November 1, 2002
EE Times: Speech technology loses its kooky luster. Long considered a niche technology years from widespread adoption, speech recognition is becoming part of the pervasive computing strategies of IBM, Cisco, Intel and Microsoft, which intend to embed it into every future cell phone, PDA, car and consumer gadget.

November 2, 2002
News.Com: IM compatibility closer to reality. Called the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, the group's instant messaging standard gives Internet users hope of one day being able to send messages to anyone on the Net, no matter what software they are using.

November 3, 2002
Fortune: Intel's $10 Billion Gamble. Intel is gambling that by pushing the state of the art in chipmaking faster than rivals are able to, it will reach a point where it can use sheer manufacturing prowess and capacity to undercut any competitor in price, performance, and variety.

November 4, 2002
EE Times: Startup Vivato pushes wireless LAN range to 7 km. Touting low-cost deployment, scalability, wide coverage, centrally located management, high data rates and mobility, the company said its WLAN solution not only shreds the business model of current 802.11 networks but also undermines that of certain 2.5G/3G and fixed-broadband wireless deployments.

SF Chronicle: Firms squelching pop-up ads. Pop-up ads may be slowly popping off. Consumer backlash against these often irritating online ads has recently prompted companies such as America Online, IVillage and Ask Jeeves to eliminate some of them from their Web sites.

November 5, 2002
uiweb.com: The ten reasons ease of use doesn't happen on engineering projects. In reviewing all the email I've received at this website, and the experiences I've had teaching and consulting, I’ve tried to catalog the different reasons why projects didn’t result in easy to use designs.

November 6, 2002
News.Com: IBM dusts off new laptop hard drives. Big Blue's pixie dust manufacturing technique, officially called antiferromagnetically coupled media, adds a thin layer of ruthenium to the platters inside a drive. This layer allows more data to be packed onto each platter.

November 7, 2002
NY Times: Tablets Mightier Than the Keyboard? It's the latest expression of a long-running Microsoft fantasy: a future world in which you'll write directly on the screen of your PC with a plastic-tipped pen. You'll take handwritten notes, mark up documents right on the screen and capture doodles on the digital equivalent of cocktail napkins.

Boxes & Arrows: Talking with Jesse James Garrett. I’ve got two main audiences in mind for the book: newcomers to the field, those who may have web design or development skills who want to know how to bring a user-centered approach to their work; and decision-makers, the people who have to decipher what the heck these web people are talking about.

November 8, 2002
SJ Mercury: Telecom strategy: Take it or leave it. Dan Gillmor. Enlightened policy may be coming from a federal agency that seems hell-bent on giving the cable and phone monopolies the control they crave over the wires. The Federal Communications Commission may be moving toward a rational policy on how to regulate -- or, in this case, deregulate -- the airwaves.

SF Gate: FCC takes step toward overhaul of wireless spectrum. Overall, the group said it advocated "more flexible and market-oriented spectrum policies," and a general shift away from the traditional FCC "command and control" system in which bits of the spectrum are auctioned and tight restrictions on their use are imposed.

November 9, 2002
SF Gate: Can tablets cure PC industry? Walter S. Mossberg. But they have a big drawback: Microsoft has done surprisingly little to adapt Windows and Office to the pen-and-ink format. So, using the stylus to do almost anything but take notes -- even basic tasks, such as adjusting speaker volume, saving a file or addressing an e-mail -- can be clumsy and frustrating.

SJ Mercury: Telecom strategy: Take it or leave it. Dan Gillmor. Enlightened policy may be coming from a federal agency that seems hell-bent on giving the cable and phone monopolies the control they crave over the wires. The Federal Communications Commission may be moving toward a rational policy on how to regulate -- or, in this case, deregulate -- the airwaves.

SF Gate: FCC takes step toward overhaul of wireless spectrum. Overall, the group said it advocated "more flexible and market-oriented spectrum policies," and a general shift away from the traditional FCC "command and control" system in which bits of the spectrum are auctioned and tight restrictions on their use are imposed.

November 10, 2002
Useit.Com: Intranet Usability: The Trillion-Dollar Question. In our study, we found that a lack of good management support for intranets had a great impact on quality. In particular, companies with ailing intranet usability rarely had a well-funded central intranet group with clear ownership of the design.

November 11, 2002
Forbes: Dead Air. The result is that one of America's most valuable natural resources sits paralyzed, consigned to uses that time and technology have long since passed by. Old technologies are swamped with excess airwaves they don't use; newer technologies gasp for airwaves they desperately need; and promising industries of the future are asphyxiated.

November 12, 2002
News.Com: Supreme Court to hear filtering case. The U.S. Supreme Court said on Tuesday that it would hear a challenge to a controversial law placing filtering software in public libraries. In May, a three-judge panel in Philadelphia ruled that a federal law designed to encourage the use of filtering software violated library patrons' rights to access legitimate, non-pornographic Web sites.

November 13, 2002
New Architect: Bottoms Up. Peter Morville. But sites keep growing and reductionism is a slippery slope. Increasingly, people are simply giving up on the big picture. They act locally but don't think globally. These individuals now design their parts in utter ignorance of the whole.

November 14, 2002
LA Times: Deals Set Stage for Online Music Firms. A spate of licensing deals this week finally will allow an array of online music companies to offer songs from most or all of the major record labels, setting the stage for them to compete on the features they offer instead of on the limitations of their catalogs.

November 15, 2002
Online Journalism Review: A Visit With a Digital Architect. Q&A with Matt Jones. Editorial folk are going to have to become more like Sherpas than censors, and make more and more use of the non-textual tools and techniques available to "manufacture understanding." As our attention gets less, we seem to get more media.

November 16, 2002
Wired News: W3C Rejects Patents on Net Tech. Daniel Weitzner, the patent group's chairman, said that after spending nearly a year trying to work out ways to allow companies to retain patents on W3C standards, the idea was finally rejected in a 12-7 a vote.

November 17, 2002
NY Times: Change Urged in Broadband Policy. A group of technology and media companies including Microsoft, Disney Yahoo and eBay plans to send a letter to the Federal Communications Commission today arguing that the open nature of the Internet will be lost unless the agency amends its broadband policy.

November 18, 2002
Dan Bricklin: Tablet PC: First Impressions. If you always wanted to do your composing with a pen, and expect handwriting to be as reliable as a keyboard, stick with the keyboard, and wait for "handwriting computing" to happen, if it ever does. It's not that important. Tablet computing is. It will make reading on a computer even more pervasive.

Computerworld: Future of the Notebook. Strange and wondrous hybrids will hit the market, too, but most will quickly disappear or find niche applications. But whatever type of portable PC they prefer, users will be the winners because they'll see more choices, more capabilities and lower prices.

November 19, 2002
Wired News: How Much Hack Info Is Too Much? But a recent post on security news mailing list BugTraq has infuriated some who normally favor full disclosure. The post details how a bit of programming code embedded in a Web page can reformat site visitors' hard drives, deleting all files stored on the affected drive.

November 20, 2002
News.Com: Copyright law gets a second look. On Tuesday, the U.S. Copyright Office began accepting comments from the public on the law's "anticircumvention" section, which limits people's ability to bypass copy-protection mechanisms. Comments are due by Dec. 18.

Wired News: Big Retailers Squeeze FatWallet. Can the unpublished discount price of a DVD player for next week's big sale at Wal-Mart be copyrighted? That's the question at the heart of a legal dispute involving several big retailers and FatWallet, a popular website that caters to bargain shoppers.

November 21, 2002
Network World: Panel: Accept the Net is vulnerable to attack. Companies and home Internet users need to accept that the global computer network is inherently vulnerable to attacks, worms, trojans and anything else miscreants want to unleash on it, and then accept that securing the system is everyone's responsibility, a panel of security experts said Monday at the Comdex trade show.

Washington Post: Dyson Seeks to Amplify the Public's Voice in Internet Policy. In order to have a meaningful voice in policy decisions, the public must become more involved, working from within ICANN rather than having elected board members vote on policies a few times a year, Dyson said.

November 22, 2002
Good Experience: Interview: Maryam Mohit, Amazon.com. We run a lot of tests in our usability lab, almost continuously. Project teams can request usability testing, and the usability team also goes out and tests stuff of interest. Or ideas to investigate might come from customer service e-mail, which is a really important source of information.

NY Times: Agency Weighed, but Discarded, Plan Reconfiguring the Internet. The idea, which was explored at a two-day workshop in California in August, touched off an angry private dispute among computer scientists and policy experts who had been brought together to assess the implications of the technology.

Washington Post: Free Web Research Link Closed Under Pressure From Pay Sites. The Energy Department has shut down a popular Internet site that catalogued government and academic science research, in response to corporate complaints that it competed with similar commercial services.

November 23, 2002
Dan Bricklin: About Tablet Computing Old and New. To understand why it doesn't seem like such an advance, you have to be familiar with the hardware and software of the early 1990's. The use of pens and tablets, and "light-pens" that you could point at the screen, goes very far back in the history of computers.

November 24, 2002
InfoWorld: The Big Bang. Lost in this shuffle is OneNote, a powerful idea processor from the Office group. Mark my words: OneNote is the new center of the Office universe, relegating Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to the edges of the architecture in a single leap.

November 25, 2002
Boston Globe: Calling off the copyright war. Jonathan Zittrain. One is crystallized by Calvin Coolidge: ''The business of America is business.'' The other is captured by Thomas Jefferson: ''He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.''

MSNBC: AOL may get content from Time Inc.. At the height of the Internet boom, executives assumed they needed to put most of their content online to boost readership and benefit from online advertising. But Time Inc. has concluded that its free Web sites hurt circulation and Web-based advertising is too meager to make up the difference.

Technology Marketing: Not your everyday email attachment. Michael Schrage. During the course of seeing many smiling children/proud parents, I was struck by an empirical intuition. So I spent about half-an-hour reviewing all my emails from the past two years. The fastest-growing parts of my email inbox are spam and attachments.

November 26, 2002
New Scientist: Way back when. Q&A with Brewster Kahle. The whole point of comprehensive library collections is that you can't tell in advance what will be important. The Web is the people's medium, it's not elitist. Anyone can publish there, so you've got the good, the bad, the ugly, the profane. It's just us, that's the amazing thing.

NY Times: A Computing Pioneer of the 1970's Joins Hewlett-Packard. Hiring Dr. Kay is an investment in Hewlett-Packard's innovation strategy. Throughout his career, Dr. Kay has worked on the design concepts and underlying technology to improve the interaction between people and computers.

November 27, 2002
Useit.Com: Flash and Web-Based Applications. The Internet is changing. Although people have primarily used it to read email and Web pages, more functionality-oriented applications are now emerging, with the goal of providing new features that do more for users.

November 28, 2002
The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Making of a Policy Gadfly. ...Mr. Felten now finds himself provoked by what he sees as egregious lawmaking. So he has taught himself to be media savvy, seeking out new ways to call attention to his message: that Congress's approach to protecting intellectual property poses serious threats to researchers and consumers.

November 29, 2002
Fortune: Sony Re-dreams Its Future. For the past two years, Ando and Sony's chairman and CEO, Nobuyuki Idei, have been trying to fast-forward the company into a broadband entertainment future, one in which nearly every Sony consumer product will be connected to the Internet or an Internet gateway device

November 30, 2002
The Register: Sklyarov gets US visa -DMCA trial to kick off. The first criminal prosecution under the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act is to begin in San Jose next week after a visa was finally granted to Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov and Alex Katalov, the chief executive of his former employers ElcomSoft.