|
November 1, 2003
InfoWorld: Your personal SOA.
Jon Udell. Ironically, the graphical desktop popularized the event-driven model that's being writ large in the Web services network. Now we need to come full circle. Local event streams need to be open in the same ways as network event streams are and for the same reasons.
SJ Mercury: New Treo has problems but also possibilities.
PalmOne's new Handspring Treo 600 has almost convinced me it's possible to merge a personal digital assistant with a mobile phone, after years of rejecting clunky hybrid ``communicators'' that did many things and did them all badly.
November 2, 2003
SJ Mercury: Small-amount purchases online may finally happen.
Dan Gillmor. Many early micropayment systems essentially tried to create new currencies. Newer ones use existing financial infrastructures, such as credit cards. Meanwhile, digital content and services are giving us more interesting things to buy.
SF Gate: MIT shuts down alternative file-swapping services.
In its statement, MIT said it was assured by Loudeye that the company was authorized by the record labels to sell the music. But after the service was launched "Loudeye informed us that some of their assurances may have been mistaken."
November 3, 2003
NY Times: Music-Sharing Service at M.I.T. Is Shut Down.
To Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches Internet law at Harvard and is a director of the university's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, that incident shows that the world of copyright has grown so arcane that even the major players do not even understand it.
SJ Mercury: Adding style to substance.
It used to be that only high-end companies such as Apple Computer or Sony cared about industrial design -- the distinctive look and feel of their products. But in an age when hardware has become a commodity, many more tech companies are coming to realize that aesthetics matter.
Wired News: New Napster Off to a Solid Start.
Despite its flexibility, the service can also be confusing. Some songs in the Napster library can only be streamed, while others are only available for a 99-cent download, even if you're paying for the streaming service. Which songs fall into each category isn't clearly spelled out.
NY Times: In Milan, Working to Unfurl a High-Tech Blanket of Fiber.
Mr. Scaglia, who is at the forefront of an effort to deliver high-speed Internet services to homes, began building a network of fiber optic cables in Milan four years ago. But critics worry that e.Biscom may be so far ahead of the curve that it will prove to be little more than a flash in the pan.
November 4, 2003
uiweb: The art of usability benchmarking.
By capturing the current level of ease of use of the current product or website, a reference point is created that can be measured against in the future. It doesn't answer the question of how usable is enough, but if the benchmark is done properly, it does enable someone to set goals and expectations around ease of use for the future.
SF Chronicle: Building a crash-test Internet.
The new test network, called the Cyber Defense Technology Experimental Research Network, or DETER, will contain lots of routers and switches imitating the complexity of the real Net. It won't be nearly as big as the real Internet -- the
goal is to eventually hook up 1,000 PCs -- but the researchers hope it will be comparable in behavior.
Technology Review: Everyone's a Programmer.
Even as software collapses under the weight of its own complexity, we’ve barely begun to exploit its potential to solve problems. The challenge, Simonyi believes, is to find a way to write programs that both programmers and users can actually read and comprehend. Simonyi’s solution.
Good Experience: Halloween story: the ghost of Boo!
But the truth isn't anything nearly as cinematic. Boo.com simply forgot the key truth about users online, at least those wanting to conduct a transaction (like, say, buying hip shoes): The only reason users use the Web to do *anything* is because it's a better experience than doing it in the real world.
November 5, 2003
Forbes: The Pride That Killed Sony.
What is true of TVs has become true of many business lines. For years consumers were willing to pay a premium for the Sony name. Recently, however, more and more of them have realized the name is not giving them extra innovative value.
NY Times: Intel Claims Breakthrough in Chip Making.
Researchers for Intel say they have discovered a new material that they believe will permit them to overcome one of the most serious obstacles facing chip makers as they struggle to shrink computer chips to ever smaller dimensions.
PC World: FCC Endorses Built-In Copy Controls.
A broadcast flag is a single bit added to the data stream of broadcast DTV programming. By itself, the flag does not protect content. Instead, the FCC is mandating that digital devices check all incoming data for a flag.
Poynter Online: Before the Web, There Was Viewtron.
Before there was the Web, there was Viewtron. Twenty years ago on Oct. 30, Knight Ridder and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company launched in Miami one of the boldest experiments in new media: a U.S. consumer videotext service.
November 6, 2003
uiweb: The myth of discoverability.
You have limited screen real estate, users have limited attention spans, and abilities to perceive or understand things. Therefore, all design for people is a zero-sum game: tradeoffs must be made and priorities must be set if there’s any hope of a good outcome for customers.
EE Times: FCC plans formal review of VoIP services.
The Federal Communications Commission said Thursday it has scheduled a Dec. 1 hearing on regulatory issues raised by the emerging voice technology. Shortly after the forum, FCC officials said, the agency will launch a review into the migration of voice services to IP-based networks.
November 7, 2003
NY Times: Penn State Will Pay to Allow Students to Download Music.
The deal between Penn State and the newly revised Napster online service is expected to serve as a model for other universities. It comes as the music industry applies pressure on students and colleges in its antipiracy campaign.
InfoWorld: Senators object to Internet tax bill.
But a group of senators, led by four former state governors, objected to the definition of Internet access in the Internet Tax Non-discrimination Act of 2003 for fear it could prevent states and local governments from collecting taxes on other services besides traditional Internet access, including voice telecommunication services offered through Internet Protocol.
News.Com: Google tests desktop search.
On Thursday, the Mountain View, Calif.-based search company debuted the Google Deskbar. The downloadable software for users of Microsoft's Windows operating system puts a Google search box in the desktop taskbar.
November 8, 2003
Wired News: Will Microsoft Wallop Friendster?
In fact, Wallop is Microsoft's venture into the red-hot social-networking arena, using the common Microsoft tack of piecing together existing technologies and packaging them for the novice user. Those technologies include Friendster-style social-networking capabilities, super-simplistic blogging tools, moblogging, wikis and RSS feeds, all based on Microsoft's Instant Messenger functionality.
November 9, 2003
Forbes: Not-So-Dumb Phones.
A glimmer of hope comes from Orange, the largest carrier in the U.K., with its slick new SPV (stands for Sound Pictures Video). Orange has sold 50,000 of these smart phones in the U.K. since the fall and aims to sell 1 million similar phones by year-end.
EE Times: Security spec gets an upgrade, broader backing.
The Trusted Computing Group passed a milestone in its efforts to improve computer security this week, announcing a key update of its specification. The update comes as the TCG adds Sun Microsystems Inc. to its membership and forms a new working group to bring its technology to PDAs.
November 10, 2003
Ask Tog: D'ohLT #2: Security D'ohLTs.
Only a D’ohLT would come up with a security scheme that is so overly complex that it’s guaranteed people will write down their passwords. And yet, this kind of D'ohLTishness is par for the course with these guys. They are the most clueless profession I know, and they are showing no signs of getting any better.
News.Com: Web hijack riles Belkin router users.
Belkin is trying to defuse a potentially embarrassing situation that arose after network administrators learned the company's routers can periodically hijack users' Web connection and display an advertisement for parental control software.
Seattle Times: At the heart of the spectrum: Powell is the man to watch on wireless.
What Powell thinks and how he approaches issues will influence the outcome of the spectrum issue. In turn, the proposed changes themselves could be significant, leading experts say, because of their potential to transform the economy and to create an abundance, rather than scarcity, of spectrum.
News.Com: Internet Explorer to stomp pop-ups.
Darin Linnman, a Microsoft spokesman, said that the company plans to add the pop-up blocking feature to an updated version of Explorer with Service Pack 2 when it's released in the first half of next year.
November 11, 2003
EE Times: Wireless mesh networking gathers momentum.
The separate announcements bring into sharp relief the immense work that has been underway to achieve a more robust, efficient, low-power and scalable wireless network than the centralized Wi-Fi and cellular network architectures now used in homes.
Useit.Com: The Ten Most Violated Homepage Design Guidelines.
time, I've used a different criterion: I've focused on the known usability principles that designers most frequently violate. Whether big or small, the very prevalence of these usability problems makes them worthy of attention.
Wired News: Sony's User-Friendly Copy Block.
The disc can be played on almost any device conventionally, said Phil Wiser, Sony Music's chief technology officer. It also contains a compressed digital copy of the music that can be quickly copied onto any computer. From the computer, users can copy that music onto Sony portable digital music players.
November 12, 2003
Financial Times: Plan for UN to manage internet 'will be shelved'.
An attempt by developing countries to put management of the internet under United Nations auspices is likely to be shelved at next month's world information summit in Geneva - but the issue is now firmly on the international agenda, summit sources say.
O'Reilly Network: PTO Director Orders Re-Exam for '906 Patent.
In what could be good news for the Web, the Director of the US Patent and Trademark Office has ordered a re-examination of the '906 patent, which was the subject of a patent infringement lawsuit this summer brought by Eolas against Microsoft.
Reason: Secrets, lies, and electronic voting.
But Floridians don't seem convinced that bytes beat butterflies: A quarter say that they are "not at all confident" in the new technology, and half believe that it's important for machines to preserve a paper trail of votes—something that's not currently done. If anything, though, voters may not be skeptical enough.
News.Com: Wild about wireless.
Q&A with Sean Maloney, Intel. The analogy is the Internet. The first time I saw a browser was 1992. It was like science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke's line, "Any good technology is indistinguishable from magic." You get the same feeling when you first use broadband wireless.
November 13, 2003
InfoWorld: Princeton, HP Labs demo plastic write-once memory.
Researchers at the Princeton, New Jersey school and Palo Alto, California-based company, were able to develop a write-once memory cell that can hold gigabytes of information and be produced very inexpensively from a commonly used plastic substance and a small amount of silicon, they said.
CIO: FrankenPatch.
Those looking to cast blame—and there were many—cried a familiar refrain: If everyone had just patched his system in the first place, Slammer wouldn't have happened. But that's not true. And therein lies our story. Slammer was unstoppable. Which points to a bigger issue: Patching no longer works.
November 14, 2003
New Scientist: Loophole claimed in new European copyright laws.
Europe's new copyright laws, which make it an offence to sell devices that circumvent copy protection technology, may contain a legal loophole. The issue centres on a single word - "effective". The loophole claim is being made by lawyer Rob Semaan, head of US-based company 321 Studios.
InfoWorld: FCC makes more spectrum unlicensed.
The FCC made an additional 255MHz of spectrum available in the 5.470GHz to 5.725GHz radio frequency band, an increase of 80 percent, it said. The additional spectrum availability will ensure continued deployment of unlicensed wireless broadband networks, the Commission said in a statement.
EE Times: Sony leads eBook venture.
Sony Corp. and 14 major publishing, printing and newspaper companies are planning a new eBook business that will focus on rental service based on OpenMG, Sony's digital rights management technology.
November 15, 2003
Wired News: Where Sharing Isn't a Dirty Word.
Ibiblio, one of the Web's oldest and largest digital libraries, has all this and much, much more -- and all of it is completely free to visitors, thanks to backing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and technology companies like Linux distributor Red Hat.
November 16, 2003
Technology Marketing: Spiraling Spiruses.
Michael Schrage. I'm not being cynical—I'm being pragmatic. Unless and until there are global efforts made to restrain unambiguous abuses of the Net, we are all going to experience a world where viruses, spam and child pornography come from places that really don't care to deal with them in any meaningful way.
Fast Company: 5 Tech Innovators.
Scott Kirsner. They work in fields as diverse as portable power, biotechnology, and information visualization. Who's working on something really new? Here are five compelling answers.
eWEEK: New Mimail Virus Poses as PayPal E-mail.
Yet another version of the Mimail virus is on the loose, but this one has a twist: it poses as an e-mail from PayPal and attempts to trick recipients into surrendering their credit card data.
November 17, 2003
NY Times: In Utah, Public Works Project in Digital.
In a 21st-century twist on Roosevelt-era public works projects, Salt Lake City and 17 other Utah cities are planning to build the largest ultrahigh-speed digital network in the country. Construction on the project is scheduled to start next spring - if the cities can raise the money to pull it off.
Technology Review: The Web’s New Currency.
These companies’ founders are well aware of the string of defunct e-payment companies whose virtual currencies have gone the way of the Confederate dollar. But they’ve got something new up their sleeves: easier-to-use technology that allows Web sites to accept tiny payments by effectively processing them in batches, thereby cutting down on bank fees.
Seattle Times: Gates armed with Microsoft arsenal against spam.
Gates announced new spam-filtering technology called SmartScreen. Developed by Microsoft's research division, it will be included in all of the company's e-mail products. The technology uses new ways to scan and detect junk e-mail before it hits a customer's inbox.
Wired News: Fast Track for Science Data.
The National LambdaRail is the biggest, fastest network ever undertaken for scientific research. Created by a private consortium of universities and tech companies, the NLR will link hundreds of research institutions around the United States with a dedicated, high-speed optical network.
News.Com: Microsoft tests Web news service.
A representative of Redmond Wash.-based Microsoft did not provide much detail on the new service, but the company's site said it is being developed in partnership with San Francisco-based Moreover Technologies, a news data source, and Microsoft Research, its research and development unit.
November 18, 2003
Good Experience: The ROSE framework.
I have presented ROSE at various events and organizations recently and people have said they found this useful - so here are some of the high points. ROSE is Results, Organization, Strategy, Experience.
Wired News: Microsoft to Give Music a Whirl.
Microsoft plans to introduce a song-downloading service next year that will compete with similar offerings from Apple Computer, Roxio's Napster and others. News of the service was first reported Monday by The Wall Street Journal.
eWEEK: AT&T Wireless Launches High-Speed Wireless Data Service.
AT&T Wireless Services Inc. on Tuesday launched its next-generation high-speed wireless data service across North America. The EDGE offers average data rates of 100K to 130K bps, according to company officials in Redmond, Wash.
November 19, 2003
Wired News: FedEx Delivers New Tech Lab.
Researchers at the new center -- which opens Wednesday, and is a collaboration between FedEx and the University of Memphis -- already are working with computer engineers and psychology experts to develop a "conscious software agent," Phillips said.
CIO: How to Play to Your Audience.
With persona-based design, ethnographic researchers study the behavior of current and potential customers by conducting interviews with them and by observing not only their use of the website but their daily routines.
eWEEK: AT&T's Zeglis Expounds on Wireless Plans.
In a more subdued keynote here on Tuesday, Zeglis apologized on behalf of the entire wireless industry for the wireless dot-com pipe dreams of 2000 that promised products ranging from wireless snow goggles to ubiquitous wireless video services.
News.Com: Qwest to launch VoIP in December.
But Notebaert said Wednesday that the company is nonetheless compelled to take advantage of U.S. District Court Judge Michael Davis' decision that Minnesota can't treat VoIP providers like regular phone companies or collect regulatory fees.
November 20, 2003
WIRED: Fiber to the People.
Lawrence Lessig. If a traditional network provider owned an advanced fiber network in a particular area, that network provider, acting rationally, would charge customers a monopoly price, or restrict service to get its monopoly benefit. But if the customer owned the network, then the customer could get the same access at a much lower price and be free of use restrictions.
Bob Frankston: The end is nigh again?
The key to the success of the PC and the Internet was that they made it OK to make disruptive mistakes and thus you could experiment and those experiments that worked were preserved and formed the basis for the next experiments.
InfoWorld: What's holding software back?
Jon Udell. It's not the rate of advance that worries me so much as the method of propulsion. The arc of software progress is defined not by increasing speed or capacity, but by the growing complexity of the data, events, messages, and relationships flowing through software systems.
News.Com: AT&T sues eBay, PayPal over patent.
AT&T on Thursday filed suit against eBay and PayPal, alleging patent infringement--the latest skirmish in the escalating Web patent wars. The suit, filed in federal district court in Delaware, claims that eBay and PayPal's online payment systems infringe on AT&T patent No. 5,329,589, "Mediation of transactions by a communications system."
November 21, 2003
News.Com: SBC challenges RIAA over subpoenas.
Critics of the DMCA say SBC's case may have a better chance of success than Verizon's, since the subpoenas have now been issued thousands of times, and the burdens on courts and the threats of exposing people's private information are no longer theoretical.
IR Web Report: Using the Web to Communicate in a Crisis.
When a crisis strikes, few companies tap into the Internet's power to protect their reputations. This reluctance exists even though research shows communicating through company websites — supported by other media efforts — is an ideal way to get the company's side of the story across quickly and effectively.
November 22, 2003
NY Times: When Free Isn't Really Free.
Web giveaways increasingly come at a steep price, in the form of computer glitches, frustration and loss of privacy and security - not to mention the threat of expensive lawsuits for large-scale music downloaders.
Wired News: China's Grip on Info Loosening.
"I won't say China is democratic, but you no longer can control information," says Guo Liang, deputy director of the Research Center for Social Development at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government-supported think tank in Beijing.
November 23, 2003
SJ Mercury: Hong Kong offers lesson in number portability.
Dan Gillmor. Starting this week, that same situation will arrive in the United States. After fits and starts, regulatory delays and carrier resistance, U.S. mobile customers will get a taste of a freedom people in Hong Kong take for granted. It's about time.
November 24, 2003
InfoWorld: The threat to universal Internet connectivity.
According to Cerf, the balkanization of the Internet and the erosion of end-to-end visibility has been under way for a decade, thanks to escalating security threats and rapid Internet growth. Cerf points to the wholesale deployment of increasingly intelligent devices such as stateful firewalls and NAT boxes...
Useit.Com: Two Sigma: Usability and Six Sigma Quality Assurance.
Six sigma quality engineering relies on a five-step process called DMAIC, which stands for define, measure, analyze, improve, and control. By employing each of these steps, Web projects can move toward better and more systematic quality achievements.
News.Com: Microsoft aims for search on its own terms.
The Redmond, Wash., software giant is experimenting with different search technologies that will, among other tasks, conduct Google-like searches on an individual's hard drive or categorize query results in different ways intended to make the data easier to digest.
November 25, 2003
WIRED: Intel's Tiny Hope for the Future.
Intel imagines the day when every assembly line, soybean field, and nursing home on the planet will be peppered with motes, prodding factory foremen to replace faulty machines, farmers to water fields, and nurses to check on something unusual in room E214.
IBM DeveloperWorks: The importance of documentation.
As documentation decreases in quality, users stop turning to it. As users stop turning to it, companies stop trying to maintain it -- why bother, if the users won't read it? This line of reasoning is dooming the future of documentation to failure. Documentation is important and needs to be taken seriously.
InfoWorld: Senate approves spam bill, goes back to House.
The House is expected to schedule a final vote on the bill Dec. 2, after which the bill would go to President Bush to be signed into law. The House voted 392-5 Saturday to approve its pumped-up version of CAN-SPAM, which originally passed the Senate in October.
InfoWorld: Preserving the Internet's policy-neutral core.
Jon Udell. In August 2002, the RIAA sued a group of U.S.-based Internet service providers, seeking to block access to a music-copying site in China. The suit was dropped when the offending site was shut down, but the event was widely regarded as a pivotal moment.
November 26, 2003
BusinessWeek: E-Shoppers Are Now E-Spenders.
It seems that the virtual world's top retailers are succeeding because they've learned the simple and time-honored tradition of keeping their customers satisfied. The idea is straightforward -- at least in concept: Provide a good experience consistently, and buyers will keep coming back.
News.Com: Publishers bet on Friendster-like service.
The two publishers, along with venture capitalist Mayfield, on Monday invested in Tribe Networks, the owner of an online community that links friends and friends of friends, and then promotes them as the ideal network through which to buy things, find a job or even get a restaurant recommendation.
November 27, 2003
Wired News: Baseball Throws Web a Curve.
But during this off-season, MLB is on a quest to assert what it considers are its exclusive rights to transmit real-time information about its games online. And some of its partners aren't buying it.
November 28, 2003
CTV: Music group aims to charge Internet users.
Although those groups are prompted to seek new sources of revenue because of what they say are illegal downloads of copyrighted content, Society of Composers, Authors, and Music Publishers of Canada is asking ISPs to pay a blanket annual royalty regardless of whether the ISP is transmitting legal or illegally downloaded music.
The Economist: Fighting the worms of mass destruction.
A better word for the threat of internet crime is therefore “cyber-hooliganism”, says Mr Schneier. Less than 1% of recent computer attacks originated in countries that America considers breeding grounds for terrorists; the vast majority came from inside America itself.
Boxes & Arrows: Natural Selections: Colors Found in Nature and Interface Design.
Perhaps no other design element has as much influence on how we feel in a space (a website, a home, etc.) as color. Colors can instantaneously change our moods and alter our opinions. They can make us comfortable, put us in a state of awe, or get us excited.
November 29, 2003
Slate: Will the Broadcast Flag Break Your TiVo?
Paul Boutin. But never mind the industry gossip. How will the broadcast flag affect your viewing? It'll be an annoyance for some, but it's not the end of the world some tech reporters predicted. Instead, it's more like the Big Four networks' last stand against their competitors.
November 30, 2003
SJ Mercury: Technology makes great gifts for everyone.
Dan Gillmor. Now, Thanksgiving weekend means counting our money -- and then spending it. In that modern spirit, I'm going to note some tech-related items that crossed my path in recent months. Some might make good gifts for family and friends, or (shhhh) even yourself.
| 