September 1, 2003
NY Times: Digital Vandalism Spurs a Call for Oversight. As America's 156 million Internet users brace for the next round of digital vandalism, some experts say that it is time for the government to bolster a basic sense of stability in cyberspace that societies expect from their critical public resources.

Technology Review: Networking From the Rooftop. Sinha’s “chimney connection” is part of MIT’s Roofnet, a project to create a self-organizing wireless network in which an amorphous, unmanaged collection of cheap Linux computers equipped with Wi-Fi cards collaborate to efficiently route data packets.

NY Times: More Companies Are Routing Calls via Internet. The systems are flexible, enabling calls to be routed through a company's internal data network, the public Internet or both. Besides major agencies like the Commerce Department, Internet telephony is being adopted by businesses, including JetBlue Airways and the bank holding company SouthTrust...

September 2, 2003
WIRED: MIT Everyware. The academic world was shocked by MIT's audacity - and skeptical of the experiment. At a time when most enterprises were racing to profit from the Internet and universities were peddling every conceivable variant of distance learning, here was the pinnacle of technology and science education ready to give it away.

Computerworld: Future Watch: Using computers to outthink terrorists. In Genoa II, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is studying potential IT that may not only enable new levels of collaboration among teams of intelligence analysts, policy-makers and covert operators, but could also make it possible for humans and computers to "think together" in real time to "anticipate and preempt terrorist threats," according to official program documents.

September 3, 2003
NY Times: Now on the Web: The Total Price. Online merchants have improved how quickly they disclose the actual selling price of goods and services after taxes, fees and shipping charges have been added on. In the early years of e-commerce, when merchants considered low prices the primary way to attract customers, such charges were often hidden many steps into the buying process.

September 4, 2003
News.Com: Details emerge in AOL-MSN outage. Microsoft on Wednesday also reiterated a statement saying it did not make any changes to its services or its network infrastructure in advance of the blackout, passing responsibility to cable-access provider Road Runner and its parent company, AOL Time Warner.

News.Com: Sony to launch Net music service. Although details remain scarce, the Sony service as described will be closely tied to the company's consumer-electronics and proprietary copy-protection technologies. The company did not provide information on pricing or business models, although Stringer did describe it as a download service.

September 5, 2003
Clay Shirky: Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content. The answer is simple: creators are not publishers, and putting the power to publish directly into their hands does not make them publishers. It makes them artists with printing presses. This matters because creative people crave attention in a way publishers do not.

Technology Review: Reinventing the Transistor. Williams’s group faces a monumental task: trying to make computers whose functionality rests on the workings of molecules. To do so will mean reinventing the transistor. While silicon and other inorganic semiconductors have always been the basic building blocks of microchips, it turns out that organic molecules can also have some potentially useful electrical properties.

September 6, 2003
InfoWorld: Security blame games. Jon Udell. Open source software partisans never seem to follow their argument to its logical conclusion, however. If more people used Linux and/or Mac OS X, more attackers would exploit the vulnerabilities of these systems. Hardly anybody argues that those systems are invulnerable to attack.

September 7, 2003
NY Times: Aiming at Pornography to Hit Music Piracy. The industry is trying to enlist broader public support with a campaign intended to show that its nemesis — the peer-to-peer networks for swapping files like KaZaA and Morpheus — are used not only to trade songs but also pornographic images, including child pornography.

SJ Mercury: Password Overload. But what else are we to do? Keeping track of an e-mail user name and password was simple enough. But then came online news subscriptions, online auctions, online banking and bill-pay -- and each of them brought a new user name and password.

September 8, 2003
News.Com: Scientology loss keeps hyperlinks legal. In denying the appeal, the court also overturned two previous rulings that lower courts had handed down. One of these decided that ISPs should be held accountable for any illegal or copyrighted materials posted by their subscribers and that ISPs should take down hyperlinks to such materials.

Business Week: Time to Rewrite the Rules of Telecom. In the next few days, the Minnesota State Public Utility Commission plans to hand down an order mandating that Vonage be held to the same standards, taxes, and requirements as more traditional telecom operations. In Minnesota's view, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it's a duck.

• Kevin Werbach: The VOIP battle heats up

September 9, 2003
Financial Times: The BBC's lessons for America. Lawrence Lessig. It also required a bit of creative thinking. For the natural intuition of content owners is control. The very idea of giving up perfect control over how and whether content is re-used is treason among insiders. But as the BBC understands, it does not live in Disney World.

Technology Review: Computers Learn New ABCs. A group of linguists at the University of California, Berkeley, is trying to change that, by making sure that nearly 100 additional scripts have a place in a crucial international standard that lets computers render, process, and send text data.

September 10, 2003
News.Com: Vint Cerf hears VoIP calling. Q&A with Vint Cerf. It's really a small step in the evolution of the Internet. The more important things are likely to be grid computing. But VoIP starts the natural progression of another modality that the Internet can support. It also changes the whole of the telephony world substantially, so (VoIP) is hard to ignore.

September 11, 2003
WIRED: BigChampagne is Watching You. But even as the industry as a whole litigates, many of the individual labels are quietly reaching out to BigChampagne, turning file-sharing networks into the world's biggest focus group. In the beleaguered music business, this market research strategy that dare not speak its name is fast becoming the Nielsen ratings of the peer-to-peer world.

September 12, 2003
The Economist: Battle for the big screen. Innovations in materials and manufacturing processes are allowing the LCD to invade the plasma panel's territory—starting with 40-inch displays later this year, and then moving briskly to bigger sizes. The two rival technologies are poised for a clash.

News.Com: Microsoft goes to Hollywood. Microsoft submitted its technology to SMPTE on Monday, but waited until Friday to officially announce both that move and a blizzard of new Windows Media partnerships. The announcments were made at the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam.

September 13, 2003
NY Times: Whatever Will Be Will Be Free on the Internet. It was inevitable, then, that the Internet would eventually force a radical rethinking of intellectual property rights, and the music industry's current travails represent a particularly dramatic example of the mutating rules — though not the only one.

September 14, 2003
The Economist: Out of the ether. Its history would seem straightforward: brilliant inventor makes a breakthrough, cleverly stands conventional organisational principles on their head and, presto, the world is a better place. In fact, Ethernet's development and ultimate success illustrates both the inexorable serendipity of invention and its cruel indifference.

September 15, 2003
Useit.Com: Time to Make Tech Work. Recently, investments in new technology have slowed and productivity has surged because companies are focused on making existing technology work rather than chasing the latest fads.

Computerworld: Microsoft's mobile phone software gets boost from deal with Motorola. Schaumburg, Ill.-based Motorola is aiming the first of the so-called smart phones that will result from its new partnership with Microsoft directly at corporate applications involving mobile end users, said Michael Tatelman, vice president of Motorola's mobile products group.

September 16, 2003
Crypto-Gram: Accidents and Security Incidents. Bruce Schneier. At a time when we're worried about attacks -- by terrorists, hackers, and ordinary criminals -- it's worth spending some time talking about accidents. Some years ago computer-security researcher Ross Anderson described the difference as Murphy vs. Satan.

Washington Post: Software Aimed at Blocking VeriSign's Search Program. The Internet Software Consortium, the nonprofit organization that develops BIND software for Internet domain name directories, is writing an "urgent patch" for Internet service providers and others who want to block customers from a new Site Finder service from VeriSign Inc.

EE Times: Drive makers slowly plowing road to consumer storage. Hard disk drives still fall short of the technical needs of many consumer electronics systems which represent a small but rapidly growing storage market, according to drive makers and users at the Diskcon conference here last week.

September 17, 2003
NY Times: In Court, Verizon Challenges Music Industry's Subpoenas. Verizon contends that the law was meant to apply only to material that subscribers post on Web sites that reside on computers controlled by Internet providers. The rise of peer-to-peer technology, which lets Internet users find and retrieve files on one another's computers, the company says, was not foreseen by Congress when it passed the law.

News.Com: Intel, Sony prep digital content standard. The Digital Transmission Content Protection over IP specification is aimed at balancing the interests of consumers, who recoil against restrictions placed on how and where they can use digital content, and copyright owners, who are terrified of piracy.

September 18, 2003
BusinessWeek: Needed: A Security Blanket for the Net. The tide of bad behavior on the Web has been rising for some time, of course, and reactions such as Farber's aren't unprecedented. Still, this summer's security breakdowns were a wakeup call for even the medium's most devoted fans, who are reaching a broad consensus that something must be done to fix the Net.

Adaptive Path: The Business Value of Web Standards. Jeff Veen. But industry accolades aside, how important is standardization to an individual business like ours? Do Web standards give organizations a return on investment? Does the transition to XHTML and CSS make financial sense? The answer to those questions is yes.

SJ Mercury: New screens for notebooks are a treat for the eyes. These improved screens are so new there isn't yet a standard term in the industry to describe them, so I'll make my own attempt: ``high definition,'' or HD, because the screens give both still images and video the sharpness and glossy look of high-definition television.

InfoWorld: More senators question DMCA subpoenas. Senators Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican, Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, and Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican, criticized the use of the DMCA subpoenas to obtain names of alleged file traders from Internet service providers during a hearing in the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee Wednesday.

September 19, 2003
Wired News: JetBlue 'Fesses Up, Quietly. JetBlue Airways began sending out apologetic e-mails Thursday to customers who are infuriated that the airline gave 5 million passenger records to a defense contractor investigating national security issues.

September 20, 2003
SJ Mercury: Focus at DemoMobile show is new uses for wireless. Wireless devices aren't exactly a new, new thing. Virtually everyone who wants a cell phone has one, for example. Increasingly, the question is: How do we use these devices to entertain ourselves, solve work problems and communicate more efficiently?

September 21, 2003
SJ Mercury: Net-linked appliances have their place. Dan Gillmor. The technology, electronics, appliance and power industries are working on all of this. Some intriguing experiments are under way, including a project in Italy, using technology from Echelon of San Jose, to help manage electricity demand via remote systems at residences.

September 22, 2003
PC World: Mobile Show Spotlights Gadgets on the Go. In past years, one big tech trend has sometimes dominated the event. Last year, it was Wi-Fi. This year, though, the show seems to be about trendlets, ranging from the growing viability of cell phones as data devices to the reemergence of Bluetooth.

EE Times: Consortium wants e-books to show images, text. While retailer Barnes & Noble Inc. ceased electronic-book sales in the United States earlier this month, a consortium of about 200 companies is just taking shape in Japan to promote the development of e-book terminals and content. The Electronic Book Business Consortium believes it holds some cultural and technical advantages over U.S. efforts...

September 23, 2003
Wired News: Termites Inspire Paper Pusher. Such biologically inspired science is all the rage among the research community. Biomimetics takes ideas from nature and implements them in other areas. PARC, IBM Research, Bell Labs and many others are using biomimetic techniques to create the next generation of software, bioengineered devices and materials.

News.Com: Jury convicts man in DMCA case. The Los Angeles jury found 38-year-old Thomas Michael Whitehead guilty on Friday of selling hardware that could access DirecTV satellite broadcasts without paying for them, according to the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles.

NY Times: A Complaint Box Turns Frustration Into Fun. The outpouring of hotel horror stories led him to create This Is Broken (www.thisisbroken.com), a forum where consumers can air their gripes about everything from hidden hotel costs to baffling error messages to bad road signs.

September 24, 2003
NY Times: A New Kind of Revolution in the Dorms of Dartmouth. Now, the college is venturing into the world of "voice over Internet protocol," also known as VoIP, which essentially turns a computer into a telephone. This week, as classes begin, the 1,000 students entering the class of 2007 will be given the option of downloading software, generically known as softphones, onto Windows-based computers.

EE Times: Sharp Labs casting wide research net. Sharp Labs occupies a campus in rural Washington State where six research and development departments report to Clemens. Research departments include digital video, multimedia communications, digital imaging systems, information systems technologies, IC process technology and LCD process technology.

InfoWorld: European Parliament votes to limit scope of software patents. The European Parliament voted in favor of a law that goes some way toward limiting the scope for patents on software programs Wednesday. The issue still must be debated by European Union member states before a new law is passed, however.

September 25, 2003
NY Times: Studios Moving to Block Piracy of Films Online. Also, as early as next month the industry will begin promoting a "stealing is bad" message in schools, teaming up with Junior Achievement on an hourlong class for fifth through ninth graders on the history of copyright law and the evils of online file sharing.

IBM DeveloperWorks: What can users do? Peter Seebach. In principle, usability problems should be addressed by encouraging people to stop making unusable things. However, that's not always practical. While you're waiting, you -- as a user -- can do a lot to make up for the hassles and annoyances of modern computer usage.

Washington Post: Internet Sales Tax May Get Amazon.com's Support. Amazon and a loose-knit coalition of state policymakers, retailers and congressional staff negotiated all day Wednesday over the scope of the legislation. According to several sources involved in the talks, Amazon wanted to ensure that most Internet retailers are subject to collecting sales taxes...

September 26, 2003
NY Times: Congress Shuts Pentagon Unit Over Privacy. A Pentagon office that became steeped in controversy over privacy issues and a market in terrorism futures was shut down by Congress today as the Senate passed and sent to President Bush a $368 billion military measure that eliminates money for it.

PC World: Camera Phones Snap Up Sales. NEC Electronics has developed a new display driver that widens support to 10-bit RGB and this means it has the capability to handle just over a billion colors. With 10 bits, each of the three main colors--red, green and blue--can be defined to lie in a range between zero and 1024 rather than 8-bit processing's zero to 256.

September 27, 2003
News.Com: The future of instant messaging. Q&A with David Gurle, Reuters Messaging. In a sense they are the future local exchange carriers. That will create the connectivity requirements. The more value-added services on these respective networks, the more there will be a need for connectivity because it will become essential for people's lives.

NY Times: Congress Shuts Pentagon Unit Over Privacy. A Pentagon office that became steeped in controversy over privacy issues and a market in terrorism futures was shut down by Congress today as the Senate passed and sent to President Bush a $368 billion military measure that eliminates money for it.

September 28, 2003
SJ Mercury: In the Wild West of the Internet, there are good guys and bad guys. Dan Gillmor. But the community spirit on which it was founded is alive and well. The Net depends on the same spirit that motivates volunteers in the physical world: a commitment to solve problems and make life better for those who might otherwise not have the resources or expertise.

InfoWorld: Emerging technologies grab MIT spotlight. A handful of somewhat futuristic technologies manifested themselves during discussions at the Emerging Technologies Conference last week at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

September 29, 2003
Wired News: Indian Net Ban Overshoots Its Aim. A government ban on an Internet discussion group run by an obscure Indian separatist movement has ended up blocking hundreds of unrelated Yahoo forums, preventing nearly all of India from using the popular online service.

LA Times: Law Won't Deter Spam, Experts Say. That's the conclusion of a range of experts on the plague of electronic advertising known as spam. They say the new law, touted by state politicians as the toughest in the country, is at best a toothless, feel-good measure and at worst might spur frivolous lawsuits.

NY Times: In Handling Innovation, Patience Is a Virtue. For a time-honored company, breakthrough technologies can be as disruptive inside the company as they are externally. Too many companies are not structurally prepared to handle them, said Professor Roberts of M.I.T.

Wired News: IBM Examines How Inventors Invent. On a bright, warm morning at IBM's research center here, seven of Big Blue's scientists gathered around a conference table to consider a nonscientific question: What helps inventors invent things?

September 30, 2003
News.Com: MPEG founder seeks copy-protection accord. With Moving Picture Experts Group founder and erstwhile Secure Digital Music Initiative Executive Director Leonardo Chiariglione at its head, the group plans to produce a set of recommendations, largely focused on existing technologies, that bring content protection plans into the digital mainstream.

PC World: Verizon Wireless Hits Higher Speeds. The service, which will be available throughout Verizon's Washington, D.C., and San Diego metropolitan coverage areas, will offer typical rates of 300 kilobits per second to 500 kbps, with burst rates up to 2 mbps, according to Andrea Linskey, a spokesperson for Verizon, in Bedminster, New Jersey.