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April 1, 2002
Salon: Where are the Mahirs of yesteryear?
Scott Rosenberg. Every now and then, though, pieces like "Fun Is Hard to Find" arrive, like anachronistic throwbacks, to remind us that some writers and editors in the newsrooms of America still can't get the Web straight, still think it's a passing fad -- and still, in some cases, can't wait to dig its grave.
Wired News: Adobe-Hack Lawyers: Toss the Case.
Elcomsoft launched a couple of constitutional attacks against the DMCA, the law that has been a thorn in the side of hackers, crackers, tinkerers and coders for the past two years, but which has so far enjoyed a relatively easy time of it in the courts.
NY Times: Plan to Change Internet Group Is Criticized as Inadequate.
Although sensitive to the fact that the Internet has become a critical international resource, some people within the United States government are also wary of any effort to hand over management of the address system to a multinational quasi-governmental body.
SF Gate: Taming The Data.
The archive's continuing struggle to build an interface that will present its information coherently is a familiar problem to those building Web search tools. After all, the Web is much like the archive -- a vast collection of unorganized documents.
NY Times: Royalties Proposal Casts Shadow Over Webcasters.
The proposed royalties, which the copyright office has until May 21 to revise or approve, have radically dimmed the prospects for the legions of entrepreneurs and hobbyists whose radio stations have for the last two years provided free access to a startlingly wide range of music.
Darwin Magazine: Charting the Virtual World.
Q&A with Martin Dodge. The more I looked, the more I got interested in the flip side: What is the geography of information in the online world? How can you map the Web to help you search for information or analyze the social structures of what people are doing online...
April 2, 2002
Business Week: Wi-Fi's "Cauldron of Innovation".
Q&A with Dan Farber. You can create a network, design applications, and build a business without having to hire Washington lawyers to do it. For example, I'm currently designing a temperature-control system for my house using Wi-Fi. And I don't need to get a license to do it.
Wired News: Yahoo's 'Opt-Out' Angers Users.
Predictably to everyone but perhaps Yahoo, user reaction to that e-mail has been less than positive. Marketing and privacy experts predict that Yahoo's action will have a widespread and detrimental effect on all electronic sales and services, due to increasing privacy concerns.
CIO: Software for the People
Q&A with Bonnie Nardi. The reason they often fail is that you need to have informal communications in order to find the knowledge in an organization, but the automated systems that capture such knowledge tend to be very top-down. Even passwords drive me crazy.
PC World: Digital Copyright Law Under Scrutiny.
Congress heeded the call. The DMCA not only outlaws the circumvention of security measures, it also prohibits the trafficking of circumvention tools, and the dissemination of information on how to bypass copyright protection. Opponents of the DMCA claim that Congress went too far.
April 3, 2002
SJ Mercury: Dot-DNS could be the first step to loosen ICANN's grip on Net.
Dan Gillmor. Frankston says the point is to split the technology from the words themselves -- separate the plumbing from its meaning. If enough people signed up for dot-DNS domains, they would help create a system less subject to jockeying by powerful interests -- and potentially a more stable system to boot.
Wired News: Full Assault on Filter Software.
The ACLU and the American Library Association claim that blocking software is problematic for a number of reasons: It doesn't do a good job of preventing access to porn, it bans many legitimate websites, and the list over verboten sites is compiled in secret by commercial vendors.
Technology Marketing: PR Prescription.
Michael Schrage. This piece is not a rant against press releases. Such a screed would be too easy. This particular column has bigger fish to fry. The Press Release—digital or physical—is both symbol and substance of everything that's wrong with PR as a service industry.
The Register: Yahoo! Rips! Up! Privacy! Policy!
As from now, Yahoo! mail users are exposed to a dozen unwanted "Special Offers and Marketing Communications", and users who've left their phone numbers with the portal will discover that they've been "agreed" to cold calling and junk snail mail, for good measure.
April 4, 2002
O'Reilly Network: Lessig on the Future of the Public Domain.
Eleven times in the last 40 years Congress has extended the term of existing copyrights. And this is a practice which they've gotten into because copyright holders see great advantage to extending their copyrights, so that they continue to milk returns from their particularly successful properties.
EE Times: Broadband coalition targets 'last mile' regulations.
The High Tech Broadband Coalition, representing the semiconductor, telecommunications, consumer electronics and software industries, said it would file a petition with the FCC. Members said the petition would urge the agency to review "unbundling" rules included in the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
News.Com: Microsoft preps content locks for devices.
The move is an attempt to ease the fears of record companies and other content providers who worry that anti-piracy locks used to protect online content will break down on portable devices, which don't have the processing power or software support of a computer.
InfoWorld: AOL partners to extend reach of IM.
Under the deal, PresenceWorks will provide the plumbing necessary to stitch AOL's IM presence capabilities into directories, applications, and databases. PresenceWorks develops presence and IM technologies for integration into a variety of pre-existing applications.
April 5, 2002
Clay Shirky: Communities, Audiences, and Scale.
With such software, the obvious question is "Can we get the best of both worlds? Can we have a medium that spreads messages to a large audience, but also allows all the members of that audience to engage with one another like a community?" The answer seems to be "No."
Darwin Magazine: Dirty Laundry on the Web.
David Weinberger. These stories are sometimes personal but still smell of the oil from the PR machinery. To their left, however, is a link to the forums where you'll find evidence that the values proclaimed and tracked in The Shell Report are actually taken quite seriously by at least some people in the company.
Boxes and Arrows: The story behind Usability.gov.
Today, Usability.gov has earned a following among technology professionals. For the uninitiated, Usability.gov is a one-stop source for government web designers to learn how to make websites more usable, useful, and accessible.
Wired News: Judges Blast Library Filtering.
The U.S. Congress' third assault on Internet pornography appears likely to meet the same ignoble end as the previous two. A two-week trial over library filtering ended Thursday with a trio of judges criticizing the CIPA as an unreasonable intrusion into the rights of Americans to view legal material online.
April 6, 2002
News.Com: Lessig's doomsday look at cyberspace.
But that reading should be as skeptical as it is attentive. For if Lessig's message is urgent, his methods are those of the insurrectionist. The book is designed to spark fear in its readers; its mission is not simply to explore and to inform, but to frighten and to inspire action born of that fear.
April 7, 2002
MIT Technology Review: Handhelds of Tomorrow.
For many years the art of human-factors engineering has been neglected by the computer industry. But as computing power seeps from the desktop further into our daily lives, it’s becoming all the more important to make products that are both easy to use and improvements on what we’re using today.
April 8, 2002
SF Chronicle: Sony puts a new twist on handhelds.
They also have the biggest, highest-resolution screens -- 320 by 480 pixels, compared with only 160 by 160 pixels in most Palm OS devices. They display text in big, bold fonts and images or even video in up to 65,536 gorgeous colors. Both text and graphics are amazingly sharp and clear...
NY Times: Google's Toughest Search Is for a Business Model.
The executives' disdain for business meant they spent nothing to advertise their site and cut very few deals with other sites. They have insisted that the ads that do run on Google should employ only words, not pictures, so as not to slow the site's amazingly quick response time.
O'Reilly Network: 802.11 Task Group Update.
Glenn Fleishman. In the meantime, although specifications haven't been finalized, the industry has moved awfully close to key compromises and consensus on the next-generation of several important elements that should offer greater speed, reliability, streaming voice and audio/video, and a baseline security...
April 9, 2002
Wired News: Just How Trusty Is Truste?.
Dyson agreed that, despite being co-founded by outspoken privacy advocates the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Truste's image has slipped from consumer advocate to corporate apologist. "The board ended up being a little too corporate, and didn't have any moral courage," she said.
Business Week: Don't Buy Hollywood's Broadband Script.
Hollywood has a history of trying to block people from using copyrighted works in ways it doesn't favor. But the courts time and again have protected "fair use," the right of consumers and enterpreneurs to use and exploit copyrighted works within certain limits.
Salon: Anti-Trustworthy computing.
Perhaps, if we'll trust computers with our lives, we'll also trust them with our credit cards. And maybe, even more important, Hollywood will trust them with its movies. The Trustworthy Computing initiative is as much about securing intellectual property control as it is about "safety."
Forbes: Computer Marries Jukebox!
There's just one problem: It doesn't work particularly well. Instead of elegantly integrated hardware and software, you get a boxful of disparate programs so poorly designed that you end up being the one who has to knit them together.
April 10, 2002
SJ Mercury: Andreessen: Copy protection efforts are doomed.
As film studios and recording studios urge Congress to extend copy protection to every home entertainment device, Andreessen said the entertainment industry need look no further than the software industry's own expensive, failed attempts at encryption to realize it is ineffective at stopping piracy.
News.Com: Gateway croons for copying tunes.
Beyond the ad, the company this weekend plans to offer free demonstrations on how to legally download songs and burn them onto CDs throughout its Gateway Country retail stores. Williams said that the company is not advocating piracy, but is putting heat on the government to find a balance...
Editor & Publish: News Sites Repeat Mistakes Of the Past.
Steve Outing. In recent months I attended two events focusing on online journalism. At both, speakers, panelists, and attendees often seemed to be of a common mind. Their message: too few people in the news industry recognize the value in true online interactivity and in creating services and content that are unique to the online medium.
EE Times: Intel wants to turn PCs into wireless LAN access points.
Intel is working on ways to repartition the software for an 802.11 access point so that part of the task runs on a PC host and part on an 802.11 client PC card in the system. That could reduce the price of a consumer access point from $250 to about $100...
April 11, 2002
DaveNet: Google is just the juice.
You'll see SOAP developers, on all platforms, getting to work, creating and publishing the glue that turns the Internet, finally, into a fantastic scripting environment. Google is just the juice we need.
O'Reilly Network: Inventing the Future.
Tim O'Reilly. But the most interesting part of the story is still untold, in the work of hundreds or thousands of independent projects that, like a progressively rendered image, will suddenly snap into focus. That's why I like to use the word "emergent." There's a story here that is emerging with increasing clarity.
NY Times: Seeking Profits, Internet Companies Alter Privacy Policy.
But even many marketing experts say that the risk to the reputations of these companies may outweigh any revenue they may receive. "What Yahoo has done is unconscionable," said Seth Godin, Yahoo's former vice president for direct marketing.
New Architect: form, function, emotion.
Founded in 1969 as Esslinger Design by product designer Hartmut Esslinger, Frog branched out to the United States from Germany in the 1980s, and moved into brand design. Frog's philosophy calls on the company's employees to regard product, brand, and user interface design as "inextricably linked."
April 12, 2002
Online Journalism Review: The Rise of Digital News Networks.
And from the vantage point of users, digital news networks can mean deeper and better news coverage -- or a sterile, homogenized product lacking soul, personality or purpose. When it comes to this flavor of convergence -- let's call it chain convergence -- execution is everything.
News.Com: Linux geeks play Hollywood politics.
Jeff Gerhardt, host of "The Linux Show," and Doc Searls, senior editor of the Linux Journal, are forming a lobbying group called GeekPAC that would try to convince lawmakers to consider developers when they draft laws concerning technology.
Computerworld: European Parliament says no to Web site blocking.
It asked that the European Commission, the EU's executive body, promote creation of content filtering systems to support parental control. Additionally, the European Parliament asked the 15 EU member states to set up hot lines to handle complaints about illegal or harmful Internet content.
April 13, 2002
InfoWorld: Old domain refrains.
Disastrous muddles even occur when customers are transferring domains to VeriSign from another registrar. In such cases, it's obvious the situation didn't arise out of any malicious intent on VeriSign's part -- it's just too incompetent or too indifferent to fix the problems.
April 14, 2002
Useit.Com: Kids' Corner: Website Usability for Children.
Most website designs for kids are based on pure folklore about how kids supposedly behave -- or, at best, by insights gleaned when designers observe their own children, who are hardly representative of average kids, typical Internet skills, or common knowledge about the Web.
Newsweek: ‘Don’t Dumb Them Down’.
Q&A with Jakob Nielsen. We have this myth that children can just do it . That’s not true. For instance, because kids have literal thinking, they don’t scroll down the page. It’s “out of sight, out of mind.” And when they encounter error messages, they just ignore it and go someplace else.
April 15, 2002
Salon: In defense of copyright.
Q&A with Morton David Goldberg. If those enactments are unconstitutional, then we're in a state of chaos as it relates to those works that are still under copyright. It's also even more disastrously a case of chaos as to what the limited scope of congressional power really is.
LA Times: Battle Stirs Over Copyright Laws.
Silicon Valley companies also are victimized by piracy and lose about $2.6 billion annually in the U.S. from unauthorized copying of software, according to the Washington trade group Business Software Alliance. But the firms said Hollywood's efforts to win greater copyright protection through legislation are misguided.
Crypto-Gram: Liability and Security.
Security has a technological component, but businesses approach security as they do any other business risk: in terms of risk management. Organizations optimize their activities to minimize their cost/risk ratio, and understanding those motivations is key to understanding computer security today.
Computerworld: BT Group Plans 4,000-Node Public-Access Wi-Fi Net.
BT Group PLC last week said it plans to install 4,000 public-access wireless LAN nodes designed to serve mobile enterprise users throughout the U.K. Analysts described the plan, expected to be completed in 2005, as one of the largest wireless LAN initiatives to date.
April 16, 2002
Computerworld: German railway operator to sue Google over sabotage links.
Deutsche Bahn AG, the German national railway operator, Wednesday will file suit against Google because the company's search engine provides links to a Web site that offers instructions on how to sabotage railway systems, Deutsche Bahn said Tuesday.
News.Com: Science publisher eases copyright rule.
The IEEE said it will no longer require authors to attest that their work does not violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The IEEE, publisher of nearly one-third of all computer science journals, said it is removing the requirement because it turned out to be more contentious than expected.
Computerworld: Web consortium backs P3P privacy standard.
Even so, Rotenberg said, many sites have yet to endorse P3P, and he predicted that users would probably end up disabling it out of frustration. He said he also fears that companies could use P3P as a way of fending off more meaningful privacy legislation.
April 17, 2002
NY Times: Music Services Aren't Napster, but the Industry Still Cries Foul.
Some industry analysts disagree. Aram Sinnreich, a music industry analyst with Jupiter Communications, said that sales were dropping because of the cyclical nature of the music market. "Very little of it can be ascribed to online music sharing," he said. Increasingly, these matters are being debated in court.
USA Today: Deal reached to combat digital piracy.
The agreement "is a good step forward," says Panasonic's Peter Fannon. But, he adds, the rules of how the technology would be implemented — what home users will and will not be permitted to do, and how much control Hollywood will have over those uses — "still have to be worked out."
SF Chronicle: Conference on privacy opens in S.F.
Participants -- who include industry and government representatives as well as privacy and freedom advocates -- will examine how the USA Patriot Act, the security bill passed in response to the terrorist attacks, may affect privacy, even in the seemingly unrelated area of health care records.
EE Times: Fixed wireless access rides wave of support.
Despite the much-publicized demise of fixed broadband wireless access providers such as Winstar and now XO Communications, and the cessation of rollouts by Sprint and Worldcom, the FBWA market is alive and well, thanks to a ground-swell of support for wireless ISPs operating in the unlicensed bands.
April 18, 2002
eWEEK: Internet Insight: Moore's Law & Order.
As Wong uses the term, Moore's Law is a technology-agnostic predictor of logic gate densities that morphs smoothly into the larger continuum of Kurzweil's Law as silicon gives way to the nanotube, which in turn gives way to quantum or other computing paradigms that might seem like science fiction today.
InfoWorld: Law experts leery of DRM solution.
In fact, five hours of presentations and debate over the issues of fair use and DRM at the twelfth annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in San Francisco Tuesday produced a wealth of questions and one clear answer: that it is too early in this era of technological innovation to start locking down digital content.
Wired News: Deep Linking Returns to Surface.
Most at risk of running headlong into virtual blockades are the "deep links" that bypass another site's front page, leading users directly to specific content. Legal experts say that deep linking can violate U.S. and European copyright and trademark laws.x
April 19, 2002
Scientific American: Wireless Data Blaster.
The high-speed data-transfer capabilities of ultrawideband systems have spurred a group of inventors and entrepreneurs to promote this short-range technology as a nearly ideal way to handle the burgeoning flow of wireless information among networks of portable electronic devices.
News.Com: Google gives some advice...for a price.
Google will then help secure an "expert researcher" to answer the question and provide the intelligence to other interested parties. Rodriquez said the company is recruiting researchers online through a careful selection process, which includes answering essay questions on the chosen topic.
LA Times: The Invisible Lightness of Beams.
Founded five years ago by an eccentric inventor, the company delivers high-speed Internet access via laser beams zapped through office windows. It might sound like science fiction, but Terabeam is actually borrowing technology developed by the military during the Cold War...
April 20, 2002
Network World: Should privacy technologies be built in?
While some attendees took the "build-the-privacy-protecting-technologies-and-it-will come" position, others lobbied for legislative action, or a combination of privacy-enhancing technologies and law, arguing that large corporations would have little motivation to deploy the technologies otherwise.
April 21, 2002
SJ Mercury: Want privacy? Take action.
Dan Gillmor. That was among the key themes at the 12th annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, held last week in San Francisco. As corporate and political interests plan and build the architecture of the emerging networks, they are tending to leave out what should be core components.
April 22, 2002
NY Times: Pay Features Gather Steam on Web.
All across the Web, consumers are buying newly offered information and services. Beyond the long-established vices of pornography and gambling, the Web now offers a variety of paid services that include dating tips, weather alerts, college classes, financial advice...
News.Com: Stop! Look before you click.
Q&A with Mark Hochhauser. We've learned a lot about Web design. We know we should be using short paragraphs without too many pages because it's tough to keep people focused on text. But these consent forms are not developed with any sense of Web design or document design at all.
InfoWorld: Can you really click 'No'?
When Mr. Fine shared his situation with me, I found Symantec's license amendment particularly intriguing. In the same breath that it took away the home use rights, it also took away all rights of return in the original EULA, presumably including the right of a refund if one didn't accept the new terms.
NY Times: Google Runs Into Copyright Dispute.
Legal experts say the episode highlights problems with the law that can make companies or individuals liable for linking to sites they do not control. And it has turned Google, whose business is built around a database of two billion Web pages, into a quiet campaigner for the freedom to link.
Computerworld: South Korean carriers plan 25k public access wireless nodes in '02.
Korea Telecom Corp. in Seoul, the state-owned nationwide telecommunications company, plans to install 15,000 WLAN access points by the end of the year, while Hanaro Telecom Inc. plans to install 10,000 in that time, according to Korea Now magazine.
April 23, 2002
Salon: Musician to Napster judge: Let my music go
Byrd is hardly the first artist to express his distaste for how record companies do business. But Byrd's letter comes at a time when the music industry is in a crisis. Record sales are down for a variety of reasons, and consumers are in open revolt.
Boxes and Arrows: AIGA Experience Design—past, present and future.
Q&A with Terry Swack and Clement Mok. AIGA Experience Design is the community that brings all types of Experience Design practitioners together to focus on larger issues of business value and collaborative practice and methods. Because of this, AIGA ED members are designers who are interested in exploring new boundaries of their professions as they are evolving across multiple disciplines.
InfoWorld: Nokia, IBM set sights on public WLANs.
IBM and Nokia, the world's largest mobile-phone maker, have agreed to jointly pursue the public wireless LAN market with the hope that in combining their strengths, they can add extra momentum to the spread of WLAN networks, the companies announced Monday.
News.Com: Display efforts yield new prospects.
But analysts don't expect OLED to unseat LCD anytime soon because, as with all emerging technologies, it takes time to streamline production and boost yields for high efficiencies and volumes. However, a new way of producing OLED displays could help push the technology toward the spotlight.
April 24, 2002
SF Chronicle: DVD-software firm beats movie industry to courtroom punch.
The program, based on controversial open-source code that descrambles DVD encryption, is designed to let users make a backup copy of a DVD movie. The suit argues that copyright laws allow such copying for personal use. Moore, a veteran software developer, has sold 75,000 copies of DVD Copy Plus...
Strategy & Business: Lawrence Lessig: The Thought Leader Interview.
The fundamental reason to be worried about the Internet changing is if it alters the environment for innovation, it will limit corporate growth in the future. To the extent we’ve seen a slowdown, I think a substantial amount can be attributed to the restrictions I’m seeing.
O'Reilly Network: Clay Shirky: What Web Services Got Right ... and Wrong.
I'm most interested in Web Services within the larger theme of decentralization. Once you "data-fy" the functions that used to be done by middleware, you suddenly get to this place where Web Services start to look like the way to implement peer-to-peer.
News.Com: Using tax dollars to combat piracy.
In a congressional hearing Tuesday before a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, the RIAA requested additional funds for federal anti-piracy law enforcement efforts and is pushing for a renewed agenda on protecting intellectual property.
April 25, 2002
Financial Times: Burmese get glimpse of superhighway.
But last month Bagan Cybertech, a "semi-government" company under the auspices of the defence ministry, and its private joint venture partner, Maykha, launched a minor internet offensive. It began accepting public subscribers to a new service - BaganNet - that combines e-mail accounts with access to a handful of carefully screened sites...
NY Times: Bypassing the Carriers, a Burg Goes Broadband.
Making the leap from providing services to the government to providing for everyone is as much a political challenge as a technical one. The county is, in essence, going into competition with Verizon, even if the phone company is not aggressively pursuing the business.
Network World: NTT-C to launch 200-hotspot Tokyo WLAN network.
NTT Communications Thursday said it plans to launch a commercial wireless LAN service in Tokyo from the middle of May. When it launches, the network will consist of around 200 hotspots at cafes, hotels, convenience stores and other locations around the capital.
April 26, 2002
Salon: A law to protect spyware.
But Hollings' bill should outrage Internet users just as much as Brilliant Digital's spyware. For while it talks a good game about protecting "sensitive" information, the truth is that it would place a congressional stamp of approval on precisely the kinds of practices that purveyors of spyware are eager to engage in.
April 27, 2002
The Register: Hands on with the PDA-killer Sony P800.
It's far from perfect, but after several years of looking at smartphones, the P800 has the kind of potential to break out of the geek ghetto, and one that leaves us even more convinced that today's PDAs need to evolve dramatically, and fast.
April 28, 2002
NY Times: Comforts of Home Yield to Tyranny of Digital Gizmos.
Of all the forces that permeate daily life, perhaps nothing has become more of a tyranny than the bits and pieces of technology that are meant to help one get through the day more easily, but instead are a source of frustration.
Useit.Com: Usability for Senior Citizens.
Websites tend to be produced by young designers, who often assume that all users have perfect vision and motor control, and know everything about the Web. These assumptions rarely hold, even when the users are not seniors.
April 29, 2002
Wired News: SDMI: Quintessential Vaporware.
Now SDMI is road kill, outpaced by developments in digital technology and done in by the narrow interests of its own members, record labels competing for dominance and music hardware companies impatient to get their products out to consumers.
MSNBC: Fox Studio quits joint venture with Disney for Movies.com.
But in both businesses, the Justice Department has zeroed in on these joint efforts, focusing on whether they unfairly shut out competitors. Besides antitrust concerns, the joint ventures often are unwieldy because competitors bring different interests to the table.
News.Com: Russian CEO defends copying rights.
The flight came at the end of what the ElcomSoft CEO hopes will be his last trip to the United States for a while. Katalov has spent many months away from his family since last July, when his company found itself on the wrong side of the law as a defendant in the first major test case of the criminal provisions of the DMCA.
USA Today: Net radio will pull plug this week to protest fees.
Radio Free Virgin, Stanford University's KZXU, Choice Radio and KING of Seattle are some of the Web radio services that will take part with either total silence or non-stop public service announcements on the issue. This follows last week's move by members of Congress to take up the cause of Internet radio...
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