June 1, 2002
PC World: Court Decision Could Mean Higher Broadband Prices. Broadband consumers could find themselves dealing with lackluster service and rising prices as the Baby Bells gain ground in the telecom deregulation debate, industry experts say. The warning comes in the wake of a District of Columbia appeals court decision last week to reject existing unbundling and line-sharing rules imposed on the Bells, put in place by a 1996 law.

June 2, 2002
SJ Mercury: Hypocrites have a point on broadband. Dan Gillmor. The issue is vitally important, though few of the advocates for universal broadband seem to understand precisely why. Mostly they say we should have fast data connections because, well, it'll be good for us. There are all kinds of sound reasons to push broadband.

LA Times: Ruling Halts Internet Limits. The government may well fare better in the high court. The justices are more inclined to say government-subsidized speech is not necessarily free of regulation. Four years ago, the court upheld a federal law that required the National Endowment of the Arts to take into account "general standards of decency" in awarding grants.

June 3, 2002
News.Com: Viewing secrets are safe with Sonicblue. Potashner said the company will continue working with content providers to develop new revenue models. "If the networks and studios focused on the inevitable evolution of their business instead of attempts to stifle technology, we believe everyone involved would benefit, consumers most of all," the CEO added.

NY Times: Privacy Is Common Issue Online. Though businesses and their customers have largely taken divergent paths to e-commerce — businesses promoted it endlessly; consumers embraced it tepidly — these two groups are in lock step on at least one issue: online privacy. They both profess concern, but do little about it.

June 4, 2002
News.Com: Studios, tech firms near digital TV pact. The Broadcast Protection Discussion Group, made up of representatives from major media companies, electronics manufacturers and high-tech companies such as chipmaker Intel, was prepared late Monday to wrap up work on the issue after struggling with it since last November.

EFF: BPDG one-page critique. In other words, the proposed BPDG Standard is a ``mini-Hollings'' bill for all devices capable of interoperating with DTV. EFF joins technology companies, consumer groups, and industry associations in opposing the deeply flawed BPDG Standard proposed in the Final Report.

Boxes & Arrows: Opening Pandora's Box: Special Deliverable #1. The parallel processes of creation and documentation feed off each other. Through the documentation, we come to a better understanding of our own conception of the system. As we develop a clearer vision of the system through the documentation, we find ways to improve the system.

June 5, 2002
NY Times: Hollywood Has a Setback in Controls for Digital TV. A long-awaited report that the studios hoped would provide the consensus necessary for anti-piracy legislation — and that members of Congress hoped would jump-start the stalled rollout of digital television — instead disclosed a host of dissenting opinions.

News.Com: Microsoft targets user/password morass. While Microsoft's existing Passport single sign-on ID system is targeted at consumers, TrustBridge will let business users log onto Windows-based systems hosted locally, or remotely at partner companies, using a single ID.

June 6, 2002
Wired News: Fans: Music Should Rock, Not Lock. Dividian's story is not unique, and his distaste for DRM is a big problem for record companies and movie studios. Without that security on CDs and DVDs, the industry thinking goes, no online business can survive. But no consumer wants to buy protected content.

News.Com: Suit filed over ReplayTV features. The online civil liberties group has filed suit in federal court in Los Angeles against more than two dozen entertainment companies on behalf of five consumers who own ReplayTV recorders, asking a judge to declare activities such as recording and fast-forwarding legal.

June 7, 2002
Salon: Getting a lock on broadband. Telecommunications, cable, and media companies and their allies in Congress have campaigned for years to deregulate most aspects of the telecom industry. Under the current administration, and the leadership of FCC chairman Michael Powell, those efforts have finally begun to pay off.

June 8, 2002
News.Com: Yahoo to give home page a makeover. The redesign is being fueled partly by advertisers, which are increasingly demanding more real estate on highly visible spots such as Yahoo's home page. Advertisers are irked that they can only buy minimal exposure on the main page of a site that draws a massive audience.

Glenn Fleishman: The Night the Lights Went Out in Wi-Fi. Robert X. Cringely writes about the threats to Wi-Fi's band and the nature of interference and the FCC: he's absolutely right on all counts. Steve Stroh will get credit when the day comes that cities light up their night skies with RF systems, and all of our 2.4 gigahertz networks sputter and fail. It won't happen all at once, and we have an exit plan.

June 9, 2002
Useit.Com: Reduce Redundancy: Decrease Duplicated Design Decisions. Simplicity may be the single most important usability guideline. The less stuff you show users, the less they'll have to scan and comprehend, and the better the odds that they'll pick the correct option at any given stage. Duplicating features adds significant overhead to both the scanning process and the comprehension process.

June 10, 2002
NY Times: 2 Tinkerers Say They've Found a Cheap Way to Broadband. At the core of their plan is the inexpensive wireless data standard known as Wi-Fi or 802.11b, which is already shaking up the communications industry, threatening to undermine the business plans of cellular phone companies by offering a much cheaper method for mobile access to the Internet.

News.Com: Handspring reads writing on the screen. Chief Operating Officer Ed Colligan, speaking at a CIBC World Markets investor conference here, told attendees that his company was surprised that consumers preferred entering information via keyboard, rather than using writing technology popularized by Palm's Graffiti technology.

June 11, 2002
News.Com: IBM labs unveil super-dense storage. Like punch cards in the computers of old, the pattern of the indentations essentially is the digitized version of the data meant to be stored. The minute size of the indentations, though, means that Millipede chips are 20 times more densely packed with information than current hard drives.

Web Reference: WebStandards.org to Relaunch. Q&A with Jeffrey Zeldman. To help our peers grasp and harness the true power of web standards, The Web Standards Project will relaunch this week with new members, a new look, new site features, new content, a new Mission, and new initiatives focused on developer education and standards compliance...

June 12, 2002
New Architect: Joint Venture. Jeffrey Veen. This strategy works so well in real-world retail settings that it has invaded our digital world as well. Yet on the Web, cobranding hasn't been nearly as successful. Too many online brands try to apply brick-and-mortar techniques to their sites with disappointing results.

NY Times: Helping Businesses Evaluate Their Internet Presence. Analysts and executives at the usability companies say that marketers often overemphasize the hard sell of specific products or fall in love with whiz-bang technology instead of worrying about whether sites create a pleasant atmosphere for consumers and dovetail with companies' overarching branding messages.

Business Week: Will Cable Unplug the File Swappers? These new pricing models could be serious trouble for the still-growing peer-to-peer file-sharing movement, which is inextricably linked to cheap bandwidth. Indeed, the cable companies just might accomplish what the entertainment industries have failed to do.

June 13, 2002
Wired News: Senators Weigh ICANN's Future. Subcommittee members concluded that both a narrowly defined set of duties and increased government oversight are in order. "For ICANN to function effectively in the future, it must narrow its function to administrative rather than regulatory matters," said Sen. Conrad Burns, one of the Senate's more vocal critics of ICANN.

News.Com: Hoax release carried on news wire. Aside from Yahoo Finance, no other news outlets picked up the Cel-Sci release from Internet Wire on Monday. Cel-Sci and Internet Wire both said Tuesday they had no information on the source of the phony press release and were cooperating with the SEC in investigating the matter.

June 14, 2002
Forbes ASAP: The Smother of Invention. Branches of the government are intervening where they never have before. Opposing camps, many with money and influence, are forming. Small inventors are diverted from where they can make the greatest contributions. And a culture of litigation, circumvention, and secrecy has evolved from an area where openness and law had long ruled.

June 15, 2002
Fast Company: How Google Searches Itself. Mayer, an intense, fast-talking product manager, scribbles rapidly as the engineers race to explain and defend the new ideas that they've posted to an internal Web site. By the end of the hour-long meeting, six, seven, or sometimes even eight new ideas are fleshed out enough to take to the next level of development.

NY Times: Competition Is Heating Up for Control of .org Domain. Although the business of registering Internet names has begun to shrink this year, as many as eight or nine bids are expected at a meeting this month in Bucharest, Romania, when the group that oversees Internet addresses will decide who should manage the list of names that end in .org.

June 16, 2002
Fortune: I Want My File-Served TV! Stewart Alsop. I first heard Hendricks say those words two months ago, and they've been bugging me ever since. Last week I figured out why--it's because file-served television seems the only sensible future for television. If I'm right, that's good news for TiVo, and for consumers as well.

June 17, 2002
NY Times: Questions Surround Domain Names. The questions echoed those heard in other investigations in Congressional halls: namely, how to deal with an entity operating largely in obscurity, mired in bureaucracy and in desperate need of more effective oversight. The impetus for the hearing was widespread dissatisfaction with the organization, ICANN.

News.Com: The little engine that could beat Google. AlltheWeb, run by Fast Search & Transfer, said Monday that it now searches 2.1 billion pages versus Google's 2.07 billion. AlltheWeb has attracted a cult following among researchers seeking hard-to-find results. However, the number of pages in an index is only one indicator of a search engine's power.

• Industry Standard: From January 18, 2000; Search Firms Argue Whether Bigger is Better

June 18, 2002
Reason: Cyberspace’s Legal Visionary. Q&A with Lawrence Lessig. The thing I’m most worried about is what happens as the network moves from an essentially common carriage-regulated medium to pipes that are unregulated and increasingly encouraged to discriminate for or against the content they serve.

LA Times: Devices That Move Digital Media Complicate Piracy Clampdown. While Hollywood studios try to rein in what consumers can do with digital files, some consumer-electronics companies are speeding ahead with products that make it even easier for people to move movies and music around the home and the Web.

Boxes & Arrows: Foreseeing the future: The legacy of Vannevar Bush. It is because of this article that Bush has been hailed as the conceptual creator of “hypertext”. The article is at its most innovative and interesting in the description of how the memex device was to work for the reader.

June 19, 2002
Scientific American: Last Mile by Laser. Newly revived over the past few years after having been invented in the 1970s, FSO relies on low-power infrared laser transceivers that can beam two-way data at gigabit-per-second rates. Small-scale FSO systems have already been installed around the world by several vendors.

News.Com: Start-up wants your help to fight spam. Technology pundits say most existing anti-spam solutions haven't been able to keep up with the rising flood of junk and the sophistication of marketers sending it. In this environment, Cloudmark is drawing attention for what some analysts call a new approach to the problem.

June 20, 2002
NY Times: The Librarian's Web Dilemma. "Because libraries are so deeply rooted in their communities, librarians have the best read on their communities and how to approach the issues around Internet access," said John W. Berry, who stepped down this week as president of the American Library Association.

Wired News: Public Protests NPR Link Policy. These requirements aren't new. According to the date on the page, the permission form was last updated in March. But the page became the talk of the blogs on Wednesday, a day after Cory Doctorow posted up a link to the permission form on BoingBoing, his blog.

Network World: NTT DoCoMo details commercial WLAN plans. NTT DoCoMo, Japan's leading cellular telephone network operator, has unveiled plans for the start of a commercial wireless LAN service in Tokyo. The new service, which will be launched on July 1 under the name MZone, is small in scale compared to that of sister-company NTT Communications...

June 21, 2002
NY Times: Fears of Misuse of Encryption System Are Voiced. A leading European computer security and privacy advocate is challenging an effort by the American computer industry to create a standard to protect software and digital content, calling the plan a smoke screen by established companies to protect their existing markets.

The Economist: Watch this airspace. Smart antennas are already in use and mesh networks are starting to appear, while ad hoc architectures and ultra-wideband are still largely restricted to the laboratory. But each challenges existing ways of doing things; each, on its own, or in combination with others, could shake up the wireless world.

SJ Mercury: Developers worry Web too controlled. At the annual Internet Society conference this week, the engineers who built the Internet and many of the policymakers who follow its development urged caution as governments try to exert control and businesses look to maximize profit.

NY Times: Internet Radio Criticizes Rate on Royalties. Webcasters, who have been slow to find advertisers despite drawing large audiences, had hoped that the rate would be set at a percentage of revenue, a move that they argued would allow them time to build a new outlet for music.

The Register: Ruling on BT hyperlink patent expected soon. The future of BT's claim that it owns the patent to hyperlinks should be decided soon. There are indications that a US court is to rule shortly whether to dismiss BT's claim that it owns the patent to hyperlinks - or let the case go to full trial.

June 22, 2002
NY Times: Gemstar Loses Initial Ruling on Patents for TV Guides. The judge, Paul Luckern, said that the Gemstar patents in question were valid, but that Gemstar had misused one of them in an effort to thwart competition. "It is the administrative law judge's final initial determination that there has been no violation by any of the respondents," the judge's order said.

June 23, 2002
Newsweek: The Big Secret. The plan, revealed for the first time to NEWSWEEK, is... Palladium, and it’s one of the riskiest ventures the company has ever attempted. Though Microsoft does not claim a panacea, the system is designed to dramatically improve our ability to control and protect personal and corporate information.

June 24, 2002
Useit.Com: Improving Usability Guideline Compliance. Thus, over 1.5 years, usability guideline compliance has increased by 4%. Although certainly not improvement at the rate of Moore's Law, if this usability growth rate continues for another fifteen years, we'll reach full usability guideline compliance.

Wired News: How Smart Is Kyocera This Time? Kyocera's new 7135 smartphone, however, emphasizes voice communications first, with the PDA functions an added bonus. "Despite the data capabilities of the device, voice remains the killer application," said Rick Goetter, senior product marketing manager for Kyocera.

June 25, 2002
Boxes & Arrows: Computer Human Values. Nathan Shedroff. When producers of the first personal computers initially launched them into the market over 20 years ago, they could think of no better use for them than storing recipes and balancing one’s checkbook. They couldn’t predict how deep computers (and related devices) would seep into our lives.

NY Times: It's a Tablet. It's a Notebook. From Microsoft, a New Hybrid. A few of the 14 companies signed up as Tablet PC partners plan to produce pure tablets, yet all are expected to be able to attach keyboards. And the dominant offering will be the notebook-tablet hybrid. With such a machine, the user can type away on it as on a standard notebook computer.

News.Com: Lawmaker: Let studios hack P2P networks. Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., whose district includes Hollywood territory, said Tuesday that copyright owners needed new legal protections to combat online piracy. Some of the labels' and studios' high-tech techniques for stopping online file traders might be illegal under anti-hacking laws...

June 26, 2002
Darwin: The Semantic Argument Web. David Weinberger. I fear that the Semantic Web will go the way of SGML and for basically the same reason: normalization of metadata works real well in confined applications where the payoff is high, control is centralized and discipline can be enforced. In other words: not the Web.

Network World: VeriSign solves multilingual name dilemma. VeriSign officials say the LangResolve and LangMail software plug-ins support a family of protocols for resolving internationalized domain names that are being finalized by the Internet Engineering Task Force. However, IETF participants questioned VeriSign's commitment to the IDN standards.

June 27, 2002
Forbes: Beware the Cyber Cops. Jonathan Zittrain. We should resist the notion that such heightened scrutiny, especially if inconspicuous to the public, carries no significant cost to law-abiding citizens. Consider the range of proposals for unobtrusive but sweeping Internet monitoring.

June 28, 2002
Dylan Tweney: Broken trust. The problem is that Palladium requires users to place a huge amount of trust in Microsoft. You don't get to decide what runs on your computer -- Microsoft does. You can't even open files unless you've been authorized by Microsoft, or by a third party.

Washington Post: Cable Firms Faulted For Restrictions On Internet Service. With the Bush administration deciding that the issues should be settled at the FCC and not through legislation, the agency has become a lobbying locus. More than 80 filings from industry and consumer organizations were received on the topic of cable-modem service alone.

Online Journalism Review: Getting to Know You. Mandatory registration is making the rounds at major online news sites, as media companies try to peel away the Internet's cloak of anonymity and build closer relationships with their customers. But it's a tricky dance, and one that risks alienating news junkies when they bump into registration walls as they surf from site to site.

Computerworld: Online marketing firm sued over pop-up ads. Seven major news organizations will ask a U.S. District Court judge in Virginia on July 12 to stop online advertising company The Gator Corp. from placing pop-up ads on their Web sites until a lawsuit between the two sides can be resolved later this year.

June 29, 2002
SF Chronicle: Sites told to 'fess up. The Federal Trade Commission has warned seven Internet search engines to fully disclose that paid advertisements are included in their search engine results. The warning, issued Friday, will be sent in letters to AltaVista, AOL Time Warner, IWon, LookSmart, Microsoft and Terra Lycos.

June 30, 2002
NY Times: Internet Address Group Approves Overhaul. Earlier this year, Icann embarked on a reorganization process that ignited debate over how a small private-sector organization based in the United States could address policy questions related to the Internet's address system in a way that took into account often divergent public, private and global interests.