turns out to be person-to-person communication. That, after all, has been the golden prize of all previous technologies, from telegraph to telephone to mobile phone.
News.Com: Vote on broadband bill possible.
The measure would also allow telephone giants like Verizon Communications and SBC Communications to launch new data networks without having to sell rivals pieces of the network for the provision of high-speed Internet service, known as broadband, as required for traditional voice services.
Computerworld: House members offer comprehensive privacy measure
Under the plan outlined by committee leaders, businesses would have to provide simple, easy-to-read and conspicuous privacy notices. Moreover, users would also have the ability to stop a company from sharing personal information for the purpose of sale or other consideration.
October 14, 2001
Useit.Com: The End of Homemade Websites.
Even though the Yahoo Store doesn't have perfect usability for end users, it is reasonably good. Most small websites are probably better off with Yahoo's default set-up than anything they could design themselves. And, most important, the usability for website owners is fine.
Newsweek: The End of Snail Mail?
Steven Levy. The threat that a deadly disease might be a consequence of opening an envelope could be a tipping point that leads to changes in the way we look at snail mail—and heads us down a road where daily mail delivery goes the way of the milkman.
Web Informant: Norton Anti-Virus 2002 a winner.
It is reassuring in these days of bloated software with feature-itis to find something that is actually leaner, better, and just all-around more usable. And especially so in these virus-troubled times when it is foolish to not protect your PC from attacks.
October 15, 2001
Wired News: RIAA Wants to Hack Your PC.
Look out, music pirates: The recording industry wants the right to hack into your computer and delete your stolen MP3s. It's no joke. Lobbyists for the RIAA tried to glue this hacking-authorization amendment onto a mammoth anti-terrorism bill that Congress approved last week.
ZDNN: DOJ expands online music probe.
The U.S. investigation, which became public in August, will zero in on a murky but increasingly important area at the intersection of antitrust and copyright law. Copyright laws allow a degree of collaboration between competitors to stop infringement and facilitate distribution.
digitalMASS: Send in the cyber G-men.
Last year, privacy advocate Simson Garfinkel warned against corporate and government snooping in his book ''Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century.'' Today, Garfinkel is putting the finishing touches on software that will make it easy to snoop on the Internet activities of millions.
NY Times: Using Humans as a Computer Model.
Mr. Horn's paper is intended partly as a call to action for researchers and the industry, but it also points toward a path for solving the problem. He calls it "autonomic computing." It is a biological metaphor suggesting a systemic approach to attaining a higher level of automation in computing.
News.Com: Handspring debuts wireless devices.
Handspring received Federal Communications Commission approval in late August for two such devices with built-in wireless communications: the Treo k180, which has a tiny keyboard, and the Treo g180, which uses Graffiti handwriting recognition for text input.
Network World: Broadband bill vote not imminent, despite rumors.
In addition to broadening the company's small business offerings, which already include online marketing and promotional services and e-commerce opportunities, the new mail service provides another potential revenue stream for the strapped Internet company.
October 16, 2001
Computerworld: Preparedness Places Special Urgency on IT.
Dan Gillmor. But Sept. 11 boosted the rationale for decentralization of a more profound kind - including people and data - and it has absolutely forced a reassessment of the technology all companies will need to stay in business in tomorrow's changed climate.
eWEEK: WTC Attacks Have IT Rethinking Storage.
Many companies are examining their preparedness in the wake of the disaster are re-evaluating digital scanning and archiving procedures and systems. IT managers and business leaders at those companies are asking if they are scanning the right documents and if they are being stored on a cost-effective and readily accessible medium.
The Register: Jakob Nielsen on how Apple blew it, how Linux will blow it, and the Next Big Thing.
We're at bursting point. Email is truly getting at the breaking point. Email will soon get to a point where it just doesn't work. If you get more than 200 or 300 emails a day you will get no work done - and email will be your life.
Online Journalism Review: Taxonomy Software to the Rescue.
One way to manage problems of information overload is by using taxonomy software. Simply put, taxonomy can be described as an effort to incorporate a "categorization" mechanism that allows functional search and retrieval to extend beyond keyword results.
BBC News: EU 'threat' over download sites.
The European Union could block major record labels from setting up their planned music download services, according to reports. Some politicians fear that the two services, Pressplay and MusicNet, would be anti-competitive and unfairly dominate the market, The Sunday Times says.
Wired News: Speaking of Voice Recognition.
If companies like Microsoft, Intel and Cisco have their way, future cellular phones, PDAs and television sets won't come with any buttons. Instead, people will navigate using their own voices --twangs, impediments, accents and all.
October 17, 2001
Fortune: Don't Go There.
Michael Schrage. Substituting bandwidth for presence misunderstands both technology and human nature. People will always travel; people will always telecommunicate. The question is, How well are travel and telecommunications coordinated and integrated?
LiNE Zine: Our Shared Playground.
Q&A with Michael Schrage. Looking at the arc of my work, if I have a single "Big Idea" it's the idea of shared space and the media that people use to collaborate, invent, and innovate. Shared spaces were at the core of my first book, Shared Minds, which is about collaboration and collaborative relationships.
eWEEK: E-Live and Well.
These strange new beings wanted, yes, more than a Telnet connection or even Web access to e-learning content. In fact, rather than self-paced e-learning—also known as asynchronous e-learning—they wanted contact with an actual human being—a real, live instructor.
Internet Week: Broadband To Reach 35M Homes By 2006.
Jupiter Media Metrix predicted that 41 percent of U.S. online households will subscribe to cable modem, DSL, satellite or fixed wireless connections by 2006. Only 9 percent of Web households subscribed to such broadband services last year.
News.Com: Apple to unveil digital music device.
Apple spokeswoman Natalie Sequeira confirmed that the event was taking place but would not discuss the product. Apple apparently is not planning to introduce a portable MP3 player, but something more sophisticated such as a component for a home digital stereo system, sources said.
Wired News: Senator Backs Off Backdoors.
Sen. Judd Gregg has abruptly changed his mind and will no longer seek to insert backdoors into encryption products. A spokesman for the New Hampshire Republican said Tuesday that Gregg has "no intention" of introducing a bill to require government access to scrambled electronic or voice communications.
October 18, 2001
Fast Company: These Guys Will Make You Pay.
Minor missteps, rapid experimentation, and strategic zigzags have been PayPal hallmarks ever since founders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin teamed up in 1998. Even the basic mission of the company has changed since its start. Yet for all of its short-lived mistakes, PayPal has always been able to regroup.
Interactive Week: Beyond Carinovore: FBI Eyes Packet Taps.
Stewart Baker is a former general counsel to the National Security Agency. He says the FBI has spent the last two years developing a new surveillance architecture that would concentrate Internet traffic in several key locations where all packets, not just e-mail, could be wiretapped.
Wired News: Pop Tech's Unbroken Connection.
Discussions of such near-term eventualities tend to focus on the kinds of devices that will enable a hive-like approach to the world: The entire World Wide Web in your palm, or projected onto your eyeglasses. But Citrano is shepherding this weekend's confab toward discussion of the societies that will be adopting these devices.
O'Reilly Network: An 802.11 ISP on Maine's Rocky Coast.
Enter into this void an enterprising college student named Jason Philbrook, who started Midcoast Internet Solutions in 1995 in a basement in Owl's Head. MIS has grown steadily, but the costs of moving data around even short distances on the coast are substantial.
Scientific American: The Electronic Paper Chase.
There have been intermittent efforts to produce such electronic paper over the past three decades, but only recently has research gone into full swing. The day when Scientific American and other periodicals are routinely published in this medium may come before 2010, thanks to competition between two start-up firms.
October 19, 2001
Fast Company: Nickeled-and-Dimed to Death.
That lesson is finally sinking in for the Internet economy, after years of sincere but misguided excitement about new economic models based on micropayments. Get consumers online, the theory went, and all of a sudden, prices could be exquisitely tailored to their actual shopping desires.
Wired News: Apple's New Toy: Portable Music.
The device -- called the iPod -- can be synched with the computer using a high-speed cable connection that allows consumers to download their music into a portable system, which can then be accessed by either a car or home stereo system.
InfoWorld: Intel drops consumer electronics range.
In addition to discontinuing the consumer products already on the market, Intel has also decided not to sell a Web Tablet Internet appliance touted by President and Chief Executive Officer Craig Barrett at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January.
NY Times: Congress Will Allow Ban on Internet Taxes to Expire.
In a move that will allow a ban on Internet taxes to expire this weekend, Congress declined today to extend it, remaining mired in a dispute over how state sales taxes should apply to billions of dollars in electronic commerce.
EE Times: Japanese display makers strain to regain footing.
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. and Toshiba Corp. said this week they will combine their flat-panel businesses into a joint-venture company, in a move that analysts see as a needed first step if Japan's once-vaunted display industry is to compete against lower-cost rivals in South Korea and Taiwan.
Interactive Week: Sprint's Decision Could Wound MMDS Market.
Sprint said on Wednesday, Oct. 17, that it would stop adding customers to its fixed broadband wireless network. The Multichannel Multipoint Distribution Service industry leader had already halted its build-out of new markets while it examines second-generation gear.
October 20, 2001
News.Com: Hacker cracks Microsoft anti-piracy software.
For any PC audio format, the media player has to decode the data to a plain, uncompressed digital format before it can be played on speakers or headphones. Unf*** exploits this weakness by capturing the decoder output before it gets sent to the PC's sound card, which creates the speaker signal.
InfoWorld: It's a sneakwrap world.
Low-tech businesses have caught on to the high-tech industry's technique of sneaking hidden license terms past customers that give vendors the right to change their prices, features, levels of service, etc., without notice. Or, to be more precise, without you noticing.
Wired News: Pop Psych at Pop Tech.
The weekend gathering seeks to understand the societal changes to come as the Internet connects to everyone's lives more ubiquitously, invisibly and seamlessly. But as keynote speaker John Naisbitt said Friday, this issue ultimately has little to do with wires, wireless and laptops.
EE Times: Ethernet standards group gets another first-mile proposal.
Four companies delivered Thursday a proposal for the Ethernet in the First Mile standards effort, suggesting that four pair of copper wire be used to deliver 10-Mbit/second Ethernet. Howard Frazier, chairman of the IEEE 802.3ah task force for EFM, summarized the proposal Friday at a seminar on copper in the last mile.
October 21, 2001
SJ Mercury: Smart use of tax dollars best boost for national security.
Dan Gillmor. We should use this opportunity to invest in things that will help us years and decades from now, not just tomorrow and next month. On any list of such national investments, three stand out for me right now: public health, decentralized communications and energy independence.
Internet Week: Web App Helps Bell Helicopter Cut Proposal Time.
Bell Helicopter has rolled out a Web-based proposal management app in a bid to respond more quickly to requests for information issued by overseas governments. The manufacturer is using Ventro Corp.'s temporarily named collaborative commerce application to replace its old paper-based proposal process...
October 22, 2001
NY Times: Aggressive Strategy Brought On Inquiry of Recording Industry.
For several years, some consumers and financial analysts have accused the major record labels of moving too slowly onto the Internet. Now, the government and the companies' competitors are saying the labels may have moved online too aggressively.
MIT Technology Review: A Smarter Web.
Many feel it can't be done. Even though things are heating up in research labs, the Semantic Web as envisioned by Berners-Lee is hampered by social and technical challenges that some critics say may never be solved. But that's not stopping the W3C and other organizations from trying.
The Economist: Extending its tentacles.
Yet grabbing a chunk of these markets is one thing. Setting their rules is quite another. To understand Microsoft's strategy, it is necessary to look at why it has been so successful. Ahead of the crowd, Bill Gates located the sweet spot in the business of bits and bytes: as the provider of a “platform”.
MIT Technology Review: Digital Preservation.
Increasingly, the record of our civilization is becoming digital, from census data to family photos. The Library of Congress alone has 35 terabytes of files. Yet rapid changes in computers and software could render this data unreadable. Congress recently allocated the library $100 million to look for a way to preserve its files...
Wired News: How Tech Goes Pop.
But perhaps Pop Tech's greatest asset is its persistent drive to present tomorrow's catch-phrases and self-evident notions years or decades before they've been rendered banal or obvious. For instance, what will the house of 2030 look like.
October 23, 2001
News.Com: Web giants support content ratings.
By assigning labels to their sites, the three major Net companies are adopting filtering standards set by the Internet Content Rating Association, an international nonprofit comprising industry leaders such as Microsoft, AOL Time Warner, IBM and VeriSign.
EE Times: PC industry girds for copy-protection fight.
The PC industry is circling its wagons in preparation to fight proposed copy-protection legislation, arguing at a Monday briefing that the protection plan backed by Hollywood would freeze technology while failing to solve piracy concerns.
News.Com: Tech giants pan anti-piracy mandate.
After weeks of conference calls and quiet rallying of the troops, technology companies including Intel, IBM, Microsoft and Compaq Computer held a coming-out press conference Monday to oppose a broad copyright protection proposal being backed by Walt Disney and Sen. Ernest Hollings.
InfoWorld: Microsoft's Tablet PC a year away.
Microsoft's super thin portable computer, called the Tablet PC, will be available in the second half of 2002, Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates said Tuesday, and the company has begun giving developers the software they need to build applications for the device.
Interactive Week: AOL Readies Own IM 'Alerts'.
First announced as a "soon-to-be-launched" Web service for the release of AOL 7.0 last week, users of AOL Instant Messenger will also be able to receive notifications. AOL has begun beta testing Alerts, and recent internal AIM builds viewed by BetaNews showcase the new feature.
October 24, 2001
SJ Mercury: Entertainment control freaks have an ally in Microsoft.
Dan Gillmor. Also Thursday, as you may have heard, a large software company based in Redmond, Wash., is holding a coming-out party for Windows XP. This is Microsoft's next-generation operating system, and one piece is potentially just what the entertainment moguls ordered.
MIT Technology Review: Super Sync.
Instead of ubiquitous connectivity to centralized databanks, we are instead building an infrastructure that's optimized for data replication. The same information is getting copied to dozens, hundreds or even thousands of places throughout the world...
Craig Burton: iFolder Revolutionizes Internet Storage.
The iFolder system automatically synchronizes replicas of my iFolder files to every machine that is part of the cloud. This way, my work automatically follows me wherever I go, and I don’t have to do anything to make it happen. This is the magic of redirection.
News.Com: EU going the extra mile for broadband.
In seven of 15 EU countries the number of fast Internet connections offered over phone lines upgraded with DSL technology has roughly doubled in the last six months. In three other states, there was a marked increase, a report obtained by Reuters shows.
Network World: SBC to cut back DSL buildout plan.
SBC Communications' project to make high-speed Internet access available to 80% of its customers by the end of 2003, will be among the programs hit by capital expenditure cutbacks announced Monday by the incumbent regional carrier.
News.Com: AltaVista serving up out-of-date listings.
AltaVista hasn't fully updated its database of millions of Web pages since July, according to company spokeswoman Kristy Kaspar. Most search engines refresh their databases every month. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company "has fallen behind schedule," she said.
October 25, 2001
Web Techniques: User to User Support.
Derek Powazek. Archibald is the poster child for a kind of online community that's not new, but one that companies are just now learning to foster. These are support communities, gift economy ecosystems where what you give is what you get.
News.Com: Microsoft backpedals on MSN browser block.
As first reported by CNET News.com, some Mozilla and Opera users found Thursday that they could not access the new MSN site. Instead, they were given the option of downloading a version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. But later Thursday, Microsoft decided to change its position.
Forbes: Fixed Wireless Is Beyond Fixing.
For fixed wireless, the cavalry has arrived too late. The technical problems that once held it back have been fixed, but rival technologies now dominate the "last mile" broadband business--and now some major defections have thinned the already dwindling ranks of its supporters.
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Penn's Bandwidth Impresses Some and Frustrates Others.
Administrators say they are committed to providing a network robust enough so that professors and students can experiment with new technologies -- like virtual conference rooms and digital video libraries -- but they also say there are limits on what the university can spend on bandwidth.
News.Com: Turning Internet2 into reality.
Q&A with Douglas E. Van Houweling. We were really pushing the frontier and decided to do that even though we knew that there were certain aspects of it that would almost certainly not work. Internet2 exists primarily to learn about the future of the Internet and to understand how to implement that future...
Interactive Week: Net Worth.
Prudential financial spent nearly $10 million redesigning its web site, but the company isn't expecting a hard-dollar return on the investment. That might seem strange in these troubled times, but it's an indication of just how integrated Web assets have become in Prudential's overall corporate strategy.
October 26, 2001
NY Times: Pornography Takes Over Financial Site for Children.
Ernst & Young had not renewed the registrations for the Moneyopolis addresses, which expired this summer, because VeriSign Inc., the company that handled the registration, sent notices of the expirations to an employee who had left the company, Mr. Kerrigan said.
Network World: AT&T Wireless scraps fixed wireless.
Observers say that product technology in the works will greatly reduce the cost of providing fixed wireless services and enable new service features, both of which are needed for carriers to justify the delivery of such services across the rural regions typically targeted.
News.Com: Google evaluates subscription options.
The company is evaluating new "vertical markets" as a means of increasing revenues, according to a source within the company. Among the considerations are new niche searches for periodicals, medical information or technology that Web surfers or companies would pay to use.
CNN: ITAA says lagging content prevents a broadband boom.
Broadband may have gotten a bad rap from some critics for alleged service glitches and pricey fees, but it's the content that has really held back the United States broadband boom, the head of the Information Technology Association of America said in a conference call.
InfoWorld: Archiving the Net all the 'Wayback' to 1996.
If you've ever wondered what books Amazon.com was recommending five years ago, what the first Web cam was focused on, or what was on more than 10 billion other Web pages dating back to 1996, you're in luck. That's exactly what's offered by the Internet Archive's free "Wayback Machine."
October 27, 2001
I wrote a short article about MSN.com's blockage of non-Internet Explorer browsers this afternoon that I posted to another weblog I recently began experimenting with. It takes a look at the blockage from another angle. Thanks for reading, Lawrence (tomalak@tomalak.org).
Dan Gillmor: Microsoft's Latest Browser Tricks.
Q&A with Tim Berners-Lee. The "best viewed with" button is bad, but there is worse. Worse are sites which not only ask you but which force you to use software which they control, so they will effectively have control over all your browsing -- even when you are browsing someone else's site.
eWEEK: MSN Buckles, Allows Access to Opera's Browser.
Opera officials said the dispute stemmed from Microsoft's claim that its browser did not comply with the latest XHTML standards. Opera officials countered that the Norway-based company's browser was in compliance, but MSN.com itself is not.
EE Times: Internet's future debated at PopTech conference.
Hijacked by fear, uncertainty and doubt, the Internet's future is no longer clear. The FUD factor has specifically raised doubts about the aspiration for a person to be online, anywhere, all the time, according to the majority of speakers at the PopTech conference here.
Network World: E-mail marketer settles suit against MAPS.
E-mail marketer Experian and the antispam group Mail Abuse Prevention System have settled a lawsuit filed by Experian after it was listed on MAPS' spam blacklist and effectively shut down for two days in November 2000.
Advertising Age: CIA-Backed Search Engine Merges with Consumer Feedback Site.
The new company will be called Intelliseek but will retain the PlanetFeedback site and brand as a conduit for spontaneous consumer feedback and provider of applications designed to solicit, track and analyze comments made directly or indirectly via Web sites, chat rooms and newsgroups.
October 28, 2001
Web Informant: Let's talk about passwords.
Maybe it is time to take a more careful look at password policies in general. And if you run your own web site, or are responsible for the servers in your organization, maybe a little paranoia will be good for your overall security and peace of mind.
Useit.Com: Poor Code Quality Contaminates Users' Conceptual Models.
Software bugs and system crashes result in huge productivity losses and undermine users' ability to form good models of how computers work. Website designers can help improve user confidence by prioritizing quality and robustness over features and the latest technology.
News.Com: Ford scraps PC program for workers.
Before it was halted, Ford had given out 166,000 PCs, the vast majority to U.S. workers. The automaker ran into tax complications as it looked to expand the program overseas. Ford workers were notified today that the program, known as Model E, was being officially shelved.
October 29, 2001
NY Times: Companies Move Away From Centralized Offices.
These days, with businesses reconsidering the desirability of everything from opening mail to clustering people in urban centers, many companies are taking a closer look at the so-called distributed workplace — and studying the handful of corporations that have chosen to adopt it.
Dan Bricklin: Web Services, Business Models, and Storage.
To me, the implications are that services must be structured so that people feel they have independent full access and control of their data. One way to do this is to make sure they can easily export it in a form they are comfortable with to keep themselves, or even make that transfer part of the service.
NY Times: Page by Page History of the Web.
Brewster Kahle wants to create within the Internet a library that is as vast as the infinite library of my dreams, and as personal as old Mr. Rosenberg's lap. And at the same time, he is teaching us a parable about what we used to call the new economy. Mr. Kahle never has thought small.
Financial Times: How the banks poured money down the internet drain.
This week Bank of Ireland became the latest to conclude that stand-alone internet banking was unpopular with customers. It folded its F Sharp offshore web bank back into its mainstream operations, at a cost of several million pounds. The issue for BoI was that consumers did not behave the way the banks expected.
CIO: Nobody to Play With.
Lowry spent the next two years laying the very real technical groundwork for his dream of a fully collaborative computing environment. And, indeed, Goldman is now ready to collaborate on a grand scale. But its partners and suppliers in the automotive supply chain are not.
October 30, 2001
Fortune: Techies vs. Telcos.
There's no question something is wrong. The phone and cable companies are gatekeepers of Internet service now because they own the pipes coming into most of our businesses and homes. But they've done a poor job of turning those pipes into pipelines.
uiweb: Strategies of Influence for interaction designers.
Step back and examine the dynamics of how decisions are made on your team. Who are the leaders, and whose opinions are respected? Before you present or ask questions at group meetings look at the big picture. Who has influence and how do they exercise it.
Internet World: Deconstructing Cisco.com.
Louis Rosenfeld. There really is no way for someone like me to complete a purchase using the Cisco.com Web site and no explanation as to why this was the case. But there were lots of special cases and distinctions to confuse me.
EE Times: Philips sees no future in HiperLAN/2 chips.
Philips Semiconductors is not going to develop chipsets for HiperLAN/2, the European wireless standard developed for 54Mbit/s data rates operating at 5GHz. Instead, Europe's third largest chip maker is concentrating on the US-oriented 802.11a and upcoming 802.11h standards.
Interactive Week: Cisco To Introduce Mobile Networks.
Mobile Networks improves on the concept because it allows the router to move, while maintaining connections for IP devices communicating with it. In addition, Mobile Networks doesn't require users to load special software on their devices.
October 31, 2001
The Register: Berners Lee: WWW royalties considered harmful.
WWW creator Tim Berners Lee has given his strongest hint yet that the W3C organization he created ought to shun the idea of accepting royalty-bearing patents as web standards. He also acknowledges that the move could lead to the fragmentation of the Web.
SJ Mercury: Satellite TV deal would be sad sign for telecom industry.
Dan Gillmor. Its outcome will tell us whether the people charged with promoting competition in Washington mean to do their jobs, or whether the oligopolists and monopolists will enjoy unfettered control over the chokepoints of tomorrow's communications.
Business Week: Why France May Hit the Wireless Jackpot.
But France's inability then to pawn off all its 3G licenses has precipitated a beneficial turn of events. Finance Minister Laurent Fabius announced on Oct. 16 that the cost of each of the four slots would be slashed to $560 million, plus a 1% to 2% tax on 3G service revenues over 20 years.
The Register: Is Negroponte mellowing as he ages?
Professional guru professor Nicholas Negroponte, the co-founder of MIT, appears to be mellowing in his old age. Not that what he says is any less out there but in an interview with the BBC this week, he seems to have lost his trademark crazy prediction habit.
Network World: LexisNexis looks to simplify search capability.
LexisNexis' typical user is a corporate librarian or researcher trained in complicated searches. By adding a natural language search feature, Derry says a business development manager can quickly get background information for an upcoming client call without having to launch a big project.
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