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September 1, 2004
News.Com: Judges OK garage door openers in copyright case.
In a case with important implications for the technology industry, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Tuesday upheld a lower court decision saying that certain garage door openers cannot be banned under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
SJ Mercury: Skype merits hype; now it's available for the Mac.
Dan Gillmor. And what a year it's been, noted Niklas Zennström, the Luxembourg company's co-founder and chief executive. Skype boasts some 20 million downloads and almost 10 million registered users, he said from London on Monday, and even more interesting technology is in the pipeline.
September 2, 2004
Technology Review: Is Encryption Doomed?
Simson Garfinkel. The "when life gives you lemons, make lemonade" message that came out of the conference was that this process of breaking codes and developing even stronger ones is all part of the cryptographer’s game. But what if a fundamental breakthrough in mathematics rendered useless all of the fancy encryption that the world now depends upon?
eWEEK: Sender ID Wars Heat Up.
Has Microsoft blinked on its licensing requirements for Sender ID, making it more acceptable to the open-source community? Some open-source leaders and companies think that it has, while others vehemently disagree.
NY Times: From Microsoft, a First Take.
Prepare ye. Today marks the dawning of the age of the Windows Mobile Portable Media Center, a Microsoft software design for hand-held audio-video-photo players. In the next month or two, Creative Labs, Samsung and iRiver will all release players that run the little operating system with the very big name.
September 3, 2004
Peter Merholz: Ethnoclassification and vernacular vocabularies.
The practice of tagging on del.icio.us works because, at its heart, it's meant for the use of the individual doing the tagging. The fact that it contributes to the group is a happy by-product... But as a tool for group tagging, it's woefully insufficient. Del.icio.us has a very low findability quotient. It's great for serendipity and browsing, and an utter disaster for anything targeted.
The Economist: Vision, meet reality.
Having swung too far towards pessimism, the industry is now becoming cautiously optimistic about 3G, says Tony Thornley, the president of Qualcomm, the firm that pioneered the technology that underpins all of the various technological flavours of 3G.
September 4, 2004
InfoWorld: Let the TiVo Olympics begin.
Jon Udell. Thanks to this cheap, Linux-based appliance, I was able to compress all of the events that interested me into a fraction of the time it would otherwise have taken to watch them. I’ll always remember the Athens games as the first TiVo Olympics. Now I’m thinking about ways to make the next one even better.
September 5, 2004
NY Times: In Internet Calling, Skype Is Living Up to the Hype.
Dozens of other companies - new ones like Vonage and established ones like Verizon - are selling VoIP services, too. Skype's distinction is that, for now at least, it is the easiest, fastest and cheapest way for individual customers to begin using VoIP.
EE Times: Group formed to promote cellular/WLAN roaming specs.
Thirteen leading wireless infrastructure providers, handset makers and network operators have teamed to promote a set of open specifications for extending mobile voice and data services over Wireless LANs.
September 6, 2004
Adaptive Path: Organization in the Way: How decentralization hobbles the user experience.
Peter Meholz. Right now, the biggest obstacle to good design is poor organizational structure. The fundamental makeup of most organizations runs contrary to producing quality designs, and as organizations get larger, this becomes increasingly apparent.
September 7, 2004
Semantic Studios: Information Architecture Research.
What do we really know about information architecture? Do we know what works? Can we defend our designs? Are we improving? In preparing for my upcoming seminars, I revisited the role of research in the design process, and surveyed the literature most relevant to the practice of information architecture.
InfoWorld: Samsung shows cell phone with hard-disk drive.
The SPH-V5400 is a clam-shell type cell phone and the hard-disk drive has a capacity of 1.5GB, said Lee Yoorim, a Samsung Electronics spokeswoman, at the show. The storage space can be used for several types of media including images photographed with the built-in, megapixel-class digital still camera or music files.
September 8, 2004
Useit.Com: Preparing for the Holiday Shopping Season.
Many B2C sites make a disproportionate share of their profits in Q4. If the holiday shopping season is important to your company, the following seven last-chance tips can help you get your site in shape for the holidays while there's still time.
Seattle Times: Fingerprint recognition a first in biometric field for Microsoft.
Three new company products will use fingerprint readers to log on a user to a computer and store passwords used at Web sites. They were developed by Microsoft's hardware group, a small team in Redmond that focuses on mice and keyboards, not software.
September 9, 2004
O'Reilly Network: Prime-Time Hypermedia.
Jon Udell. I don't know beans about high-end AV technologies, so don't look for expert guidance or Hollywood production values. I come at this from the bottom up, as a web-savvy blogger frustrated by the opaqueness and intractability of existing hypermedia content.
SJ Mercury: TiVo, ReplayTV agree to limits.
The makers of TiVo and ReplayTV digital video recorders have agreed to limit how long consumers can keep pay-for-view movies stored on future versions of the VCR-like devices. The new technology also will allow Hollywood movie studios and broadcasters to regulate how often movies purchased through pay-for-view services can be watched.
Newsweek: I Want a Movie! Now!
NEWSWEEK has learned, the companies plan to unveil a simple but significant partnership that could shake up the media world. Subscribers who belong to both services will be able to download their Netflix DVDs over the Internet directly into the TiVo boxes in their homes...
September 10, 2004
eWEEK: Cell Phones, GPS and Wi-Fi Take Center Stage at DemoMobile.
And even with Shipley putting services front and center, in the end it was the devices that got the most attention, including RIM's new Blackberry 7100t phone and a range of other devices. Here's a look at what caught my eye, as examples of how mobility is changing business...
SJ Mercury: Intel and HP want to overhaul Internet.
Intel Chief Technology Officer Pat Gelsinger said in a speech Thursday at the Intel Developer Forum that the companies want to commercialize an experimental version of the Internet that they have been working on for two years. They would retain the basic plumbing of the Internet but overlay it with an intelligent network to better handle ever-growing traffic...
September 11, 2004
NY Times: Court Rules Against Pennsylvania Law That Curbs Child-Pornography Sites.
The decision is considered a broad victory for both free speech and Internet-rights advocates who have argued that although the Internet Child Pornography Act of Pennsylvania was well-intentioned, its methods and unintended effects were unconstitutional.
Poynter Institute: The Best of Eyetrack III.
In Eyetrack III, we observed 46 people for one hour as their eyes followed mock news websites and real multimedia content. In this article we'll provide an overview of what we observed. You can dive into detailed Eyetrack III findings and observations on this website...
September 12, 2004
NY Times: Let a Thousand Ideas Flower: China Is a New Hotbed of Research.
The labs vary in size and ambition, but as they multiply and expand they may help China grow from mostly a user and copier of advanced technologies developed elsewhere into a powerful incubator of its own, industry executives and experts say. And the shift may eventually reshape applied research, jobs and policies in the United States and other developed countries.
September 13, 2004
Useit.Com: The Need for Web Design Standards.
The entire concept of "Web design" is a misnomer. Individual project teams are not designing the Web any more than individual ants are designing an anthill. Site designers build components of a whole, especially now that users are viewing the entirety of the Web as a single, integrated resource.
Wired News: U.S. Exports DMCA Down Under.
Australia appears ready to adopt U.S-style copyright laws, courtesy of a Free Trade Agreement deal negotiated between the two countries. But the agreement has some Australian civil liberties advocates and lawyers crying foul. They say it's nothing more than a money-grab by the powerful U.S. copyright owners lobby...
September 14, 2004
Technology Review: Wireless Gets Up Close.
When comparing wireless transmission range, longer is almost always better. Yet the developers of a new technology called Near Field Communications, or NFC, boast not about how long a distance it works over, but how short. With a range of just 10 centimeters, NFC can get by with a very small, low-cost radio transmitter that draws only a pittance of power.
Computerworld: IETF deals setback to Microsoft antispam effort.
Members of the IETF's Mail Transfer Agent Authorization Records in Domain Name System working group voted last week not to proceed with the Sender ID standards proposal that Microsoft submitted in June. The group's members reached "a rough consensus" that questions about intellectual property claims made by Microsoft could torpedo deployment of the technology...
September 15, 2004
Crypto-Gram: Cryptanalysis of MD5 and SHA.
At the CRYPTO conference in Santa Barbara, CA, last month, researchers announced several weaknesses in common hash functions. These results, while mathematically significant, aren't cause for alarm. But even so, it's probably time for the cryptography community to get together and create a new hash standard.
NY Times: Amazon to Take Searches on Web to a New Depth.
Amazon.com, the e-commerce giant, plans to take aim at the Internet search king Google with an advanced technology that the company says will take searches beyond mere retrieval of Web pages to let users more fully manage the information they find.
September 16, 2004
eWEEK: Amazon.com's Search Launch Triggers Second Thoughts.
Amazon.com subsidiary A9.com may have officially entered the search wars on Wednesday, but its effort so far is drawing lukewarm user reviews and raising privacy concerns over its core personalization features.
News.Com: AOL drops Microsoft antispam technology.
The online giant cited "lackluster" industry support and compatibility issues with the antispam technology SPF, or Sender Policy Framework, that AOL supports. AOL's moves come days after the Internet Engineering Task Force standards body voted down the Sender ID proposal.
September 17, 2004
Wired News: Attack of the Radio Clones.
Armed with the playlist data, Microsoft's computers try to replicate the various station playlists by dipping into the company's vault of 500,000 licensed songs. Microsoft hopes the online clones, available only to PC users for now, will sound a lot like original stations, just without contests, jingles, chit-chat or local commercials.
AskTog: The Worst Interface Ever.
For $1500, you can equip your luxury car with a genuine self-destruct switch. Once it’s in place, you must remember to flip it whenever you shift from driving your car to not driving your car. Forget once or do it wrong, and your engine and transmission will self-destruct.
September 18, 2004
O'Reilly Network: MP3 Sound Bites.
Jon Udell. Although the amount of audio content keeps growing, the time available for listening remains constant. Until and unless we achieve a radical breakthrough in speech-to-text translation--and I'm not holding my breath--we'll need to find another way to make audio content more granular, and easier to consume selectively.
September 19, 2004
SJ Mercury: Hollywood: It's time to get creative, use the Net.
Dan Gillmor. The gate-keeping function of the TV networks and channels is a bug in today's world, not a feature. It's an artifact of a time when delivery options were limited, and when the cost of producing high-quality programming was high. Neither has to be the case anymore.
September 20, 2004
Computerworld: Gartner analysts talk about the security companies don't need.
The plethora of security technologies on the market are enough to overwhelm even the most knowledgeable IT managers, but in sorting through all of the options, it may be helpful to look at what is not needed, according to research that Gartner Inc. detailed today at its IT Security Summit conference in London.
eWEEK: Canada Sizes Up VOIP Regulation.
CRTC chairman Charles Dalfen said in an April public notice that VOIP should be treated like any other local phone service, meaning that those incumbents in a position to bundle VOIP with broadband would have to file tariffs and wait for CRTC approval. New entrants, however, would be free of such regulation.
September 21, 2004
InfoWorld: Philly plans world's largest mesh Wi-Fi net.
Once complete, the Wi-Fi network, estimated to cost between $7 million and $10 million, would deliver broadband Internet almost anywhere radio waves can travel, including neighborhoods where high-speed Internet access is currently rare.
PC World: Sony Eyes 200GB Blu-ray Discs.
Sony will announce next month that it developed an 8-layer version of the Blu-ray Disc that is capable of storing 200GB of data, according to a company spokesperson. The announcement will be made at the International Symposium on Optical Memory 2004...
September 22, 2004
News.Com: Sony to support MP3.
Sony is revisiting its MP3 strategy at a time when competition in the digital music market is heating up and threatening to leave the company behind. The surprise move could portend a major strategy reversal for the consumer electronics giant...
eWEEK: Internet Task Force Shuts Down Anti-Spam Working Group.
Citing a lack of agreement on basic issues in the discussions of the working group, the IETF has disbanded the MARID working group. The group had been working to create a standard for mail authentication for the fight against spam, mail worms and other e-mail abuse.
September 23, 2004
NY Times: Verizon Wireless Expands High-Speed Data Network.
The new network will, for now, be far faster than services offered by other mobile carriers, analysts said. The network will download data at 300 to 500 kilobits per second, at least equivalent to the speeds of residential high-speed connections. But the network uploads data at about 50 kilobits per second...
September 24, 2004
News.Com: Clues may point to Google browser.
Evidence is growing that may support rumors that the preeminent search company plans to introduce a Google-branded Web browser down the road. Among the clues are a domain-name registration, a patent application and several recent hires.
The Economist: Pictures as passwords.
And forcing employees to use different passwords, and to change them regularly, can be counterproductive: they are then even more likely to forget their passwords, and may end up writing them down. Might the idea of the password, which is thousands of years old, have finally had its day?
September 25, 2004
BBC News: Web tool may banish broken links.
Currently, said the students, website reviews require manual maintenance. Administration staff have to go through all the links on an intranet - internal website - or external website to check the information being linked to is still relevant.
September 26, 2004
InfoWorld: Making old technologies new.
Jon Udell. Perhaps quite the opposite. There’s no shortage of foundation technologies, and latent within many of them are unanticipated uses. Discovering new ways to use existing technologies is arguably as important as inventing new ones.
September 27, 2004
The Economist: You're hired.
It is, you could say, the ultimate in outsourcing. Self-service can have benefits both for companies and customers alike. It is already changing business practices in many industries, and seems likely to become even more widespread in future.
Useit.Com: Checkboxes vs. Radio Buttons.
Am I just being picky when I insist on the correct use of checkboxes and radio buttons? No. There are good usability reasons to follow GUI standards and use the controls correctly. Most important, following design standards enhances users' ability to predict what a control will do and how they'll operate it.
September 28, 2004
News.Com: Saluting the data encryption legacy.
Bruce Schneier. But with the outcry came research. It's not an exaggeration to say that the publication of DES created the modern academic discipline of cryptography. The first academic cryptographers began their careers by trying to break DES, or at least trying to understand the NSA’s tweak.
PC World: Toshiba Has Big Plans for Small Drives.
The drive, which was first unveiled earlier this year, is about the same size as an SD memory card. Target applications include a new generation of smaller digital music players and other portable multimedia devices such as cellular telephones.
September 29, 2004
Technology Review: Great Expectations.
Michael Schrage. When artfully calibrated against actual progress, they keep markets salivating and investment—of both financial and human capital—flowing. Reviewing the headlines of times past can help innovators constructively fine-tune that balance around their own inventions.
Technology Review: Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
Our lives will be enriched by this data, which we didn’t have access to before, and we’ll be able to write programs that will actually help because they’ll be able to understand the data out there rather than just presenting it to us on the screen.
September 30, 2004
News.Com: The technologist who has Michael Powell's ear.
Q&A with Robert Pepper. I don't know if I'm the chief futurist, but I try to meld technology and policy and the financial markets, and look a little bit around the corner (at) what's next. I spend a pretty good amount of my time trying to understand what the financial community thinks we're up to, because we want to understand the financial community's perceptions.
PC World: Netflix, TiVo Team Up on Broadband Movie Delivery.
The two companies do not provide very many specifics about the agreement in a press release issued Thursday. They are working out with movie studios the details of exactly how the movies will be distributed, says Kathryn Kelly, a TiVo spokesperson.
News.Com: Broadband dreams and multicast 'beams'.
Q&A with Vint Cerf. Current Internet technology simply cannot keep up. However, there is a solution to make the Internet more of a "broadcast" platform, and therefore a more effective entertainment medium. "Multicast" is a technology that efficiently broadcasts data over the Internet.
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