May 1, 2002
Boxes and Arrows: The age of findability. Peter Morville. Findability is about recognizing that we live in a multi-dimensional world, and deciding to explore new facets that cut across traditional boundaries. Findability isn’t limited to content. Nor is it limited to the Web. Findability is about designing systems that help people find what they need.

May 2, 2002
Network World: California court ponders key 'Net jurisdiction case. The suit, filed in a Santa Clara, Calif., court in 1999, alleged that Pavlovich and other defendants violated state law governing trade secrets by revealing the contents of the entertainment industry's DVD encryption code. The group claimed that it was filing the suit in California because the industry was concentrated in the state.

May 3, 2002
SJ Mercury: SonicBlue ordered to track ReplayTV users' viewing choices. Central District Court Magistrate Charles F. Eick told SonicBlue to gather ``all available information'' about how consumers use the Santa Clara company's latest generation ReplayTV 4000 video recorders, and turn the information over to the film studios and television networks suing it for contributing to copyright infringement.

May 4, 2002
Wired News: Another DMCA Attack Looms. Rep. Rick Boucher is finally ready to try and dismantle a key part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Boucher, a Virginia Democrat, said last July that he wanted to amend the DMCA to permit certain "fair uses" of digital content, such as backing up an audio CD by bypassing copy protection technology.

InfoWorld: UCITA, the undead. In 1999, just when ALI's dislike of UCC 2B had doomed it, NCCUSL rushed out the original draft of UCITA just a few months before it was adopted at the annual meeting. That's how this process works. It's when you think the beast is dead that it's at its most dangerous.

May 5, 2002
Network World: Avatier releases policy engine for password creation. Through a wizard-driven interface, administrators can set policies that force the use of upper and lower case letters and the position of certain characters such as requiring the fourth character in any password to be a numeral or restricting passwords that end with numerals or special characters.

May 6, 2002
Clay Shirky: Domain Names: Memorable, Global, Non-political? Names that are both memorable and globally unique will therefore require global political oversight. As long as we want names we can remember, and which work unambiguously anywhere in the world, someone somewhere will have to handle the issues that ICANN currently handles.

Business Week: Lawrence Lessig: The "Dinosaurs" Are Taking Over. They've succeeded in making Washington believe this is a binary choice -- between perfect protection or no protection. No one is seriously arguing for no protection. They are arguing for a balance that avoids the phenomenon we are seeing now -- one where the last generation of technology controls the next generation of industry.

NY Times: Access to Free Online Music Is Seen as a Boost to Sales. Disputing the position held by the major record companies, a report issued on Friday found that people who use file-sharing networks to obtain music at no charge over the Internet are more likely to have increased their spending on music than are average online music fans.

May 7, 2002
MSNBC: Music industry finally online. Since the launch, MusicNet has attracted only about 40,000 subscribers. Critics have panned it. AOL Time Warner’s America Online service, which was supposed to be MusicNet’s biggest distributor, says it wants something better before it will introduce the service.

InfoWorld: Yahoo Nazi case tests bounds of online free speech. The CDT, the ACLU and a handful of other rights organizations filed a friend-of-the-court brief Monday, asking a California court to deny an appeal in a 2-year-old case between Internet powerhouse Yahoo and two French nonprofit groups dedicated to eliminating anti-Semitism.

News.Com: Can your Net access travel through walls? Sprint says that the tests in Houston and Montreal are among the largest yet for non-line-of-sight wireless access by any U.S. Web service provider. However, tests are limited as the economic downturn and competitive challenges have put a serious damper on research and development budgets.

May 8, 2002
Business 2.0: Hollywood vs. High-Tech. This fight goes beyond any single device -- beyond entertainment, for that matter. Pleading self-defense, the movie studios and their allies are trying to construct an instrument of control out of the very technology they decry. Citing an unprecedented peril, they have embarked on a quest for unprecedented power...

Editor & Publisher: Content Publishing Systems Squash News Design. Steve Outing. The classic example: many of the newspaper Web sites of Knight Ridder, which a few months ago took on a uniform look. The Miami Herald's Web site no longer looks like a news site that plays up the Herald brand. Instead, visitors see a blandly designed Miami.com home page.

Wired News: Judge: Elcomsoft Case Can Proceed. A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that the copyright infringement case against the Russian software company Elcomsoft can go on, dismissing the defense's claim that key provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act are unconstitutional.

May 9, 2002
uiweb: Strategic usability. Tactical use of usability engineering is responsive and isolated, focusing on adjustments to existing designs, often late in the schedule. Strategic use of usability or user research is proactive and integrated, improving decision making at many levels of project and business planning.

Washington Post: A Visual Rather Than Verbal Future. Shneiderman thinks visual tools are what will let humans master computers. If he's right, the next-generation Internet may have fewer software "robots" than most pundits predict. Or if software agents do catch on, visual tools may be how we control them.

NY Times: The Entertainment Server. Entertainment servers are making their way onto the rack next to the television. These various devices — game systems, audio centers, set-top boxes and digital video recorders — have four common attributes: a microprocessor, networking capability, a graphical user interface and a huge hard drive.

May 10, 2002
Salon: Use the blog, Luke. Scott Johnson. It's about information management. The bloggers have the potential to do something far more original than offer up packaged opinions on the news of the day; they can actually help organize the Web in ways tailored to your minute-by-minute needs.

Salon: Much ado about blogging. Weblogs expand the media universe. They are a media life-form that is native to the Web, and they add something new to our mix, something valuable, something that couldn't have existed before the Web.

InfoWorld: Fujitsu claims disk drive breakthrough. Current 2.5-inch hard disks can store around 30GB per disk platter. When Fujitsu commercializes its new disk head technology in two to four years time it will lead to capacities of 180GB per platter, six times current capacities, Fujitsu said in a statement.

May 11, 2002
First Monday: Creating a Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections. Managers and implementers of digital collections are now expected to take much the same approach to digital collection development. This means that planners of digitization projects today must consider issues of reusability, persistence, interoperability, verification, and documentation.

SJ Mercury: Hollywood wants a stranglehold on your digital technology. Cory Doctorow. The people who fought tooth and nail to keep VCRs off the market will have a veto over all new digital television devices, including digital television devices that interface with personal computers. The next generation of home entertainment systems will include only features that don't inspire Hollywood's dread of infringing uses, no matter what the consequences for you, the owner of the device.

May 12, 2002
SJ Mercury: Web pioneer looks at ground covered, future. Dan Gillmor. The Web Berners-Lee envisioned and forged wasn't really the one that has emerged in recent years. He believed that the Web should be a medium for writing, not just reading, a medium for robust collaboration. The community has created most of the needed tools to make the Web more collaborative, in a robust and secure way.

Useit.Com: Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability. The homepage is your company's face to the world. Increasingly, potential customers will look at your company's online presence before doing business with you -- regardless of whether they plan to close the actual sale online.

May 13, 2002
USA Today: High court has issues with porn shield law. But the court went on to say that there are other potential constitutional problems with the law that were not addressed by the lower court. Without taking a position on those other potential problems, the high court threw out the lower court's ruling and sent the case back for further review.

NY Times: A New Direction for Intellectual Property. Perceiving an overly zealous culture of copyright protection, a group of law and technology scholars are setting up Creative Commons, a nonprofit company that will develop ways for artists, writers and others to easily designate their work as freely shareable.

New Architect: Captured. That initial board started two independent tracks to develop ways to elect the nine Board members from industry and nine Board members from the Internet community at large. No one knew it in 1998, but this two-track strategy would eventually kill the concept of the at-large in its entirety… and maybe ICANN with it.

NY Times: The Yahoo Privacy Storm That Wasn't. Immediately, privacy advocates reacted with criticism, and outraged postings flooded message boards all over the Internet. But for all the smoke, there was little fire of reaction, according to a study conducted by comScore, a research firm that monitors the Web pages...

May 14, 2002
Fortune: 'This Is War'. They fear the government could muck up the computer industry royally. Moreover, they question whether it's their responsibility to rescue an industry that has historically been more concerned with cranking out Frankenstein sequels than embracing change.

John Gilmore: The Need to Protect Content. I have not been shy about telling Intel what I think of their efforts to prevent users from making legitimate uses of their products. The heart of the difference between Intel and I on this point is on what you called "the need to protect content".

Wired News: Supreme Court Volleys on COPA. Now they know -- and it's hardly clear. The justices unanimously decided to block prosecutors from enforcing the COPA law, at least temporarily, but they couldn't agree on the future of the legal concept of "community standards" that's used in smut-prosecutions.

Harvard Business School: 'Screen Language': The New Currency for Learning. It's simply the vernacular of digital culture, the way technology is increasingly put in the service of human imagination in sophisticated ways. For the shorthand version, just think of any teenager's natural affinity for instant messaging, video games, movies, open source, and eBay.

Wired News: Another Run to a Deep-Link Suit. Rodale Press, the publisher of Runner's World magazine and many other prominent health-oriented publications, sent a stiff note to a hobbyist website this week, demanding it delete a hyperlink to a "printer-friendly" version of a runnersworld.com article or -- face the consequences.

May 15, 2002
SJ Mercury: The technology behind Napster is far from dead. Dan Gillmor. Yet anyone stopping by the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in Santa Clara this week surely noted the insurgency's continuing strength. The concepts Napster made popular, notably in the arena known as ``peer to peer'' technology, are an indelible and growing part of the scene.

Technology Review: The State of Innovation: Information Technology. Now, though, software designers, including several members of this year’s TR100, are turning the Internet and the Web into the media we’ll use to stay connected, share our favorite content, tap into distant computing resources and run our businesses—and do it all faster.

Washington Post: Rights Group Joins Fight Against DVR Snooping Order. In a "friend-of-the-court" brief filed in a Los Angeles federal court Monday, the Electronic Privacy Information Center argued that court-order surveillance of ReplayTV users to satisfy litigious movie studious and television broadcasters would trample on the consumers' privacy rights.

May 16, 2002
Dan Gillmor: Hollywood versus Silicon Valley, Ignoring the Customers. Articles like this are infuriating. They cast the debate in binary terms, industry versus industry, as if that's really the issue. It isn't. Guess who's missing from the story, and all too often from the debate? That's right, the customers.

Law.Com: 'Commons' Sense for Copyrighted Material? Now he's taking a different tack, providing a mechanism to enable copyright holders to relinquish some of their rights. Specifically, Creative Commons will provide Web-based applications that allow an author or artist to specify the terms for making an entire work or portion of a work available to the public.

SJ Mercury: China unblocks foreign media Web sites. There was no official announcement explaining why normally censored Web sites, which included those of Reuters, CNN and the Washington Post, were accessible, some as early as Wednesday evening. Nor was there any immediate indication of a change in policy.

May 17, 2002
Salon: Napster's wake. The MP3 movement may have already had its day in the sun -- the revolution, with all its attendent celebrity, has ended -- but file-swapping still continues in a quieter sort of way. Will the record labels eventually catch up to reality and offer a reasonable product that customers won't resist?

IBM Ease of Use: The Core of Computing. Today's peripatetic lifestyles have spawned a massive dependence on portable computing devices. As users become increasingly reliant on laptops and PDAs, they desire ever more convenient computing options that will enhance their productivity while fitting seamlessly into their busy lives.

May 18, 2002
Crypto-Gram: Secrecy, Security, and Obscurity. Any system that tries to keep its algorithms secret for security reasons is quickly dismissed by the community, and referred to as "snake oil" or even worse. This is true for cryptography, but the general relationship between secrecy and security is more complicated than Kerckhoffs' Principle indicates.

May 19, 2002
SJ Mercury: Imagine a world with unlimited airwaves. Dan Gillmor. In a panel discussion and interview last week at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in Santa Clara, Reed put in plain English some of the concepts he discussed at the FCC and which he has put online at his Web site. Simply put, he said, we have to start looking at spectrum as an almost limitless commodity, not a scarce one.

May 20, 2002
NY Times: Microsoft's $1 Billion Bet on Xbox Network. It is a bet as ambitious as it is expensive. When Microsoft opens the electronic doors for its service this summer, the Internet technology in its three data centers in London, Seattle and Tokyo will have more capacity than its own Microsoft.com, which itself is one of the world's largest Web sites.

digitalMASS: In the future, we'll be seeing the world differently. Scott Kirsner. MicroOptical Corp., a Westwood-based technology firm, produces computer displays that can be integrated into — or clipped onto — eyeglasses. The displays can be connected to a wide range of devices, like a cellphone, PDA, laptop, Blackberry, or a specially designed wearable computer.

May 21, 2002
Boxes and Arrows: Designing on both sides of your brain. Scott Berkum. Later in life, having read about our best thinkers and problem solvers, I learned that there is a natural balance that can be mastered between both intensely imaginative, and passionately logical lines of thought. It’s my claim, echoing many people before me, that we need to seek out this synergy to be good at design.

Wired News: Webcasters Spared Extra Royalties. The Librarian of Congress has rejected proposed royalty rates that would have charged Internet broadcasters based on each Web user that listens in. Librarian James H. Billington will issue a final decision setting the new rates by June 20, the U.S. Copyright Office said Tuesday.

May 22, 2002
Technology Review: Leaky Cyber Borders. Simson Garfinkel. And that’s probably where the world is headed. Just as nations now regulate their physical frontiers, so too will they regulate their electronic ones—using computer security rather than objectionable ideas as their justification.

MSNBC: Internet navigators think small. Although they’re not specifically studying Weblogs, Flake and his NEC colleagues are focusing on how smaller communities develop on the Internet. However, such research requires a sophisticated Web crawler to identify the thousands or millions of global villages on the Internet.

May 23, 2002
EE Times: U.S. takes hard look at broadband deployment. The Federal Communications Commission convened the first in a series of meetings Wednesday designed to probe where the United States stands in the race to deploy broadband networks, which some see as the telecom sector's way out of its current slump.

Washington Post: Visions Of a Wild and Wireless Future. To get a few clues as to what may come, I went out this week to a little brick office park in Reston to talk with Kahn, co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocols, the language that is the foundation of the Internet.

May 24, 2002
American Specatator: The Cyberspace Cowboy: John Perry Barlow. There isn’t a great deal going on that’s more important than laying the foundations of the place where practically all commerce–whether social, economic, or political–will be conducted for the next couple of thousand years. We really need to do this right.

Cooper Interaction Design: Don't get burned by bad mapping. You may be surprised to learn that your digital products may suffer from the same fundamental problem that makes these stoves annoying and counterintuitive. The problem with these stoves is poor or unnatural mapping.

PC World: Video Demands Expected to Boost Storage. They chomp through storage space at the rate of about 1GB per hour. Because the drives are not removable, they also require a lot of storage space so users don't have to constantly juggle files to make room for new recordings. "I would suggest that a 200GB drive would seem small when you get into digital television," said Munce.

May 25, 2002
InfoWorld: Unfairly used. You might think Congress, which wrote the copyright laws that created the concept of fair use, would be stepping in to put a stop to this abuse. On the contrary, so far Congress seems eager to sell consumers' fair use rights down the river, and it's just a matter of determining who will be the highest bidder.

May 26, 2002
Useit.Com: Supporting Multiple-Location Users. By contrast, in 1998, only 20% of Internet users accessed the Net from more than one location. In only three years, Internet use has changed from being overwhelmingly a single-location activity to being a multiple-location activity for almost half of all users.

SJ Mercury: Building harmony through the Internet. Dan Gillmor. Nothing can replace personal contact, and human nature isn't changing. But a medium -- or is it a place? -- that transcends the traditional limitations of time and space, enabling connections on an unprecedented scale, is fertile territory for innovation.

Washington Post: Why Won't We Read the Manual? And so it has come to this: Americans buy the most sophisticated computers, the coolest digital cameras, the most advanced automobiles, the most versatile cell phones and handheld organizers, and then . . . and then we forget, or decline, or flat out refuse, to read the directions.

May 27, 2002
SJ Mercury: Lieberman to visit Bay Area in push for broadband strategy. Other bills on some of the same issues are already moving through Congress, but Lieberman is one of the more powerful lawmakers to take up broadband as a cause. He has said he is considering a run for president in 2004, and his support for the high-tech industry's agenda could play well in California.

NY Times: A Libel Suit May Establish E-Jurisdiction. But Mr. Young did not file his case in the defendant's jurisdiction. Instead, he sued in Virginia, even though the newspapers had almost no print circulation there. That decision on where to sue is the nub of a legal dispute that could reverberate nationally and internationally, lawyers say.

May 28, 2002
Bob Frankston: The FCC in Context. Examining the FCC decisions in terms of winners and losers misses the point. As long as it is constrained to support the telecommunications infrastructure as it exists, and thus frustrate change, we are all losers. Instead, we must help the FCC act as the agent of change and steward of the industry as it passes through a necessary, even if traumatic, change.

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Museums Seek Methods for Preserving Digital Art. Several museums are organizing to recommend methods for preserving digital art -- works that deal in light, code, and constantly changing technology. The project seeks to create a historical record of an art form that barely has any history at all, and that constantly threatens to slip away.

May 29, 2002
Wired News: A Broadband in Every Pot. Lieberman pointedly avoided any specificity in his ideas, saying that the government should refuse to endorse any single company or technology in its plan. His slogan, he said, is "broadband positive, technology neutral." But Lieberman is apparently neutral -- or at least undecided -- about many of the other issues swirling around broadband.

EE Times: Display makers unsure of OLEDs' near-term prospects. While about 50 companies worldwide are estimated to be investigating OLED technology, only a few companies in Taiwan are active on the OLED front, though more are expected to invest hundreds of millions of dollars over the next few years.

May 30, 2002
Washington Post: Critics Say ICANN Should Compete For Net Governance Duties. The ACLU, Consumers Union, Consumer Federation of America, EPIC and EFF all signed onto the letter, which was organized by the Washington-based Media Access Project. The groups argue that ICANN has repeatedly failed to give the international public any meaningful role in Internet governance.

May 31, 2002
Wired News: Court: Library Filter Law Illegal. A controversial library filtering law is unconstitutional, a special three-judge court ruled on Friday. The Philadelphia court unanimously said that a federal law designed to encourage the use of filtering software violated library patrons' rights to access legitimate, non-pornographic websites.

MSNBC: ‘Pop-up’ relief for AOL members? America Online subscribers may finally get some relief from the barrage of aggressive pop-up advertisements that greet them when signing on and off the online service. Reducing the number of pop-up ads is a part of the online service company’s grand scheme to get back on the growth track...

• Salon: From December 1, 1998; The birth of an Internet network? Scott Rosenberg.