The New York Times Stephen King Sows Dread in Publishers With His Latest E-Tale
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"Is the horror writer Stephen King leading a revolution in the way books are published, or just exploring the power of celebrity in the digital age?

His latest thriller, entitled "The Plant," describes a vicious vine that terrorizes a small publishing house, extorting human sacrifices. To some in the book business, the image is apt, because with the "The Plant" Mr. King plans to become today the first major author to self-publish on the Internet. He will offer the new book to fans in electronic installments available for downloading from his site, www.stephenking.com.

The launch has touched off a debate over whether the Web can liberate authors from their dependence on publishers, or just make it easier for truly famous people to rally their fans."

LA Times E-Book Publishing: Much Ado About Nothing Much?
"King is asking readers to send $1 each time they download, an experiment to see whether the honor system can trump the Internet urge to pirate. The effort is another sign of the building enthusiasm for electronic publishing. Unlike the recording industry, which has fought rear-guard legal battles against Napster, MP3.com and other online technologies that spread pirated music, the big New York publishing houses have been investing rapidly in new e-book companies and joint ventures.

Yet for all the ink getting spilled about e-books, almost no one is making money.

And King's latest move shows how precarious the old industry's plans are. As he wrote recently on his http://www.stephenking.com site: "My friends, we have a chance to become Big Publishing's worst nightmare.""

redux [03.28.00]
Salon The revolution that wasn't
"The news that Stephen King would release a story exclusively in digital form and exclusively via the Web rode the media mountain like an intermediate skier on a black-diamond trail -- tentatively at first, then with a little more confidence and, finally, hurtling out of control, crashing into unexpected territory. The trade press gave its imprimatur, and within a few days the story spread like a virus over Web and wire. Television and radio chugged behind.

For those who've watched digital content come into its own, the frenzy was nothing short of remarkable."

"...[Publisher Simon & Schuster] seems to be proclaiming something more insidious with the publication of "Riding the Bullet": that not only can it drag us kicking and screaming into the next era of digital entertainment but that, as a traditional content provider, it can control how and when that will happen. For the consumer, it seemed to say, cyberspace offers much that is new -- speed, efficiency, lower costs. But it also reminded us that, for the moment, Old Media and traditional entertainment still rule."

redux [04.07.00]
O'Reilly Network Jon Katz: Book Publishers Still Don't Get It
"I think interactivity involves many, many things. It involves the way the company is structured. It involves whether people are listening to their customers or paying attention or interacting with them. Publishing is one of those institutions that's almost medieval. You have a handful of people cloistered in New York, and nobody knows how they make decisions. The process is completely closed to the public.

And the reason that they dislike it [interactivity] so much is that if you're a newspaper editor or publisher or book publisher, you have to give up some power. You have to be less powerful. You have to listen more. You have to share a bit. You're still more powerful than your customers, but you're not as powerful as you used to be. And what we see about -- you know, corporations dread this because they're afraid it's going to cost money, they're going to lose control. I think the structure of the modern corporation is not inherently creative. These companies basically were designed for selling cereal, not for creating books.

You really need to let the public in. Let people into the process. Open it up. That's what interactivity is, and this thing with Stephen King is a classic stunt. It reminds me so much of newspapers saying, "Okay, we're going to join the 21st century. Let's throw up a Web site." Now they're giving away their products free, and they're saying to people in the bargain, "You don't even need to subscribe to us anymore." And then they wonder why this isn't good business."

redux [03.09.00]
Alertbox Electronic Books - A Bad Idea
"Even when electronic books gain the same reading speed as print, they will still be a bad idea. Electronic text should not mimic the old medium and its linear ways. Page turning remains a bad interface, even when it can be done more conveniently than by clicking the mouse on a "next page" button. It is an insufficient goal to make computerized text as fast as print: we need to improve on the past, not simply match it.

The basic problem is that the book is too strong a metaphor: it tends to lead designers and writers astray. Electronic text should be based on interaction, hypertext linking, navigation, search, and connections to online services and continuous updates. These new-media capabilities allow for much more powerful user experiences than a linear flow of text. Linear text may have ruled the world since the Egyptians learned to produce arbitrarily long scrolls of papyrus, but it's time to end this tradition. Nobody has time to read long reports any more: information must be dynamic and under direct control of the reader, not the author."

Xerox Research and Technology A Comparison of Reading Paper and On-Line Documents
"We report on a laboratory study that compares reading from paper to reading on-line. Critical differences have to do with the major advantages paper offers in supporting annotation while reading, quick navigation, and flexibility of spatial layout. These, in turn, allow readers to deepen their understanding of the text, extract a sense of its structure, create a plan for writing, cross-refer to other documents, and interleave reading and writing. We discuss the design implications of these findings for the development of better reading technologies."

The Standard When Data Checks In
"When it opened in 1928, the former R.R. Donnelley & Sons' Lakeside Press plant on the near South Side of Chicago embodied the splendor and sweat of the old economy."

"Now, the building is on the verge of becoming a bellwether for the new economy."

"Across the country, real estate investors are turning obsolete manufacturing plants and warehouses – as well as derelict office buildings and failed retail centers – into so-called telecom or carrier hotels. Instead of packing the buildings with crates, lathes or die casters, companies this time around jam them with racks of switches, routers and generators. Once brick-and-mortar icons of heavy industry, the structures are being rehabbed to house the backbone of the Internet Economy."

"These structures were built to house heavy machinery, so they usually feature floors that can support more than 125 pounds per square foot; high ceilings that provide clearance and ventilation for telecom-equipment racks; and space for generators to take over in case of power outages. The Lakeside Technology Center, for instance, has more than 80 generators and stores 300,000 gallons of diesel fuel to run them."

"Generally, upgrades require bringing in huge power supplies – the Lakeside Center could use up to 96 million megawatts – as well as state-of-the-art heating and air conditioning systems."

redux [07.05.00]
The New York Times Digital Economy's Demand for Steady Power Strains Utilities
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"Read-Rite's milling machine is indicative of a long-running, but accelerating problem: the nation's electrical power supply system is not up to the task of meeting the digital economy's needs. While the utility industry has historically prided itself on delivering fairly stable power 99.9 percent of the time, today's computerized economy is demanding even fewer interruptions and a much steadier current.

That is because electricity is more than just energy for computers -- it is the medium they use to do their job. Rapid, minute changes in voltage represent the ones and zeros that make up digital information.

Those patterns are ultimately translated into a human voice during a phone call, a calculation during a banking transaction, a dose of radiation during cancer therapy or a photo of a new baby e-mailed to scattered relatives. Any disruption in the power supply that compromises the processor's ability to manage those voltages can lead to lost data or system crashes."

USA Today Internet saps California's power grid
"As California's tech-savvy businesses and households plug into an increasingly wired economy, the state's power system is sputtering like a frayed electrical cord."

"Computers consume about 13% of the nation's power, according to EPRI Corp., a Palo Alto research and development group that studies the utility industry.

The Internet's borderless community also is taxing U.S. power suppliers because about 80% of online traffic comes through this country.

To handle all the Internet action, businesses are turning entire offices into warehouses for the powerful computer servers and peripheral equipment needed to navigate networks. These so-called ''server farms'' consume 10 to 12 times more power than the traditional office building filled with human workers. "

SiliconValley.Com Rich nations tap 'Dot Force' to tackle IT divide
"Leaders of the Group of Eight nations decided on Saturday to establish a task force, dubbed "Dot Force,'' to search for ways to fuse the gaping information technology (IT) split between industrial and developing countries.

The G8 gave the aptly named group the task of supporting the development of communications infrastructure in poor countries and drawing them into the Internet-led economic revolution."

""Because Napster users are music enthusiasts, it's logical to believe that they are more likely to purchase now and increase their music spending in the future," Jupiter analyst Aram Sinnreich said in a statement."

""`Everyone, everywhere, should be enabled to participate in and no one should be excluded from the benefits of the global information society,'' the G8 said in an IT charter."

redux [04.23.00]
The New York Times When Villages Go Global: How a Byte of Knowledge Can Be Dangerous, Too
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"The prospects seemed bright when the Internet was recently introduced in a remote part of the mountainous Cotopoxi region in Ecuador. Under the guidance of aid workers, Quichua-speaking peasants planned to gather crop information and sell their crafts over the Web.

Soon, though, it was discovered that some of the men were using the computer to visit pornographic sites. "

"Dismayed, the women began to question how the men were treating them, and a debate ensued over the common practice of beating women. Although use of the Internet was later curtailed, its introduction unexpectedly generated discussion on a once taboo topic.

"The changes created by the Internet in rich industrialized nations are well known, affecting everything from how people date to how they work. But less is known about the impact on societies with limited contact with the rest of the world. As such experiments multiply, at least one outcome seems certain: the way people in these communities relate to each other and with the world is likely to be altered forever."

redux [07.09.00]
Washinton Post Poor in Latin America Embrace Net's Promise
"Until a brilliantly sunny day when the Internet reached this Ashaninka Indian village in central Peru, tribal leader Oswaldo Rosas could think of few benefits modern life had brought his people.

Poverty and disease had debased and decimated them since British missionaries brought the first link to the outside world 81 years ago. As recently as the early 1990s, communist guerrillas had forced some Ashaninka into slavery. Even after the Peruvian army defeated the insurgents, life in this thatched hut settlement with no electricity or running water remained a grueling struggle.

It still is, but as the incongruent buzz of a computer fired up in Rosas's hut--now doubling as a tribal cybercafe--the somber 30-year-old leader could not repress a smile. "This," he said, pointing to the machine, "is the first real chance they have ever given my people.""

""Calep, 15, who hovered by the humming unit covered with a brightly hued Indian blanket here in Marankiari Bajo, would agree. His village computer, he said, has brought "the hope that I won't be poor for the rest of my life."

Calep wants to be a computer programmer. He is not naive enough to think one computer will be his ticket out of poverty. But he is not cynical enough to rule it out.

"I've never gone very far from my village, but I've [chatted] with kids [on the Internet] in places like Canada," he said. "Now I think anything is possible.""

redux [05.14.00]
Netfuture I'm Glad The Internet 'Corrodes' My Culture
"I have spent my whole life in Corrientes, Argentina. Even as it is a state-capital and my family is relatively well-off, there are tons of cultural treasures that I couldn't have known if it wasn't for the Net, and not only knowledge or information, but whole mental frames: a passionate, whole-hearted love for science and philosophy, self-respect as a computer geek, excellent non-contemporary thinking (like Chesterton's, Voltaire's or Shaw's), non-hispanoameric poetry, enlightenment values and, yes, all kinds of erotic information and art (OK, pornography, too :), along with lots of other things.

Those things, althought mostly intellectual in nature, have, as you have pointed, corroded my "native" culture, to the point that I feel more at ease with Scientific American, the Need to Know e-zine, the Linux scene or the Discordian(-like) humor|philosophy. I still have my friends, my girlfriend and my family here, but I don't think I share my culture with them anymore (not that this started wholly with the Net; I have read Asimov from age 6, programmed from age 7, &c., but the richness of the Net has deepened it to the point of making myself councious of it).

It has its social and psychological side effects, but I wouldn't go back for all the group status of the world. I like this culture a lot more than my "native" one, for sheer deepness, meaning and beauty."

The Freedom Forum Katz: geek and proud
""It's appealing to me," Katz added, "that people who have always been perceived as outcasts, marginalized, different, have all of a sudden become the only people who understand how the world works. And you can see it's freaking out the rest of the world."

"These kids have done something unprecedented in the world, which is they have created this rich, diverse and critically important universe almost by themselves — without help or support from any of these other institutions. What they've done is now becoming one of the most significant social institutions in the world, and everyone else is trying to figure out what's happened."

"This is the first time I can think of that a culture of kids understands so much more than any adults about something so important. Sometimes I think if you're not 15 or 16, you're already beginning to fall behind in this culture.""

News.Com Study: Napster users buy more music
"People who use Napster and other file-swapping networks to trade MP3 files are more likely to boost their music spending than those who don't use such services, according to a new study from Internet research firm Jupiter Communications.

The study is the latest attempt to gauge the economic impact of file-swapping services such as Napster and Scour.net, both of which stand accused of encouraging brazen Internet piracy and untold damages in lost CD and video sales."

""Because Napster users are music enthusiasts, it's logical to believe that they are more likely to purchase now and increase their music spending in the future," Jupiter analyst Aram Sinnreich said in a statement."

Dan Gillmor Napster and the Internet Fringe
"...Napster, the idea, is unstoppable. And if the company goes away, the problem for the industry will not have changed, and in fact will only get worse (from the industry's perspective).

No one should have been surprised that Napster moved so quickly from the fringe to the middle, not in retrospect. Yet most of us didn't see it coming until it was already over, at least those of us over 25."

NME Napster users exceed the 20 million mark
"The ongoing problems experienced by MP3 file-swapping application NAPSTER seem to have done little to dent the Internet company's popularity. It was announced on Wednesday (July 19) that users of the application now exceed 20 million - and that figure alone is double what it was only three months ago."

redux [05.02.00]
Infoworld Napster sends a message to music industry: 'Your customers aren't happy'
"The Recording Industry Association of America wants to educate consumers with the message, "Artists deserve to be compensated -- artists won't make music if they can't make money." I can only imagine the public service announcements with multimillionaire artists pleading for their right to a seventh Porsche in the driveway. There's no rationalization for piracy; it is what it is. However, rampant music piracy online indicates that the music industry's distribution and pricing model is out of whack with what people want. The problem isn't the piracy; the problem is unhappy customers. And the music industry had better do something about it. This is a dinosaur moment -- with the big rock looming overhead -- where the music industry needs to ask itself how it will adapt."

MSNBC Hackers stumble toward legitimacy
"IT IS EVERY social activist’s fantasy and every CEO’s nightmare: a powerful, motivated grassroots movement gains legs, legitimacy and sympathetic media attention. Access to the national stage follows thanks to an articulate mouthpiece for the message. And for corporate America what used to be merely a nagging irritation—a kind of free market jock itch—now becomes a cause celeb, with teeth.

And that’s what one sensed happening at H2K."

The New York Times Magazine The Smart Set
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"A generation ago the kind of students who entered science fairs were considered nerds -- preternaturally bright kids whose ardent intellects, moire-patterned wardrobes and clueless social instincts put them outside the adolescent mainstream. Geeks still roam the halls of American high schools -- and of Midwood, for that matter -- but many of Midwood's Intel kids move comfortably in the newly respectable mainstream, where being scientifically astute has a certain cachet. They inhabit an area of cultural endeavor that -- coming a quarter-century after the birth of biotechnology and personal computers and, yes, the rise of Nasdaq -- is now seen not only as intellectually precocious but also, suddenly, improbably, as positioned in a fast lane pointed toward wealth, creature comforts and the freedom to choose what to make of one's life. "

redux [05.14.00]
Netfuture I'm Glad The Internet 'Corrodes' My Culture
"I have spent my whole life in Corrientes, Argentina. Even as it is a state-capital and my family is relatively well-off, there are tons of cultural treasures that I couldn't have known if it wasn't for the Net, and not only knowledge or information, but whole mental frames: a passionate, whole-hearted love for science and philosophy, self-respect as a computer geek, excellent non-contemporary thinking (like Chesterton's, Voltaire's or Shaw's), non-hispanoameric poetry, enlightenment values and, yes, all kinds of erotic information and art (OK, pornography, too :), along with lots of other things.

Those things, althought mostly intellectual in nature, have, as you have pointed, corroded my "native" culture, to the point that I feel more at ease with Scientific American, the Need to Know e-zine, the Linux scene or the Discordian(-like) humor|philosophy. I still have my friends, my girlfriend and my family here, but I don't think I share my culture with them anymore (not that this started wholly with the Net; I have read Asimov from age 6, programmed from age 7, &c., but the richness of the Net has deepened it to the point of making myself councious of it).

It has its social and psychological side effects, but I wouldn't go back for all the group status of the world. I like this culture a lot more than my "native" one, for sheer deepness, meaning and beauty."

The Freedom Forum Katz: geek and proud
""It's appealing to me," Katz added, "that people who have always been perceived as outcasts, marginalized, different, have all of a sudden become the only people who understand how the world works. And you can see it's freaking out the rest of the world."

"These kids have done something unprecedented in the world, which is they have created this rich, diverse and critically important universe almost by themselves — without help or support from any of these other institutions. What they've done is now becoming one of the most significant social institutions in the world, and everyone else is trying to figure out what's happened."

"This is the first time I can think of that a culture of kids understands so much more than any adults about something so important. Sometimes I think if you're not 15 or 16, you're already beginning to fall behind in this culture.""

Salon Learning to Love Your Geek
"The key to interacting with your geek is to learn to speak his or her language, she explains -- defining personal improvements as "upgrades" and bad habits as "nonproductive feedback loops." It's simply a matter of using the right encouragement. Don't tell him he needs to get some exercise and lose some weight; tell him that he will be better prepared for all-night Doom marathons if he is in better physical shape. It's all about becoming more "efficient.""

The New York Times British Authorities May Get Wide Power to Decode E-Mail
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"As the Clinton administration formally enters the debate about law enforcement surveillance in cyberspace, the British government is about to enact a law that would give the authorities here broad powers to intercept and decode e-mail messages and other communications between companies, organizations and individuals.

The measure, which goes further than the American plan unveiled on Monday in Washington, would make Britain the only Western democracy where the government could require anyone using the Internet to turn over the keys to decoding e-mails messages and other data."

redux [07.11.00]
MSNBC FBI’s system to covertly search e-mail raises privacy, legal issues
"The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is using a superfast system called Carnivore to covertly search e-mails for messages from criminal suspects."

"Word of the Carnivore system has disturbed many in the Internet industry because, when deployed, it must be hooked directly into Internet service providers’ computer networks. That would give the government, at leasttheoretically, the ability to eavesdrop on all customers’ digital communications, from e-mail to online banking and Web surfing.

The system also troubles some Internet service providers, who are loath to see outside software plugged into their systems. In many cases, the FBI keeps the secret Carnivore computer system in a locked cage on theprovider’s premises, with agents making daily visits to retrieve the data captured from the provider’s network. But legal challenges to the use of Carnivore are few, and judges’ rulings remain sealed because of the secretive nature of the investigations."

Dan Gillmor Draconian cyber-surveillance near in Britain
"BRITAIN'S Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has been talking up the Internet and technology, vowing to bring the United Kingdom firmly into the emerging digital economy and culture. Yet despite real progress toward this worthy goal, Blair's Labor government is undermining its promise with proposals for pervasive, intrusive cyber-surveillance -- quite possibly the most Draconian in the Western world.

The legislation is called the Regulation of Investigatory Powers bill, or RIP, and its passage in Parliament may be imminent. Growing recognition of the bill's potentially disastrous impact has triggered some second thoughts. But the government is pressing ahead, and foes of the legislation say their chances of heading it off remain, at best, 50-50."

"Internet service providers don't like the bill. Some, but not all, would be required to install equipment allowing the government to tap communications in something close to real time. The government hasn't explained very well why a criminal with even half a brain would use such an ISP instead of a provider that wasn't part of the surveillance network.

One ISP told the Independent newspaper that it was exploring a move offshore if the bill passes. Its clients include unions and activist non-governmental organizations that have a rational concern of unbridled government power."

Salon Can a labeling system protect your privacy?
"P3P, the new Internet privacy protocol unveiled last month by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), has been both lauded as the answer to everyone's privacy worries and castigated as a Trojan horse that will divert public attention from real problems. The truth is, it's neither. It's merely a potentially nifty tool that might help ensure privacy in cyberspace -- if the government gets its act together.

"But P3P isn't technology, it's politics. The Clinton administration and companies such as Microsoft are all set to use P3P as the latest excuse to promote their campaign of "industry self-regulation" and delay meaningful legislation on Internet privacy."

"Ultimately, though, Americans shouldn't be put in the position of having to decide whether or not they want to give up their privacy in order to partake in the pleasure of viewing pages on the Internet: We should have base-level privacy protections in law. We do this in other areas, such as food, drugs and the environment. Likewise, there should be certain privacy guarantees that are fundamental to our society; privacy guarantees such as the right to see information that a company has collected on you and the right to have erroneous information expunged.

P3P can't create these rights and it can't enforce them. But P3P will make it easier to cut through the legalese and tell the difference between Web sites that are truly committed to protecting privacy and those that are information sharks -- provided, of course, that both kinds of Web sites post P3P policies that are comprehensive and accurate. And, of course, there's a fat chance of that happening without meaningful legislation."

GoodExperience Surviving the Bit Infinity
"Though Microsoft is not the first to do so, Microsoft is absolutely right in identifying the new problem of technology. The age of the bit infinity is now beginning, in which users will increasingly demand some way to help sift through the bits that deluge them. E-mails, voice mails, IMs, and other bitstreams are just the beginning. Bits are virtually free and almost infinitely replicable, and their sheer number will continually lower the quality of any bitstream.

As bits increase in users' lives, users need to take more personal responsibility for their bits -- using good software, yes, but not by ceding responsibility to the software. The awareness of and responsibility for one's own bits is what I call "bit literacy." This process of bit literacy can make users effective, despite the increase in bits."

"Microsoft's solution to the increase in bits, however, is at best risky and at worst misguided -- and it's definitely not bit literate. Instead of showing users a path to regain control of their tools and their lives, Microsoft has done the opposite: its solution is to let the software decide for the user what bits to engage at all."

The New York Times Microsoft Sees Software 'Agent' as Way to Avoid Distractions
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"Attention, please.

Hoping to shed its longstanding industry reputation as a mere imitator, not an innovator, Microsoft is spending heavily on research in a wide range of software technologies that include hand-held computing and voice recognition. But the most intriguing project may be taking place in the cramped office of Eric Horvitz, a devotee of an obscure, 17-century statistical technique that plays a key role in his current work."

"In essence, Horvitz and his team of researchers are trying to make it possible, in the age of information overload, to reclaim the right to pay attention."

"In the view of many computer-design experts, restricting electronic interruptions to only the most urgent ones has become a pressing necessity in the Internet Age.

"Most Internet entrepreneurs treat the users' attention as a Third World country to be strip-mined," said Jakob Nielsen, a Silicon Valley expert on software usability."

redux [06.29.00]
First Monday The Work of Information Mediators: A Comparison of Librarians and Intelligent Software Agents
"Intelligent software agents promise to traverse and organize information spaces for us, alert us, remind us, call for a refrigerator repair-person, communicate with each other ... to fundamentally alter how we accomplish many of our daily tasks. These red-hot and revolutionary software critters have a lot to learn from their closest human peers: librarians. As I read and think about how intelligent systems reason, search, classify, and filter information, I'm struck repeatedly with how librarians do exactly these same tasks. Both act as information mediators for the end user: both negotiate information spaces and retrieve information relevant to a particular user or goal. Librarians have been efficiently accomplishing many of the tasks at which the artificial intelligence community is now working to make software agents competent. Therefore, the development of software agents can be informed by a look at how human information agents do their work.

This paper will examine the characteristics of agency, the work of librarians as information mediators, the differences between human and software agents, the possible tasks for software agents in libraries, and speculate on the future of human and software agency."

redux [04.25.00]
Doors of Perception The design challenge of pervasive computing
"What happens to society when there are hundreds of microchips for every man, woman and child on the planet? What cultural consequences follow when every object around us is 'smart', and connected? And what happens psychologically when you step into the garden to look at the flowers - and the flowers look at you?"

"The signs of such a change are there for all to see. Enlightened managers and entrepreneurs understand, nowadays, that the best way to navigate a complex world is through a focus on core values, not on chasing the latest killer app. (This picture illustrates the core values of the French train company, SNCF). Business magazines are full of talk about a transition from transactions, to to a focus on relationship. We are moving from business strategies based on the domination of markets, to the cultivation of communities. The best companies are focussing more on the innovation of new services, and new business models, than on new technology per se. They are striving to change relationships, to anticpate limts, to accelerate trends." [via idvilla]

NPR : All Things Considered Failure
"A new magazine arrives on-line today, after a few false starts. Failure magazine is, as its title implies, about failure: battles lost, sports blunders, products that didn't catch on. The fact that someone would even come up with an idea for such a magazine suggests that, in an age when dot-coms come and go like buses, the very notion of failure may not have the stigma it once did when Willie Loman first walked the boards."

redux [06.03.00]
The New York Times Magazine I'm a Loser
[requires 'free' registration]
"If you go back to the early 1800's, to be a failure meant basically one thing: to go bankrupt in business. Today if we say I feel like such a failure, we think generally of someone who's a loser, somebody who has so me defect in his personality. The meaning of failure has fundamentally changed from being a crisis you pass through to being more of an identity. My understanding of the failure ethic in Silicon Valley is that the profits of success are so enormous that the risk of failing is worth it."

Wired Signing Up to Be Surveilled
Forget the pager number and don't bother calling.

One company is making it easier for folks to "track" anyone, by allowing them to pull up a map of the person's location on a personal digital assistant (PDA) or computer.

"Cell-Loc isn't the only company to come out with location-sensitive devices. After all, the industry is expected to bring in a whopping $3.9 billion by 2004, according to the Strategis Group.

The same Strategis study showed that people didn't mind being tracked down for emergency situations like roadside assistance."

redux [05.25.00]
USA Today Denver may track workers by satellite
"It could be getting harder to hide from the boss.

After allegations that some city employees are loafing on the job, Denver officials said Monday they want to spend $1.5 million to track city vehicles with the military's Global Positioning System satellites."

"One labor expert said it might be counterproductive for an employer to try to scrutinize its workers so closely."

redux [04.11.00]
Salon Japanese firm developing tool to track stray grannies
"Johnny: "Mom! Grandma's missing again!"

Mom: "Don't worry, dear, the satellite will find her.""

"According to Reuters, a Japanese company has come up with a new way to track down grandmas, grandpas and anyone else who forgets where he or she is supposed to be, by using a satellite-based global positioning system and cellular technology."

Applied Digital Solutions What is Digital Angel?
"The Digital Angel™ transceiver can be implanted just under the skin or hidden inconspicuously on or within valuable personal belongings and priceless works of art. When implanted within the human body, the transceiver is powered electromechanically through the movement of muscles. It can be activated either by the "wearer" or by a remote monitoring facility."

Business 2.0 Semantics of the New Economy
"The struggle over monetizing the digital economy is now a war, if we follow the rhetoric of its leaders. The battle over music and movies is inspiring Charlton Heston-like images, most recently from Edgar Bronfman, head of Universal Studios (whose last widely distributed quote came years ago when he declared the Internet the "CB radio of the ’90s"), in a speech at Real Conference 2000 in May. "

""I am warring against the culture of the Internet, threatening to depopulate Silicon Valley as I move a Roman legion or two of Wall Street lawyers to litigate in Bellevue and San Jose," Bronfman said. "I have moved these lawyers…not to attack the Internet and its culture, but for its benefit and to protect it."

Bronfman justified his fight as defense of his "intellectual property rights," and those of creators everywhere. "You own a home. You own a car. They’re yours–they belong to you. Well, your ideas belong to you, too. And ‘intellectual property’ is property, period." In pursuit of pirates, he said, "we must restrict the anonymity behind which people hide."

"The semantics of the issues intrigue me, and came to my attention through Richard Stallman, who suggests that terminology is a foundation for our ideas, and that words such as consumer, protection, piracy, and intellectual property reinforce faulty premises."

redux [04.15.00]
MIT Technology Review Freedom—Or Copyright?
"Once upon a time, in the age of the printing press, an industrial regulation was established for the business of writing and publishing. It was called copyright. Copyright’s purpose was to encourage the publication of a diversity of written works. Copyright’s method was to make publishers get permission from authors to reprint recent writings.

Ordinary readers had little reason to disapprove, since copyright restricted only publication, not the things a reader could do. If it raised the price of a book a small amount, that was only money. Copyright provided a public benefit, as intended, with little burden on the public. It did its job well—back then.

Then a new way of distributing information came about: computers and networks. The advantage of digital information technology is that it facilitates copying and manipulating information, including software, musical recordings and books. Networks offered the possibility of unlimited access to all sorts of data—an information utopia.

But one obstacle stood in the way: copyright. Readers who made use of their computers to share copyright infringers. The world had changed, and what was once an industrial regulation on publishers had become a restriction on the public it was meant to serve."

redux [02.05.00]
Reason Magazine Copy Catfight
"There is an inherent conflict between intellectual property rights and freedom of speech, a tension between your right to control a story you've written and my right to use it as raw material for my own work. Thanks to two trends, that tension is turning rapidly into a collision... On one hand, as information has grown more valuable, copyright and trademark law has become increasingly restrictive. At the same time, there has been, in the words of MIT media studies professor Henry Jenkins, an "explosion of grassroots, participatory culture," a new high-tech folkway that not only draws on pop culture but appropriates from it more easily than ever before, and disseminates itself on a wider scale."

redux [05.16.00]
Suck Pirate Flags
"Intellectual property rights seem a quaint notion these days — the antiquated, Elizabethan remains of the Old Economy with all the here-and-now applicability of lace collars. Intellectual property is a fairy tale, told by dot-commers to make their interns laugh, like stories of stockholders who expect a profit and journalists who check their sources. The idea of owning what you create has become a sad little joke."

"The near-universal disregard with which intellectual property is treated leaves anyone with even the slightest interest in their own rights thinking that the population of the Internet consists almost entirely of beady-eyed, slack-jawed warezd00dz. But moralizing never got anybody anywhere, save nailed to a tree. And since piracy is going to continue no matter what the courts or copyright-holders do, Metallica and the AP and anybody else with complaints about the state of intellectual property rights on the Web is going to have to do some hard thinking fast.

"First one with a business plan wins."

Yahoo! News Online Music Fight Comes to Capitol Hill
"Grunge music blared, computer monitors glowed, and rock stars got out of bed before noon as music-industry heavyweights and Internet moguls brought their fight over the future of music distribution to Capitol Hill."

"Sen. Orrin Hatch the Utah Republican who chairs the committee, quizzed witnesses on what they considered to be reasonable music duplication. Hatch, who recently released his own CD of Christian pop music, asked whether making cassette copies of CDs to play in the car or swapping digital files on the Internet was acceptable."

Inside Music Hatch Warns Labels, Don't Make Me Come Over There and Spank You
"Facing a veritable who's who of the music-copyright wars, Chairman Hatch threatened -- in surprisingly direct terms -- to force the music labels and publishers, by legislation, to make their content digitally available for a standard fee if the record business continued to ensnarl e-music with lawsuits. As a capper, Hatch suggested that Congress might even go so far as to offer its own comprehensive definition of ''fair use'' to hasten the arrival of paid digital music -- an action that would have implications far beyond music."

"''Fair and reasonable licensing needs to take place,'' Hatch flatly told the industry as he closed the hearing. ''We'll be watching closely.''

etown SENATE COMMITTEE HEARS ALL SIDES IN ONLINE MP3 DEBATE
"Senator Hatch referred to two charts that illustrated the differences between Napster, a centralized file-sharing system, and Gnutella, a decentralized system. Napster requires a central server to operate. Shut down that hub, and you've shut down Napster. Gnutella and most other newer file-sharing systems are distributed, meaning users' computers link directly to each other on the Internet. Since Gnutella and others like it don't depend on any specific computer to survive, they're virtually impossible to shut down.

Senator Hatch demonstrated an understanding of this somewhat complex concept, and rather than suggesting that Gnutella and others can be shut down, asked if it would be possible to create an accounting system within applications like Gnutella."

MSNBC FBI’s system to covertly search e-mail raises privacy, legal issues
"The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is using a superfast system called Carnivore to covertly search e-mails for messages from criminal suspects."

"Word of the Carnivore system has disturbed many in the Internet industry because, when deployed, it must be hooked directly into Internet service providers’ computer networks. That would give the government, at leasttheoretically, the ability to eavesdrop on all customers’ digital communications, from e-mail to online banking and Web surfing.

The system also troubles some Internet service providers, who are loath to see outside software plugged into their systems. In many cases, the FBI keeps the secret Carnivore computer system in a locked cage on theprovider’s premises, with agents making daily visits to retrieve the data captured from the provider’s network. But legal challenges to the use of Carnivore are few, and judges’ rulings remain sealed because of the secretive nature of the investigations."

Dan Gillmor Draconian cyber-surveillance near in Britain
"BRITAIN'S Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has been talking up the Internet and technology, vowing to bring the United Kingdom firmly into the emerging digital economy and culture. Yet despite real progress toward this worthy goal, Blair's Labor government is undermining its promise with proposals for pervasive, intrusive cyber-surveillance -- quite possibly the most Draconian in the Western world.

The legislation is called the Regulation of Investigatory Powers bill, or RIP, and its passage in Parliament may be imminent. Growing recognition of the bill's potentially disastrous impact has triggered some second thoughts. But the government is pressing ahead, and foes of the legislation say their chances of heading it off remain, at best, 50-50."

"Internet service providers don't like the bill. Some, but not all, would be required to install equipment allowing the government to tap communications in something close to real time. The government hasn't explained very well why a criminal with even half a brain would use such an ISP instead of a provider that wasn't part of the surveillance network.

One ISP told the Independent newspaper that it was exploring a move offshore if the bill passes. Its clients include unions and activist non-governmental organizations that have a rational concern of unbridled government power."

Salon Can a labeling system protect your privacy?
"P3P, the new Internet privacy protocol unveiled last month by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), has been both lauded as the answer to everyone's privacy worries and castigated as a Trojan horse that will divert public attention from real problems. The truth is, it's neither. It's merely a potentially nifty tool that might help ensure privacy in cyberspace -- if the government gets its act together.

"But P3P isn't technology, it's politics. The Clinton administration and companies such as Microsoft are all set to use P3P as the latest excuse to promote their campaign of "industry self-regulation" and delay meaningful legislation on Internet privacy."

"Ultimately, though, Americans shouldn't be put in the position of having to decide whether or not they want to give up their privacy in order to partake in the pleasure of viewing pages on the Internet: We should have base-level privacy protections in law. We do this in other areas, such as food, drugs and the environment. Likewise, there should be certain privacy guarantees that are fundamental to our society; privacy guarantees such as the right to see information that a company has collected on you and the right to have erroneous information expunged.

P3P can't create these rights and it can't enforce them. But P3P will make it easier to cut through the legalese and tell the difference between Web sites that are truly committed to protecting privacy and those that are information sharks -- provided, of course, that both kinds of Web sites post P3P policies that are comprehensive and accurate. And, of course, there's a fat chance of that happening without meaningful legislation."

redux [04.30.00]
The New York Times Magazine The Eroded Self
[requires 'free' registration]
"A liberal state should respect the distinction between public and private speech because it recognizes that the ability to expose in some contexts aspects of our identity that we conceal in other contexts is indispensable to freedom, friendship, even love. Friendship and romantic love can't be achieved without intimacy, and intimacy, in turn, depends upon the selective and voluntary disclosure of personal information that we don't share with everyone else. Moreover...privacy is also necessary for the development of human individuality. Any writer will understand the importance of reflective solitude in refining arguments and making unexpected connections: in an odd but widely shared experience, many of us seem to have our best ideas when we are in the shower. Indeed, studies of creativity show that it's during periods of daydreaming and seclusion that the most creative thought takes place, as individuals allow ideas and impressions to run freely through their minds without fear that their untested thoughts will be exposed and taken out of context. "

"We are trained in this country to think of all concealment as a form of hypocrisy. But perhaps we are about to learn how much may be lost in a culture of transparency -- the capacity for creativity and eccentricity, for the development of self and soul, for understanding, friendship and even love. There is nothing inevitable about the erosion of privacy in cyberspace, just as there is nothing inevitable about its reconstruction. We have the ability to rebuild some of the private spaces we have lost. What we need now is the will."

Salon Twilight of the crypto-geeks
"Neal Stephenson, a writer with a cultlike following among the technologically minded and author of the classic "Snowcrash," has given an over-long, hugely digressive -- and brilliant -- speech. After many, many turns and a deep stack of points and stories, Stephenson gets around to saying that the best defense for one's privacy and personal integrity turns out to be not cryptography but, what do you know, "social structures." He is not explicit about the exact nature of these structures, but from the slides that follow, we get a sense of every sort of social relationship from neighborly friendliness to political parties. The slides show drawings of small circles representing areas of social trust. The circles widen and merge, to create a field of autonomy, a trusted space.

Stephenson is making a point about code: Without a sociopolitical context, cryptography is not going to protect you. He singles out PGP for criticism, saying that relying on the encryption scheme is like trying to protect your house with a fence consisting of a single, very tall picket. A slide shows the lone picket rising into the sky, a bird considering it with bulging eyes."

Strange Connections Little Blue Folders
"The Web is big. A billion pages big, according to a recent study by Inktomi and the NEC Research Institute. It's the ultimate testing ground for information retrieval technologies."

"If your search engine can automatically bring order to this overwhelming global mess of stuff, just think what it can do for a single web site or intranet. No more agonizing over the design of topical hierarchies. No more worrying about how you'll afford your growing staff of information architects. Just sit back and let the software work its magic.

"Perhaps the biggest problem with these automated approaches to classification is the fact that they're completely content-centric. They focus solely on organizing the stuff inside the folders, ignoring the broader information ecology.

"The key to success in designing information architecture solutions for really large web sites and intranets is to intelligently combine manual AND automated approaches."

redux [06.29.00]
The New York Times The Search Engine as Cyborg
[requires 'free' registration]
"Five ears ago, search engines seemed like the Web's salvation. Today, they need some saviors of their own."

"It is not just the vastness of the Web that is causing problems. Consider the way people search: Typical users enter single keywords, cross their fingers and hit the search buttons. And when they are faced with lists of 1,000 results, they usually click on the first few options instead of refining their searches by adding keywords or trying new terms.

The confluence of technological limitations and simple searching methods means that only two kinds of online searchers are well served: those looking for very popular terms and those who are using uncommon words to hunt for specific things. But the majority of searchers, whose requests fall somewhere between, are finding searching as frustrating as ever.

To cope, many search engines have concluded that simply indexing more pages is not the answer. Instead, they have decided to rely on the one resource that was once considered a cop-out: human judgment. Search engines have become more like cyborgs, part human, part machine."

First Monday The Work of Information Mediators: A Comparison of Librarians and Intelligent Software Agents
"Intelligent software agents promise to traverse and organize information spaces for us, alert us, remind us, call for a refrigerator repair-person, communicate with each other ... to fundamentally alter how we accomplish many of our daily tasks. These red-hot and revolutionary software critters have a lot to learn from their closest human peers: librarians. As I read and think about how intelligent systems reason, search, classify, and filter information, I'm struck repeatedly with how librarians do exactly these same tasks. Both act as information mediators for the end user: both negotiate information spaces and retrieve information relevant to a particular user or goal. Librarians have been efficiently accomplishing many of the tasks at which the artificial intelligence community is now working to make software agents competent. Therefore, the development of software agents can be informed by a look at how human information agents do their work.

This paper will examine the characteristics of agency, the work of librarians as information mediators, the differences between human and software agents, the possible tasks for software agents in libraries, and speculate on the future of human and software agency."

redux [06.15.00]
The New York Times The Library as the Latest Web Venture
[requires 'free' registration]
"When Carrie Larkworthy, a student at Harvard University, is faced with a research project, getting a book out of the library is the last thing on her mind. Instead she sits in her dormitory room and logs onto the Web, starting with Harvard's online system for searching and retrieving journal articles. "I hate the library, so I try to avoid it," Ms. Larkworthy said. "It's such a big facility that you have to search through.""

""...But new efforts are afoot to change that. Several companies are racing to put the full texts of hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books, old and new, on the Web."

"These electronic library projects are not attempts to compete with the budding electronic book industry, which offers books for downloading to handheld devices and is focused on popular fiction, like Stephen King's recent Web-only novella, "Riding the Bullet," and on other newly published trade books. The library projects have very little to do with the debate over the promise or pitfalls of gadgets that let people read novels electronically from the comfort of their beds.

In fact, the new effort to build an electronic library is not about reading at all. It is about the power of electronic searching."

Digital LIbrary Magazine Who Is Going to Mine Digital Library Resources? And How?
To partially answer the questions raised in the title of this paper -- "Who is going to mine digital library resources? And how?" -- today’s end-users are not capable of mining today’s digital libraries, let alone the more comprehensive digital libraries of the foreseeable future."

"Today’s attention to database creation and better search engines fails to address a critical consumer need. Better digital libraries and more powerful search engines will not get quality materials into the hands of the end-user. Developers of digital libraries must work with content experts to develop an array of information products that help users identify and understand the available resources."

redux [01.31.00]
O'Reilly News An Interview with Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville
"As a friend of ours once said, information architecture is similar to chronic fatigue syndrome. We often don't know what's wrong or how to fix it, so we endure."

Washinton Post Poor in Latin America Embrace Net's Promise
"Until a brilliantly sunny day when the Internet reached this Ashaninka Indian village in central Peru, tribal leader Oswaldo Rosas could think of few benefits modern life had brought his people.

Poverty and disease had debased and decimated them since British missionaries brought the first link to the outside world 81 years ago. As recently as the early 1990s, communist guerrillas had forced some Ashaninka into slavery. Even after the Peruvian army defeated the insurgents, life in this thatched hut settlement with no electricity or running water remained a grueling struggle.

It still is, but as the incongruent buzz of a computer fired up in Rosas's hut--now doubling as a tribal cybercafe--the somber 30-year-old leader could not repress a smile. "This," he said, pointing to the machine, "is the first real chance they have ever given my people.""

""Calep, 15, who hovered by the humming unit covered with a brightly hued Indian blanket here in Marankiari Bajo, would agree. His village computer, he said, has brought "the hope that I won't be poor for the rest of my life."

Calep wants to be a computer programmer. He is not naive enough to think one computer will be his ticket out of poverty. But he is not cynical enough to rule it out.

"I've never gone very far from my village, but I've [chatted] with kids [on the Internet] in places like Canada," he said. "Now I think anything is possible.""

redux [05.14.00]
Netfuture I'm Glad The Internet 'Corrodes' My Culture
"I have spent my whole life in Corrientes, Argentina. Even as it is a state-capital and my family is relatively well-off, there are tons of cultural treasures that I couldn't have known if it wasn't for the Net, and not only knowledge or information, but whole mental frames: a passionate, whole-hearted love for science and philosophy, self-respect as a computer geek, excellent non-contemporary thinking (like Chesterton's, Voltaire's or Shaw's), non-hispanoameric poetry, enlightenment values and, yes, all kinds of erotic information and art (OK, pornography, too :), along with lots of other things.

Those things, althought mostly intellectual in nature, have, as you have pointed, corroded my "native" culture, to the point that I feel more at ease with Scientific American, the Need to Know e-zine, the Linux scene or the Discordian(-like) humor|philosophy. I still have my friends, my girlfriend and my family here, but I don't think I share my culture with them anymore (not that this started wholly with the Net; I have read Asimov from age 6, programmed from age 7, &c., but the richness of the Net has deepened it to the point of making myself councious of it).

It has its social and psychological side effects, but I wouldn't go back for all the group status of the world. I like this culture a lot more than my "native" one, for sheer deepness, meaning and beauty."

The Freedom Forum Katz: geek and proud
""It's appealing to me," Katz added, "that people who have always been perceived as outcasts, marginalized, different, have all of a sudden become the only people who understand how the world works. And you can see it's freaking out the rest of the world."

"These kids have done something unprecedented in the world, which is they have created this rich, diverse and critically important universe almost by themselves — without help or support from any of these other institutions. What they've done is now becoming one of the most significant social institutions in the world, and everyone else is trying to figure out what's happened."

"This is the first time I can think of that a culture of kids understands so much more than any adults about something so important. Sometimes I think if you're not 15 or 16, you're already beginning to fall behind in this culture.""

redux [04.23.00]
The New York Times When Villages Go Global: How a Byte of Knowledge Can Be Dangerous, Too
[requires 'free' registration]
"The prospects seemed bright when the Internet was recently introduced in a remote part of the mountainous Cotopoxi region in Ecuador. Under the guidance of aid workers, Quichua-speaking peasants planned to gather crop information and sell their crafts over the Web.

Soon, though, it was discovered that some of the men were using the computer to visit pornographic sites. "

"Dismayed, the women began to question how the men were treating them, and a debate ensued over the common practice of beating women. Although use of the Internet was later curtailed, its introduction unexpectedly generated discussion on a once taboo topic.

"The changes created by the Internet in rich industrialized nations are well known, affecting everything from how people date to how they work. But less is known about the impact on societies with limited contact with the rest of the world. As such experiments multiply, at least one outcome seems certain: the way people in these communities relate to each other and with the world is likely to be altered forever."

CNN.Com Company aims to preserve Web history
"The Internet provides a unique glimpse into the lives of ordinary people, much like newspapers of old, but little is being done to preserve Web pages for future historians. One non-profit company is trying to change that.

"We have a shadow of the world that we're able to capture and make available to the future," said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive.

"Why save the entire Internet, when some would argue that most of it is junk?

Referring to newspapers of the past, Kahle said, "If we had been selective, we probably would have kept all the articles and thrown away those ads, but it's the ads that the historians really like. That's what of what life was like."

The Internet Archive Why the Archive Is Building an ‘Internet Library’
"Libraries exist to preserve society’s cultural artifacts and to provide access to them. If libraries are to continue to foster education and scholarship in this era of digital technology, it’s essential for them to extend those functions into the digital world."

"The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet — a new medium with major historical significance — from disappearing into the past. Collaborating with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, we are working to permanently preserve a record of public material.

Open and free access to literature and other writings has long been considered essential to education and to the maintenance of an open society. Public and philanthropic enterprises have supported it through the ages.

The Internet Archive is opening its collections to researchers, historians, and scholars to ensure that they have free and permanent access to public materials. The Archive has no vested interest in the discoveries of the users of its collections, nor is it a grant-making organization."

Mappa Mundi Conceptual Map of Net Spaces - Circa'94
"It is important to realise that the Internet is not just the Web. Many people are unaware that the Internet in fact provides a rich array of services beyond those beginning with WWW. I'm a geographer so I like to think of these as different information spaces, with differing virtual 'geographies'. A good way to get a information spaces of the Internet, their shape, size, landmarks and interconnections, is to map them. One of my favourite conceptual maps of net spaces was drawn back in 1994 by John December."

"The map was drawn at the end of 1994 and the nature of the Internet has changed markedly since then, with certain information spaces dying off as they fall out of favour with users, particularly WAIS and Gopher. Undoubtedly, the biggest change has been the inexorable and exponential growth of Web space which would now be a huge blue blob on the map, squeezing and submerging many other information spaces. For many end-users the Web, seen through the browser interface, is the only information space, although e-mail is still the most widely used. But even here, the Web is coming to dominate with the growing popularity of Web-based e-mail services like Hotmail.

Other important information spaces within the global Internet have evolved and grown to prominence since December drew his map. Notable examples include, instant messaging (e.g. ICQ), chat environments (e.g. IRC), multi-user game spaces (e.g. Quake) and streaming media (e.g. RealNetworks, MP3s). Also, large intranets have proliferated, creating important private information spaces, which are largely unseen from the outside and are therefore difficult to quantify and map. While at the scale of the networks of the Matrix, John December commented to me, via e-mail, that since 1994 there has been "the swallowing up of all alternate networks into the Internet…everyone thinks of only the Internet as the online world.""

Council on Library and Information Sources Avoiding Technological Quicksand: Finding a Viable Technical Foundation for Digital Preservation
"There is as yet no viable long-term strategy to ensure that digital information will be readable in the future. Digital documents are vulnerable to loss via the decay and obsolescence of the media on which they are stored, and they become inaccessible and unreadable when the software needed to interpret them, or the hardware on which that software runs, becomes obsolete and is lost. Preserving digital documents may require substantial new investments, since the scope of this problem extends beyond the traditional library domain, affecting such things as government records, environmental and scientific baseline data, documentation of toxic waste disposal, medical records, corporate data, and electronic-commerce transactions."

BBC Tiny disk to record posterity
"New ways of storing information in a way that can be understood thousands of years from now have been discussed at a conference in the United States.

Scientists, librarians, technologists, anthropologists and others, with the backing of the Long Now Foundation, are considering the best way to ensure that the culture and heritage of the 21st Century are not forgotten.

The foundation has developed a small metal disk which can store hundreds of thousands of words.

Called the Rosetta disk, experts hope it will provide our descendants with details of how we live today."

USA Today Japan pioneers brave new wireless world
"Look around this city for a minute and a dozen people - all staring at their mobile phone screens - come into focus.

Takoryo Horii, 26, an office assistant, reads the headline news. Yurino Akamime, 19, taps short e-mails. Kouchi Kanda, 25, a waiter, kills time looking for a better job on the Internet postings accessed via phone.

"It's communication anytime, anywhere," Akamime says."

redux [05.14.00]
The New York Times Rising Internet Use Quietly Transforms Way Japanese Live
[requires 'free' registration]
""The use of the Internet here has started more as a social thing that in the end is going to have enormous implications," said Jiro Kokuryo, a professor at Keio University's business school, who specializes in e-commerce and information systems. "It is changing people's point of view and empowering them to challenge traditional ways of doing things."

Groups that have traditionally had little influence here are finding their voices and taking action on the Internet. Farmers like the Kimuras escape the huge, bureaucratic distribution system that has been sucking up their profits. Working mothers are banding together to form business ventures. Small companies are using the Internet to expand business and decrease reliance on a primary corporate customer. These are all revolutionary developments by Japanese standards, and not limited to marginal players."

redux [04.23.00]
The New York Times When Villages Go Global: How a Byte of Knowledge Can Be Dangerous, Too
[requires 'free' registration]
"The prospects seemed bright when the Internet was recently introduced in a remote part of the mountainous Cotopoxi region in Ecuador. Under the guidance of aid workers, Quichua-speaking peasants planned to gather crop information and sell their crafts over the Web.

Soon, though, it was discovered that some of the men were using the computer to visit pornographic sites. "

"Dismayed, the women began to question how the men were treating them, and a debate ensued over the common practice of beating women. Although use of the Internet was later curtailed, its introduction unexpectedly generated discussion on a once taboo topic.

"The changes created by the Internet in rich industrialized nations are well known, affecting everything from how people date to how they work. But less is known about the impact on societies with limited contact with the rest of the world. As such experiments multiply, at least one outcome seems certain: the way people in these communities relate to each other and with the world is likely to be altered forever."

The New York Times Manila's Talk of the Town Is Text Messaging
[requires 'free' registration]
"Muslim insurgents battling Philippine troops in the south have a new weapon. When the shelling and gunfire let up, they send a barrage of scathing insults to Manila's forces by cell phone.

"There is a text war among the MILF and our forces," said Brig. Gen. Eliseo Rio Jr., referring to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the larger of two rebel groups fighting for an independent state. "Our soldiers are texting insults to the MILF. And the MILF are sending the insults back." ."

"Sending e-mail on mobile phones, has also taken off in richer parts of the world: Europe, especially in Scandinavia, and in Japan and other East Asian countries, particularly among teen-agers. But in the Philippines, where incomes are far lower, it is even more popular. And it has spawned an entire subculture, complete with its own vocabulary, etiquette and tactical uses. It has become particularly popular here, in large part because text messaging is cheap while traditional telephone service is spotty and Internet access by computer is expensive."

nzoom.com Keep Kids off Computers - Educators
"A growing number of experts are recommending that young children not be allowed on computers for any reason at all. These people are not technophobes, but rather psychologists and educators who have taken a cold, hard look at the issue of kids and computers and found potential problems in the mix.

""The Internet," [Theodore Roszak, a history professor and author of The Cult of Information] recently told The Dallas Morning News, "offers electronic graffiti. The idea that they should be swimming in a sea of information is idiotic. The essence of thinking is mastering ideas."

Said another way, computer education may be imparting technical skills, but it is not imparting knowledge. Clifford Stoll, the author of High-Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don't Belong in the Classroom, says that the instant gratification involved in downloading information off the Internet - to which 94 per cent of America's public schools are now connected - "discourages study, reflection, and observation"."

NetFuture TECHNOLOGY LITERACY : Four Guiding Principles for Educators and Parents
""Technology literacy" is increasingly becoming an explicit goal of schools throughout the country. But few educators, parents, or policymakers have a clear idea of what that phrase means."

"In a democracy, the point of technology literacy should be to prepare students to be morally responsible citizens, actively participating in creating the nation's technological future, rather than merely reacting to it as passive consumers. All technologies, after all, have social impacts and many have had profound moral and political repercussions as well. No technology is the result of inevitable forces. Its design and its pattern of use reflect a series of human choices -- some explicit and some tacit. For that reason, it is possible to imagine alternative designs and alternative patterns of use that might have resulted -- and might yet result -- from different choices.

Helping all students prepare to take part in this kind of democratic decision-making is a major new challenge for educators precisely because advanced technologies have become so dominant in our culture. Ultimately, how well our schools and colleges educate students for this kind of thoughtful technological citizenship is far more critical to the future of democracy than how well they train students to operate the latest generation of computers."

First Monday Technology and Education: Between Chaos and Order
"Technology in all forms, young and old or simple and complex, can be potent tools that engage learners in meta-cognitive reflection. These tools engage learners to rethink their old beliefs, knowledge, and understandings. These tools might allow learners to compare new ideas with other individuals to assess whether new concepts and ideas are plausible and fruitful. Technologies can be educators' tools in finding creative ways that encourage students to self-test, self-question, and self-regulate learning in helping them to create solutions to complex problems. Educators need to help students realize that understanding about knowledge and beliefs are essential to human growth and development. Technologies should not estrange us from our humanity or the noble profession of educating competent citizens. We should not become "high-tech, self-driven slaves to technology.

"Protecting the embodiment of quality education encompasses learning to think, learning to teach, and learning to lead creatively, not only within the classroom (virtual and traditional) but also throughout all institutions of higher education."

Slashdot Are Computers in Classrooms Bad for Learning

The New York Times Digital Economy's Demand for Steady Power Strains Utilities
[requires 'free' registration]
"Read-Rite's milling machine is indicative of a long-running, but accelerating problem: the nation's electrical power supply system is not up to the task of meeting the digital economy's needs. While the utility industry has historically prided itself on delivering fairly stable power 99.9 percent of the time, today's computerized economy is demanding even fewer interruptions and a much steadier current.

That is because electricity is more than just energy for computers -- it is the medium they use to do their job. Rapid, minute changes in voltage represent the ones and zeros that make up digital information.

Those patterns are ultimately translated into a human voice during a phone call, a calculation during a banking transaction, a dose of radiation during cancer therapy or a photo of a new baby e-mailed to scattered relatives. Any disruption in the power supply that compromises the processor's ability to manage those voltages can lead to lost data or system crashes."

The Standard Growing Pains
"After three straight years of spectacular growth, America Online's three buildings in Fairfax County, Va., were so crammed with young workers that company officials worried about visits from the fire marshal. "We had people sitting out in hallways," remembers Faith Denault, AOL's vice president of facilities and business services. Denault scoured northern Virginia for space and soon settled on a 154-acre tract of land in rural Loudoun County to build its sprawling headquarters that now includes five "creative centers," hundreds of servers and more than 3,000 employees. AOL's move in 1996, as well as cheap land, tax breaks and the proximity to a new toll road and Dulles International Airport, was enough to trigger an explosion of growth in the county, from 124 high-tech firms to 294 today.

"But the residents of Loudoun County are not so thrilled about the impact of the high-tech invasion. Endless traffic snarls the roads and a slew of new roadside strip malls and matching subdivisions is rapidly turning this charming and historic area into an overbuilt eyesore. "We're bringing people in at such a rate that we cannot absorb them," says Loudoun County Supervisor James Burton. "A thousand people a month are moving in, and one-third are children. We're building two or three classrooms a week, and our debt is piling up like crazy."

USA Today Internet saps California's power grid
"As California's tech-savvy businesses and households plug into an increasingly wired economy, the state's power system is sputtering like a frayed electrical cord."

"Computers consume about 13% of the nation's power, according to EPRI Corp., a Palo Alto research and development group that studies the utility industry.

The Internet's borderless community also is taxing U.S. power suppliers because about 80% of online traffic comes through this country.

To handle all the Internet action, businesses are turning entire offices into warehouses for the powerful computer servers and peripheral equipment needed to navigate networks. These so-called ''server farms'' consume 10 to 12 times more power than the traditional office building filled with human workers. "

Online Journalism Review The Final Days of Privacy
"The recent admission by the White House drug office that it routinely dropped "cookies" onto the hard drives of those who accessed its Web site would have seemed, in more innocent times, like a friendly gesture. It's difficult to think of cookies as menacing. But in the brave new world of the Internet, where privacy has been sacrificed on the altar of a technologically fueled avarice, the cookies being referred to are more accurately thought of as creepy crawlers--small text files inserted surreptitiously into your computer to stalk your every movement on the Internet."

"In this case, the spying was done by a government agency, but it's a practice common to the way business--including the Los Angeles Times Web site--is conducted on the Internet. DoubleClick, the private company that did the Drug Enforcement Administration's snooping, routinely gathers such data for business use and already has profiles of the vital statistics, habits and tastes of 100 million Americans."

"The goal of the snooper industry is to use any means--cookies are one, Web bugs invisible to the naked eye embedded in the graphics of Web pages you visit are another--to pierce that shell of privacy that humans erect for their basic sense of security. Widespread paranoia can be expected to be the norm when the books you buy, the songs you hear, the medical advice you seek, your religious, political and social beliefs and financial holdings become the stuff of common currency available to all who snoop, whether for profit or pursuits more perverse."

politechbot DoubleClick tracks porn sites
"We all know by now that when we log on to the Internet and surf the World Wide Web from the privacy of our homes, such privacy is largely an illusion. After all, websites keep track of their visitors, bulletin-board postings are archived, and even e-mail is not safe from prying eyes.

But the state of privacy on the Web may be worse than you imagine. A new generation of technology is making it easier for marketers and Web hosts to track us without our knowledge. Moreover, these tracking devices are showing up in places where many people may be most sensitive about guarding their privacy: pornography and medical sites."

"DoubleClick is an online advertising agency that buys and places banner-ad space for its clients. But it adds another layer of service, too it keeps track of who views and clicks on those banners, and now, with Web bugs, it can track people on pages without banner ads. DoubleClick's pioneering role on the Internet has earned it the adoration of Wall Street, but the enmity of privacy advocates, who are concerned that the company is building a mammoth database that profiles people s lives on the Web in elaborate detail."

News.Com Failed dot-coms may be selling your private information
"Some dot-com failures are resorting to selling information their customers may have thought would remain under lock and key as they scramble to find assets that can be sold to appease creditors.

At least three companies that have recently failed, Boo.com, Toysmart and CraftShop.com, have either sold or are trying to sell highly sought-after customer data that could include information such as phone and credit card numbers, home addresses, and even statistics on shopping habits."

"Companies on the Internet are not alone in collecting data about customers or turning it over to new owners following bankruptcies or mergers. For example, it is routine for banks and hospitals to transfer intimate consumer or patient data following an acquisition.

However, the assurance of privacy on the Net is particularly troubling for many consumers, because they have only a vague notion about the wealth of information that can be gathered, analyzed and transmitted to third parties. "

Salon Microsoft's .Net: Visionary or vaporware?
"My first thought on hearing last week that Microsoft has dubbed its new technology scheme ".Net" was, There they go again. "

"Microsoft's gamble on XML as the Net's next-generation lingua franca makes bold sense. But the company's plan to be all things to all people on all devices smacks of a lack of focus.

While Microsoft is fumbling around trying to get every piece of its giant universal everything-machine to work together, the next Napster developer will be inventing some specific cool tool that works today and captures the fancy of millions. While Gates places his chips all over the table, others will place their bets on the winning squares -- and quite possibly walk off with the game.

Of course, at that point Microsoft can still revert to Plan B: What it hasn't built, it can always buy."

Dan Gillmor .Net initiative is close to all Microsoft, all the time
"TALK about integration. The Microsoft.Net (pronounced dot-net) initiative is the ultimate merger of the Windows operating system, Microsoft's other core products and just about everything else -- including the Internet itself.

It's monumentally Microsoft-centric, far more than necessary. It's also a move in the right direction, if you have accepted that the Internet has become the most important computing platform of all and that software is morphing into Net-based services."

"Anyone who doubted the company's intention to use its desktop monopoly as leverage in the next generation of computing just isn't paying attention. The .Net platform isn't all Microsoft, all the time, but it's close.

Despite some share-the-wealth rhetoric from Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, the overall message seemed clear enough to me: You won't be required to use Windows and other Microsoft products, but if you don't, you'll fall irretrievably behind the curve."