Wired News High-Tech Voting Gets Thumbs Up

"Few problems emerged in early voting Tuesday with touchscreen and other high-tech voting machines that made their full-scale debut in more than 200 counties nationwide."

""It's great. I've been voting for a lot more years than I care to say," Joe Penley of Barnesville raved. "It's almost too simple. My 4-year-old granddaughter could do it. It's hard to make errors if you just follow instructions.""

Salon Voting into the void

"Why paper over machines? It's an odd thing to hear in the Internet age, but these technologists insist that marking data on dead trees, rather than suspending choices in silicon, is the best way to ensure America's democracy. Paper is bug-free, it can be made tamper-resistant, and it's readable by most humans. It has a proven record. Mercuri, who, after all, has a day job that requires her to be bullish on computers, says that electronic systems simply aren't up to the job of voting. "The only thing the computer is good for," she says, "is as a fancy ballot printer.""

redux [11.01.00]
CNN Online voting debate rages in run-up to election

"The U.S. elections on Tuesday will not only pick a president but could herald the start of a new American revolution as online voting tests in California and Arizona provide a glimpse of democracy in cyberspace.

But is the Internet the 21st century's land of the free and home of the brave?

Proponents claim that voting with just a click of a mouse will spark a dramatic reversal in dwindling American voter participation, while opponents say it opens a Pandora's box of problems ranging from threatened national security to introducing a new class division to the electoral process."

Information Technology and Politics Can Technology Enhance Democracy? The Doubters' Answer

Wilhelm's Democracy in a Digital Age has the most thorough and sensible review of contemporary thought on the social construction of technology and the technological construction of society. He groups authors and pundits as neofuturists, dystopians, and technorealists, but also saunters by Derrida, Heidegger, and Habermas. He offers a concise grouping of the ways public communication may be facilitated or inhibited by conducting politics online. First, public communication will be affected by the skills and resources people bring to the process of engagement. Second, it will be affected by the distribution of computing resources across familiar categories of social inequality - race, gender and class. Third, people will have to commit to a deliberative process that involves subjecting one's opinions to public scrutiny and validation. Finally, the technical design of software applications, network architecture and hardware devices will affect the quality and quantity of political engagement online. His conclusion, in line with his peers, is that political communication online is unraveling the democratic character of the public sphere. Barriers to entry into the digitally-mediated public sphere are high, the online public does not represent or reflect the American public, the speed of the networked democracy undermines the useful slow pace of democratic decision making, and the public sphere itself is giving way to market pressures, pay-per-use services and privately owned media environments. However, barriers to entry are actually dropping because of market pressures, the online public is becoming demographically representative, and speeding up the deliberative process may weaken the political power of social elites."

Netfuture Will the Internet be bad for democracy?

"It is easy to romanticize the past of democracy as Athenian debates in front of an involved citizenry, and to believe that its return by electronic means is nigh. A quick look in the rear-view mirror at radio and then TV is sobering. Here, too, the new media were heralded as harbingers of a new and improved political dialogue. But the reality of those media has been one of cacophony, fragmentation, increasing cost, and declining value of "hard" information.

The Internet makes it easier to gather and assemble information, to deliberate and to express oneself, and to organize and coordinate action. The Internet can mobilize hard-to-reach groups, and it has unleashed much energy and creativity. Obviously there will be some shining success stories. But it would be naive to cling to the image of the early Internet -- nonprofit, cooperative, and free -- and ignore that it is becoming a commercial medium, like commercial broadcasting that replaced amateur ham radio. If anything, the Internet will lead to less stability, more fragmentation, less ability to fashion consensus, more interest-group pluralism. High-capacity computers connected to high-speed networks are no remedies for flaws in a political system. There is no quick techno- fix.

The Internet does not create a Jeffersonian democracy. It will not revive Tocqueville's Jacksonian America. It is not Lincoln-Douglas. It is not Athens, nor Appenzell. It is less of a democracy than those low-tech places. But, of course, none of these places really existed either, except as a goal, a concept, an inspiration. And in that sense, the hopes vested in the Internet are a new link in a chain of hope. Maybe naive, but certainly ennobling."

The Boston Globe Online music sales plummet

"When Napster, the seminal file-swapping service, tempted people with the ability to pluck copyrighted songs from the Internet for free, the music recording industry said its sales would suffer. Napster has since been shuttered, but a report scheduled for release today suggests that the proliferation of other file-swapping services, such as Kazaa, has done exactly what the recording industry said it would."

"Peter Daboll, president of ComScore, acknowledged the quality of music might have played a role in the slumping music sales, as the popularity of Britney Spears and boy bands like 'N Sync has waned with no clear successors driving sales. But Daboll and record labels place most of the blame on illicit file-swapping services that have taken the place of the defunct Napster."

redux [10.23.02]
USA Today Music industry spins falsehood

"On the first day I posted downloadable music, my merchandise sales tripled, and they have stayed that way ever since. I'm not about to become a zillionaire as a result, but I am making more money. At a time when radio playlists are tighter and any kind of exposure is hard to come by, 365,000 copies of my work now will be heard. Even if only 3% of those people come to concerts or buy my CDs, I've gained about 10,000 new fans this year.

That's how artists become successful: exposure. Without exposure, no one comes to shows, and no one buys CDs. After 37 years as a recording artist, when people write to tell me that they came to my concert because they downloaded a song and got curious, I am thrilled."

redux [06.14.02]
Wired News Record Biz Has Burning Question

"Traditional music pirates, who burned and sold bootlegs long before the days of Napster, continue to cost the music industry billions of dollars every year.

But the same technologies that pirates use to steal -- -- file sharing, CD-burning and computers -- are driving legitimate sales by consumers, according to research from market research company Ipsos-Reid."

redux [05.06.02]
The New York Times Access to Free Online Music Is Seen as a Boost to Sales
[requires 'free' registration]

"Disputing the position held by the major record companies, a report issued on Friday found that people who use file-sharing networks to obtain music at no charge over the Internet are more likely to have increased their spending on music than are average online music fans."

""File-sharing is a net positive technology" in spurring sales, said Aram Sinnreich, author of the Jupiter report, explaining that people who download music online often are, in effect, sampling it. "It gets people enthusiastic about new and catalog music.""

redux [04.24.02]
Newsbytes Long-Time File-Swappers Buy More Music, Not Less - Jupiter

"Contrary to charges that Internet song-swapping is killing the music industry, new Jupiter Media Metrix research contends that experienced online song-swappers are more likely to buy new albums than average music fans, not less."

redux [04.17.02]
SFGate New musical acts get lift from Internet

""Our data show that the dominance of a few music superstars is decreasing, and their hold on music sales is slipping," said Sudip Bhattacharjee of the University of Connecticut's School of Business. "This is definitely good news for up-and-coming artists and groups, who now have a better chance at chart success because of (new) technologies" such as programs that allow users to download songs for free from the Internet."

""Superstars just don't have the sustaining power they used to," said Gopal, who headed the research team. "They get knocked off by new artists who get sampled over the Internet.""

The New York Times Music Services Aren't Napster, but the Industry Still Cries Foul
[requires 'free' registration]

"The record industry's legal victory over Napster last year has neither stopped the trading of free music online nor halted a slide in music sales."

"Underscoring the industry's woes, a survey released today by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, an international record industry trade group, found that revenue from global music sales fell 5 percent in 2001, to $33.7 billion."

redux [03.18.02]
Matt Haughey The future of music

"Everyone with a computer I know uses them, rips them from their CDs, and shares them with others. Napster (and later on, Kazaa) built massive worldwide networks based on the sharing of these files, spreading terabytes of files to millions of users. And yet, you can't walk into a store anywhere in America and buy a physical form of media embedded with mp3s."

"Given the ubiquity of mp3s among consumers, the continued rise in popularity of the format despite anything that's been put in place to stop them, and the millions of dollars being spent on mp3 encoding/decoding software and hardware, I no longer think the RIAA operates solely on fear. At this point, they're simply running on stupidity."

redux [12.18.01]
Salon Don't steal music, pretty please

"Indeed, the pointless attempt to control copyrighted data every step of the way from musician's voice to listener's ear is the biggest roadblock to success for online music. Just as HBO doesn't try to stop you from taping its movies, so music sellers need to let go and trust their customers. Remove the incentives for people to steal, rather than imposing more technology that treats customers as would-be shoplifters. Even former BMG head Strauss Zelnick, who says he has no problem throwing big-time bootleggers in jail, agrees the industry's challenge is to come up with an attractive alternative to Aimster and its ilk. "We need to give consumers a service they want, at a price they're willing to pay," he told me in an interview this summer. "People don't like to think of themselves as criminals." But ironically, the more anti-theft hurdles crammed into the legal products, the more attractive the pirate alternatives become."

redux [07.21.00]
News.Com Study: Napster users buy more music

"Jupiter said it surveyed more than 2,200 online music fans about whether the money they spent on music purchases had increased, decreased or remained the same since they began visiting music destinations on the Web. People between the ages of 18 to 24 who spend less than $20 on music within a three-month period indicated that they were likely to remain at a constant purchasing level despite online music use. All other groups said they had increased spending as a result of online music use, Jupiter reported."

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."

The New York Times Magazine Mr. Ambassador
[requires 'free' registration]

"But now it is two years later, and on a muggy late summer evening, Eminem is performing before his fans in the Detroit suburbs, the last stop of his 2002 Anger Management Tour. A high point of the show is a song in which he exults in his role as universally despised spokesman for alienated Middle American youth. ''White America! I could be one of your kids!'' goes its hectoring refrain, insistently gaining in malevolence as if a furious mob were gearing up for a rampage. At its climax he vows to urinate on the White House lawn and hurls expletives at Lynne Cheney and Tipper Gore. But the roaring throng of 16,000 at the Palace of Auburn Hills is not angry. There is barely a whiff of pot in the air, let alone violence. It's a happy crowd, mixed in race and sex, that might just as well have congregated to cheer the Pistons, who also play at the Palace, or at a megachurch or a mall. Even some boomers are on hand (me among them), as well as a few smiling pre-PG-13 kids perched on their dads' shoulders. ''It's kind of strange,'' Eminem would tell me when I asked if he was noticing any difference in his audience of late. ''It used to range from 10 years old to 25. Now it seems to be from 5 years old to 55.''"

Urban Think Tank Is There A Gangsta Double Standard

"Eminem has been touted as a major talent for his gross content, while Black rap artists are still vilified for theirs. Eminem's lyrics are acceptable to a large portion of American, as are performers like Jim Carrey, Tom Green, and other obnoxious White men, all of whom have made millions from their lowbrow antics.

Unlike some Black rap artists who are appropriately deemed misogynist and homophobic; Eminem gets a pass from most critics on these offenses. The Washington Post's Gene Weingarten concedes that "Eminem is not overly respectful of women or homosexuals or competing recording artists or anyone not technically, Eminem." But, Weingarten adds, "Eminem is a hoot . . . A joke is a joke." A Manhattan writer was quoted in the New York Times as saying of Eminem, "I'm 42 and I have three children . . . I think he's a brilliant vocalist, a brilliant writer, and has something to say." Perhaps times have changed, but when Chuck D and his peers were rapping about having a state holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr., police misconduct, and the misery of ghetto life, they were deemed threats to America. Now some years later, a White rapper who refers to gays and women in the crudest of terms and seems to see rape and murder as recreational activities is a brilliant jokester."

AlterNet The Eminem Shtick

"Say what you will about redeeming social (or artistic) value: At its hard core, Eminem's poetics is pornography, and it's accorded the same privileges. Just as we've declared the XXX zone exempt from social thinking, we refuse to subject sexist rap to moral scrutiny. We crave a space free from the demands of equity, especially when it comes to women, whose rise has inspired much more ambivalence than most men are willing to admit. This is especially true in the middle class, where feminism has made its greatest impact. No wonder Eminem is so hot to suburban kids and Downtown alter cockers. He's as nasty as they wanna be.

Once you call this stuff cathartic, it's a small step to removing it from the world entirely. Eminem's music becomes an encapsulated experience, all the more heavily defended because it's a guilty pleasure."

The New York Times The Angry Appeal of Eminem Cuts Across Racial Lines
[requires 'free' registration]

"Jose Gallardeo, 16, a student at James Monroe High School in the South Bronx, says that Eminem's revenge fantasies, which have included raping his mother and killing his ex-wife, give him an edge over other rappers.

"It's the kind of music that makes you stop and say, `Is this dude for real?' " he said. "He's not like everybody else."

Mike Brisbain, 18, who lives in the Bronx River Houses, is unimpressed: "He needs to calm down with all that crazy white-boy stuff -- that fight music, yo. That's gonna get him hurt. He's a good lyricist. He should concentrate on that.""

Salon Money talks, Microsoft walks

"This is the way the Microsoft antitrust suit ends: Not with a bang but a whimper.

With their proposed settlement last autumn, the hollow men of the Bush Justice Department had already gutted whatever remnant of serious penalty or constraint against Microsoft that had been won during the five-year legal process. Now, with that settlement largely rubber-stamped by Federal District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the endless process is, if not over, close to a finale."

Business2.0 Microsoft Gets Its Wish

"Put another bottle of champagne in the fridge for Microsoft (MSFT) -- the company has another reason to celebrate. Just two weeks after Redmond reported a boffo 26 percent rise in quarterly revenue, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled Friday that the original settlement between Microsoft and the Department of Justice -- often referred to as the "Seattlement," because of its leniency toward Microsoft -- would largely suffice, thank you very much."

"Count on seeing Microsofties whooping it up in Seattle-area bars this weekend, but the official reaction was curt and to the point -- which didn't surprise IDC analyst Roger Kay. "If you're dealt an ace at a poker table, you don't say anything," Kay says. "Microsoft won't gloat too much over this; it's in their best interest to be magnanimous.""

The Economist Consultant, heal thyself

"IT IS as if a neutron bomb has hit the consulting industry. Pay a visit to your local management-consulting shop, and you will find that the building is intact but many of the people are gone. See the rows of empty desks, once filled with eager young MBAs. Read plaintive postings on www.vault.com, a yuppie website devoted to the rants and raves of the downturn. Listen to consultants, poor things, complain about having to work for nothing.

The past 12 months have been an annus horribilis for strategy consultants--the sort that advise top bosses on the bigger issues facing their firms."

redux [11.06.00]
Wired Magazine Brattitude Adjustment

""Tell me what you do," [CBS correspondent Bob] Simon insisted, "in English."

"We provide services to companies to help them win," [Razorfish cofounder Jeff] Dachis offered.

"So do trucking firms!" Simon snapped. Dachis seemed taken aback - the trucking remark was really uncalled for.

"What is it you do?" Simon pressed.

"Our talent is to do a certain thing, whereas the trucking firm..."

"Yes, but what is - what is it you do?"

"We radically transform businesses to invent and reinvent them," Dachis said. It was his best shot.

"That's still very vague," Simon said cheerily. He looked as if he might high-five his cameraman. A pause of several aeons ensued - too much for even the scientist. Kanarick stepped in to summarize the professional services sector in a way that Bob Simon, and perhaps the rest of America, might understand: "Business strategy," he said."

News.Com Defending the use of open source

"A new report reveals just how much the U.S. Department of Defense depends on open-source software and recommends steps to ensure that open source is recognized and accepted."

"The report published Monday found that what it calls free and open-source software (FOSS) "plays a more critical role in the (Defense Department) than has been generally recognized." The report also noted that if open source were banned, the department's security would plummet and costs would rise sharply."

redux [07.31.02]
News.Com Free speech, free beer and free software

"The experience of Sun and others is that open source provides ideal development and business models for today's Net Effect economy. It's not about free stuff; it's about enfranchising every user and development community member. Today's software innovations need this model more than ever before. With an open foundation, companies can gain their just compensation for their innovations "above the line," but the subtle lock-in offered by our traditional understanding of "standards" is largely avoided.

Most importantly, open source is not just about code; it is about community. You don't make a project open source just with a license. It takes the costly and time-consuming birthing of a community of code, a trusted gatekeeper function and a series of symbiotic commercial enterprises to make true open source. 21st century open source is not free."

redux [07.31.02]
Salon Same job. Different cubicle

""The way a lot of people see it is we were doing open-source before [VA Linux] and we've continued doing open source after VA Linux for the exact same reason: because we love to do it," Jennings says. "It was nice to get paid for it, but getting paid was always viewed as kind of a perk."

That many ex-VA Linux employees still get to hack for pay is probably the top reason so few complain when it comes to the former company. As the old high-tech saying goes, it's the pioneers who usually end up with the most arrows in their backs."

redux [05.17.02]
BusinessWeek Giant Steps for a Software Upstart

"A lot has changed for Linux in the past two years. True, the basic tenets of the rebellious open-source software-development movement popularized by coder Linus Torvalds remain largely intact. Loosely organized collectives, often from competing companies, collaborate to build software products that no one owns, with source code that anyone can view and alter. Any changes in the code are held by the community at large.

While such idealism worked fine in academia and among uber-geeks, it wasn't immune to market economics as the movement matured."

redux [12.09.01]
First Monday Code, Culture and Cash: The Fading Altruism of Open Source Development

"The nexus of open source development appears to have shifted to Europe over the last ten years. This paper explains why this trend undermines cultural arguments about "hacker ethics" and "post-scarcity" gift economies. It suggests that classical economic theory offers a more succinct explanation for the peculiar international distribution of open source development: hacking rises and falls inversely to its opportunity cost. This finding throws doubt on the Schumpeterian assumption that the efficiency of industrial systems can be measured without reference to the social institutions that bind them."

redux [11.21.00]
News.Com Open-source approach fades in tough times

"The ideological purity of the open-source software business is being diluted by a new era of pragmatism as start-ups adjust to the economic slump."

"Where is our business model if everyone else can copy it?" asked Holger Dyroff, former CEO and now director of sales for Linux software seller SuSE. "The question is where we can make money now. Nobody cared about profitability two years ago."

"The new thinking often involves a proprietary product that has been built on top of an open-source foundation--a situation that could be considered the best, or worst, of both worlds."

winterspeak.com Interview with Sleepycat President and CEO, Michael Olson

"How to make money with the GPL. How to promote and spread free software. How open source's experience advantage with developers gives companies a competitive edge. Sleepycat President and CEO Michael Olson shows us what happens when free software meets intelligent business strategy."

Eric S. Raymond The Magic Cauldron

"This paper analyzes the evolving economic substrate of the open-source phenomenon. We first explode some prevalent myths about the funding of program development and the price structure of software. We present a game-theory analysis of the stability of open-source cooperation. We present nine models for sustainable funding of open-source development; two non-profit, seven for-profit. We continue to develop a qualitative theory of when it is economically rational to be closed. We then examine some novel additional mechanisms the market is now inventing to fund for-profit open-source development, including the reinvention of the patronage system and task markets. We conclude with some tentative predictions of the future."

MSNBC Worries of a cyber war

"Politically motivated hack attacks are rising "sharply," London-based computer security firm mi2g said Tuesday, citing in particular the rise of what it called "Islamic interest hacking groups." And while political hacks account for just a fraction of all hacking activity, security experts worry that may soon change."

"October, mi2g said, has already qualified as the worst month for overt digital attacks since its records began in 1995, with an estimated 16,559 attacks carried out on systems and Web sites."

redux [09.18.02]
News.Com Government unveils cybersecurity plan

"CSIS analyst Arnaud de Borchgrave, a former editor-in-chief of the Washington Times and United Press International, warned that a "cyberattack" was just around the corner.

"It is later than we think. The next generation of transnational terrorists understands that a hand on a mouse can be more lethal than a finger on the trigger," said de Borchgrave, who co-authored a report that concluded: "Cyberattacks now arise whenever disputes occur anywhere in the world...Can cyberterrorism and cyberwar be far behind?""

redux [08.14.02]
ZDNet Is the U.S. headed for a cyberwar? I doubt it

"THE FIRST THOUGHT that comes to my mind when people mention cyberwar is: What kind of attack are they really talking about? We've seen Web page defacements traded between Palestinian and Israeli cyberactivists. The Yaha worm, thought to have originated in India, recently caused a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the Pakistani government's main Web site. In the grand scheme of things, however these are relatively minor inconveniences compared with a major military ground or air attack."

"No one has ever made it clear to me exactly what a cyberwar would entail--and I'm betting I'm not the only one who's confused here. "

The Register Mock cyberwar fails to end mock civilization

"A mock cyberwar enacted by faculty of the US Naval War College and analysts from Gartner does not appear to have fulfilled the Clancyesque predictions of mass devastation envisioned by the leading security paranoiacs of the Clinton and Bush Administrations.

The exercise, named "Digital Pearl Harbor," apparently in tribute to US CyberSecurity Czar and Chief Alarmist Richard Clarke, brought together a team of experts in several areas related to critical infrastructure for a three-day hackfest."

redux [07.23.02]
The Washington Post U.S. Cyber-Security Efforts Faulted

"Years after orders from the White House to beef up the security of the nation's most important computer systems, the government is having trouble identifying which organizations should be involved and how they should be coordinated, according to a new report."

"Even organizations already involved are slowly discovering the scope of the problems from an increasingly interconnected world."

redux [10.04.01]
First Monday Networks, Netwars, and the Fight for the Future

"Netwar is an emerging mode of conflict in which the protagonists - ranging from terrorist and criminal organizations on the dark side, to militant social activists on the bright side - use network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy, and technology attuned to the information age. The practice of netwar is well ahead of theory, as both civil and uncivil society actors are increasingly engaging in this new way of fighting. We suggest how the theory of netwar may be improved by drawing on academic perspectives on networks, especially those about organizational network analysis. As for practice, strategists and policymakers in Washington and elsewhere have begun to discern the dark side of the network phenomenon - especially in the wake of the "attack on America" perpetrated apparently by Osama bin Laden's terror network. But they still have much work to do to begin harnessing the bright side, by formulating strategies that will enable state and civil-society actors to work together better."

The New York Times Securing the Lines of a Wired Nation
[requires 'free' registration]

""People aren't going to be killing us with computers," Mr. Hunker said, "but our life may be hell because of computer attacks."

The likeliest use of the technology, he said, would be to complicate matters further after a real-world attack, a tactic he describes with the military phrase "force multiplier." That could involve planting false information on the Web to create a panic or taking down crucial computers in the financial or communications sectors."

redux [08.19.01]
AsianWeek Get Ready for Cyberwars

""Taiwan has one of the world's largest computer software and hardware manufacturing bases," said D.K. Matai, managing director of the British-based Mi2. "The computer software programmers in Taiwan are world class. Our view is that getting involved in any kind of conflict with Taiwan, given the kind of intellectual capacity the country has, may prove detrimental."

The Chinese government has been quite open about its future strategic military objective. In paper appearing in the spring issue of China Military Science journal, a member of the Chinese Committee of Science, Technology and Industry of the System Engineering Institute, wrote: "We are in the midst of a new technology in which electronic information technology is the central technology. The technology provides unprecedented applications for the development of new weaponry...Military battles during the 21st century will unfold around the use of information for military and political goals.""

redux [09.06.00]
Rand Corporation In Athena's Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age

"The thesis of this think piece is that the information revolution will cause shifts both in how societies may come into conflict, and how their armed forces may wage war. We offer a distinction between what we call "netwar" -- societal-level ideational conflicts waged in part through internetted modes of communication -- and "cyberwar" at the military level. These terms are admittedly novel, and better ones may yet be devised. But for now they illuminate a useful distinction and identify the breadth of ways in which the information revolution may alter the nature of conflict short of war, as well as the context and the conduct of warfare.

While both netwar and cyberwar revolve around information and communications matters, at a deeper level they are forms of war about "knowledge" -- about who knows what, when, where, and why, and about how secure a society or military is regarding its knowledge of itself and its adversaries."

redux [01.04.01]
MSNBC Bytes without the blood in Mideast

"Scenes of street violence are played out day after day in Palestinian towns across Gaza and the West Bank. But another modern-day arena for battle between the Palestinians and the Israelis is growing ever more heated, so much so that the Internet war waged by computer-savvy political activists is being dubbed an "e-Jihad.""

redux [03.22.00]
CNN Kashmir conflict continues to escalate -- online

"A group of Pakistani hackers has used the conflict in Kashmir as a reason to deface almost 600 Web sites in India and take control of several Indian government and private computer systems, according to the group."

"Unlike the majority of Web vandals, the MOS members say they secretly take control of a server, then deface the site only when they "have no more use" for the data or the server itself.

"The servers we control range from harmless mail and Web services to 'heavy duty' government servers," says the MOS representative. "The data is only being categorically archived for later use if deemed necessary."

The Christian Science Monitor Wars of the future... today

"Take the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade several weeks ago. Rage spread across China and hackers from the mainland attacked the Web sites of the US Departments of Energy and the Interior, and the National Park Service. A subsequent attack brought down the White House Web site for three days. The attacks generated headlines across the country.

What the news media didn't report was that the US government had known for a long time that someone had been in its computer systems - they just didn't know who. Then, in a fit of anger, the Chinese hackers caused some real damage - and gave away the hidden "location" of several "backdoors" they had built in US government networks."

"The US Government Accounting Office estimates 120 groups or countries have or are developing information-warfare systems. According to a report issued by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 23 nations have cyber-targeted the US."

WSJ.Com How Internet Time's Fifteen Minutes Of Fame Ran Out

"Internet Time, along with cousins like Web Time and Warp Speed, became handy phrases to throw into book titles and PowerPoint presentations as proof of savvy topicality. Into newspaper articles, too; The Wall Street Journal mentioned the idea four times in 1996 but 43 times in 2000.

This morning, though, will mark only the second time the phrase has been used in these pages all year. Internet Time's time was short indeed."

redux [06.01.01]
MIT Technology Review The Myth of "Internet Time"

"However, being first-or even one of the first-doesn't necessarily confer an overwhelming advantage. Just consider the early personal computer pioneers, such as Atari. Where are they now? Even the recent history of the Internet abounds in counterexamples to the thesis of first-mover advantage. Look at the market for Internet search engines. Five years ago, AltaVista achieved a technical breakthrough that propelled it to dominant status on the world's desktops. Today, AltaVista is a distant also-ran."

The main reason the first-mover advantage is much less potent than is commonly claimed is that Internet time, the dominant theme of the dot-com bubble, is false. Yes, product development cycles have become noticeably shorter. This is true not just in software, but also in such old-economy products as cars. But consumers do not operate on Internet time. Novel technologies do not diffuse notably more rapidly than they did in the days before dot coms strode the earth."

redux [10.25.01]
MarketingProfs.Com Will and Vision: How Latecomers Grow to Dominate Markets

"Everybody thinks that it's the market pioneers who have the best name recognition, the highest market share, and the most enduring market leadership....Right?"

"Our discoveries may surprise the business community. After exposing the limitations of prior studies that extolled the success of pioneers, we find that pioneers mostly fail, have low market share, and are rarely enduring market leaders. In addition, we found that the current trend of staking everything on getting there first all-too-often leads companies to embrace a disastrous strategy of rushing to market with incomplete, inferior, and flawed products."

Prospect Good books

"For the next decade or two, the paperback book will continue to be one of the most cost-effective, portable storage devices ever invented. Upmarket hardback non-fiction is increasingly pleasing to the eye and touch and the market for these titles is also likely to remain immune to the challenge of e-books. Nevertheless, the e-book will develop a growing following-a US report claims that 180,000 electronic titles were published there in 2001-and will sit alongside other forms, such as the audio book and the bound copy as it gradually becomes established. As with all technologies, there will be generational differences. The over 35s may still retain an attachment to wads of printed paper, but for younger generations, this affection may be more fickle.

When the shift towards electronic books gets underway, the news for publishing companies is likely to be mixed."

redux [08.26.02]
The Chronicle of Higher Education Students Complain About Devices for Reading E-Books, Study Finds

"E-book technology needs some improvement before students will be willing to use e-books instead of textbooks, according to a report on a study conducted at Ball State University.

The researchers hoped to find out how using e-books compared with using textbooks, and how e-book use affected students' learning. Although the researchers started with the assumption that e-books would be just as easy to use as textbooks, they soon found that students had various complaints about the performance of the e-book devices. But students who used e-books did just as well on quizzes as those who used printed texts."

redux [07.08.02]
Washington Post E-Books Not Exactly Flying Off The Shelves

"There are those in the industry who continue to emote about the e-book and praise its capabilities, but the plain old reading public -- on the beaches, in the coffee shops, at the Metro stations -- just aren't buying into e-books. You don't see a horde of people devouring Huck Finn on a handheld or "Ulysses" on a laptop.

"So much about e-books was about simulating paper on the screen," says Mark Bernstein. "It's like vinyl siding. People rarely like simulations as much as they like the real thing.""

Tim O'Reilly Repeated Misconceptions About eBooks

"Yes, of course paper is a good technology for providing word-based information. But that is to confuse the delivery mechanism for a book with what is being delivered. A book is a wonderful artifact, to be sure, and I have more than 5000 of them in my house. But what does a book contain? Stories, ideas, facts, interpretations, the voices of people long dead or from a faraway land. A book is a user interface to the world of the mind. As Edwin Schlossberg once said, "The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think." Or imagine. Or find out what they need to know.

The eBook that simply mimics the print book on screen is a transitional form, just like the early "moving pictures" that simply pointed a camera at actors on a stage."

The Shifted Librarian Ebooks Don't Need To Fly Off Shelves

"Can someone please explain to me when it was decided that ebooks would completely replace printed books? Why is it so difficult for the media (let alone publishers) to view them as a complementary instead? (That's a rhetorical question.

Here's a novel idea - let's think of ebooks the same way we think of audiobooks. No one believes that audiobooks will replace printed material and as a result, the format carries far less pressure for market penetration and sales figures. In fact, this is one area where libraries are recognized as a valuable market. So let's all agree here and now to apply these same principles to ebooks, both text and audio. Growing sales figures and markets are a good thing. Not everyone will choose to use them, and that's okay. And libraries are a valuable market for ebooks, a fact publishers and manufacturers should acknowledge."

redux [01.22.02]
MSNBC Oprah, Bill Gates and the Future of Books

"How primitive is the current system? Later this century, kids will be amazed to learn how we used to distribute books. Think about it. We grow entire forests, chop them down, flatten them out, spread ink on them, turn them into bricks of wood pulp, which we then drive around the country on trucks. Our children won't be amazed because we were primitive--they'll be amazed that we were so rich. Current-day book publishing is a tremendously wasteful way of moving information around: while paper is a terrific display mechanism, it's a terrible transport device. Publishers take huge risks when they print and ship large quantities of books--and that's why gatekeepers like Oprah so utterly control the fate of books and authors."

"While consumers have been quick to buy MP3 players for online audio--not much different, really, than a Walkman that plays cassettes--there's simply nothing in our retail genes that drives us to buy "book players." So the e-book may have to sneak in disguised as something else."

redux [08.28.01]
The New York Times Forecasts of an E-Book Era Were, It Seems, Premature
[requires 'free' registration]

"A year later, however, the main advantage of electronic books appears to be that they gather no dust. Almost no one is buying. Publishers and online bookstores say only the very few best-selling electronic editions have sold more than a thousand copies, and most sell far fewer. Only a handful have generated enough revenue to cover the few hundred dollars it costs to convert their texts to digital formats."

"Consumers appear confused, Mr. Arland said, because the devices are neither computers nor hand-held organizers, nor do they connect to the Internet. The appliances download electronic books over phone lines directly from a central server.

The device has been the kind of purchase people imagined someone else might enjoy."

redux [08.12.00]
SiliconValley.Com Forget the hype, e-books still hard on the eyes

"The publishing industry has gotten very excited about electronic books lately. Random House, Time Warner and just about every other publishing giant has put out a flurry of announcements outlining grand plans for digital distribution.

Adding to the hype, Microsoft last week released its Microsoft Reader 1.5 software for the PC, and Barnesandnoble.com released 2,000 e-book titles, while promising to release 150 more each week.

Ignore all this stuff. E-book technology is just not ready. It's too hard to read on the screen."

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."

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."