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October 1, 2003
News.Com: Parsing with Powell.
Q&A with Michael Powell. The real question for the country, for the market, for the innovators, the regulators, the policymakers, and the politicians to figure out is: What are we going to do to reach the world we want to see--one in which applications are very separate and can be run over IP.
InfoWorld: ICANN seeks views on VeriSign's Site Finder.
VeriSign Inc.'s Site Finder has come under further scrutiny from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. A committee of the Internet governing body is investigating whether the service hurts the Internet's stability.
October 2, 2003
Good Experience: Four Words to Improve User Research.
The method is the "listening lab": a more open-ended version of the traditional usability test. Listening labs generate strategic findings - not just tactics - and point the way to measurable business results - not just usability results like task success or time-on-task.
EE Times: Call to arms: new group seeks to unleash promised digital revolution.
Leonardo Chiariglione, founder of MPEG, said this week that a new international group of experts, participating from 21 countries, has completed a document called The Digital Media Manifesto. It spells out both political and technical actions needed for a global digital media industry to flourish.
News.Com: Digital-rights group knocks 'trusted' PCs.
The paper, which was set to be released late Wednesday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, analyzes the promised features of several different trusted computing initiatives. The efforts aim to develop next-generation hardware and software that can better protect data from attackers, viruses and digital pirates..
NY Times: Software for Media Moguls.
The breakthrough is the Media Center's two different on-screen personalities. When you work on e-mail and spreadsheets, it looks like any other Windows XP machine. But when you want some music, video or photos, you press a button on the included remote control and enter "10-foot mode."
October 3, 2003
Wired News: Microsoft Sued for Weak Security.
The lawsuit, which was filed on Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court, also claims that Microsoft's security warnings are too complex to be understood by the general public and serve instead to tip off "fast-moving" hackers on how to exploit flaws in its operating system.
News.Com: Microsoft moves beyond patches.
Ayala declined to detail Microsoft's new approach, or say whether the plans include getting further into the market of providing antivirus software. He did say that part of the effort will be a deeper relationship with firewall providers.
Washington Post: VeriSign Freezes Search Service.
VeriSign Inc., the firm that operates a key piece of the Internet's address system, said it would temporarily shut down a new service that makes money off the typos of Web users after the Internet's oversight body threatened to take legal action against the company.
October 4, 2003
PC World: What Palm Chiefs Learned From Newton.
Palm employs a major cadre of ex-Apple people, with the corporate headcount said to comprise a third of former Apple employees. Palm executives admit they learned from working on Apple's Newton personal digital assistant, which was discontinued in February 1998.
October 5, 2003
NY Times: Spam Fighters Turn to Identifying Legitimate E-Mail.
Put simply, these efforts are trying to develop the Internet equivalent of caller ID, a technology that will let the receiver of an e-mail message verify the identity of the sender. As with caller ID for telephones, senders will be able to choose whether to remain anonymous.
October 6, 2003
NY Times: Product Liability Lawsuits Are New Threat to Microsoft.
Yet whether the software industry can remain beyond the reach of product liability is still not certain. The modern economy — from office work to financial markets to power grids — depends increasingly on software. And the trial lawyers are not the only ones who think software makers should face stronger incentives to create products that are more reliable and secure.
News.Com: VeriSign says .com redirect isn't dead.
But in a press conference Monday, VeriSign executives said ICANN did not have authority over the new service and that the company would fight back against the "prejudice and bias of a few folks who have a set way of doing things."
Boston Globe: Spambusters.
The low-level fighting between techies and spammers that followed Canter's original blast has erupted into a full-scale war. And the most interesting dimension of the battle against spam is the manifold brigade of warriors now assembled to fight it.
October 7, 2003
News.Com: Court rejects FCC cable ruling.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the FCC incorrectly ruled in March 2002 that cable broadband networks are an "information service" rather than a "telecommunications service." This is an important distinction because telecommunications services can be forced by governments to open their broadband lines to third parties.
Fast Company: If It's Broke, Fix It.
Seth Godin. Instead of giving every customer the evil eye on the way out, what if Home Depot realized that its system was broken and stationed its very best employees in front of the cash registers? They could ask, "Did you find everything you were looking for?"
Salon: E-mail is broken.
Q&A with Dave Farber, Brad Templeton and Jakob Nielsen. You can't go home again, or at least, you can't go back to a home without spam. The questions now are: Can e-mail be saved? How bad is the problem, really? And what can be done to fix it?
eWEEK: Microsoft Alters IE Over Eolas Suit.
The change will mean that Web developers must update methods used in Web pages with ActiveX Controls or users will face a dialog box asking them to click "OK" for the Web browser to load the control, Microsoft officials said.
October 8, 2003
InfoWorld: Microsoft's Office 'system' attacks collaboration from all sides.
Jon Udell. Administrators will have to install and manage three or four sets of clients and servers. The new capabilities are exciting, but it’ll take lots more integration to make Office-based collaboration a seamless and manageable experience.
News.Com: Court's call: Hands off VoIP.
In ruling from the bench late Tuesday, Minneapolis, Minn., federal Judge Michael J. Davis permanently barred Minnesota from applying traditional telephone rules to Vonage, a pioneer in technology that lets consumers bypass the traditional phone network by making voice calls over a broadband connection.
October 9, 2003
PC World: What's Next in LCDs?
Several of the latest innovations in display technology for portable electronics devices will be on display at the Ceatec Japan 2003 exhibition in Japan this week. The new and prototype displays offer a number of different advantages over existing displays and point to brighter, clearer, and more compact screens coming to gadgets in the future.
EE Times: Global broadband deployment growing as DSL spreads.
Cable companies rather than incumbent telecommunications carriers have lead the way in introducing broadband access in the industrialized world, but the telecom industry is starting to catch up, a new government survey has found.
BusinessWeek: So Much for Michael Powell's Net Vision.
The unraveling of FCC Michael Powell's grand plan for the Internet continued on Oct. 6 with a ruling from a U.S. court in San Francisco. A three-judge panel on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found unanimously that cable-TV companies should allow competing ISPs to sell Web access over broadband cable networks.
October 10, 2003
The Economist: Agents of creation.
They certainly cannot be faulted for a lack of ambition. The scientists and engineers who gathered this week in Oxford for the first International Workshop on Complex Agent-Based Dynamic Networks are seeking to explain much of the world's behaviour through the use of “agents”.
News.Com: SunnComm won't sue grad student.
Without specifying a reason, SunnComm president William Whitmore told CNET News.com on Friday that the company had abandoned its promised litigation. Whitmore said the company was preparing a statement to be released later in the day.
eWEEK: Eolas Seeks Injunction Against IE Shipments.
Eolas Technologies Inc., fresh from a $521 million jury verdict against Microsoft Corp. in a closely watched Web browser patent infringement lawsuit, now is seeking an injunction to stop Microsoft from distributing its market-leading Internet Explorer browser.
News.Com: Dell's site gets a makeover.
Dell hopes to get to the point more quickly with a new version of its Web site, set to be unveiled over the weekend. The new Dell Web site is designed to offer a cleaner, more streamlined view of products such as PCs and servers and easier access to services such as tech support.
October 11, 2003
EE Times: Ceatec exhibits Japan's ubiquitous tech search.
Shaking off the effects of a decade-long industry depression that the Japanese call “the lost years,” Japan's electronics industry headed into the Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies this week with vigor and confidence in its products for the emerging world of ubiquitous computing and connectivity.
October 12, 2003
San Diego Union Tribune: Bubble bursts for electronic books.
But the reader's love affair with the printed word is far from over because, as Chris Barnard, technology analyst at IDC consultancy, concluded, "One problem is that e-books are up against a very established technology, namely books. And most people are very happy with that technology."
October 13, 2003
Boston Globe: Missing the point on antipiracy technology.
Unless consumers are forced to buy computers that will not copy CDs -- fat chance -- it's impossible to completely eliminate music piracy. So instead, the industry might be designing systems that seek to gently nudge people toward honesty, rather than dragging them in chains toward the path of righteousness.
BBC News: Web guru fights info pollution.
"The entire ideology of information technology for the last 50 years has been that more information is better, that mass producing information is better," he says. But the net is now so much an machine with all the answers instantly, it has mutated into a "procrastination apparatus..."
Wired News: Is MS Wising Up to Smartphones?
Microsoft has been promising U.S. customers a Windows-powered smartphone, or cell phone with computing capabilities, for two years now. Finally, the company appears ready to make good on its word.
October 14, 2003
News.Com: Supreme Court weighs Net porn law.
Tuesday's decision to hear the COPA case, which was expected, is likely to result in a high court ruling by next July that could clarify the legal rules applying to both hard-core pornography Web sites and mainstream publishers that may occasionally include some off-color content.
Wired News: Fighting to Preserve Old Programs.
"Though a cave painting in pigment on rock may survive millions of years without any action on the part of archivists, the same is not true of digital works," wrote Kahle and several others in their DMCA exemption request to the Copyright Office.
News.Com: The future of talking computers.
Q&A with Kai-Fu Lee, Microsoft. People also have to be taught to talk to the computer. This will happen. It will just take time. I don't see that happening within the next five years but definitely in the next 10. The human social interface is by speech, not typing.
October 15, 2003
Crypto-Gram: The Future of Surveillance.
A combination of forces -- the miniaturization of surveillance technologies, the falling price of digital storage, the increased power of computer programs to sort through all of this data -- means that surveillance abilities that used to be limited to governments are now, or soon will be, in the hands of everyone.
hypergene.net: We Media.
Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis. Historically, journalists have been charged with informing the democracy. But their future will depend not on only how well they inform but how well they encourage and enable conversations with citizens. That is the challenge.
Fast Company: Tech Support.
Scott Kirsner. As a corporate strategy, that might make sense. But as Nokia, Motorola, and other cell-phone makers pursue that path, their products drift further and further from what consumers really want.
October 16, 2003
NY Times: Digging for Nuggets of Wisdom.
Yet Dr. Liebman is convinced that new cures could someday emerge for breast cancer if only someone could read all the literature and synthesize it. So he has found a solution: enlisting a computer program to read the articles for him.
InfoWorld: VeriSign sells Network Solutions.
VeriSign gained Network Solutions' registrar and registry businesses when it purchased the company in 2000. The registrar business, which offers services such as business e-mail, Web sites, hosting and Web presence, will go to Pivotal Private Equity...
EE Times: FCC frees spectrum for 3G and broadband wireless.
In separate actions Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission continued to follow through on its commitment last year to removing the regulatory barriers to the deployment of advanced wireless broadband services.
October 17, 2003
Adaptive Path: User Expectations in a World of Smart Devices.
This kind of intelligence is already starting to leak into mainstream products, and I bet that designers will have to think about it seriously within the next five years. Perhaps the biggest change for user-experience designers will be a user’s subsequent disregard for predictability.
Useit.Com: Ten Best Intranets of 2003.
North Tyneside College provides the ultimate proof that good intranets depend more on will, talent, clarity of mission, and commitment to usability than it does on having lavish funding. This winning intranet, which supports 300 staff and 15,000 students, was designed and developed by a single person...
News.Com: The cultural divide and the Internet's future.
Q&A with VeriSign CEO Stratton Sclavos. It's very difficult to have the people who built the infrastructure originally also be the reformers of it. That is one of the challenges they will run in to. It's mostly a collection of very technical people and a lot of lawyers.
October 18, 2003
NY Times: The Home Theater Headache.
All right, the truth is, setting up a home theater is neither easy nor fun. In fact, it's mind-numbingly technical, which is why anyone with the money generally hires someone else to do the work. Clearly, anything that could make this chore less daunting for the average non-engineer would be a smash hit.
October 19, 2003
SJ Mercury: Progress, innovation coming to cell phones.
Dan Gillmor. What makes this vision of the future different is the insistence that the customer actually gets to pick and choose. Several years ago, a technology executive showed me the screen of his Palm device and said, ``This is the most valuable real estate on Earth'' -- a statement suggesting that someone else, not the customer, owned it.
October 20, 2003
NY Times: Europe's Antipiracy Proposal Draws Criticism.
In an effort to fight product counterfeiting and piracy, the European Union is preparing to enact a sweeping intellectual property law that critics say is ill-conceived and tilted heavily in favor of copyright and patent holders.
Scientific American: Shrink-Wrapping the World.
Consumers and scholars have succeeded recently in expanding the dialogue on otherwise esoteric intellectual-property issues such as the patenting of basic biomedical research and fair use of digital content. Now at least the public has a chance to hear both sides of these critical debates.
BusinessWeek: What Price Online Music?
But I took a closer look at the 99-cent-per-song pricing model and came to this conclusion: For most consumers, this deal just doesn't make economic sense. That's a real problem for the recording industry if it wants people to stop stealing songs through Internet file-sharing.
October 21, 2003
BusinessWeek: These Wireless "Phones" Rate a Wow!
They'll start appearing on store shelves next year. Improving on everything from displays to audio, these devices continue to blur the line between cell phones and multimedia computers, making them well suited for applications way beyond voice.
InfoWorld: Critics blast EU antipiracy proposal.
Everyone agrees that a pan-European law punishing counterfeiters is the only sensible way to deal with counterfeiting rings, which rarely limit themselves to one country. However, the critics argue that the proposal extends far beyond the murky world of criminals.
October 22, 2003
CIO: The Copyright Cuffs.
So far as I can tell, federal courts experts don't reject or loathe our system of federal courts, and criminal law experts split every which way on the overall virtue of the criminal justice system. So what's with cyberprofs' uniform discontent about copyright?
October 23, 2003
Wired News: The Great Library of Amazonia.
An ingenious attempt to illuminate the dark region of books is under way at Amazon.com. Over the past spring and summer, the company created an unrivaled digital archive of more than 120,000 books. The goal is to quickly add most of Amazon's multimillion-title catalog.
NY Times: Smart Servers as Watchdogs for Trouble on the Web.
A consortium of university and industrial scientists has created a network designed to test a new generation of tools that may one day lead to a smarter, more secure Internet that can spot network problems like traffic jams and worms long before they affect individual computers.
The Guardian: Second sight.
Moreover, the sense of human agency implied in the term "user" has been forgotten. Usability is a valuable element of the process, but it can't substitute for it, as it is limited. Usability can be used to improve an innovation, but it can't drive innovation.
October 24, 2003
Discover: How the Web Edits News.
Steven Johnson. Now, however, the power to declare what news is most important is being eroded by the Internet. Dozens of online services allow you to create your own personalized front page with headlines arranged according to your interests—what some have dubbed the Daily Me.
Jon Udell: Apple's Knowledge Navigator revisited.
During my session at BloggerCon I referred to Apple's famous Knowledge Navigator concept video. I first saw that video in 1988. Today I tracked down a copy and watched it again. It stands the test of time rather well! Certain elements of that vision are now routine...
October 25, 2003
Computerworld: New law would require computer security audits, status reports.
New legislation being drafted in the U.S. House of Representatives, which could be introduced as early as next week, would require all publicly traded companies to conduct independent computer security assessments and report the results yearly in their annual reports.
October 26, 2003
IBM developerWorks: The recent brouhaha with Site Finder.
It's easy enough for a Web browser to implement such a feature, and the resulting feature can be enabled or disabled by users as they wish. Wildcard DNS records, by contrast, affect every aspect of network functionality, not just the browser; in doing so, they have a substantial negative impact on quality of service for all services.
October 27, 2003
Slate: The Best Search Idea Since Google.
Steven Johnson. For logical reasons, Amazon seems to have designed "search inside" to help readers find text in books that they haven't bought yet. But there's just as much opportunity to apply "search inside" to books you already own.
NY Times: Web Redesigns for the Holidays.
Analysts say the efforts are improving online shopping for millions of consumers, who this holiday season will be doing business with an industry that increasingly understands how to help customers shop with a minimum of frustration.
Computerworld: DNS servers prove resilient.
But the lack of security at lower levels of the DNS stack remains worrisome, according to security experts. And progress on a critical security enhancement designed to add data authentication and integrity services to the DNS protocol remains disappointingly slow, they added.
InfoWorld: Cerf: ICANN finally working on 'substantive issues'.
Speaking during a conference call from Carthage Monday, Cerf said that the organization has been bogged down in organization issues and is just now able to deal with "substantive issues" such as how to expand the Internet and shore up its security.
NY Times: With Cable TV at M.I.T., Who Needs Napster?
Major music industry groups are reserving comment, while some legal experts say the M.I.T. system mainly demonstrates how unwieldy copyright laws have become. A novel approach to serving up music on demand from one of the nation's leading technical institutions is only fitting, admirers of the project say.
October 28, 2003
Salon: Hollywood to the computer industry: We don't need no stinking Napsters!
As long as the broadcast flag will, as the MPAA promises, not hinder our ability to make personal copies of the shows we love, we might well wonder, "How is this scheme going to hurt us?" The MPAA is counting on your apathy.
Useit.Com: "About Us" -- Presenting Information About an Organization on Its Website.
Saying who you are and what you do is basic politeness in any conversation. In business, it's also good to establish credibility and respect by explaining your company's origins, how you view your business, and how you relate to the community.
October 29, 2003
NY Times: Web Group Backs Microsoft in Patent Suit.
The Web consortium has representatives from many technology companies, including competitors of Microsoft. But after discussions among the consortium members, the group agreed that there was an overriding broader interest in challenging the patent, thus helping Microsoft.
SJ Mercury: 5 'exabytes' of information created in '02, report says.
That task appealed to two masters of the megabyte, Peter Lyman and Hal Varian, professors at the University of California-Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems. Their first project to quantify the world's information in 2000 attracted so much interest that they decided to count it all over again this year.
EE Times: Nortel to test public WLAN architecture with BT, MIT.
The P-WLAN architecture includes peer-to-peer access point capabilities; with smart antennas, integrated routers and adaptive routing and security capabilities — to backhaul data wirelessly to wired broadband networks.
October 30, 2003
Seattle Times: Amazon's inside look irks authors: Search function previews any page.
The feature is particularly troubling to reference-book authors who think they may lose a sale if a user can find "the best place to hike in Chaco Canyon" or "where to find the best airfare to Cuba" by using Amazon's search feature instead.
PC World: Microsoft Looks in the Crystal Ball.
Tablet applications that quickly transform math formulas into graphics, and classrooms where professors can field instant-message queries from remote students: Both are leaping from the drawing board to reality in Microsoft Research projects.
Computerworld: Developers get hands on Microsoft's upcoming security technology.
The company also further narrowed its focus for NGSCB, previously known by its Palladium code name, saying it is focused on putting the first version of the hardware-based security technology to work for specific business applications only, not consumer software.
October 31, 2003
Wired News: BBC Offers Power to the People.
The British Broadcasting Corporation has launched a sophisticated activism website that it hopes will get people more involved with their communities and provide tools to help them get government officials to address their concerns.
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