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December 1, 2003
EE Times: Stage set for FCC debate on regulating VoIP.
When the FCC examines VoIP in landmark hearings Monday, the battle lines in the debate will be sharply drawn between the country's two sunny states — California and Florida. California wants to regulate VoIP, Florida doesn't. Each state is sending a public regulatory commissioner to argue its respective merits.
WIRED: The Golden Age of Gadgets.
Common standards, it seems, don't lock consumers into brand loyalty. This is where the PC industry comes in and the golden age begins. If traditional electronics firms were all about exclusivity, computermakers are all about common standards and commoditized parts.
NY Times: Marketers Adjust as Spam Clogs the Arteries of E-Commerce.
E-mail is everything a direct marketer could want - fast, flexible and, most of all, cheap. It is, in fact, far too cheap. That makes it possible for marketers of all sorts to send lots of it - even for products like miracle pills that only one person in a million buys - until recipients are swamped with spam.
December 2, 2003
Bob Frankston: Policy vs Reality.
The policy issues themselves are important but the marketplace is moving inexorably toward providing more Internet connectivity. But regulatory policy can slow the process and it can create new classes of criminals -- those who embrace the new opportunities. This is why it is important to understand the issues.
New Scientist: Internet mapping project weaves colourful web.
"It started as a bet, but after I warmed up to the idea I found a lot of value in the project itself," Lyon writes on the project's homepage. He says his maps could provide a useful overview of the internet's structure and even reveal the effects of disruptions caused by real-world disasters. But more importantly, he says: "The project is art."
December 3, 2003
News.Com: Skype's VoIP ambitions.
Q&A with Niklas Zennstrom, Skype. What we're saying is that telephony is just an application. You can use this software application that does all the call setup and routing, which traditionally has been done by big company switches. Telephony is software. It's not big software in a centralized system.
Network World: NTT DoCoMo plans dual 3G/WLAN handset.
In WLAN mode, the telephone supports data transmission and, when linked to a corporate IP telephony server, voice transmission. This enables the telephone to double as both a regular cellular telephone and, within a company wireless network, as a cordless handset and data modem.
December 4, 2003
Technology Review: The Myth of Doomed Data.
Simson Garfinkel. This ironic death of Domesday has been taken as a rallying cry for an increasingly vocal group of computer scientists and archivists who argue that we are in danger of losing our cultural heritage—or at least that part of our cultural heritage that we have been foolish enough to commit to electronic storage devices. There’s just one problem with this reasoning: it’s wrong.
News.Com: FCC seeks to overturn cable broadband ruling.
However, cable companies are considered information services and are thus not federally required to share their broadband networks with anyone else. In Thursday's filing, the FCC argued that it was correct in classifying cable as an information service, sticking to its long-held desire to keep regulation out of the cable industry.
December 5, 2003
CIO: How to Create a Know-It-All Company.
When embraced by individuals, KM can help companies such as Giant Eagle and Shell weather the worst this economy can dish out. Trouble is, sharing knowledge does not come easily, even during boom times.
PC World: Wi-Fi Improvements in the Works.
The 802.11e standard is intended to allow certain types of wireless network traffic to take priority over others to ensure that IP phone conversations and video sound and look as good over wireless connections as they do over wires.
December 6, 2003
Wired News: Yahoo's New Plan to Fight Spam.
Under Yahoo's new architecture, a system sending an e-mail message would embed a secure, private key in a message header. The receiving system would check the Internet's Domain Name System for the public key registered to the sending domain.
December 7, 2003
SJ Mercury: Future of TV looks a lot like broadband.
Dan Gillmor. If the future of television is taking shape here, our choices of programming appear to be nearly infinite. But whether we have flexibility and freedom in how we use those choices will be someone else's decision.
December 8, 2003
Useit.Com: Automated Email From Websites to Customers.
Confirmation messages and other automated transactional email can complete the user experience: they reach out to customers in ways that are otherwise impossible for websites, which must sit still and wait for users to approach. For email to fulfill this potential, messages must be designed for optimal usability...
NY Times: Nations Chafe at U.S. Influence Over the Internet.
Icann and the United States government are expected to come under heavy fire at the conference, which begins Wednesday in Geneva and will be one of the largest gatherings of high-level government officials, business leaders and nonprofit organizations to discuss the Internet's future.
December 9, 2003
AskTog: When Good Design => Bad Product.
What a trained quality assurance professional brings to the software party is a knowledge of how to put together a test plan, one that systematically looks at the full range of every feature under all reasonably expected conditions, including edge conditions.
Kevin Werbach: The Battle of ICANN.
It's worrisome that ICANN insiders still think the best response is to insist that ICANN is just a boring technical coordination body. If that were the case, ICANN wouldn't have nearly the influence, visibility, and funding level it enjoys.
December 10, 2003
News.Com: Internet worms and critical infrastructure.
Bruce Schneier. And regardless of the answers, there's a very important moral here. As networked computers infiltrate more and more of our critical infrastructure, that infrastructure is vulnerable not only to attacks but also to sloppy software and sloppy operations. And these vulnerabilities are not the obvious ones.
SecurityFocus: A Comparison Study of Three Worm Families and Their Propagation in a Network.
Most of the research that has been pursued has looked at the spread of worms in the context of the global Internet rather than the rate that it will spread through an isolated private sector of the Internet, a corporate network for example. When looking at a global threat, and trying to estimate response time with given protection scenarios, this difference can be critical.
Computerworld: Moving data to the mountain.
In response to the resulting surge in demand for safe and secure digital records storage, Iron Mountain earlier this year opened a 5,000-sq.-ft. data center inside its secret underground facility. The data center includes 24TB of storage capacity and the equivalent of 1,586 T1 communication lines connecting it to the world above.
December 11, 2003
EE Times: PC, consumer engineers play different tunes on road to wireless music.
PC and consumer engineers are taking separate paths to audio over Bluetooth, raising the possibility of incompatible wireless MP3 players, headsets and speakers. Word of the split comes as Bluetooth is gaining traction in its core market of cellular handsets and marshalling its forces for a next-generation spec that could deliver megabit data rates and multimedia capabilities.
EE Times: VoIP battles heats up with carrier, cable announcements.
In a year-end claim-staking stampede, carriers from the cable TV, local phone exchange and long-distance worlds are scrambling to make announcements pledging customer support for Voice Over Internet Protocol service in 2004.
December 12, 2003
News.Com: Canada deems P2P downloading legal.
In a ruling released Friday, copyright regulators in Canada said downloading copyrighted music from peer-to-peer networks appears to be legal under Canadian law but that uploading is still prohibited. In the same decision, the Copyright
Board of Canada imposed a government fee of as much as $25 on iPod-like MP3 players...
NY Times: Conjuring a Superphone, With 3 Formulas to Choose.
In any case, the most visible battleground for OS dominance, after computers, is the cellphone. Microsoft, Palm and a European alliance called Symbian have each devised a software engine that's supposed to manage all the functions of the modern superphone...
News.Com: Google delivers parcel search.
The new "Search by Number" feature, announced Friday, also brings up information linked to other kinds of numbers, such as patent numbers, equipment identification numbers issued by the Federal Communications Commission, and airplane registration numbers from the Federal Aviation Administration.
December 13, 2003
Boxes and Arrows: The Visual Vocabulary Three Years Later.
Interview with Jesse James Garrett. I think my favorite aspect of the system is the emphasis on practicality throughout its design. At that time, the mainstream school of thought held that any respectable information architect should be producing color deliverables in a professional diagramming or drawing application...
December 14, 2003
SJ Mercury: China tries to establish homegrown tech rules.
Dan Gillmor. China isn't just reluctant to pay what amount to taxes to the developed-world owners of global technology standards. With the largest domestic market on the planet, at least potentially, plus an increasingly creative and well-educated workforce, China is creating its own competitive set of standards for its own market, although the global potential is obvious.
December 15, 2003
Crypto-Gram: Computerized and Electronic Voting.
What we need are simple voting systems--paper ballots that can be counted even in a blackout. We need technology to make voting easier, but it has to be reliable and verifiable. My suggestion is simple, and it's one echoed by many computer security researchers. All computerized voting machines need a paper audit trail.
SJ Mercury: Research forum leader takes on wireless challenge.
When 4G does arrive, it could operate at 100 megabits a second -- nearly 10 times faster than most of the wireless hot spots that laptop users are gushing about today. Uusitalo's mission offers a glimpse at the ways the global wireless business can imitate politics.
News.Com: Intel to push Centrino in 2004.
Between the new chips and its stepped-up marketing effort, Intel aims to broaden Centrino's presence in the consumer notebook market. Intel hopes to help PC makers improve the mobility of their consumer-oriented notebooks with thinner, lighter, more wireless-friendly models.
December 16, 2003
Boston Globe: Rent-a-researcher.
These days IBM's leadership is pushing the 3,000-person research division toward the marketplace. Long-term research continues, in fields ranging from nanotechnology to autonomous computing, but the new priority is to integrate research more tightly with IBM's focus on finding business and technology solutions for its clients' problems.
News.Com: Loudeye, Microsoft team on music store.
Seattle-based Loudeye and the software giant said Monday that they will work together to handle the infrastructure and distribution for online music services branded by other companies that are looking to sell songs online or to enter the digital media business in some other way.
December 17, 2003
Clay Shirky: The RIAA Succeeds Where the Cypherpunks Failed.
In response to the RIAA's suits, users who want to share music files are adopting tools like WINW and BadBlue, that allow them to create encrypted spaces where they can share files and converse with one another. As a result, all their communications in these spaces, even messages with no more commercial content than "BRITN3Y SUX!!!1!" are hidden from prying eyes.
PC World: Users Help Govern the Internet.
The "At-Large" groups aim to engage individual Internet users in ICANN activities at the local or issue level, the Marina del Rey, California, organization says. They also will generally foster a greater understanding of, and participation in, the Net governing process, ICANN says.
December 18, 2003
NY Times: A Voice in the Calling Wilderness.
Stewing over my latest experience with Verizon, I soon decided to do something that I rarely do: become an early adopter of a new technology. For the last month, my wife and I have relied on the Internet for our main phone line.
News.Com: Wal-Mart, Amazon fine-tune online music plans.
Internet retailer Amazon.com extended a contract with digital media services provider Loudeye on Thursday to supply music samples on its Web site. Meanwhile, retail giant Wal-Mart Stores announced that it has begun testing its own online discount music download service.
December 19, 2003
News.Com: Court: RIAA lawsuit strategy illegal.
Overturning a series of decisions in favor of the Recording Industry Association of America, the Washington, D.C., court said copyright law did not allow the organization to issue subpoenas for the identity of file swappers on Internet service providers' networks.
InfoWorld: Dutch Supreme Court rules Kazaa is legal.
The Supreme Court of the Netherlands is the highest European body yet to rule on file-sharing software. In its decision, the court cites international rulings including the 1984 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that said device makers, a VCR maker in that case, can't be held liable for user infringement.
EE Times: China's Wi-Fi security stance ruffling feathers.
China's controversial decision to mandate a proprietary encryption scheme for Wi-Fi systems used within its borders has industry groups, chip makers, OEMs and even U.S. government officials scurrying for answers. While China has a history of going its own way on technological standards, few attempts have aroused the ire of this spec.
The Economist: Hard disks go home.
Hard drives are increasingly suitable for use in consumer-electronics devices as they become quieter, cheaper and more robust. Most important of all, they are also getting smaller: some of the biggest potential markets depend on tiny new hard drives that appeared on the market only this year.
December 20, 2003
The Economist: How to bake the perfect chip.
When you bake cookies, it is important to ensure that your cooking equipment is not contaminated with other foodstuffs—garlic, say—that might taint the final product. The same is true, on an altogether different scale, when making silicon chips.
December 21, 2003
SJ Mercury: Balance may be back in file-sharing battle.
Dan Gillmor. For the most part, Congress and the courts have given the copyright cartel just about everything it wanted. But a federal appeals court's ruling Friday against the industry's unwarranted invasions of Internet users' privacy is a hopeful sign that some balance may return.
Computerworld: RIAA says it will continue fight, despite subpoena ruling.
The RIAA, which has requested hundreds of subpoenas this year and filed 382 civil lawsuits against people who allegedly shared music files illegally, will continue its legal fight -- even without the benefit of the DMCA subpoenas, the association said in a statement.
December 22, 2003
Useit.Com: Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003.
Many of this year's top design mistakes actually indicate a happy phenomenon: we are making progress in Web usability. Now that sites are doing certain things correctly, we get hit by second-order phenomena that only cause problems because users have progressed past the first-order issues.
Salon: The long road to Longhorn.
Scott Rosenberg. It has succeeded, in a way that no millions spent on Waggener-Edstrom P.R. and trade-press shmooze-fests could, in transcending the Evil Empire stereotypes that inevitably cling to Microsoft -- and highlighting the human faces behind the intimidatingly omnipresent Windows logo.
News.Com: Verizon announces final fiber suppliers.
On Monday the company announced it has selected the last of its equipment suppliers. The four vendors named will supply the carrier with fiber-optic cabling and other outside plant equipment, also known as the "passive" elements of the FTTP system.
News.Com: Norwegian cleared of DVD piracy.
Johansen, called "DVD Jon," had pleaded not guilty to charges that he broke Norwegian law by helping break the code on commercial DVDs. The original court said that he was free to do what he wanted with DVDs he bought legally. Prosecutors, who appealed against the original verdict, had urged a suspended 90-day jail term for Johansen.
December 23, 2003
IBM DeveloperWorks: Ease-of-use or marketing-driven sabotage.
This highlights that users really need to be able to trust their hardware. The traditional assumption is that hardware is trying to do what it's supposed to do -- conform to specifications, route packets, store data, whatever. All of the reliability features of the Internet depend on some degree of good faith. Just as VeriSign's SiteFinder caused a certain amount of technical trouble, Company X's ad-routing feature raises some issues.
December 24, 2003
InfoWorld: U.S. drops probe of Pressplay, MusicNet.
The U.S. Department of Justice has dropped an antitrust investigation of two online music services backed by major record labels after concluding the services have not harmed consumers or competition.
December 25, 2003
Merry Christmas!
December 26, 2003
BBC News: Microsoft aims to make spammers pay.
"The basic idea is that we are trying to shift the equation to make it possible and necessary for a sender to 'pay' for e-mail," explained Ted Wobber of the Microsoft Research group. The payment is not made in the currency of money, but in the memory and the computer power required to work out cryptographic puzzles.
Wired News: The New Voice of Tech Support.
The high cost of live support and a desire to provide better after-hours support led TiVo to sign a contract with TuVox in January 2003. Though the company already had hired an outside company to build a user-friendly, Web-based self-help service, Mortenson realized that wasn't enough.
Computerworld: Microsoft to pay SPX $60 million in patent suit.
After the November ruling, it was unclear whether Microsoft, which denied any patent infringement had occurred, would appeal the jury's decision, but Wednesday's settlement resolves the matter, said Stacy Drake, a Microsoft spokeswoman.
December 27, 2003
WIRED: Welcome to the Broadband Home of the Future.
There, they are starting to connect strange new devices, part computer, part consumer electronics: digital video recorders with hard drives and Ethernet ports, networked MP3 players, online game consoles, media servers, even connected digital picture frames. And by connect, I don't mean RCA jacks in the back. I mean TCP/IP.
December 28, 2003
SJ Mercury: The year's lowlights and highlights in technology.
Dan Gillmor. Human beings make some terrible decisions, and the malevolent among us do enormous damage, but somehow the species seems to muddle through and even make progress. That's how it looks from here as I look back at the last 12 months in technology, tech policy and overall economic matters.
Seattle Times: Consumers go adrift in sea of unfiltered data.
The always-connected nature of our world can be overwhelming. Instead of driving technology to better our lives, we're often letting technology manhandle us. And the longer we stay connected, the more data we tend to produce for others to process, quickly cycling into information overload.
December 29, 2003
Wired News: The Fantasy and Reality of 2004.
So we asked a dozen experts in fields that are apt to touch all our lives this year -- privacy, defense, spam, security, open source, technology development, life online and human rights -- to answer this question: "What do you wish would happen in 2004, and what do you think will actually happen?"
USA Today: 2004 may see 'bit of a gold rush' for digital tunes.
Companies of all types have begun examining ways to make digital music downloads a centerpiece of online strategies, says Josh Bernoff, digital media analyst at research firm Forrester. "The frenzy for music downloads is like nothing we've seen since the dot-com insanity," he says.
NY Times: Heavyweights Are Choosing Sides in Battle Over Next DVD Format.
The new discs and their players will not be widely available until at least 2005, but already the world's largest electronics, computer and entertainment companies are embroiled in a multibillion-dollar fight over whose technology will become an industry standard.
December 30, 2003
WIRED: The 100-Megabit Guitar.
If Henry Juszkiewicz didn't build a digital guitar, I can assure you the digital guitar would still happen." Like Sony and Philips with the compact disc 20 years ago, Gibson is making a big bet on Magic, whose success hinges on nothing less than the reinvention of an entire industry.
December 31, 2003
WIRED: 101 Ways to Save the Internet.
Paul Boutin. Desperate solutions range from abandoning email to requiring a license to log on. Halt, fools! The Internet's problems stem from the same virtues that make it great: open architecture, the free flow of information, peer-to-peer cooperation, and a bias for linking strangers, not disconnecting them.
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