October 1, 2002
eWEEK: ePeriodicals: Microsoft's Killer App for Tablet PC? Microsoft Corp. thinks it's found a killer app for its Tablet PC: as a home for a new breed of electronic magazines. The software giant is prepping an end-to-end electronic publishing solution, known as ePeriodicals, which it will introduce at its Tablet PC launch in New York City on Nov. 7, according to sources.

BusinessWeek: A Case to Define the Digital Age. A Supreme Court ruling against the CTEA would be the first major victory for digital-rights activists, who want more books, music, and images to enter the public domain. And it would be a grand defeat for corporations, which claim they would forfeit billions in lost revenues.

October 2, 2002
Adaptive Path: User-Centered URL Design. Jesse James Garrett. But despite the universality of URLs, we often forget that they're not just a handy way to address network resources. They're also valuable communication tools. They help orient users in your architecture, and can suggest whether other options are available.

October 3, 2002
SJ Mercury: Apple stands firm against entertainment cartel. Dan Gillmor. I wonder, now that I've published this, whether an upcoming version of the DVD Player will remove this user-friendly feature. Which leads me into some other questions: Can Apple's distinctly pro-customer approach continue in the face of Hollywood's ire and the entertainment industry's clout in Congress?

Clay Shirky: Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing. A lot of people in the weblog world are asking "How can we make money doing this?" The answer is that most of us can't. Weblogs are not a new kind of publishing that requires a new system of financial reward. Instead, weblogs mark a radical break.

Wired News: Fighting Net Censorship Abroad. Rep. Chris Cox introduced a bill Wednesday that would establish an Office of Global Internet Freedom to foster development of censorship-busting technology for users in countries including China and Saudi Arabia. The bill would allocate $50 million each for 2003 and 2004.

October 4, 2002
since1968: Lou Rosenfeld & Peter Morville Interview. On the other hand, the search system may be incredibly usable, but poorly designed from an architectural perspective, and therefore doesn't help you find what you're looking for. Usability and findability are simply different aspects of design, and you can have one without the other.

The Economist: What does the Internet look like? Any effort to map the Internet is necessarily incomplete and out of date the moment it appears. Instead, Albert-Laslo Barabasi and his colleagues at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana, treat the net as though it were a natural phenomenon.

October 5, 2002
PC World: DVD Copying Software Sparks New Legal Battle. The company has taken a preemptive strike against its movie industry foes by filing a lawsuit aimed at protecting the software from being squashed. Moore and his lawyers argue that people should be able to create backup copies of their DVD movies, just as they can copy VHS movies or music CDs.

October 6, 2002
Newsweek: Glitterati vs. Geeks. Steven Levy. Now Lessig has his chance to shift the momentum by overturning the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. The most recent of 11 extensions of copyright terms, it stretches exclusive control of a work from 50 to 70 years after the creator’s death.

October 7, 2002
NY Times: Music Industry in Global Fight on Web Copies. The Sharman case may well raise again the unsettled question of whether Internet companies should be forced to adhere to the laws of every country whose citizens have access to their Web sites.

LA Times: Labels, Webcasters Reportedly Reach Deal. Sources on both sides of Sunday's deal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said it was a two-year agreement that calls for Webcasters to pay back and future royalties equal to 8% to 12% of their revenue or 5% to 7% of their expenses, whichever was higher.

October 8, 2002
BusinessWeek: David Farber: Tech's Deep Thinker. Now, more than ever, Farber believes sound policy is the cure to the New Economy's ills. The best route out of the telecom nightmare, he believes, is to make the FCC completely independent. "The only way the FCC can make effective policy is to remove it from the day-by-day politics on the Hill," he says.

October 9, 2002
New Architect: Managing Traffic Spikes. Your Web servers are humming along peacefully, doling out Web pages at a leisurely rate as Internet users from around the globe request them. Then something happens that drives hordes of visitors to your site, and that manageable traffic flow turns into a crushing load.

October 10, 2002
NY Times: Changing Channels, on the PC. The result is a PC that can also play music CD's and DVD movies, present slide shows of your digital photos, play back video clips from your camcorder, let you watch TV, and even record TV shows without tapes, much like a TiVo recorder.

News.Com: MIT tries free Web education. As of Sept. 30, people with an Internet connection and a Web browser have been able to access the syllabus, lecture notes, exams and answers, and in some cases, even the videotaped lectures of 32 MIT courses.

October 11, 2002
The Economist: Free Mickey Mouse. Instead, it has branded him a cultural anarchist bent on justifying the rampant theft of others' property in the name of “openness”—ie, a direct threat to its bottom line. This week, Mr Lessig landed another blow, arguing his case before America's Supreme Court.

News.Com: Anti-hacking copyright law to get review. Regulators aren't looking to change the law, but they are looking for public suggestions on what kinds of activity should be legalized in spite of the rules. This is only the second time in the controversial law's five-year history that the public has been able to pitch in with suggestions for exceptions.

October 12, 2002
Salon: Riding along with the Internet Bookmobile. The Internet Bookmobile is a van on a mission: to drive across the country, stopping at schools, museums and libraries, making books for kids and spreading the word about the digital library that is the Net.

October 13, 2002
NY Times: An Uphill Battle in Copyright Case. But there is a big difference between thinking a law is bad policy and finding it unconstitutional. That hangs on the question of whether Congress has exceeded its Constitutional authority to grant copyrights for "limited times" by repeatedly extending the term.

October 14, 2002
News.Com: The copyright conundrum. This renewed interest in copyright law could be a very good thing. The reason: More and more of what people do in real life--trading files on peer-to-peer networks and descrambling DVDs, for instance--has become illegal.s

Useit.Com: Making Flash Usable for Users With Disabilities. Flash used to be inaccessible for users with disabilities, but the 2002 release of Flash MX changed this by including support for accessibility. What was once a barrier has turned into an opportunity for making advanced Internet features available to users with disabilities.

October 15, 2002
MSNBC: Online music sites near license deal. In a major step forward, MusicNet and pressplay, the online services owned by the major international record labels, are close to reaching licensing agreements that would allow both of them to offer songs from all five big music companies.

October 16, 2002
Crypto-Gram: National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace. This government has tried this sort of thing again and again, and it never works. This National Strategy document isn't law, and it doesn't contain any mandates to government agencies. It has lots of recommendations. It has all sorts of processes. It has yet another list of suggested best practices.

Wired News: Copyrights, Wrongs Get a Review. The rulemaking is supposed to determine what circumvention activities are legal. But some say the discussion will have little immediate impact on what people can do to circumvent digital copyright protection.

October 17, 2002
DevEdge: An Interview With Douglas Bowman of Wired News. One of the Web's oldest news sites, Wired News draws between 20 and 25 million page views every month. On October 11, 2002, Wired launched a brand-new site design that uses validating XHTML for its structure and a small collection of CSS files for its layout.

CNN: Ailing AOL rediscovers its 35 million members. Now, with the company's corporate reputation and stock price in the gutter, AOL has embarked on a new mission: rekindling the affections of its 35 million subscribers. The company says next Tuesday's release of its new software, version 8.0, is the first step.

October 18, 2002
The Economist: Filter it out. Its new anti-spam system also uses economic intuition, by requiring senders of e-mail to state clearly whether they are sending spam, and to back that statement with their own money in the form of a bond that will be forfeited if it turns out that they are lying.

October 19, 2002
Wired News: Professor's Case: Unlock Crypto. At stake: the last remnants of a system that once prevented U.S. citizens from releasing software code that creates secure, electronic communications. Bernstein is trying to eradicate the last of the export laws that previously kept Americans from distributing any work related to cryptography.

October 20, 2002
SJ Mercury: Software idea may be just crazy enough to work. Dan Gillmor. The software is being designed to securely handle personal e-mail, calendars, contacts and other such data in new ways, and to make it simple to collaborate and share information with others without having to run powerful, expensive server computers.

October 21, 2002
First Monday: Letter from San Francisco: The Internet Bookmobile. Last week, Kahle wrote me asking for the names of librarians who would be interested in talking about the importance of libraries and how digital technologies can help. Kahle was preparing for a cross-country trip to publicize the digital library, and The Archive was hosting a party on September 27.

October 22, 2002
Good Experience: Interview: Marissa Mayer, Product Manager, Google. All of us on the UI team think the value of Google is in not being cluttered, in offering a great user experience. I like to say that Google should be "what you want, when you want it." As opposed to "everything you could ever want, even when you don't."

The Register: PGP reborn makes its pitch for the mainstream. PGP Corporation was created to market PGP Desktop and Wireless encryption products bought from Network Associates back in August. The deal ended month of speculation over the future of the technology following Network Associates' decision to mothball it back in March.

October 23, 2002
Washington Post: Attack On Internet Called Largest Ever . Around 5:00 p.m. EDT on Monday, a "distributed denial of service" attack struck the 13 "root servers" that provide the primary roadmap for almost all Internet communications. Despite the scale of the attack, which lasted about an hour, Internet users worldwide were largely unaffected, experts said.

PC World: When Will Desktop Chips Hit 15 GHz? Users can expect to see the processing speed of Intel's desktop processors hit 15 GHz and that of wireless device and PDA processors hit 5 GHz by 2010, the chip maker's chief technology officer said in Tokyo on Wednesday.

October 24, 2002
News.Com: Tech's big challenge: Decentralization. Kevin Werbach. These approaches are under siege--and not because there's a New Economy, or because information deserves to be free, or because of any fluctuation in the stock market. Centralized systems are failing for two simple reasons: They can't scale, and they don't reflect the real world of people.

October 25, 2002
MIT Technology Review: The Palladium Paradox. David Weinberger. Although Microsoft touts Palladium as a way to keep computers virus free and to give users control over what information they give out, critics were quick to notice that it just so happens to be an ideal platform for the management of digital content...

October 26, 2002
The Economist: Securing the cloud. Until recently, most people were either unaware of computer security or regarded it as unimportant. That used to be broadly true, except in a few specialised areas—such as banking, aerospace and military applications—that rely on computers and networks being hard to break into and not going wrong.

October 27, 2002
SJ Mercury: Tools coming for connecting information. Dan Gillmor. But we need more sophisticated methods for gathering, massaging and making connections among all the pieces of information that enter our lives each day -- everything from e-mail to Web pages to phone numbers and more. So when I see useful tools, I pay attention.

October 28, 2002
digitalMASS: Microsoft Tablet PC technology a stroke of genius. It's been several years since Microsoft decided that future portable computers would be slate-like tablets, controlled by a stylus rather than a keyboard. It's taken this long for the company to get the software together and to work with computer makers on the necessary hardware.

Useit.Com: Celebrating Holidays and Special Occasions on Websites. In late 2001 and early 2002, we surveyed a sample of 56 websites from the U.S., U.K., and Israel on each of seven holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, Valentine's Day, Presidents' Day, Purim, and St. Patrick's Day.

October 29, 2002
Seattle Times: Open-spectrum advocates say it will boost technology. But a growing group of lawyers, engineers and telecommunications analysts believes that it has the solution needed to finance, develop and ultimately restore the broadband vision: The solution lies with you, the consumer. All we need is a little help from the Federal Communications Commission.

The Economist: The weakest link. Human failings, in other words, can undermine even the cleverest security measures. In one survey, carried out by PentaSafe Security, two-thirds of commuters at London's Victoria Station were happy to reveal their computer password in return for a ballpoint pen.

October 30, 2002
Computerworld: ICANN critics may create rival Internet administration group. The idea, Courtney said, is that a number of TLD holders may want to take over some of the Internet's administrative work now done by ICANN under a contract with the U.S. Department of Commerce. The so-called IANA maintains administrative contacts for the Internet, updates name servers and completes other administrative tasks...

October 31, 2002
USA Today: Powell takes path to free up airwaves. In a speech at the University of Colorado, Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, will trumpet the wider use of unlicensed spectrum, say people familiar with his plans.