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July 1, 2003
Bob Frankston: We Have Connectivity!
Our policies seem to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the Internet. The Internet is not defined by fibers or wires or even not-wires (wireless). The Internet simply happens when we understand how to define the services outside the network itself by using any available transport as a way to exchange fungible packets of bits.
Washington Post: Web Firms Choose Profit Over Privacy.
...marketers and an array of service providers expanding their collection and use of consumers' e-mail addresses and other personal information, despite broad assurances to protect individual privacy and honor consumers' choices about how much marketing they want to receive.
July 2, 2003
NY Times: Intel Loses Decision in E-mail Case.
The California Supreme Court ruled yesterday that a former employee of Intel was free to send e-mail messages to current company employees, overturning a lower court's injunction. The court rejected Intel's argument that the messages represented illegal trespassing to its computer systems.
Discover: A Chat Room Like No Other.
Steven Johnson. There is a testing ground for one of today's most interesting experiments in communication, one that harks back to where we were just a little more than 100 years ago, when a technology first appeared that convincingly fooled our eyes into seeing the illusion of motion in a series of still images.
July 3, 2003
NY Times: Windows Palmtops Reviewed.
Clearly, Microsoft still thinks about simplicity and directness only as an afterthought, if at all. (After my review of Pocket PC 2002 last year, a public-relations representative asked me, "What areas do you see for improvement - apart from, you know, that user-interface stuff?")
Bob Frankston: Hotspots Cold Cells.
The current telecommunications infrastructure has one overriding purpose -- to generate billable events. It is a tragic mistake to assume that this is the only way we can pay for vital infrastructure since it is an extremely inefficient and dysfunctional system that extracts an unbearable cost on society.
July 4, 2003
The Economist: Mobile snaps.
But now a new threat has appeared: camera-equipped mobile phones. These could change the nature of photography entirely, because they make sharing digital snaps far easier—and they will soon outstrip both film and digital cameras.
July 5, 2003
CIO: Smooth Talkers.
Today, preconfigured speech templates, drop-in objects and other packaged tools make speech integration development less burdensome. Hardware improvements, particularly speedier processors, also help make speech integration a more practical technology.
July 6, 2003
NY Times: A Simpler, More Personal Key to Protect Online Messages.
Two years ago, the two researchers proposed a theoretical solution known as "identity based encryption" as an alternative to the current, complex approach, using public keys, which must be validated with digital certificates held by a central and trusted repository.
July 7, 2003
EE Times: Chiariglione launches Digital Media Project.
Anticipating membership from companies around the world, the initiative will seek solutions for breaking up the current digital media logjam created by technical, political, legal and economic differences. Another goal is "helping the digital media revolution take hold," said Chiariglione.
July 8, 2003
News.Com: Court backs thumbnail image linking.
That part of the ruling held Arriba Soft liable for copyright infringement for opening a new window to display full-size images, a practice known as in-line linking or framing. Other visual search engines use this technique, including Google, Lycos and AltaVista. The case is now ordered to go to trial.
Computerworld: McDonald's signs on for Wi-Fi in San Francisco area, Singapore.
McDonald's Corp. broadened its push into the Wi-Fi public-access market today, with deals to provide the wireless service in 75 San Francisco Bay-area restaurants and 140 outlets in Singapore. In the Bay area, 55 restaurants began offering wireless Internet connectivity today.
July 9, 2003
News.Com: Talking computers nearing reality.
Microsoft on Wednesday will release the first public beta of its Speech Server, which will let servers better handle oral commands. It will also release the third beta of its Speech Application software developer kit.
July 10, 2003
News.Com: Google cache raises copyright concerns.
The practice has proved a boon for readers hoping to track down Web pages that are no longer accessible at the original source, for whatever reason. But the feature has recently been putting Google at odds with some unhappy publishers.
SJ Mercury: Former FCC chairman's plan: broadband in every home.
Dan Gillmor. A serious national broadband policy -- designed to bring 10 to 100 megabits of information per second to every home -- would be as crucial an economic-development and infrastructure tool as the roads of the previous century, Reed Hundt said at the Supernova technology conference...
July 11, 2003
The Economist: Storing e-text for centuries.
Rather than invent a better mousetrap, they are using existing technology to imitate an important function of libraries. They want to ensure that readers will still be able to access electronic academic journals even centuries after they have been published.
Forbes: Korea's Weird Wired World.
South Korea has gone gaga over broadband. This nation of 46 million people, packed into an area smaller than Virginia, has quickly become the world's most wired nation. Politics, entertainment, sex, mass media, crime and commerce are being reshaped by a population as online as it is offline.
July 12, 2003
The Economist: The sentient office is coming.
By adding sensors to today's computing and communications technology, sentient computing seeks to take account of a machine's environment in order to make it more responsive and useful. Sentient computing systems are always on, ubiquitously available, and can adapt to their users.
July 13, 2003
SJ Mercury: Privacy rights under threat by lawmakers.
Dan Gillmor. In the constant battle to preserve what's left of our privacy and roll back some of the invasions we've already suffered, one reality is all too clear: Elected officials are not on our side.
July 14, 2003
News.Com: Yahoo to buy Overture for $1.63 billion.
In a conference call Monday morning, Yahoo Chief Executive Officer Terry Semel said that the combined companies represent the largest player in the Internet advertising sector and that the deal gives Yahoo greater ability to market to small and medium-size advertisers.
Useit.Com: PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption.
Users get lost inside PDF files, which are typically big, linear text blobs that are optimized for print and unpleasant to read and navigate online. PDF is good for printing, but that's it. Don't use it for online presentation.
EE Times: Intel stokes fixed-wireless fire.
A vision of a seamlessly connected wireless world popped into clearer focus last week as the world's largest IC vendor threw its weight behind a key wireless standard. But even Intel Corp.'s announcement that it will develop silicon for IEEE 802.16a fixed wireless access is only the first step on a long road pitted with potholes of cost, reliability issues and just plain skepticism.
The Economist: Grokking the infoviz.
Interactive charts are showing up on websites. And earlier this year, Groxis, a start-up based in Sausalito, California, released Grokker, an innovative graphical tool that it also sells to consumers for $99. Will “infoviz”, as geeks call the technology, become a killer application, rather as spreadsheets did?
July 15, 2003
Adaptive Path: The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams.
Jesse James Garrett. Formal titles, job descriptions, and reporting structures can vary widely. But the best teams I’ve encountered have one important thing in common: their team structure and processes cover a full range of distinct competencies necessary for success.
Crypto-Gram: How to Fight.
Sadly, I believe things will get much worse before they get better. Many people seem not to be bothered by stupid security; it even makes some feel safer. In the U.S., people are now used to showing their ID everywhere; it's the new security reality post-9/11.
July 16, 2003
News.Com: Researchers delve into the human factor.
A team of computer scientists, academics and others gathered this week at IBM's Almaden Research Center to swap ideas on how to better understand the ways in which humans interact with machines. Specifically, they met to compare notes on different ways to make sense of how technology is being consumed.
Semantic Studios: International Information Architecture.
The ways we categorize are rooted in language and culture. This creates unique challenges for information architects. For example, a web site targeted for a Japanese audience may require a completely different structure and organization than its German equivalent. Localization isn't limited to translation.
The Age: The cyberspace invaders.
Ironically, both sides in the cyber terrorism debate – those who warn that governments and businesses are not doing enough to protect essential computer systems and those who claim the threat of genuine cyber attack are overstated – use the Boden case to further their positions.
Internet Week: U.S. Cybersecurity Efforts Lacking, Says Former Presidential Cybersecurity Advisor Clarke.
Because the federal government has failed to implement the public-private partnership called for by the national cybersecurity strategy, private companies need to join together to "work on security problems without help from the government," Clarke said.
July 17, 2003
News.Com: Record industry sends out subpoenas.
The Recording Industry Association of America on Wednesday said it sent out subpoenas to Internet service providers, in preparation for lawsuits it plans to file against hundreds of individuals who illegally distribute songs over the Web.
Technology Review: When Rebooting is Not an Option.
Q&A: MIT computer scientist Larry Rudolph. This solution has worked so far. But very soon it’s not going to work for, say, devices in our houses. It won’t be clear what to reboot. The vision of Oxygen is that there’s no PC that is the center, there’s no central server to which everything is connected.
July 18, 2003
WIRED: Your Permanent Record.
David Vaskevitch, chief technology officer for Microsoft. In fact, memory - the ability to record, store, organize, play back, expand, edit, and elicit experiences - is the future of computing. What we need is more memory, plus better software tools to manage this abundance.
The Economist: Searching for relevance.
The ground being fought over is located on the results pages of internet searches. These, contrary to expectations during the dotcom boom, are now the most exciting place on the internet for many advertisers.
July 19, 2003
Wired News: Sony Breaks Ground With New PDA.
Sony is so confident Americans will want this sleek new product -- which folds into a convenient 4.2-by-3.5-inch box and has an eye-catching high-resolution flip-and-rotate screen -- that the company plans to charge $700 for it. The new PEG-UX50 Clié will appear in retail stores in September.
July 20, 2003
The Economist: Coming soon to a laptop near you.
Later this summer, however, a wholly new type of screen technology, based on the so-called “organic light-emitting diode”, will become available. If it lives up to expectations, it will solve many of the shortcomings of present displays, and create possibilities for applications that have yet to be imagined.
July 21, 2003
NY Times: Amazon Plan Would Allow Searching Texts of Many Books.
Executives at Amazon.com are negotiating with several of the largest book publishers about an ambitious and expensive plan to assemble a searchable online archive with the texts of tens of thousands of books of nonfiction, according to several publishing executives involved.
NY Times: ReplayTV's New Owners Drop Features That Riled Hollywood.
Like any kind of antisocial behavior, one entertainment company executive said, "Every system tolerates some amount of it. But when it starts to overwhelm the business activity, there won't be any more business activity. That's when we have to take action."
NY Times: Apple Co-Founder Creates Electronic ID Tags.
...Mr. Wozniak described WozNet as a simple and inexpensive wireless network that uses radio signals and global positioning satellite data to keep track of a cluster of inexpensive tags within a one- or two-mile radius of each base station.
July 22, 2003
Good Experience: Top Sites' User Experience Teams and Their Challenge.
Across all of those companies, the issues were strikingly similar. Despite the different business models - e-commerce, content, software development, search, etc. - team after team recited the same few issues that they are now trying to address.
NY Times: Developing Systems of Online Payment.
Still, the idea that micropayments are an untapped source of online wealth stayed alive. In recent weeks, two micropayment companies, BitPass, based in Palo Alto, Calif., and Peppercoin, based in Waltham, Mass., have rolled out test versions of their services.
July 23, 2003
SJ Mercury: Studios demanding too much in their copyright campaign.
Dan Gillmor. The cartel believes -- and basically says -- that fair use is something copyright holders may provide or withhold at their whim. This stance tells customers they have no rights, except to spend or not spend.
MIT Technology Review: Don't Break E-Mail To Save It.
Vipul Ved Prakash, founder and chief scientist for Cloudmark. My perspective on design of spam filtration solutions is centered around exploitation of the various constraints of the spammer. One thing we don't talk about enough is the fact that spammers have rather serious constraints.
July 24, 2003
NY Times: In the Lecture Hall, a Geek Chorus.
Mr. Aral discovered that he was not alone. The next day in the auditorium, which was outfitted with a wireless link to the Internet, a group of people booted up their laptops, opened their IM programs and spent the next three hours happily exchanging notes during the presentations.
Boston Globe: BC, MIT decline to name students in music-use case.
MIT and Boston College yesterday said that they support the rights of copyright holders and would comply with any subpoena that addressed their concerns about the proper notification of students and was filed ''properly'' in US District Court in Massachusetts, not in Washington D.C.
July 25, 2003
Wired News: RIAA, Colleges Seek Piracy Fix.
The universities are exploring technologies that would control illegal peer-to-peer file sharing. In addition, they are working with digital music and movie companies to offer downloading services tailored to universities.
InfoWorld: Gates: Longhorn is 'a bit scary'.
Longhorn, the next version of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows desktop operating system, will be so different from its predecessors that users may not like it right away, Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates said Thursday.
July 26, 2003
News.Com: Borders founder to open Net newsstand.
Borders' newest venture, KeepMedia, which launches Monday, is an online portal that provides access to archives of 140 magazines for a monthly fee of about $5. It's also a one-stop entry point for current news, for those people who already hold subscriptions to any one of its publications...
EE Times: Samsung to seek technology with MIT Media Lab.
Samsung plans to invest $3.75 million over the next five years on the program, the company said on Friday. The research to be based in the digital multimedia domain would include assessing the impact of technological progress on human lifestyles at home and work.
July 27, 2003
SJ Mercury: History ignored once again.
Dan Gillmor. Ignoring economic history has its pitfalls, however, as so many have learned the hard way in this new century. Have we stayed educated? Apparently not -- and that's more than a little scary.
July 28, 2003
Useit.Com: Gateway Pages Prevent PDF Shock.
If you distribute documents for printing or if you absolutely have to repurpose existing content into a substandard user experience, at least protect your users from nasty surprises. Create a gateway page for each PDF document and make sure that users are always guided through the gateway.
NY Times: Diverging Estimates of the Costs of Spam.
Gauging the cost of tiny bits of computer power and the value of many moments of wasted time, multiplied by millions of e-mail users, leads to big, if inevitably imprecise, numbers.
Network World: Mailblocks service simplifies challenge-response.
The latest version of Challenge/Response reduces the likelihood that senders will get challenged by Mailblocks by aggregating the valid responses from all Mailblocks users, according to Phil Goldman, Mailblocks' CEO. "We figured out this - if you send mail to me at Mailblocks, get challenged and respond, we know you're a human being," he said.
July 29, 2003
NY Times: Subpoenas Sent to File-Sharers Prompt Anger and Remorse.
A blizzard of subpoenas from the recording industry seeking the identities of people suspected of illegally swapping music is provoking fear, anger and professions of remorse as the targets of the antipiracy dragnet learn that they may soon be sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.
Digital Web Magazine: An interview with Jeffrey Veen.
There are amazing things happening on the Web, and, interestingly enough, most businesses couldn’t imagine living without it. We’re spending an increasing amount of our time at Adaptive Path trying to understand the value of a quality user experience.
News.Com: Yahoo settles patent dispute.
The company sued Yahoo in December, accusing it of infringing 10 patents related to e-commerce technology that alerts customers to the availability of a product or the details of an order when they attempt to purchase something online.
July 30, 2003
Business Week: Verizon's Gutsy Bet.
At the heart of this reinvention is the most ambitious deployment of new telecom technology in years. Verizon plans to roll out fiber-optic connections to every home and business in its 29-state territory over the next 10 to 15 years, a project that might reasonably be compared with the construction of the Roman aqueducts.
Network World: Microsoft Research preps Usenet analysis tool.
Researchers at Microsoft are working on technology that makes it easier to navigate Usenet news groups and could eventually help clear clutter in e-mail inboxes, a Microsoft researcher said Tuesday.
News.Com: Cox tests Internet phone service.
Cox Senior Vice President Dallas Clement told financial analysts that the marketing trial will also investigate what alternative power supplies to sell alongside VOIP dialing plans. One of VOIP’s major problems is that when electricity is disrupted, modems go down and the phones no longer work.
July 31, 2003
Wired News: One ISP Refuses to Yield.
Pac Bell claims that more than 200 subpoenas seeking file-sharers' e-mail addresses were issued from the wrong jurisdiction. And the recording industry's demand for information on multiple file-sharers cannot be grouped under one subpoena, and that the demands themselves are overly broad, Pac Bell said.
News.Com: Microsoft.com revamps search.
The development is believed to be the first step in a multiyear plan to build new search technology that's aimed at home and business users. The ultimate goal of the technology is to bind Microsoft's various Web sites, applications and the Windows operating system.
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