February 1, 2003
NY Times: Pentagon and Companies in Agreement on Spectrum. The companies said this would lift the popularity of high-speed wireless Internet service, a bright spot in an otherwise moribund industry. For the military, the agreement wards off an emerging threat to their radar systems by setting detailed technical mechanisms to deal with interference.

February 2, 2003
NY Times: Sony Again Turns to Design to Lift Electronics. Sony says its reputation, which has added luster to its brand, should be preserved lest it devolve into just another electronics maker. To do that, Sony executives are convinced that the company must continue to emphasize styling.

February 3, 2003
digitalMASS: E-paper rivals in race to prove their innovations. Scott Kirsner. Now, the companies are hurrying to find smaller steps that will take them closer to that big goal. Their backers are leaning on them to prove that their innovations can create value in the marketplace, right now.

February 4, 2003
Bob Frankston: Spam Fixation. The solution is not to blame the spammers, the solution is to take charge of our availability and gain control over our availability. We can start by recognizing that we are victims of bad tools and a lack of understanding more than we are victims of spammers.

• Good Experience: From July 18, 2000; Surviving the Bit Infinity

Wall Street Journal: New York Times' Web Site Plans Print-Like Ad Format. The New York Times' Web site will begin displaying half-page magazine-style ads adjacent to its articles, making its online pages appear more similar to their print counterparts.

February 5, 2003
LA Times: Copyright Legislation Unlikely, Both Sides Say. Leaders of major entertainment and technology trade groups, often at odds over piracy and copyright issues, have found something to agree on: Chances are slim that Congress will jump into their controversies with significant legislation this year.

February 6, 2003
Business Week: Why NTT Is Running Scared. Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. is lobbying hard to increase fees--by 8% to 13%--to swat down purveyors of Internet phone service, which it sees as a threat to its dominant position in Japan's $40 billion fixed-line phone business.

Network World: France Telecom launches WLAN initiative. The company sees 802.11b wireless LAN as an enrichment of existing fixed and wireless Internet access services and will invest to make the technology widely available to business users and consumers, it said in a statement. No financial details were disclosed.

February 7, 2003
CIO: Off the Charts. The University of Illinois Medical Center won an Enterprise Value Award because of a brilliantly executed change management strategy, through which it managed to get the toughest users on the planet to lift their heads up long enough from the work of saving lives to change the way they deliver care to patients.

February 8, 2003
News.Com: Web publishers settle with Gator. Seven publishers including The Washington Post, The New York Times and Dow Jones reached an agreement on settlement terms with the Internet software company early Tuesday, according to Terence Ross, attorney for the plaintiffs. He said terms of the agreement were made strictly confidential.

February 9, 2003
Technology Marketing: The Telecom Con. Michael Schrage. No, it leaves us with the best of all possible worlds for marketing segmentation and differentiation in the history of technology. Why? In an era of "excess network capacity" and "excess bandwidth," size becomes less relevant rather than more important.

February 10, 2003
Technology Review: Creating a Culture of Ideas. Nicholas Negroponte. Any society that prides itself on being harmonious and homogeneous is very unlikely to catalyze idiosyncratic thinking. Suppression of innovation need not be overt. It can be simply a matter of people’s walking around in tacit agreement and full comfort with the status quo.

Bob Frankston: Email Is Still Just a Toy. The reality of email falls short of what we should expect and that is just one more reminder of how little we take advantage of the potential of these technologies even as they become fundamental to society.

February 11, 2003
Scientific American: Digital Entertainment Jumps the Border. But new technologies for distributing movies and television shows now threaten to overwhelm these national barriers. Satellite broadcasters in Europe and Asia are already offering subscribers an unregulated mix of programming dominated by American shows.

February 12, 2003
Technology Review: 10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change the World. But in this special section, Technology Review’s editors have identified 10 emerging technologies that we predict will have a tremendous influence in the near future. For each, we’ve chosen a researcher or research team whose work and vision is driving the field.

February 13, 2003
News.Com: Blue laser format gets green light. The nine companies promoting Blu-ray Disc technology--a next-generation recordable DVD format using blue-violet lasers--announced Thursday that licensing will begin Feb. 17. Blu-ray Disc technology allows for 27GB storage capacities on a single-sided 12cm disc.

February 14, 2003
NY Times: Out With the Old? It's Not So Simple. "Some day," she said, sounding vaguely wistful, "I will get those files off that computer. Or something." In the electronic age, when the trails one leaves are often digital, the biggest trail of all may be the stream of computer hardware left behind in the process of upgrading.

February 15, 2003
Washington Post: Plan Approved To Save U.S. Digital History. Now, with congressional approval of the plan, the library continues work with federal, university and corporate partners to develop the infrastructure needed to carry out data preservation, to build a network to manage the data, and to assemble people and set guidelines to help choose which data to save.

NY Times: Out With the Old? It's Not So Simple. "Some day," she said, sounding vaguely wistful, "I will get those files off that computer. Or something." In the electronic age, when the trails one leaves are often digital, the biggest trail of all may be the stream of computer hardware left behind in the process of upgrading.

News.Com: Blue laser format gets green light. The nine companies promoting Blu-ray Disc technology--a next-generation recordable DVD format using blue-violet lasers--announced Thursday that licensing will begin Feb. 17. Blu-ray Disc technology allows for 27GB storage capacities on a single-sided 12cm disc.

Technology Review: 10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change the World. But in this special section, Technology Review’s editors have identified 10 emerging technologies that we predict will have a tremendous influence in the near future. For each, we’ve chosen a researcher or research team whose work and vision is driving the field.

February 16, 2003
SJ Mercury: Disk-drive capacity continues to grow. Dan Gillmor. The kinds of files we store keep getting bulkier, but the disk-drive wizards are moving fast enough to stay ahead. In the next few years, given their continuing innovation, they're likely to do something I didn't imagine possible until recently -- give us so much storage at such a low cost that we genuinely don't know how to use it all.

Clay Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality. Inequality occurs in large and unconstrained social systems for the same reasons stop-and-go traffic occurs on busy roads, not because it is anyone's goal, but because it is a reliable property that emerges from the normal functioning of the system.

February 17, 2003
EE Times: Boeing preps jets for broadband. I'm on Connexion One, a test plane for Boeing Co.'s new network, which delivers a 20-Mbit/second satellite uplink to specially outfitted aircraft like this one. Each of about 30 seats on this 737-400 has access both to 10/100-Mbit Ethernet and 802.11b.

February 18, 2003
New Scientist: Designed for life. Q&A with Donald Norman. But in fact emotions came first precisely because they are all about survival. Modern computers are pretty autonomous and run 24/7, performing a lot of tasks. With machines this powerful, survival is important, so putting emotions in the machine makes a lot of sense.

February 19, 2003
News.Com: FCC plans landmark vote on broadband. But the FCC's painstaking internal deliberations also highlight an ideological conflict between two wildly different views of how to keep broadband prices low and competition robust: Should federal regulations be strengthened or rescinded?

Useit.Com: Investor Relations Website Design. While companies must provide IR information to attract and retain investors, they must also be realistic about the types of content and features that users need most. Simplicity and a coherent story about the company are better than drowning users in incomprehensible data.

February 20, 2003
MSNBC: How to Can the Spam. Steven Levy. But in the meantime, we have to take a step that some digital libertarians might find distasteful. We should pass a federal law to control spam. Some states have acted on their own, but the nature of the Net demands a single, unified and powerful bill.

February 21, 2003
SJ Mercury: FCC ruling is a blow to the competitive marketplace. Dan Gillmor. Barring technological and regulatory developments that spur innovation from genuinely new directions, the nation's regional phone monopolies have won a huge advantage in deploying tomorrow's high-speed data networks. And if they operate true to form, they will use that advantage in anticompetitive ways.

Kevin Werbach: What the FCC was thinking. I'm far less troubled by the elimination of sharing requirements for new fiber deployments (what the High Tech Broadband Coalition endorsed) than the destruction of line-sharing for today's DSL. The problem isn't with Intel's position, it's with the set of compromises the FCC made.

February 22, 2003
Computerworld: Microsoft details new rights management technology. Microsoft Corp. said today that it is developing add-on security technology for its forthcoming Windows Server 2003 operating system software that will allow organizations to implement rights-management protections on corporate documents such as e-mail messages and data files.

February 23, 2003
SJ Mercury: From Demo: 10 technologies to watch. Of the 60 companies invited, I picked 10 I think are poised to change the way we interact with technology in the next three years or so -- either because their product itself was so impressive, or because their idea is sure to inspire others in the industry to pursue similar goals.

February 24, 2003
News.Com: Cable operators pledge to keep Net open. In a letter sent Friday to the Federal Communications Commission, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association said that "cable operators have no intention of blocking access to content" and that no government regulations are necessary to guarantee this.

Useit.Com: Employee Directory Search: Resolving Conflicting Usability Guidelines. In the employee directory question, there are two arguments for why the new two-search guideline is correct: empirical evidence and theoretical reasoning. When in doubt, you can always run a user test.

February 25, 2003
InfoWorld: IM has identity crisis, Microsoft says. Speaking at the Instant Messaging Planet Spring 2003 Conference and Expo here Tuesday, Gurle told attendees that IM is often misunderstood, and that for its true potential to be realized, service providers will have to undergo a tremendous shift in their business models.

LA Times: Studios, Firms in Piracy Talks. This time, the issue is how to preserve anti-copying signals on a digital television show, online video or DVD when converted from digital to analog. That kind of conversion, which has to happen before a digital program can be sent to the vast majority of TV sets, is inherently fatal to digital copy-protection techniques.

February 26, 2003
Washington Post: Bell Firms Pledge to Fight New FCC Rules. Two of the four former Bell companies, SBC Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. also renewed promises made after the vote that they would not invest in new, high-speed Internet networks unless the local telephone rules are scuttled.

February 27, 2003
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Preparing for Computer Disasters. Most colleges have some sort of plan to protect their computer information, although few have faced the kind of disaster that would demonstrate whether those plans actually worked. Experts say staging a mock computer disaster can highlight a preparedness plan's shortcomings, but such tests happen only rarely.

February 28, 2003
Financial Times: Exclusive rights to stagnate. Lawrence Lessig. The system in America is broken - to the great detriment of software developers generally - and there is no reason to believe the Europeans could do any better. The claim that the US patent system is in crisis is nothing new. What is new is the identity of those making it.

Network World: IETF creates antispam research group. Underscoring growing concern over spam, the Internet Engineering Task Force has created an Anti-Spam Research Group that aims to put unsolicited commercial e-mail in its crosshairs by setting standards for spam detection and potential legislation.