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April 1, 2004
NY Times: Google Planning to Roll Out E-Mail Service.
The standard industry practice is to offer tiered mail services, providing only limited storage for free and charging higher fees to users who want to preserve larger numbers of e-mail messages. Google, by contrast, is planning a service to be supported by advertising that will permit its users to store very large amounts of mail at no cost.
EE Times: Lucky warns of end-user broadband expectations.
Using the example of Voice Over Internet Protocol's impact on circuit-switched voice service, Lucky said that the telecom market's primary problem is that "no one knows what anything costs." "Telecom may be heading the way of DRAMs, where the price is set by the most idiotic competitor," Lucky said.
News.Com: Court ruling points way to broadband regulation.
In essence, the court said that cable networks' broadband services have an element of telecommunications services in them. The rejection could pave the way for municipalities to force cable companies to share their broadband Internet lines with third parties.
April 2, 2004
Wired News: Free E-Mail With a Steep Price?
Gmail would only insert ads into incoming mail -- presumably editorializing only incoming mail. Google already targets ads on its search results pages. But Richard M. Smith, a privacy and security consultant, said scanning e-mail to seed it with ads is a bad idea.
News.Com: Microsoft's iPod killer?
Few online music subscription plans have enjoyed great success to date, but some music company executives said they believe Janus will make renting music more attractive to consumers and eventually give a la carte download services such as Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store a run for their money.
April 3, 2004
Wired News: Technology Resets the Clock.
Montez handles tech support at a major New York City electronics retailer. Starting this weekend, and continuing all next week, Montez expects to be besieged by people who have lost the manuals that accompanied their gadgets and no longer remember how to reset the devices' clocks.
April 4, 2004
EE Times: Internet movies not ready for prime time.
Two Web services backed by groups of Hollywood studios have set up online movie rental sites, but they have a long way to go before they supplant the corner rental store. One of those services, CinemaNow, has about 10,000 subscribers and one million unique visitors a month, about four percent of which rent a movie online...
April 5, 2004
Economist: Off with the pith helmets.
But now the computer industry needs the advice of anthropologists more than ever before, argues Marietta Baba, a social scientist at Michigan State University and the creator of the first business-anthropology course in America, at her former employer, Wayne State University.
BusinessWeek: The Camphone Revolution.
Last year sales of camera phones from all makers topped 84 million units worldwide -- nearly twice the purchases of conventional digital cameras. Consumers turn out to love the convenience of having a point-and-shoot camera wherever they tote their phones.
April 6, 2004
Wired News: Find the Download in a Haystack.
But RealNetworks hasn't been doing itself any favors with its affinity for pop-up ads, icon installations throughout users' computers and aggressive (and sometimes misleading) pitches for subscription products, analysts say. Instead of developing user-friendly products, RealNetworks has been focused on getting as much money as possible from users with each registration.
NY Times: Many Hospitals Resist Computerized Patient Care.
The systems are intended to overcome problems as common as illegible handwriting on doctors' prescriptions that cause patients to receive the wrong drugs or doses, or result in one physician's not knowing what another has ordered. Still, hospitals and doctors say they have good reason to be cautious about the new technology.
April 7, 2004
News.Com: Governments and governance.
Daniel J. Weitzner, technology and society domain leader W3C. While we must be on our guard against all of these dangers, now is the time for the Internet community to face the fact that the entire world has an interest in the way that the Net is designed and how it operates.
Technology Review: The Pure Software Act of 2006.
Simson Garfinkel. But there is another way to fight spyware—an approach that would work because the authors are legitimate organizations. Congress could pass legislation requiring that software distributed in the United States come with product labels that would reveal to consumers specific functions built into the programs.
April 8, 2004
NY Times: Cut-Rate Calling, by Way of the Net.
Now, nerds have been making PC-to-PC Internet calls for years, using their computers' microphone and speakers. But VoIP is different: you dial and talk using a conventional phone. The computer doesn't even have to be on.
April 9, 2004
The Economist: Why speed isn't everything.
On the one hand, it seems the law, at least as it relates to increases in transistor density, will continue to hold for some time. On the other hand, the law's significance is likely to diminish, as computer-buyers demand more than just speed from their machines—and chip designers tailor their wares accordingly.
PC World: Tech Pioneers Preview the Future.
Bob Taylor, Alan Kay, Charles "Chuck" Thacker, and Butler Lampson were recently honored for their groundbreaking research at Xerox PARC in California 30 years ago. Among their accomplishments: accurately envisioning the office of the future that most of us now use daily. The four winners shared with PC World their views on the future of computing.
April 10, 2004
InfoWorld: Filling in the margins.
Jon Udell. The fuzzy intersection of official and unofficial data has never been a comfort zone for information technologists. In chapter 4 of Klaus Kaasgaard's Software Design and Usability, Xerox’s PARC alumnus Austin Henderson says that "one of the most brilliant inventions of the paper bureaucracy was the idea of the margin."
News.Com: American Airlines disclosed passenger data.
AMR's American is the third U.S. airline to admit to turning over passenger data since the government tightened airline security following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The revelations have raised privacy concerns and sparked several lawsuits.
April 11, 2004
SJ Mercury: Radio tags may give consumers more power.
Dan Gillmor. RFID tags, often promoted as an advance on today's bar codes, have raised major questions about customers' privacy and corporate muscle. But putting identification tags on or in everything doesn't have to be entirely one-sided.
April 12, 2004
NY Times: Microsoft Settles InterTrust Patent Suit.
Microsoft said today that it had reached a $440 million legal settlement and licensing deal with the InterTrust Technologies Corporation, a private company and a pioneer in the development of software to protect digital music and movies from piracy.
Online Journalism Review: Teaching Online Journalism: How to Build the First College-Level Course.
After all, they've seen newspaper stories and TV news segments on Web sites, and there is very little difference between the Web versions and the originals. Your first challenge will be to show students that there is something called online journalism that can be distinguished from other forms of journalism.
Useit.Com: Why Mobile Phones are Annoying.
What is certain is that the research documents the fact that mobile phones are annoying, and that conversation loudness is only one factor. If mobile-phone vendors want to avoid a backlash against their products, they're well advised to heed these findings and launch a major effort to make mobile phones less irritating to bystanders.
April 13, 2004
BusinessWeek: Sneek Peeks at Tomorrow's Office.
All of these ideas have one goal in common: To raise white-collar productivity -- or at least preserve the huge gains of recent years while avoiding employee burnout. The idea is to build upon the innovations that have transformed offices over the past 15 years.
April 14, 2004
EE Times: Theory promises brighter plastic LEDs.
A new take on the theory of light-emitting polymers suggests that their efficiency could be doubled, a development that would boost the introduction of flexible displays or possibly reduce the cost of flat-panel displays which currently depend on more costly materials.
News.Com: Utopia in jeopardy.
Utah's plans for a large-scale municipally owned fiber-optic network called Utopia is officially on the ropes, after the Salt Lake City council voted not to support financial backing for the project. On Tuesday evening, Salt Lake City's city council voted 4-2 against allocating future tax revenue to back the network.
InfoWorld: Intel tries to keep its cool.
Faced with this challenge, Intel's engineers are looking at several different approaches to reduce the amount of heat generated by processors and to dissipate that heat more quickly, Pawlowski said. However, engineers have a limited set of options that are available with current technologies and chip designs.
April 15, 2004
EE Times: Sony, Toppan develop 'paper' disk for Blu-ray.
Taking advantage of the Blu-ray disk's thick substrate structure, Sony Corp. and Toppan Printing Co. Ltd. have developed a "paper" disk that can hold 25 Gbytes of video data. The two companies will present the development at the Optical Data Storage 2004 conference next week in Monterey, Calif.
PC World: NVidia Promises 'Cinematic Computing'.
The new processors are "the biggest graphics generational gap we've ever done," says Dan Vivoli, NVidia's marketing executive vice president. "We're only seeing the tip of the iceberg in what these programmable GPU [graphics processor units] can do," says Jen-Hsun Huang...
April 16, 2004
Network World: IETF to lead anti-spam crusade.
The MARID technique will be most successful at eliminating spam when it is widely deployed across the Internet's e-mail servers, experts agree. However, corporations might choose to be early adopters of this technology to prevent spammers from spoofing their domains and eliminate outbound spam.
Crypto-Gram: National ID Cards.
In fact, everything I've learned about security over the last 20 years tells me that once it is put in place, a national ID card program will actually make us less secure. My argument may not be obvious, but it's not hard to follow, either. It centers around the notion that security must be evaluated not based on how it works, but on how it fails.
April 17, 2004
InfoWorld: Can e-mail be saved?
Paul Boutin. Instead of tinkering with ever more complex anti-spam filters and gateways, it's time to rethink the way e-mail works in the enterprise. With that in mind, we rounded up a half dozen successful software entrepreneurs -- plus one unrepentant spammer -- and asked them how they would change the system to remove mass-marketers' incentives to flood your workplace with ads.
April 18, 2004
SJ Mercury: Xerox gets closer to plastic transistors.
Xerox said it has moved closer to the commercialization of low-cost transistors made of plastic instead of silicon. Xerox and other companies are trying to develop transistors that can be imprinted onto plastic, potentially leading to chips that are lighter, more flexible and cheaper to produce than today's silicon chips.
April 19, 2004
NY Times: Teaching an Old Walkman Some New Steps.
With its ownership of premier music labels and its foundation in electronics, Sony had all the tools to create its own version of iPod long before Apple's product came to market in 2001. But Sony has long wrestled with how to build devices that let consumers download and copy music without undermining sales in the music labels or agreements with its artists.
EE Times: Wireless security tops U.S.-China trade talks.
For the technology community, this week's meeting has taken on added importance in light of recent clashes between the trading partners over three key issues: China's 17 percent VAT on imported semiconductors, its proprietary wireless-networking encryption standard and lagging IP protection.
Wired News: EFF to Fight Dubious Patents.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation launched a campaign on Monday to overturn several patents that it says are having a "chilling effect" on public and consumer interest. In a white paper posted to its website, the civil liberties group targeted 10 patents in particular...
April 20, 2004
Boxes and Arrows: Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research.
Kuniavsky devotes the bulk of the book to describing a series of proven techniques for researching user needs and behaviors, including user profiles, contextual inquiry (plus task analysis and card sorting), focus groups, usability tests, and surveys, as well as more secondary-research approaches...
April 21, 2004
Scientific American: The First Nanochips.
The desire for boosting the number of transistors on a chip and for running it faster explains why the semiconductor industry, just as it crossed into the new millennium, shifted from manufacturing microchips to making nanochips. How it quietly passed this milestone, and how it continues to advance, is an amazing story of people overcoming some of the greatest engineering challenges of our time...
News.Com: Net threat overstated, says security researcher.
Watson, who's scheduled to present that research here at the CanSecWest 2004 conference this week, referred to the media reaction as an "inordinate level of attention in respect to the amount of risk." At greatest risk, he said, may be e-commerce sites that manage their own routers...
EE Times: TCP vulnerability could lead to bigger gateway protocol problems.
A vulnerability in the Transmission Control Protocol discovered by researchers last year could cause greater than anticipated problems with inter-domain routing using the Border Gateway Protocol, the Department of Homeland Security warned this week.
News.Com: China, U.S. strike trade accord.
According to sources close to the negotiations, China agreed that it will not implement WAPI by its announced deadline and will indefinitely postpone enforcement of the WAPI directive. In the meantime, the country will work to revise and perfect the standard...
April 22, 2004
The Guardian: Library without books.
The latest development in Ukita's division is arguably the first successful attempt at a proper electronic book with a display that approximates the look of traditional paper. The ebook reader (the Librie EBR-1000EP) launches in Japan on Saturday, and we met with Sony in Tokyo for a sneak preview.
News.Com: California votes against Diebold.
California's Voting Systems and Procedures Panel unanimously voted to send its recommendations to the secretary of state in a second morning of contentious hearings, during which Diebold's president apologized to the panel and admitted that the company's errors had prevented some Californians from voting.
April 23, 2004
eWEEK: Google's Brin Talks on Gmail Future.
"I get a lot of e-mail—I have many gigabytes of it, and it's hard to manage. I have all the same challenges as everybody out there, and I found that having effective search, having large storage, having the kind of threading that we've done here—all those things make me more efficient with my e-mail. And that's what I then decided that we should make available to the entire world."
eWEEK: JPEG Hits New Patent-Infringement Snag.
Patent infringement issues surrounding the JPEG image standard resurfaced on Thursday after a small software vendor filed lawsuits against 31 companies ranging from Adobe Systems Inc. and Apple Computer Inc. to IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co.
April 24, 2004
InfoWorld: E-mail’s many hats.
Jon Udell. But even though e-mail isn't the best tool for any of these tasks, it provides a single interface to all of them. Here's a challenge: Let's improve the various functions performed by e-mail without multiplying the interfaces people must learn in order to use those functions.
April 25, 2004
SJ Mercury: Feds want to eavesdrop on Internet phone calls.
Dan Gillmor. Law enforcement's fix would be yet another huge expansion of surveillance capabilities on top of the already dangerous ones we've seen in recent years. When the FBI claims it's not asking for anything new here, it's not telling the truth.
News.Com: IBM teams with Stanford University on spintronics.
Magnetic random access memory could become the next product where spintronics could be incorporated. Ideally, MRAM will be able to store a substantial amount of data, consume little energy, and operate at a much faster rate than conventional flash memory. It could also last forever.
April 26, 2004
Useit.Com: B2B: Help Your Fans Convince Their Bosses.
Advocacy kits are rare on current B2B sites, but they're a great way to leverage the Internet's one-to-one ability to reach directly inside a customer company and connect with people who are eager to help you close the deal.
WIRED: Hello, Ningbo.
If anyone knows how explosive cell phones can be, it's the folks behind the A760. For years, Motorola has dominated the handset market in China as it once did worldwide; Nokia has held down second place. Increasingly, however, both companies are being threatened by a local outfit with the unlikely name of Ningbo Bird...
April 27, 2004
NY Times: Cognitive Rascal in the Amorous Swamp: A Robot Battles Spam.
Within minutes, the program had discovered rules of spam identification that had taken me years to acquire. The results were so reliable that I have almost abdicated the responsibility. Part of my brain has been replaced by 2.9 megabytes of computer code downloaded free from the Internet.
Wired News: NETI to Examine Net's Strengths.
They want to figure out how to make the Internet faster and more reliable, but to do that they need to gather data from tens of thousands of personal computers around the world. Currently, Internet performance research almost always uses data gathered from various router points along the Internet's backbone, the high-speed pipelines that keep data moving around the globe.
April 28, 2004
BusinessWeek: DoCoMo's "New Business Model".
People can easily tell with voice -- if they talk too long, they will have a high bill. But in the content-delivery service, with high-resolution videos and pictures, your bill could skyrocket without you noticing it. So in order to free users from such concerns, we have decided to have a flat rate.
NY Times: Pssst, Computer Users . . . Want Some Candy?
As a species, humans tend to be very good at risk evaluation. We avoid a certain street because it looks and feels dangerous. A car moving too fast causes a fear that is felt as much as it is thought. But technology - or, more to the point, the general lack of knowledge about the most basic workings of a computer network - obscures that ability.
April 29, 2004
Technology Review: Microsoft’s Magic Pen.
This "universal pen," as Wang calls it, could transform the way people interact with computers. Unlike gizmos that write on computer displays or special pads of paper, Wang’s invention uses regular ink, works with regular paper, and lets users combine handwritten text and diagrams with digital content from reports, magazines, and Web pages.
April 30, 2004
WIRED: File-Sharing Is, Like, Totally Uncool.
They're engaged in a role-playing game, as directed in a lesson plan sponsored and bankrolled by the Motion Picture Association of America. The curriculum - called "What's the Diff?: A Guide to Digital Citizenship" - has reached slightly more than half a million junior high students since it began this school year.
eWEEK: Spam Sleuths Follow the Money.
The government's first criminal case under a new law outlawing some types of spam e-mails was based on low-tech investigative methods: Authorities followed the money. Investigators said Thursday they tracked defendants by purchasing a weight-loss product for $59.95 and waited to see who collected the money.
EE Times: Cameraphone makers address user issues.
Canon, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, Nokia, Siemens, and Samsung announced the Mobile Imaging and Printing Consortium on Thursday. The group will issue technical guidelines to make cameraphones and printers work better together.
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