January 1, 2003
Happy New Years!

January 2, 2003
NY Times: And Now, the Portable Desktop PC, Up to a Point. Microsoft may have quite a challenge explaining to the masses how this wireless screen differs from last fall's Tablet PC, whose looks, marketing language, core audience of well-heeled techies and manufacturer roster are confusingly similar to those of the Smart Display.

January 3, 2003
Washington Post: FCC Preparing to Overhaul Telecom, Media Rules. If all of the changes being reviewed by the Federal Communications Commission are enacted as proposed, major telecommunications and media corporations will be less regulated, and more free to grow, than at any time in decades.

January 4, 2003
Editor & Publisher: 2003 Predictions For Online News Biz. Steve Outing. For my last column in 2002, I'd like to reflect on the state of the online news industry and gaze ahead a bit. Where have we been? Where are we going? While I don't pretend to have all the answers to the latter, please allow me to offer some year-end thoughts, predictions, and recommendations.

January 5, 2003
SJ Mercury: Tech industry to take on Hollywood over digital rules. The Business Software Alliance and Computer Systems Policy Project -- two prominent high-tech trade groups representing Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and other industry heavyweights -- are forming a new coalition and working to enlist support from consumer and business groups.

January 6, 2003
NY Times: Studios Using Digital Armor to Fight Piracy. Hollywood's new strategy is likely to affect everyone from computer-adept users of online music services to the average couch potato. The digital future, hailed as more convenient and of higher quality than the scratchy, fuzzy analog past, is coming with multiple strings attached.

January 7, 2003
NY Times: Programmer Cleared of Digital Piracy, in Blow to Hollywood. Although Norway has outlawed hacking and computer piracy, the legal boundaries around DVD replication in Europe are less clear, and Mr. Johansen's case is a key test of international attitudes toward a legal issue that continues to frustrate Hollywood.

Bob Frankston: Bad Coupling. Unfortunately the concept of simplicity is very difficult to grasp. It is "obvious" that as we add more possibilities systems must be become very complex and the "solution" is to add some intelligence into these systems. In reality it is this intelligence that is the real source of complexity by creating complex linkages among the elements.

January 8, 2003
Clay Shirky: Customer-owned Networks. However, a second possibility has appeared. If the economics of internet connectivity lets the user rather than the network operator capture the residual value of the network, the economics likewise suggest that the user should be the builder and owner of the network infrastructure.

January 9, 2003
NY Times: A Microsoft Watch Will Provide Much More Than Time. But even as the company extends its reach to new devices, Microsoft's vision is closely linked to the computer. Both the watch — which can provide weather information, text messages and other data — and the media player are designed to be controlled through wireless connections to their owners' PC's.

January 10, 2003
Bob Frankston: VoIP is a simple idea and simply works. In the Times article, the Verizon spokesperson said that the Public Switched Telephone Network has worked well for many decades. That's true by comparison to the alternatives -- no phone system at all. Now that we have alternatives the PSTN comes up wanting.

January 11, 2003
Good Experience: The Good Experience Review of Bits, 2002/2003. The biggest technology story of 2002, in my opinion, was the exponential increase in the number of bits and bitstreams engaged by Net users worldwide. Not just sp-m mail, which got the most attention, but all bitstreams.

News.Com: A life in bits and bytes. Q&A with Gordon Bell. Jim and I wrote an article on the 50-year outlook for computing, and that's when we realized that the amount of storage was so vast that we in principle could capture everything--everything you read, every picture you've ever taken, everything you've said.

January 12, 2003
SJ Mercury: Cartel's copyright control loosening. Dan Gillmor. Still, it was evident that -- technologically speaking, at any rate -- tomorrow is not on the side of the copyright control freaks. Information doesn't want to be free, but customers definitely want it to.

January 13, 2003
NY Times: AOL Chairman Quits His Post Amid Criticism. Mr. Case's sudden resignation is the culmination of an 18-year rise on the crest of the Internet boom, which took him from founding an obscure start-up betting on the future of an unknown medium to becoming the top executive of the world's largest media company.

• Salon: From January 10, 2000; AOL and Time Warner's marriage of insecurity. Scott Rosenberg.

January 14, 2003
Wired News: 'Landmark' Accord on Copyrights. The leading trade associations for the music and technology industries, which have been at loggerheads over consumers downloading songs on the Internet, have negotiated a compromise they contend will protect copyrights on movies and music without new government involvement.

January 15, 2003
NY Times: Music Industry Won't Seek Government Aid on Piracy. In turn, the Business Software Alliance and another technology group, the Computer Systems Policy Project, said they would not support legislation that seeks to clarify and bolster the rights of people to use copyrighted material in the digital age, which the recording industry has opposed as unnecessary.

News.Com: Supreme Court OKs copyright extension. It dealt a defeat to an Internet publisher and others who challenged the law for limiting free speech and for harming the creative process by locking up material they said should be in the public domain for all to use without charge.

January 16, 2003
SJ Mercury: Copyright ruling is a ripoff of consumers. Dan Gillmor. Sometimes I worry that people are oblivious to anything but immediate gratification. But I also sense that the public is beginning to grasp the scale of corruption that has led to incessant copyright extensions -- and will see the risks in even more theft from what should belong to all of us.

January 17, 2003
Salon: After the copyright smackdown: What next? While disobedience might be more fun, the power of civil discourse remains. In fact, the ruling gives public interest activists both motivation and ammunition in the continuing battle against the excessive expansion of the power to control information and culture.

News.Com: Building a better spam trap. Unsolicited e-mail messages, or spam, are on track to make up the majority of traffic on the Internet. But a group of researchers and developers gathered here Friday hopes to halt that by coming up with better ways of blocking those messages from consumers' inboxes.

January 18, 2003
NY Times: Court Rules Against Network Associates' Software Review Policy. A New York court has ruled that Network Associates, a maker of popular antivirus and computer security software, may not require people who buy the software to get permission from the company before publishing reviews of its products.

News.Com: RIAA: ISPs should pay for music swapping. Rosen suggested one possible scenario for recouping lost sales from online piracy would be to impose a type of fee on ISPs that could be passed on to their customers who frequent these file-swapping services.

January 19, 2003
SJ Mercury: Copyright proposal endorses a status quo that's anti-consumer. Dan Gillmor. On Tuesday, the recording industry and two technology lobbying organizations announced a much-hyped set of seven ``policy principles'' that essentially tell the government to avoid further regulation of customers' rights to copy content they have legally paid for.

InfoWorld: Will new filters save us from spam? The roughly 500 programmers, researchers, hackers and IT administrators gathered in a chilly classroom on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Friday aren't just looking to slow the relentless onslaught of spam -- they want to completely destroy its business model.

January 20, 2003
Newsweek: Sony’s New Day. Steven Levy. To Idei, everything comes together with his beloved buzzword: broadband. Sony will create not only network-connected products but also devise services that deliver the content—much of which Sony owns through its own music, movie and game divisions.

Wired News: No Harmony Yet in Content Land. It was a warm and fuzzy occasion by Washington standards, but the deal reached between music and tech groups last week may only signal more turmoil in the coming months as old and new rifts surface.

January 21, 2003
SJ Mercury: Technology helps make music more democratic. Dan Gillmor. This transformation has been accelerating, no surprise given the rate at which technology improves. The gear and software on display last week at the International Music Products Association annual trade show in Anaheim were more capable and powerful than ever.

News.Com: RIAA wins battle to ID Kazaa user. This case represents the entertainment industry's latest legal assault on peer-to-peer piracy. If its invocation of the DMCA is upheld on appeal, music industry investigators would have the power to identify hundreds or thousands of music pirates at a time without going to court first.

January 22, 2003
SJ Mercury: Internet content in peril in non-competitive world. Dan Gillmor. Should giant telecommunications companies -- namely the cable and local-phone provider -- have vertical control over everything from the data transport to the content itself? Or should we insist on a more horizontal system, in which the owner of the pipe is obliged to provide interconnections to competing services?

Good Experience: Interview: Elizabeth Peaslee, VP, Customer Experience, Travelocity. Along the way we've used data from our own internal successes, and from successes at other sites, to help sell the idea that focusing on customer experience can have an impact on the bottom line.

January 23, 2003
uiweb.com: How to run a design critique. In the early and middle phases of a project, teams need a way to understand and explore the current direction of the design. The challenge is to create the openness needed for good ideas to surface, while simultaneously cultivating the feedback and criticism necessary to resolve open issues.

InfoWorld: Tech giants: No government copy-control mandates. A coalition of technology company heavyweights and consumer groups have joined the chorus of voices calling for the U.S. government to stay away from mandating anti-copying schemes on computers.

January 24, 2003
Wired: The Civil War Inside Sony. What's changed since the original Walkman debuted is that Sony became the only conglomerate to be in both consumer electronics and entertainment. As a result, it's conflicted: Sony's electronics side needs to let customers move files around effortlessly, but its entertainment side wants to build in restraints, because it sees every customer as a potential thief.

January 26, 2003
Bob Frankston: The Legacy of Spectrum. The presumption that underlies the FCC management of communications is that we must have prior restraint because we are not allowed to do better than the methods used over 100 years ago! Communicating with a radio is treated as being special and not only is prior restraint allowed, it is required.

January 27, 2003
Useit.Com: Voice Interfaces: Assessing the Potential. So, it's not that voice is useless. It's just that it is often a secondary interaction mode when additional media are available. It's much easier to pick out the desired item from a list when the list is displayed on a monitor than when it's read aloud.

January 28, 2003
NY Times: Sifting Through the Online Medical Jumble. Now there are a few services that, for a fee, promise to take over that work, to weed through the deluge of information, selecting effective treatments and trashing fakes. The conundrum is no longer evaluating health advice, but evaluating the evaluators.

January 29, 2003
The Economist: A radical rethink. The alternative is to return to the original purpose of copyright, something no national legislature has yet been willing to do. Copyright was originally the grant of a temporary government-supported monopoly on copying a work, not a property right.

January 30, 2003
SJ Mercury: SBC's patent claim on Web navigation is way off course. Dan Gillmor. I'm not quite ready to echo Web commentary that calls SBC's offer a BT-like shakedown. But the company's claim has a certain odor, at best. In fact, U.S. Patent Nos. 5,933,841 and 6,442,574 may well turn out to be just one more example of a patent system that has run off the rails.

The Economist: The other Powell has a big year too. Stumped, the pundits wrote Mr Powell off as a crank, whose shaky command of his horribly complicated brief would all too soon end in tears. Two years later, the outlines of Mr Powell's ambitious and thoughtful agenda have begun to emerge and will be implemented this year through four big decisions.

January 31, 2003
NY Times: Microsoft to Alter Online System to Satisfy Europe. Under the agreement, Europeans who sign up to use .Net Passport will be prompted to look at a brief summary of their privacy rights under the law. They will also be shown a link to the European Commission's Web site, where more information about data protection will be available.