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March 1, 2005
MSNBC: Music labels seek higher download prices.
But music executives expressed caution about their ability to push through unilateral price increases. Among the biggest groups, Universal Music and Sony BMG are known to be particularly reluctant to disrupt the market for downloads. One top label said it would not raise wholesale prices now because the market was not yet mature enough for a price increase.
March 2, 2005
eWEEK: Court Overturns Eolas Browser Judgment Against Microsoft.
The case has been sent back to the U.S. District Court in Washington for retrial. Eolas Technologies Inc., of Chicago, holds the license from the University of California for a patent on technology for embedding and invoking interactive objects in Web browsers, such as applets and plug-ins.
March 3, 2005
IBM developerWorks: Baby duck syndrome.
The phenomenon of baby duck syndrome is well known -- it's what happens when users judge new and upcoming systems by comparing them with the first system they learned. This means that users generally prefer systems similar to those they learned on and dislike unfamiliar systems.
News.Com: Intel rethinking the living room PC.
Future living room units will be smaller, more stylish and likely less costly, he said. They could possibly even be integrated with movie delivery or other content services. Equally important: The fact that the box is a PC will be heavily de-emphasized.
NY Times: Sharpening Plasma's Image.
In casual conversations, the presidents of Panasonic, the world's top-selling plasma brand, and Samsung, which ranks third, promoted their strong commitment to plasma, even though no one was actually asking. The problem is that once a product's reputation falls in a hole, it is not so easy to get it out.
March 4, 2005
eWEEK: Microsoft Shows Off Prototypes to Blunt Network Attacks.
At the company's annual TechFest event in Redmond, Wash., Microsoft Corp. engineers presented the first glimpse of a new technology code-named Vigilante that proposes a brand-new approach to automate worm containment.
March 7, 2005
InfoWorld: Annotating the planet with Google Maps.
Jon Udell. In the very near future, billions of people will be roaming the planet with GPS devices. Clouds of network connectivity are forming over our major cities and will inevitably coalesce. The geoaware Web isn’t a product we buy; it’s an environment we colonize.
March 8, 2005
eWEEK: FCC: Consumers Can Put End to VOIP Port Blocking.
According to Carlisle, consumers are becoming more savvy about their broadband providers and will notice if services such as those provided by Vonage Holdings Corp. stop working. The industry is going through a "frontier period," Carlisle said, where corporations could press the limits of the law.
Computerworld: Scammers use Symantec, DNS holes to push adware.
Online scam artists are manipulating the Internet's directory service and taking advantage of a hole in some Symantec Corp. products to trick Internet users into installing adware and other annoying programs on their computers, according to an Internet security monitoring organization.
March 9, 2005
eWEEK: Skype CEO Takes on Telcos at CeBIT.
He might have been wearing pinstripes and a button-down shirt, but he claimed that the current and future strategy of Skype will knock the financial legs off of any company that still thinks it can make money by charging for phone calls.
March 10, 2005
eWEEK: Proposed Utah Law Has ISPs Up in Arms.
A proposed Utah bill that would force Internet service providers to filter and block any material and Web sites deemed "harmful to minors" has ISPs and advocacy groups up in arms, claiming unconstitutionality on several grounds.
News.Com: 'iPod tax' planned for music downloads?
Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle now wants his state to start collecting taxes on digital music, videos and software. Key Republicans in the GOP-dominated legislature say they will block the proposal, but administration officials say they're just trying to make things fair.
March 11, 2005
Schneier on Security: Speech-Activated Password Resets.
This is a clever idea from Microsoft. We know that people forget their passwords all the time, and I've already written about how secret questions as a backup password are a bad idea. Here's a system where a voiceprint acts as a backup password.
March 14, 2005
Useit.Com: Lower-Literacy Users.
The main and most obvious advice is to simplify the text: use text aimed at a 6th grade reading level on the homepage, important category pages, and landing pages. On other pages, use text geared to an 8th grade reading level.
EE Times: Nokia boosts cellular-Wi-Fi convergence target for smartphones.
All smartphones produced by Nokia for the enterprise market will, within two years, support dual mode cellular and Wi-Fi capability, a senior executive at the company said, during a session looking into next generation phones at the CTIA Wireless expo, which kicks off officially Monday.
March 15, 2005
NY Times: Can Papers End the Free Ride Online?
As a result, nearly a decade after newspapers began building and showcasing their Web sites, one of the most vexing questions in newspaper economics endures: should publishers charge for Web news, knowing that they may drive readers away and into the arms of the competition?
eWEEK: Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 Details Begin to Leak.
IE 7.0 will feature IDN (international domain name) support; transparent PNG support, which will allow for the display of overlaid images in the browser; and new functionality that will simplify printing from inside IE 7.0, partner sources said. The new browser also likely will include a built-in news aggregator.
March 16, 2005
Schneier on Security: The Failure of Two-Factor Authentication.
AOL is rolling them out. Some banks are issuing them to customers, and even more are talking about doing it. It seems that corporations are finally waking up to the fact that passwords don't provide adequate security, and are hoping that two-factor authentication will fix their problems.
March 17, 2005
Technology Review: E-Commerce Gets Smarter.
The business jargon for this model of integrated retail sales is "multichanneling" -- that is, fusing digital services with in-store, mail-order, and telephone sales, and with any other retail channels. The digerati have called it "clicks and mortar" since the Internet boom of the 1990s. No matter the term, it is now the driving force in retail.
eWEEK: Tags Turning Web Chaos into Categories.
In the halls and session rooms at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference here, a series of talks this week explored the growing use of tags to let users associate keyword metadata to Web information.
March 21, 2005
The Economist: The future, just around the bend.
Like his boyhood hero, Mr Kurzweil cannot seem to keep his fingers out of the future. He keeps venturing on to the bleeding edge—his critics say the lunatic fringe—of science to imagine futures where computers are as intelligent as we are, millions live in virtual reality and immortality is not only possible, but likely.
PC World: Google Removing Agence France Presse From Google News.
Google's decision is a direct reaction to a lawsuit AFP filed against the search engine provider alleging copyright infringement over the inclusion of AFP content in Google News, said Steve Langdon, a Google spokesman, on Monday.
March 22, 2005
PC World: IBM Fights Spam With FairUCE.
New technology from IBM is designed to stop spam by identifying the Internet domain it came from, and can help spot online scams such as phishing attacks and e-mail spoofing. The company this week announced the release of FairUCE, or for the company's alphaWorks advanced technology program...
March 23, 2005
Scott Berkun: How to build a better web browser.
I’m in the lucky minority of people that have actually designed successful browsers, or parts of them, for any length of time, and with Firefox and Opera in the headlines, and the art of browser design becomes important again, I thought I’d write down some of what I know.
March 24, 2005
eWEEK: Yahoo Search Embraces Content Sharing.
Yahoo has created a search site for finding digital content that can be reused and shared for free. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company Thursday will announce Yahoo Search for Creative Commons, a service for searching millions of Web pages which include content that is available under the Creative Commons license.
March 28, 2005
Useit.Com: Evangelizing Usability.
The goal of late-stage evangelism is to fully integrate usability with development so that it becomes second nature to start projects with usability activities, before design begins. The organization needs a usability culture. All managers should understand the basic steps in the UCD life cycle...
eWEEK: Vendors Join Forces to 'Fingerprint' Hacker Attacks.
Using the Peakflow SP platform, Jahanian said members of the alliance can collect data from devices around the network and look for anomalies. If the network deviations are flagged as a malicious attack, the platform generates a fingerprint that can be shared automatically and securely with select peers.
March 29, 2005
PC World: PC Drive Reaches 500GB.
Demand for greater capacity continues to rise due in large part to a growing need for music and video storage on PCs and consumer electronics devices. To meet that need, storage vendors are turning to new recording technologies. The first of these, perpendicular recording, will debut from Toshiba this year.
March 31, 2005
NY Times: It's Not Just a Phone, It's an Adventure.
Practically every new iteration of cellphone promises more: digital music, streaming video, 3-D video games, location-based navigation and full Internet browsing, not to mention a camera. With more features often come more buttons, complications and costs, and thicker operating manuals.
InfoWorld: Microsoft offers video download service for mobile devices.
Microsoft is launching a service that lets users download videos to mobile devices to watch daily television programming, including news, sports, and other content from MSNB.com, FOX Sports, the Food Network and other content providers.
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