December 1, 2002
Context Magazine: The Sky's No Longer the Limit. David Reed. But it is time for a more fundamental change. To this point, spectrum has been treated as scarce. It was, in the time of the Titanic, because of the technology available then, but not any longer. Instead, there is reason to see spectrum as almost limitless...

December 2, 2002
MSNBC: ‘Wi-Fi’ gives cell carriers static. While Wi-Fi poses problems for cable companies and conventional phone carriers selling high-speed Internet access, it has the potential to be a major headache for the cellphone business. Cellular carriers have spent billions of dollars over the past two years upgrading their networks...

December 3, 2002
Wired News: All Eyes on ElcomSoft Trial. Observers say the case could set significant legal precedent in interpreting the reach of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law drafted to protect intellectual property owners that has drawn criticism for stifling the public's ability to freely use copyrighted materials they purchase.

Network World: Companies defend against Chinese censorship charge. A number of technology companies defended themselves Monday against charges made by human rights group Amnesty International that they were assisting the Chinese government's efforts to censor the Internet.

December 4, 2002
Wired News: An Inside Look at China Filters. Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman -- the Harvard Law School researchers who detailed the Saudi government's Internet filtering -- have produced the first comprehensive, empirical look at China's blocking policy.

December 5, 2002
Business Week: Usability Is Next to Profitability. Back in the 1970s, it took a multimillion-dollar mainframe to complete tasks that today can be done by the average desktop. Thus, the idea of dedicating valuable processing power and programming to the task of designing screens that simplify and speed up the use of a particular program or even of an entire computer network was laughable.

Network World: PGP 8.0 released in several new editions. PGP Corp. Tuesday introduced several new products, 16 weeks after it acquired the software portfolio based on the Pretty Good Privacy security technology from Network Associates Inc. The Palo Alto start-up released PGP 8.0 in Enterprise, Desktop and Personal versions, as well as a new freeware version...

December 6, 2002
News.Com: Tech titans launch Wi-Fi company. As expected, Intel Capital, along with Big Blue, AT&T and investors Apax Partners and 3i, announced the creation of Cometa Networks--formerly known as Project Rainbow--a new company focused on deploying hot spots throughout the United States.

December 7, 2002
InfoWorld: Some call it fair play. But a significant minority -- some of them software developers but many IT customers as well -- have expressed sympathy for the vendors' desire to protect themselves from erroneous or biased product reviews. Not wanting to be a censor myself, I think we need to listen to what they have to say.

December 8, 2002
NY Times: A New Tack in Fighting Spam. These "bonded" messaging services are creating the equivalent of certified, or first class, e-mail. If they catch on — and that is a notion that some Internet analysts doubt — they could signal a fundamental shift away from the proposition that it is free to send mail over the Internet.

December 9, 2002
Useit.Com: In the Future, We'll All Be Harry Potter. Much of the Harry Potter books' charm comes from the quirky magic objects that surround Harry and his friends. Rather than being solid and static, these objects embody initiative and activity. This is precisely the shift we'll experience as computational power moves beyond the desktop into everyday objects.

Wired News: Saving Your Bits for Posterity. That's the idea behind MyLifeBits, a new Microsoft research project that aims to record the essence of a person's life on computer disks: every photograph snapped, home movie filmed, Web page browsed, e-mail scribbled, phone call made or bill paid.

December 10, 2002
Wired News: New Plan for Spammers: Charge 'Em. In "Selling interrupt rights: A way to control unwanted e-mail and telephone calls," a paper published last week in IBM's Systems Journal, Scott Fahlman argues that spammers should be charged each time they trespass your inbox.

News.Com: Sklyarov testifies in copyright trial. During Sklyarov's testimony Monday in federal court here, ElcomSoft attorney Joseph Burton tried to paint the programmer as an upstanding assistant professor who sought to expose flaws in Adobe software as part of his dissertation.

December 11, 2002
NY Times: Internet Makes Dow Jones Open to Suit in Australia. The Australian High Court ruled yesterday that a local businessman could bring a libel action against Dow Jones & Company in a local court, a decision that reignited publishers' fears that posting material on Web sites could leave them open to libel prosecution in any country with Internet access.

December 12, 2002
Good Experience: Interview: Rick Robinson, VP of Community Products, AOL. What members want, what members need: everything at AOL now stems from that. More specific to the customer experience, we have an in-house studio of designers and UI experts, each of whom acts as a final gateway to the members.

Wired News: ElcomSoft Case in Jurors' Hands. Attorneys for both the government and ElcomSoft presented closing arguments Thursday morning, the sixth day of the trial. In both statements, lawyers focused on the question of "willfulness," one of the key issues that the jury must consider.

December 13, 2002
Salon: Life on the edge. Scott Rosenberg. Instead, the recent cratering of so many companies seems to have chastened the suits -- and the very absence of get-rich-quick opportunities has cleared a space for geek enthusiasms to flourish. That was certainly the feeling I got from this week's Supernova conference on decentralization...

O'Reilly Network: Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution. Tim O'Reilly. The continuing controversy over online file sharing sparks me to offer a few thoughts as an author and publisher. To be sure, I write and publish neither movies nor music, but books. But I think that some of the lessons of my experience still apply.

December 14, 2002
Financial Times: A threat to innovation on the web. Lawrence Lessig. But increasingly, the providers of internet connectivity are pushing a different principle. US broadband companies are trying to ensure that they have the power to decide which applications and content can run.

NY Times: A Retailing Mix: On Internet, in Print and in Store. The Internet's effect is far greater than that. Best Buy's surveys show that more than half of its customers check its Web site before coming into its stores, up from one-third last year. It wasn't always that way.

December 15, 2002
SF Chornicle: Burning Debate. What's even more unusual is that the lawsuit was brought by the program's maker, Missouri's 321 Studios Inc., in an attempt to get a definitive ruling that making personal copies of DVDs is a legal activity under U.S. copyright laws.

December 16, 2002
News.Com: U.S. court says no to Web libel lawsuit. The two courts appear to have reached different conclusions: The U.S. ruling focused on whether the pair of newspapers had a commercial presence in Virginia, while the Australian high court worried more about where the harm from allegedly libelous material would be felt.

Wired News: Creative Types: A Lot in Common. On Monday, Creative Commons will release its collection of free, machine-readable licenses. The idea is to give copyright holders another way to get the word out that their works are free for copying and other uses under specific conditions.

December 17, 2002
Glenn Fleishman: Quality of Servitude. Here's where I hope I represent Bob, David Reed, and David Isenberg's arguments correctly: it's better to focus on having more bandwidth than more intelligent networks. That is, forget about the fascist task of deciding that certain network traffic is more important than other network traffic.

News.Com: ElcomSoft verdict: Not guilty. Jury foreman Dennis Strader said the jurors agreed ElcomSoft's product was illegal but acquitted the company because they believed the company didn't mean to violate the law.

December 18, 2002
Crypto-Gram: Counterattack. The MPAA disabling someone's computer because he's suspected of copying a movie is wrong, even if the movie was copied. Revenge is a basic human emotion, but revenge only becomes justice if carried out by the State.

December 19, 2002
SJ Mercury: Copyright verdict, new technology are reasons to hope. Dan Gillmor. So, a nod of appreciation goes to Creative Commons. Ditto to the dutiful ElcomSoft jury. In a year when the news on copyright was so consistently sour, let's be thankful for the gifts we've received this week.

News.Com: Patent creates IM wrinkle. The breadth of this definition could create controversy in the industry. AOL's primary competitors, Microsoft and Yahoo, have their own instant messaging services, each with millions of subscribers. With the patent, AOL could technically sue rival instant messaging services for infringement...

NY Times: Online Sales Offer Fresh Look at Economy. Hal R. Varian. Though online sales are not yet important economically, they are important to economists because they offer a rich source of economic data. It is much easier to collect online prices than offline prices, and with a little bit of ingenuity, you can even harvest data about costs and sales volume, information that is awfully hard to come by in the real world.

December 20, 2002
NY Times: Bush Administration to Propose System for Monitoring Internet. The President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board is preparing the report, and it is intended to create public and private cooperation to regulate and defend the national computer networks, not only from everyday hazards like viruses but also from terrorist attack.

InfoWorld: U.S. government denies plans for Net monitoring system. A representative for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security denied a report Friday that the U.S. government was planning to release a proposal requiring ISPs to help build a centralized system designed to monitor Internet use.

Slate: Is the Computer Desktop an Antique? Steven Johnson. But that unified approach is starting to fragment. Ironically, the company that has put forward the greatest challenge to the one-metaphor-fits-all model is the company that first popularized the desktop metaphor nearly two decades ago: Apple.

December 21, 2002
Fast Company: Translating Sony Into English. Frequently, Tokyo's innovations translate fawlessly into the U.S. market. But sometimes, they do not. It's the job of Mark Hanson and his marketing team here at the American outpost of Sony's Video Audio Integrated Operations division to figure out which Sony products fit into which category.

Wired News: Studios See Red Over DVD Burning. Hollywood fought back against a maker of DVD movie-copying software, countersuing the company for allegedly trafficking the tools of digital theft. Seven major motion picture studios filed a counterclaim Thursday in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, against 321 Studios...

December 22, 2002
Fortune: Hollywood's Latest Flop. Stewart Alsop. But they forgot to make the service usable, appealing, or compelling. So MovieLink will fail, people will argue that you can't sell digital content on the Internet--and the studios will have proved nothing.

December 23, 2002
SJ Mercury: Consumers' rights given little respect. Dan Gillmor. Yet something akin to this practice is already in existence, and growing. In the world of electronic devices, digital entertainment and software, customers are routinely subjected to restrictions that forbid modification of products they've already purchased.

Boxes & Arrows: What Is A Controlled Vocabulary? The most effective communication occurs when all parties involved agree on the meaning of the terms being used. Consequently, finding the right words to communicate the message of your website can be one of the most difficult parts of developing it.

December 24, 2002
The Register: Greece, Denmark (and no-one else) make EC copyright deadline. It's best to see this as a delay -rather than a derailment - of the controversial measures, fiercely advocated by the film and music industry. The software industry, most notably the Business Software Alliance, has also lobbied hard for the introduction of the directive as an important means to fight piracy.

Useit.Com: Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002. Every year brings new mistakes. In 2002, several of the worst mistakes in Web design related to poor email integration. The number one mistake, however, was lack of pricing information, followed by overly literal search engines.

December 25, 2002
Merry Christmas from Tomalak's Realm!

December 26, 2002
Scientific American: Fair Use and Abuse. The divisions that pit the entertainment industry against fair-use advocates should lay the groundwork for a roiling intellectual-property debate this year. Enough momentum exists for some of these opposing bills to be reintroduced in the new Congress.

December 27, 2002
The Economist: The power of voice. Yet innovation in telecoms has not stopped. And it may be telephone services that help struggling telecoms firms to claw their way out of their slump. This time, however, the voice applications that are attracting attention are radically different from those that data networkers dismissed a few years ago.

December 28, 2002
Washington Post: 'Peering' Dispute With AOL Slows Cogent Customer Access. AOL carries roughly as much traffic from Microsoft, Sprint Corp., Cable & Wireless PLC as each of those companies does from AOL, so it doesn't assess a charge. But when peer companies carry more than two times the data, AOL charges a fee, he said.

December 29, 2002
SJ Mercury: 2002 was a rough year for liberty and trust. Dan Gillmor. As another year winds down, it's time for our annual review of the technology world, the economy at large and fundamental liberties. Even though we took two steps backward for every step forward, there are still some reasons for optimism.

December 30, 2002
O'Reilly Network: In-Room Chat as a Social Tool. Clay Shirky. For us, the chat served as a kind of social whiteboard. In this note, I want to detail what worked and why, what the limitations and downsides of in-room chat were, and point out possible future avenues for exploration.

December 31, 2002
The Chronicle of Higher Education: College Groups Challenge Copyright Office on Exceptions to Digital-Copyright Law. The groups made a similar but unsuccessful appeal two years ago. But this year, in a departure, the groups are faulting the standards the Copyright Office uses to determine whether exceptions to the anti-circumvention provision should be granted.