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September 1, 2002
SJ Mercury: AOL capitulates, gives up struggle for `open access'.
Dan Gillmor. The cable and phone giants say they won't invest in upgrading their data networks and lines if they can't assert considerable control over what flows up and down those lines. That's their argument against open access. If they prevail we'll end up with only a handful of Internet service providers that will remain at the not-so-tender mercies of the conglomerates that own the data pipes.
September 2, 2002
NY Times: U.S. Cellphone Users Don't Seem to Get Message About Messaging.
The service, known as S.M.S. (for short message service), is already wildly popular in Europe and Asia, but it has been delayed in the United States — partly because it had been impossible to send messages among carriers and partly because it has not been marketed well by the cellphone companies.
September 3, 2002
Bob Frankston: Trapped by the Web!
Finding the balance between building highly tuned applications, between providing the complete service or the enabling technologies, and all the other choices is a challenge and there is no one right answer. But there is a wrong answer -- limiting yourself to lame and painful web interfaces.
News.Com: New 'entertainment' PCs restrict copying.
Already, consumers can legally record television programs to VHS tapes for personal use and view them on another VCR in the household. Microsoft has taken a more conservative approach by thwarting the sharing of programs recorded digitally.
September 4, 2002
News.Com: University to challenge copyright laws.
The school, which plans to announce the gift at a conference in Washington on Thursday, is using the money to fund a center focused on finding "the correct balance" between intellectual property rights and material that should be in the public domain.
Washington Post: ICANN Threatens to Take Away VeriSign's '.com' Privileges.
The ICANN, which manages the Internet's global addressing system, said VeriSign, owner of the largest and first commercial dot-com registrar, "blatantly ignored" its obligation to fix inaccuracies in its "Whois" database, citing 17 violations over the past 18 months.
September 5, 2002
Washington Post: A Story Of Piracy And Privacy.
The recording industry and the nation's largest telephone company are crossing legal swords in what could be a test case of how far big record labels can go to track down computer users who swap music online.
PC World: AOL Makes a Deal for DSL.
AOL will have access to a network that currently covers more than 40 million U.S. homes and businesses, Covad says in a statement. The company estimates that its network reaches approximately 40 percent to 45 percent of all U.S. homes and businesses.
September 6, 2002
Technology Review: Handspring Treo 270.
Simson Garfinkel. While my column in Technology Review magazine, “The Net Effect,” examines larger issues of the digital age—with particular focus on privacy—here I’ll bite into specifics. Each month I’ll profile a new gadget that is both captivating and significant.
September 7, 2002
Useit.Com: Ten Best Intranets of 2002.
Even though the full process can take about two years, our winning projects did not hold off until everything was perfect before releasing the new intranets to an unsuspecting public. Some companies had been burned before by "big bang" development projects that took forever to create a hoped-for solution to all problems in a single, delayed release.
September 8, 2002
SJ Mercury: 10 choices that were critical to the Net's success.
Dan Gillmor. A series of decisions proved critical -- choices that helped turn data transport into a commodity business and put the power in users' hands, not in the centralized telecommunications companies' controlling grasp.
September 9, 2002
SF Chronicle: Engineers gather in San Jose for all things Intel.
"The mantra for us now is . . . convergence of computing and communications, " said Intel spokesman Robert Manetta. The Santa Clara firm, known for its Pentium chips used in desktop and laptop computers, has been positioning itself in recent years to take a stab at the communications chip market.
September 10, 2002
Clay Shirky: Broadcast Institutions, Community Values.
Even here, though, there are significant obstacles to hosting community, obstacles peculiar to the nature of media. Much of the discipline a broadcast organization must internalize to do its job well are not merely irrelevant to community building, but actively harmful.
News.Com: Yahoo, ISPs enter Net privacy fray.
The 30-page amicus brief, signed by 12 groups including the U.S. Internet Industry Association, the Computer and Communications Industry Association, and Yahoo, accuses the RIAA of hoping to turn Internet providers into copyright cops.
LA Times: File-Sharing Networks Relying on VCR Ruling.
Two file-sharing networks--Napster Inc. and Aimster (later renamed Madster)--sought refuge in the Betamax case with no great success. Now, three popular successors--Morpheus, Kazaa and Grokster--are relying on Betamax in a critical pretrial skirmish.
September 12, 2002
Technology Review: Data Extinction.
Both are faced with the knowledge that current methods for preserving digital things work poorly, even in the short term. Just how bad is the problem? Examples of digital things lost forever abound, some personal in scale, some global.
September 13, 2002
New Architect: The Road to Usability.
Q&A with Tim Bray. Today's Web UI doesn't look much different than it did in 1994. Have we learned nothing? Second, the huge gulf between the visual access your desktop provides to your hard drive and the "query, hit Enter, look-at-lists-of-items" basis of most Web apps.
September 14, 2002
Boxes and Arrows: Building the Beast: Talking with Peter Morville.
Our biggest area of learning was bottom-up information architecture. The first edition was grounded in the type of top-down processes that come with building a new site from scratch. In the second edition, we were able to draw upon an understanding of how to redesign sites that already contain huge amounts of content and applications.
September 15, 2002
SJ Mercury: Issues that will shape the Internet.
Dan Gillmor. It took a series of smart decisions to create the Internet as an open network where innovation could thrive, as I noted in this space a week ago. Now let's look at some upcoming decisions that will shape communications for the next 50 years -- and ponder the consequences for openness and innovation if we make the wrong choices this time.
September 16, 2002
Useit.Com: Offshore Usability.
Offshore design and development of websites and intranets can present potential difficulties with respect to usability. One problem is temporary and can be overcome in the long run; the other is more fundamental, but can also be overcome if it's recognized and addressed explicitly.
September 17, 2002
EE Times: Industry blamed for missing content-protection deadline.
Computer companies, consumer electronics vendors and Hollywood studios have failed to meet a self-imposed deadline for agreeing to a watermarking technology for DVD movies, moving the technology back to the drawing boards once again.
New Architect: Progress Paralysis.
Peter Merholz. Companies typically tackle such issues with a battery of small projects. While it's a good idea to break things down into manageable pieces, you might have to take more drastic measures. Stop, step back, and survey the entire system. It may be time for an overhaul.
September 18, 2002
Wired: Lawrence Lessig's Supreme Showdown.
To Lessig it is both an opportunity to make up for losing the prize that was snatched from him some four years ago, and a giant step in his crusade to stop a trend he fears may be inevitable: big-media dinosaurs controlling the Internet. That's why the law professor has declared war on Mickey Mouse.
September 20, 2002
Wired: Being Wireless.
Nicholas Negroponte. Messages can hop peer-to-peer, leaping from lily to lily like frogs — the stems are not required. You have a broadband telecommunications system, built by the people, for the people. Carriers are aware of this, but they discount it because they do not feel there will be sufficient coverage. They are wrong.
SJ Mercury: Feds' cyberspace plan should appeal to control freaks.
Dan Gillmor. But the much-ballyhooed, much-revised ``National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace'' looks alarmingly like a recipe for the world's control freaks -- the people who view security as a way to help big government and big business regulate the way we use technology.
September 21, 2002
EE Times: Bill would add copy protection to DTV receivers.
Draft legislation released this week by the House Commerce Committee would add copy protection technology to all digital TV receivers by 2006 and relieve cable operators of obligations to carry DTV signals on their systems.
September 22, 2002
SJ Mercury: Valenti presents Hollywood's side of the technology story.
Dan Gillmor. I made that offer after I heard from a colleague that Valenti, meeting recently with journalists in Los Angeles, had complained about what I'd been writing. So while I don't agree with much of what he said -- and I'll respond in a subsequent column -- it's only fair to give you his side of the argument.
September 23, 2002
News.Com: Google search gets newsier.
The search tool brings the company's highly respected statistical methods for ranking the relevance of information on the Web to the specific category of news--an experimental approach compared with traditional methods of news selection, said Google product manager Marissa Mayer.
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Fed Up With Spam.
A rising chorus of complaints about unsolicited commercial e-mail has convinced many college officials that they need to do more to fend off spam. Colleges are trying a variety of methods to fight spam, with mixed success.
PC World: Pen, Voice, Tablets Push Office to New Paths.
A Microsoft executive gave a brief peek at Office 11 here Monday, and said the suite is quickly moving beyond desktop applications to include Web services and more collaboration tools, as well as playing on new platforms that use alternate input devices.
September 24, 2002
News.Com: At the center of the patent storm.
Q&A with Danny Weitzner, W3C. The critical concern that has led us to push so hard for a royalty-free policy is that for all the different Web software implementers it would be terribly hard to negotiate with the parent holders. They don't have their own patent portfolios or intellectual property lawyers.
September 25, 2002
Computerworld: Privacy battle seen as a 'gathering storm'.
Things are lining up for real legislative battles next year in Congress and in the states, triggered by the impending expiration of a provision of the Fair Credit Reporting Act that blocks states from imposing their own data privacy rules.
September 26, 2002
News.Com: The new "copyspeak".
Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association. In copyspeak, there is no such thing as fair use "rights," rather fair use is only an affirmative defense to copyright infringement and therefore not a right. But various recognized "rights" may only be asserted as affirmative defenses in a lawsuit.
September 27, 2002
MSNBC: Wildly optimistic data drove telecoms to build fiber glut./
The issue isn’t simply a matter of setting the historical record straight. The amount of unused capacity is so vast that it will be virtually impossible for any new fiber company, no matter how good its technology or business plan, to raise funds in the foreseeable future.
September 28, 2002
Seattle Times: Matchmaker Bluetooth.
Bluetooth-enabled devices form loose networks through "pairing," or having devices talk to each other and exchange an authenticating passphrase, allowing them to exchange data. Once paired, you can take advantage of many combinations of services among different machines.
September 29, 2002
SJ Mercury: Studios' copyright goal: total control.
Dan Gillmor. A week ago in this column, after visiting Valenti in his Washington office, I did my best to faithfully reflect the position of the lobbying organization he heads, the Motion Picture Association of America. Now it's my turn. Saying you believe in compromise is one thing. Acting like it is another.
September 30, 2002
David P. Reed: Open Spectrum in the Wall St. Journal today.
Lee says it will probably take 5-10 years before we realize these ideas fully in the marketplace. I'm hoping for sooner, but these new ideas threaten some very entrenched interests in limiting and controlling communications.
Useit.Com: Email Newsletters Pick Up Where Websites Leave Off.
The positive emotional aspect of newsletters is that they can create much more of a bond between user and company than a website can. The negative aspect is that usability problems have much stronger impact on the customer relationship than they normally do.
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