Berita ::Nyentrik

2003-02-24T20:23:00.000-08:00

Low-income housing goes wireless

BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- The technician sat by the apartment window with a laptop on his knees, configuring the computer to pick up the Internet signal from a rooftop antenna a half a block away.

"How's the signal?" asked the apartment's resident, Nakia Keizer, watching from a sofa.

"Not bad," said Kevin Bowen, the technician.

Not bad at all, considering this wireless "hotspot" was intended not for cafe-hoppers and Internet surfers with money to burn but for urban poor who only a few years before had been fighting roof leaks and overflowing sewers.

Camfield Estates, a rebuilt 102-unit public housing development, has trimmed bushes and groomed grounds. What also sets it apart from other low-income complexes lies hidden behind its walls, atop its roof and in the airwaves.

For the past two years, Camfield has been the site of a project aiming to span the "digital divide" between impoverished Americans and those with easy access to technology.

Called the Creating Community Connections Project, it has given residents free computers to connect to the Internet using high-speed cable lines wired into every home.

Residents gather at a community computer room to take free classes on everything from how to plug in a mouse to setting up Web sites.
The project, mostly paid for with a $200,000 grant from the Kellogg Foundation and supported by companies like Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft as well as public and nonprofit entities, is now taking another step.
Now that Camfield's

2003-02-24T20:22:00.000-08:00

RAFE NEEDLEMAN'S WHAT'S NEXT

Browsers: Here We Go Again
Another battle is brewing in the Web surfing market. This time, though, Microsoft won't win.
By Rafe Needleman, February 24, 2003

Even early on in the Microsoft (MSFT) vs. Netscape browser wars, it was pretty clear how the conflict was going to turn out. When the Redmond giant entered the fray with its formidable resources, Netscape was doomed, because no matter how good Netscape Navigator became, the company was playing in Microsoft's backyard: the Windows platform. It really didn't have a chance.

What a difference a few years make. The PC was where the action was in 1996, but it's not where it is today. Today the most interesting technological developments are happening in game consoles, handhelds, and cell phones. That's also where the money is: Some 400 million cell phones are sold worldwide each year, yet only 137 million PCs will be sold in 2003, according to Gartner. What's more, only a miniscule percentage of the cellular-capable devices currently available (mobile phones and cellular PDAs) run a Microsoft operating system.

It's true that, at the moment, a Web browser isn't critical software for a cell phone -- not the way it is for a PC. People talk on their phones, send text messages, and, increasingly, retrieve e-mail, play games, and take pictures. None of these applications requires a Web browser. Yet the browser opened the door to a new kind of commerce on PCs, and it could do the same on mobile devices. This is of great interest to the cellular carriers, who would like nothing more than for people to use their phones as wallets.

The game here is also more interesting than it was on the PC, because of the way cell-phone software is distributed. Wireless carriers ship their phones with pre-installed software, for the most part, and support software can be downloaded only from their own cellular portals, which means that users are unlikely to seek out new browser programs for their handsets. And unlike the PC, there's currently no standard software -- or hardware -- package on mobile phones. The cellular carriers prefer it this way, and each angles to make its network and hardware packages different from the competition's. Cell-phone OS maker Symbian actively supports this by allowing carriers and manufacturers to customize the look and feel of its operating system -- a strategy which is completely different from Microsoft's.

There are a few browser manufacturers for cellular phones: Microsoft, open-source play Mozilla, cell-phone application powerhouse OpenWave, and a few other smaller companies. No single company has a lock on the market, and since few phones today are Web-capable, the field is wide open and clearly expanding.

I think the most interesting browser for cellular devices is Opera. Many in the business press have written Opera off because its PC product, Opera 7 for Windows, is largely irrelevant (although it is an excellent browser -- and I encourage you to try it). Meanwhile, Apple (AAPL) locked up the Mac platform with the release of its own browser, Safari. However, Opera's real revenue opportunity has always been non-desktop devices, and this category holds great potential for the company: Symbian spokespeople told me they think Opera has the best browser technology for cell phones today -- a very significant endorsement.

The revenue potential is also there: Opera is paid for each cell phone on which its browser is installed, and it also charges engineering fees for adapting the software to different devices. So even if cell users never think of their phones primarily as Internet terminals, as long as handsets continue to carry such software, companies like Opera stand to make a heap of money.

2003-02-24T20:15:00.000-08:00

Web Phones Take Wing

Now, cell phones can deliver nifty Net services fast, and Americans are signing up by the millions
Perhaps you live in a place like Lakewood. There, business execs use their wireless phones to grab e-mail from the back seat of a cab. At their suburban homes, kids use cellular phones to play games while sitting on front stoops. And on weekend camping trips, families pull color Internet images of news and sporting events via their mobile handsets.
A scene from some science fiction flick? Well, sort of. Lakewood was the fictitious everytown the folks at Sprint created on a Las Vegas stage in January, 2002, to help paint a picture of our wireless future. I didn't buy it then. But a year later, I'll admit, aspects of Lakewood's improbable wireless culture are popping up all across America. "It really is beginning to take off," says Jane

Zweig, chief executive of wireless consultants Herschel Shosteck Associates.

The era of wireless data has arrived. No, you can't put the equivalent of a high-powered Dell PC (DELL ) in your pocket. You can, however, connect to the Internet with a cell phone, download and play games and music, store color photos, and send and receive e-mail--with attachments.

AT&T Wireless Services (AWE ) and Sprint PCS (PCS ) have experimented with mobile data service in the past, but it has been a slow, cumbersome experience for users. All that changed last year when most of the major wireless providers began marketing a faster, more effective data service called 2.5G, shorthand for wireless service with more data capacity than the previous voice-only generation of service.

ZAPPING DATA. The new technology zaps bits of data--the building blocks of games, e-mails, and funky ring tones--at about 40 kilobits to 60 kilobits per second. At that clip, cell phones approach the pace of most dial-up PCs. Two wireless players, AT&T and T-Mobile USA, also sells an even swifter service dubbed Wi-Fi, which lets laptops and handhelds gallop the Net at speeds 20 times faster than most home systems.

While nifty, these services have not yet achieved true bliss. In some neighborhoods, carriers haven't built enough towers to avoid gaping holes. Data sessions drop, just as cell-phone calls do, and they're often slower than advertised. As I tapped into wireless data networks, my experience was sometimes painfully reminiscent of the days when cellular phones would dawdle along at 10 kbps.

Despite the pitfalls, today's data service is gaining traction. At the end of 2002, some 22.5 million mobile-phone subscribers said they use their phones to connect to the Net, up from 9 million in 2001, according to researcher eMarketer. What's luring so many people? The carriers unleashed new phones last year with fancy color screens and improved Web browsers. "The magic formula for wireless data is color screens and compelling applications," says Scott Ellison, the wireless program director at researcher IDC. "The industry finally got those right."

Nothing fits better with the color screens than games. Seven million wireless users in the U.S. paid to download a game to their phone in 2002, according to IDC. This year, gamers should nearly double, to 13.3 million. A version of the game Wheel of Fortune was pre-loaded on my Motorola T720 from Verizon Wireless. Sprint phones come with demos of games like Monkey Ball and Space Invaders. Additional downloads cost $1 to $5 per game. And beware: Some of these dollops of fun expire after a few weeks. True, most of the games are downloaded by teens, but operators haven't forgotten adults. On a recent bus trip from Whistler ski resort to Vancouver, B.C., my wife grabbed the T-Mobile Pocket PC phone I was testing and played an old favorite, Solitaire.

Games may grab you, but the biggest wireless data hit has been messaging. Sending text, photos, and sound bites have caught on like a new Bon Jovi single. Already, 13.5 million wireless users--10% of the total--regularly tap short messages--"Whassup?" or "I luv u!"--and zap them along with a downloaded photo of, say, Bon Jovi himself. "Messaging is three to four times quicker than it used to be," boasts Sprint PCS President Len Lauer.

The messages don't have to be short, either. In an effort to nab lucrative business customers, Sprint and others offer a suite of specially designed services targeting business enterprises. The carriers work with enterprises to set up a secure connection between employees' mobile phones and companies' corporate e-mail systems. That way, workers can even exchange e-mails with files attached.

If wireless data phones have a weakness, it's browsing the Web. Punching in a Web address on a tiny phone is no cinch. To help, operators are preloading phones with an assortment of popular sites: News from CNN, sports from ESPN, weather, horoscopes, and more.

Aric Saunders is amazed by how easily he gets Web information on his phone. The 22-year-old loan officer for Hawaii HomeLoans uses his Sprint data phone to download financial news and visit his company's Web site. But the clincher came a few weeks ago while he was shooting the breeze with a buddy. They got into a debate about the distinction between arteries and veins. Saunders settled the dispute by connecting to Encyclopedia Britannica using his Sprint phone. Within seconds, he found that arteries carry blood away from the heart and veins take blood back. "The service has a ton of upside," he says.

I didn't always have as much luck. While I was showing off the Sprint PCS service to friends at a midtown Manhattan restaurant, the phone could not connect to the digital network that enables the new technology. And using my T-Mobile phone to log onto CNN from my living room in Chicago took minutes rather than seconds.

It might take years before traditional phones can surf the Net at lickety-split broadband speeds. That's why select operators have introduced a supplementary service, dubbed Wi-Fi, for true high-speed needs. For about $50 a month, you can slip a rectangular data card into your laptop or a handheld PC and cruise cyberspace at a cat-quick 11 megabytes per second--faster than a broadband connection.

The catch: You can't use this service everywhere. T-Mobile and AT&T Wireless are currently the only cellular operators offering it, though others are sure to follow soon. Plus, Wi-Fi service works only in small zones called hot spots--certain airport lounges, hotels, and some 2,200 Starbucks coffee houses. Jon Ramer, a Seattle entrepreneur, regularly darts into a Starbucks to talk with clients by cell phone while he navigates around Web sites on his laptop. One day soon, as more phones become Wi-Fi compatible, Ramer won't need two devices. With much of America already looking like data-savvy Lakewood, that day when your phone hums at Wi-Fi speed shouldn't be far off.

2003-02-24T20:14:00.000-08:00

Spike in "spyware" accelerates arms race

EarthLink's technical support staff handles a variety of problems: broken networks, corrupted files, coffee spills--and, increasingly over the past few months, bitter complaints from subscribers about "spyware" and "adware."

Those persistent types of programs, frequently operating on computers without owners' knowledge, have spread quickly in the last year, evolving as rapidly as anti-spyware software has been able to find them. EarthLink executives estimate that 40 percent to 50 percent of the Internet service provider's subscribers have running on their machines some kind of advertising or more-malicious program, which often monitors their behavior and sends the data back to the software's parent company.
The level of complaints has risen high enough that EarthLink says it's finally looking for an official spyware-killer to distribute to its angry customers.

"That's usually not what they've originally called to report, but when they find out (the source of their problem), that's what causes the most emotional reaction," said Jim Anderson, EarthLink's vice president for product development. "They feel that their trust has been broken."

EarthLink's move toward spyware-hunting marks just one new front in a bitter war over programs that sneak onto hard drives. Security companies say that the incidence of so-called spyware, adware, sneakware and other varieties of surreptitious software is climbing dramatically, adding that the most irritating of the bunch are becoming even more difficult to stop--or even identify.

These types of programs had been available for years but became more common as free file-swapping services such as Kazaa and Imesh began bundling these ad-supported programs with their software to help pay their bills. Today, many programs are automatically installed when a person views an unsolicited HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) e-mail or visits Web pages that activate a "drive-by download."

The most benign of these programs simply serve advertisements. Others can collect detailed information about a viewer's behavior and send it back to a parent company the person likely knows nothing about. Many change the settings of a browser or other software, sometimes in ways that only someone with sophisticated technical knowledge can reverse.

None of this is illegal, and in most cases, notice of such functions is contained somewhere in a piece of software's terms of service or license agreement. But critics say few people read these agreements. As a result, incautious surfers can often unknowingly wind up with software that monitors their behavior, soaks up their computing and network resources, and can even damage their computers, in extreme cases.

Large businesses too are concerned, as many of these programs--sometimes downloaded unwittingly by employees surfing the Net--use corporate networks to send data back to their parent companies. For businesses that spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on firewalls and security, that's an unacceptable risk.

"Since last fall, we've seen a real spike in corporate customers purchasing our software because of spyware," said Pete Cafarchio, vice president of business development at Pest Patrol, whose software helps identify and eliminate a long list of "pest" programs, ranging from comparatively benign adware to viruses and Trojan horses. "Their argument is that there can be no unauthorized (network) communication."

The last year has seen a steep rise in the number of companies and products aimed at eradicating or mitigating the effects of these surreptitious programs. Software such as Pest Patrol, Spybot--Search & Destroy and Lavasoft's Ad-Aware are popular hard-drive cleaners. Personal firewalls like ZoneLab's ZoneAlarm help prevent unauthorized programs from using network connections to contact the outside world without permission.

At the same time, however, adware and spyware program writers have met the challenge with creative new means of distribution and installation.

Recent months have seen a spurt in so-called browser helper objects (BHO), which attach themselves limpetlike to Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser software and act as a toolbar or other browser plug-in. The worst of these can radically change browser settings, including home pages and bookmarks, and make it difficult or impossible for people to change these back without their knowing how to manipulate the Windows registry. Recent examples of these, distributed by Web advertising portals Lop.com and Xupiter.com, redirected browsers to their respective sites at every available opportunity.

Some of these programs are getting better at sinking roots deep into a computers' operating system, making removal impractical. A widely distributed marketing program called "CommonName" recently changed its code, so that removing it with software such as Spybot made it impossible for the affected computer to access the Net.

Distribution methods are becoming increasingly creative as well, going well beyond the tested means of piggybacking on peer-to-peer or other types of software.

In one recent example, a small piece of advertising software was installed quietly on the machines of people who played a popular post-Sept. 11 Java game called "Yo Mamma, Osama!" That software activated itself every three minutes, to send data back to its home company, and stayed on machines long after the game was finished, Pest Patrol's Cafarchio said.

In addition, spam e-mail can include hidden HTML links to spyware that is downloaded when a viewer opens it. So-called drive-by downloads operate similarly, starting a download process when visitors view a Web page. Although drive-by downloads typically ask for permission, many people accept the download, believing that it is a normal function of the Web site.

Setting Internet Explorer security settings to high or medium can help guard against these download attempts, security experts say. Examining a PC's system with one of several free anti-spyware programs can also help people understand what is running on their computer, though they cannot guarantee absolute protection against new forms of the surreptitious technology.

"Spyware makers are looking for new, better-hidden places in the system to anchor themselves," Spybot creator Patrick Kolla said in an e-mail interview. "The challenge for any anti-spyware software lies here in keeping the detection mechanisms as well as the detection database up-to-date at the same time."

While it is clear that concern about clandestine software is growing, it is less evident exactly what the concern is about. Figures on the spread of adware and spyware are hard to come by, and definitions of the categories are vague at best. That has made fighting the phenomenon difficult, and some adware companies say they are being unfairly targeted.

In a list of the most prevalent software "pests" issued in February, Pest Patrol cited software released by an ad software company called Gator as far and away the most common pest--the source of more than half of the 81,000 reports logged by customers of its software over the past month.

Gator, however, provides the advertising support for many of the most popular free software programs distributed online. The company says it has 30 million people who seek out various pieces of software supported by its advertisement, hardly putting it under the traditional "pest" definition.

The company does collect information about people's behavior to target ads specifically, for example, sending car advertisements to those shopping for a vehicle. However, unlike most other advertising companies, Gator creates pop-up ads that are clearly branded and includes links to information on how to uninstall the associated tracking and ad-serving software, said Scott Eagle, the company's chief marketing officer.

Coming in at No. 2 on the Pest Patrol list of common pests was software from online media company Brilliant Digital Entertainment. Last year many people objected to software from Brilliant being quietly bundled with their Kazaa file-swapping program. But that software is now the basis for a paid-content distribution network that has formed the backbone of Kazaa parent Sharman Network's defense against copyright-infringement charges.

The upshot: If people want free software, say these companies, they will have to be prepared to accept advertisements or other marketing devices.

"Over half-a-billion dollars in software that people would have had to pay for, they got for free in exchange for seeing occasional ads," Eagle said. "People don't like TV commercials either, but most people would acknowledge there is a trade-off."

2003-02-18T21:36:00.000-08:00

Nokia, HP put wireless words into print

Nokia on Tuesday said it's working with Hewlett-Packard to let customers print content from their cell phones.
Nokia, which sells about 39 percent of the world's cell phones, plans to add printing capabilities to its Series 60 cell phones, including more advanced wireless devices like the handset maker's n-Gage gaming phone. Nokia has teamed up with HP to design an application for the phones and expects to sell printer-friendly cell phones sometime later this year. The printers and cell phones will connect using Bluetooth, a powerful but short-range wireless technology.

HP believes modern wireless devices have grown sophisticated enough to receive and store information that someone would want to print. For example, camera phones could print snapshots, or a traveling salesman storing his calendar on a cell phone could print out his day's itinerary, Nokia said.

But U.S. customers may balk at such features, having shown little enthusiasm to do anything other than make calls on their phones, according to analysts.

Nokia is the third handset maker to sign on to HP's effort, launched in October. Both Research In Motion, which helped develop the printing feature with HP, and SonyEricsson intend to add the same feature to some of their own wireless devices, company representatives said.

RIM and HP already are selling the technology directly to businesses. Companies are charged $35 per person, per year, to outfit businesses with 100 or less employees. The price drops to $18 per user, per year for more than 100 employees, up to 1,000 people, HP said.

HP also is working with PalmSource to make the technology available for handhelds based on the Palm operating system, HP said.

2003-02-18T21:32:00.000-08:00

Anti-spam company backflips over marketing

SpamArrest, the anti-spam company caught spamming, have back-flipped, apologising to recipients of their unsolicited advertisements.
They had previously defended their action as a legitimate marketing campaign, but after coming under fire from the press, anti-spam organisations and irate Internet users, they decided that spamming was perhaps not the best marketing approach they could use to sell their anti-spam product.

The company operates a challenge-response system used for sorting legitimate mail from spam; messages sent to SpamArrest clients require verification before delivery. The company had used the email addresses of people sending mail to their clients in their spamming campaign, in what some have described as a "ridiculous" and "ironic" action.

The apology was posted on the front page of the company's website overnight. It read: "Recently we have received some inquiries regarding a mailing we delivered to some verified users of SpamArrest.

"While this contact was completely covered by our privacy policy, our customers concerns come first.

"Because of this, SpamArrest has ceased sending such solicitation and will not send unsolicited bulk email again. SpamArrest apologises for any inconvenience this action may have caused anyone".

2003-02-14T05:48:00.000-08:00

The IT revolution
The best thing since the bar-code

Smart labels may be about to change the way that companies distribute and sell almost everything they make

AT A Tesco's supermarket in Cambridge, England, the shelves have begun to talk to their contents, and the contents are talking back. Soon, razors at a Wal-Mart store in Brockton, Massachusetts will begin to let staff know when they suspect theft. This spring, a group of firms will attempt to track, in real time, many thousands of goods as they travel from factory to supermarket shelf. Consultants tout cost savings and extra sales that could run into tens of billions of dollars a year.
The reason for the sudden buzz of excitement is a new, supercheap version of an old tracking technology called Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). RFID systems are made up of readers and “smart tags”—microchips attached to antennas. When the tag nears a reader, it broadcasts the information contained in its chip. In the past four years, the cost of the cheapest tags has plunged, from $2 to 20 cents. In the next two to three years, prices are likely to fall to five cents or less. Already, RFID tags are made in their millions and used to track pets and livestock, parts in car factories and luggage at airports. Last month, Gillette announced that it had put in an order for half a billion smart tags, signalling the start of their adoption by the consumer-goods industry. If they catch on, smart tags will soon be made in their trillions and will replace the bar-code on the packaging of almost everything that consumer-goods giants such as Procter & Gamble and Unilever make.

The inspiration behind the new, cheap tags is a partnership between academic researchers and business called the Auto-ID Centre, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1999, the centre boasts 87 member companies, including the world's biggest retailers and consumer-goods firms. Traditional RFID tags, says Sanjay Sarma, the centre's research director, carry all their information. That makes them big and costly—fine in small numbers, but expensive in the sorts of quantities that the consumer-goods industry might want. Procter & Gamble, for instance, makes 20 billion products a year. So Mr Sarma has stripped the information his tags carry to the bare minimum—a single serial number. This serial number is unique, identifying the exact can of fizzy drink or bottle of shampoo on which it is stuck. But detailed information about the product—what it is, where and when it was made, and so on—is stored on a computer elsewhere, to be looked up as needed via the internet.

When less information is more
Nobody had got it, says Kevin Ashton, who runs the centre. Big technology firms such as Intel and Motorola thought it was impossible to build a tag costing a few cents. Traditional RFID makers, who grew up without the internet, did not understand the beauty of removing information from the tag and storing it centrally. So Messrs Sarma and Ashton did the work themselves, designing specifications for a new chip and inventing new software and network services to support their idea.

Abandoning the likes of Intel, Mr Ashton and Mr Sarma turned instead to a handful of start-ups. One of them, called Matrics, says that it is now ready to start making the new tags. The price will depend on volume, says Matrics' boss, Piyush Sodha. If Matrics makes 1 billion tags a year, they will cost ten cents apiece, he says. At 10 billion tags a year, the price falls to five cents. Gillette is buying its 500m tags from a firm called Alien Technology, which has pioneered a promising low-cost manufacturing technique that involves suspending chips in liquid, then flowing the liquid over the chip mounts. Mr Ashton expects other members of the Auto-ID Centre to place big orders (some exceeding Gillette's) for tags this year.

Gillette is piloting two uses for its tags. The first combines smart tags with “smart shelves”, which are fitted with tag readers. Gillette says that retailers and consumer-goods firms in America lose around $30 billion a year in sales because shop shelves run out of products and stand empty. On Gillette's smart shelves, the tagged razors let the shelf know when they are coming and going, and the shelf keeps count. If it gets too empty, the shelf sends a message to store staff to fill it up. Because Gillette's razors are small, valuable and easily resold (for evidence, visit eBay), they are also often stolen; tags and shelves will do double duty as security against theft. If the shelf notices that lots of razors have left at the same time, it alerts staff.

Gillette is also piloting the use of smart tags to track products as they move from factory to supermarket. Using bar-codes, this can be a labour-intensive, error-prone task. Readers can scan smart tags automatically as pallets of products pass along conveyor belts and through loading bays. That will reduce shipment errors and cut theft, argues Gillette. Because manufacturers can be certain that they are shipping the right quantity of goods to the right place at the right time, they can also afford to shrink the inventories they maintain in case of error. Consultants at IBM have worked with six member companies of the Auto-ID Centre. Their work suggests that smart tags can shrink inventories by 5-25%, says IBM. If so, the increase in efficiency of inventory management during the past two decades, thanks to “just-in-time”, “Dell-isation” and so forth, will take another huge leap forward, helping to keep America's recent productivity miracle going—and, with luck, spreading it to the rest of the world.

Having finished two field trials, Mr Ashton says that most technical difficulties are now behind them. “We are ready to go,” he says. Following pilot projects this year, says IBM, companies will start deploying smart tags in earnest in 2004, beginning with pricey, oft-stolen goods such as razors, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. If all goes well, Matrics and Alien Technology should be making tens of billions of tags by 2005 or 2006.

The biggest worry is that consumers might reject smart tags because they seem too invasive of their privacy. If firms link products to customers at the checkout, ordinary objects could become traceable to their purchasers (imagine a stray coke can at the scene of a crime). Following Gillette's announcement, e-mails sent to the RFID Journal, an online trade magazine, hint at some of the concerns. “I'll grow a beard and fuck Gillette,” wrote one reader.

Here too the Auto-ID Centre seems ahead of the game. Its chip specifications include a “kill command” that can permanently disable the tag. The centre is working on a privacy policy, a draft of which gives the customer the option to kill tags at the checkout. The customer would forgo after-sales benefits, such as better warranty and returned-goods services, for instance, or chickens that could tell ovens how to cook them. But the kill command is just the thing for those who suspect that their fridge has begun to spy on them.

2003-02-14T05:47:00.000-08:00

Cooling technologies
Running a temperature
If you think laptops run hot now, just wait ten years. Unless new technologies cool things down, you'll be able to cook on them.

In the summer of 1986, Don Tilton was knee-deep in his fellowship at the prestigious Air Force Office of Scientific Research in Dayton, Ohio, a research center with a long history of developing cutting-edge aerospace and defense technology. Three years earlier, President Ronald Reagan had delivered his famous "Star Wars" speech in which he outlined the urgent need for a protective shield against the "evil empire's" nuclear missiles. His vision was to deploy satellites armed with, among other things, powerful lasers that could destroy an intercontinental ballistic missile in midflight. While much of the defense industry was concerned with how to build such large, destructive lasers, a few scientists, including the affable Mr. Tilton, were thinking about an ancillary but important problem: even if they could build the lasers, they needed to figure out how to cool the electronic components, since the standard fan-cooling method doesn't work in space.
Little did Mr. Tilton know that the issue of cooling would occupy him for the next 16 years and become one of the most critical problems facing the semiconductor industry. Heat, it turns out, is one of the major roadblocks in the continued march of Moore's law, which has driven the technology sector for nearly 40 years (see "Forget Moore's Law" ).

The 55 million transistors packed on an average Pentium chip (about the size of a fingernail) switch on and off at such a rapid rate that they generate too much heat for their own good. A typical laptop with a Pentium 4 processor gets hot enough to burn human skin (or at least discourage users from working in shorts). By the end of the decade, it is estimated that a square centimeter of microprocessors (a bit smaller than a postage stamp) will produce an amount of heat equivalent to the space shuttle's rocket exhaust--roughly 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Ouch! And as Pat Gelsinger, Intel's chief technology officer, said at an Intel developers conference last spring, "People are not going to carry rocket nozzles on their laptops." Nor do they want to listen to the large, powerful fans that would be needed to cool these chips--fans that would generate 85 decibels, almost loud enough to damage the ear drum. With so much heat and noise packed in such a small place, "it looks like there is a train wreck coming in the industry," says Dave Corbin, CEO and president of Cooligy, a stealth startup that is developing a new cooling technology for semiconductors.

The Heat Is On
But we don't have to wait ten years for the problems to arise. On May 11, 2000, Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) announced a recall of 1 million faulty motherboards, a PC's main circuit board, because the ultrafast Pentium microprocessors were reported to be overheating. As a result, PCs were either freezing up or shutting down and losing data. In response to the news, Intel stock plummeted 9.3 percent in one day of trading. Even Intel's latest chip, the Itanium, presented major cooling challenges that pushed back its release date. In 1999, Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: SUNW) experienced a similar problem before the m_quote_type=name&view=release of one of its server systems. Those problems, never publicly discussed, forced Sun to delay the release.

Chip engineers say that 70 percent of chip failures are caused by excess heat, which results in device breakdowns, wasted time, and even lost data. For every 10-degree rise in temperature, say the experts, the reliability of the chip drops by a factor of two.

Despite these problems, chip manufacturers like Advanced Micro Devices, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, and Sun are just starting to get their hands around the issue. Transmeta (NASDAQ: TMTA), a small, yet prominent chip maker, designed its Crusoe chip with special software to reduce its clock rate (the number of times a chip switches on and off), thus reducing heat output. Other newcomers are getting into the act as well: researchers at companies like Active Cool, Cooligy, Cool Chips, and Isothermal Systems Research are placing a high priority on designing and developing chip-cooling technologies and materials.

Chillin' Out
One of those researchers is Mr. Tilton, who, with the help of an initial federal Small Business Innovation Research Award of $50,000, has continued the work he started back in the '80s. He is working on a technology in which a noncorrosive liquid is sprayed directly onto the hot electronic components. The liquid immediately evaporates, carrying away heat in the process. In 1988, he founded Isothermal Systems Research. In May 2001 it completed a $1.5 million first round of funding, led by Raven Ventures in Spokane. ISR now has around 100 employees and has generated about $12 million in revenue for 2002.

ISR's system uses a series of nozzles to spray a fine mist of fluid onto the microprocessor and its surrounding components. The resulting vapor is captured by an exchanger that dissipates the heat into the air and condenses the vapor back to a liquid. A miniature pump then recirculates the liquid. (HP is employing its patented inkjet nozzles in a similar spray-cooling technology.) ISR's technology has demonstrated the ability to cool 300 watts per square centimeter, which is roughly ten times more efficient than the forced-air cooling system that chills Intel's latest Itanium chip.

The company's spray-cooling technology, still limited in its commercial applications, is maintaining temperatures in high-end supercomputers, aircraft electronics, and microprocessors used in the U.S. Marine Corps' Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicles, which have to operate in extreme environments, like deserts that reach 142 degrees Fahrenheit.

While chip industry experts concede that liquid cooling is effective, they question the reliability of the pumps and seals in its closed system. They also question the high cost. Mr. Tilton maintains that, once spray-cooling systems are mass-produced, economies of scale will help lower the cost. (Today, most of ISR's cooling systems are custom built, which makes their cost much higher than the few hundred dollars that chip manufacturers are willing to pay per unit.) Moreover, spray-cooling systems allow chips to run hotter and generate more clock cycles, thereby improving performance and productivity, which, in essence, offsets the higher cost of spray cooling. "Our costs get cheaper as the power density increases," says Mr. Tilton.

In the early '80s, a couple of thousand miles from Mr. Tilton's work at the Office of Scientific Research, Stanford University professor R. Fabian Pease was also immersed in cooling. His work centered around carving miniature channels along the microprocessor. Like a car radiator, these channels were filled with a special fluid that carried heat away. More than a decade passed. The Star Wars initiative stalled and transistors were not dense enough to produce heat problems. Then, in 1998, as the number of transistors began to reach a critical point and heat became a factor, a group of mechanical engineers at Stanford--with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (the venture capital/research arm of the U.S. Department of Defense), AMD, Apple Computer, and Intel--took up Mr. Pease's work. The team, led by Tom Kenny, designed and built a tiny silicon pump, powered by changes in electricity and pressure, that could propel the cooling fluid through microchannels roughly 150 to 300 microns wide, or a little bigger than the period at the end of this sentence.

In lab tests, the system has been very effective at removing heat. What's more, engineers say, the pump pushes a much smaller volume of fluid than spray-cooling systems. Less fluid generally means more reliability. To take advantage of this new technology, Mr. Kenny's team founded Cooligy in June 2002 with a $5.4 million round of funding from Mohr, Davidow Ventures and Granite Ventures.

Running a Temperature
If, by the end of the decade, a tiny group of microprocessors will produce the exhaust heat of a rocket, imagine several billion microprocessors humming along in a data center that covers a city block. Chandrakant Patel, principal scientist in the Internet systems and storage lab at HP, and his colleagues estimate that in five years it will cost $4 million a year to cool an average data center, up from roughly $1 million today. Companies spend about 10 percent of their entire power budget just on cooling data centers. To combat this cost, HP has been developing technology around what it calls "utility computing." In this approach, computing power operates like electricity: processing power, storage, and memory are pulled from wherever it is available: if it is hot in one place, say, Arizona, the network moves its numbers-crunching to a cooler place, say, Alaska. Mr. Patel says such smart cooling could reduce electricity costs by 25 percent.

But true utility computing is years off, so HP is studying how to identify hot areas within a data center and move processing tasks to cooler areas of the center. To that end, the company has demonstrated RoboRunner, a mobile robot that looks like a laptop riding a Segway and is armed with heat sensors. RoboRunner will roam the data center on a preprogrammed course to take temperature readings that will then be sent wirelessly to a server that shifts processing power from hotter areas to cooler ones.

It remains to be seen, however, if such a remote robot will make economic sense, just as it remains to be seen if other technologies, like Mr. Tilton's, will solve one of the most difficult problems facing the semiconductor industry. Cooling ever-hotter electronics will be a tough problem to solve, but one well worth the effort. "When you run a small company, it seems like you're fighting an endless battle, and sometimes you wonder why you stick with it. But when I come back to it, I realize the physics are right," says Mr. Tilton. So right, in fact, that if something isn't done in ten years, we'll end up with a few microprocessors producing the heat of a rocket blasting off, and that's a lot of heat in such a little space.

2003-02-10T19:38:00.001-08:00

High-Stakes Hunt For Cable Pirates
Premium-Channel Theft Leads to More Arrests, Fines

Who knows what the residents of the ground-floor garden apartment in Fairfax County will think when they return from work and see a blue piece of paper hanging from their doorknob like a request for hotel maid service.
All it says on the outside is "IMPORTANT NOTICE!" And the language Cox Communications has chosen for the inside -- "our records do not indicate we have a customer at this address" -- is perhaps a tad vague.
But the real message will be clear the instant the television in the apartment is turned on and shows only a brief, static-filled snowstorm followed by a blank screen.
Every day in the Washington area, dozens of cable company cops -- "field auditors" in industry parlance -- do battle in an unceasing war, weeding out people who don't pay for the cable programming they receive. The fight is waged with weapons both high-tech (electronic pulses sent down the line to frizzle illegal converter boxes) and low (the anonymous tip is among the cable cops' best weapons).
A tip has brought a blue-jacketed Cox technician to this Fairfax apartment complex near Interstate 66. He has already hung the doorknob notice. Now he walks around back to the utility room, unlocks the cable box, finds the wire that's running to the offending apartment and pulls out a wrench.
"We're going to terminate that port," he says. And he does. Another cable thief bites the dust.
The National Cable Television Association estimates that 10 percent of U.S. homes with cable access get their cable illegally. It costs the industry $6.6 billion a year. Satellite television operators report similar losses.
"It is a huge problem," said Jaye Gamble, regional senior vice president of Comcast's Washington Metro/Virginia region. "There's no neighborhood, community or socioeconomic group that is free of cable thieves."
Executives at Comcast and Cox, the area's two largest cable companies, say that cable pirates, like department store shoplifters, raise the costs for everyone else. They also note that local governments lose revenue, since franchise fees paid by cable companies are based on the number of paying customers. Virginia and Maryland have recently stiffened their penalties against cable theft. In Maryland, for example, fines could range up to $5,000.
It's a problem that has been around since cable started its march across the country about 30 years ago. Reluctant to pay for something that had always been free -- television programming -- some viewers would secretly tap into a cable connection. Others would keep quiet when they moved into a home and discovered that the previous occupant's cable had never been disconnected.
Both of those activities -- dubbed "active" theft and "passive" theft, respectively -- still occur. But what worries cable companies today is "premium" theft, which because of the ubiquity of the Web is simple. Typing "cable descrambler" into an Internet search engine yields thousands of vendors selling devices with such names as Viewmaster, Clearmax and Coolbox. The devices unscramble the signal that makes premium channels such as HBO, Showtime and Spice look like hose-drenched oil paintings. The descramblers -- known as "black boxes" -- start at about $200.
Who buys them? People such as a Prince George's County man who said he bought his first black box in 1996 because he was fed up with the increase in cable rates. "I didn't want to pay $30 a month just to get basic cable and local programming," said the man, who spoke on condition that he not be identified. He said he has a natural antipathy toward cable companies because of what he sees as their poor service. "That starts with when they tell you they'll be there between 2 and 7 to install your cable and they walk in your door at 7:30."
Today, he said, he's a paying Comcast customer who uses his descrambler to turn pay-per-view movies into watch-for-free movies. "I honestly don't believe the cable company is going to go after people like me," he said.
If cable companies did, he probably wouldn't go to jail. Companies usually confiscate the black boxes of individual scofflaws and demand that they repay any fees they dodged. Law enforcement is brought in only if there is a chronic problem. "We want to make them paying customers," explained Alex Horwitz of Cox Communications.
It's the black-box manufacturers whom cable companies pursue with single-minded vigor. "Today we have over 100 active prosecutions in the courts," said Comcast's Gamble.

2003-02-10T19:38:00.000-08:00

2003-02-10T19:36:00.000-08:00

Broadband over power lines? Technology spurs surging optimism

ST. LOUIS (AP) Coming to a home or office near you could be an electric Internet: high-speed Web access via ubiquitous power lines, of all things, making every electrical outlet an always-on Web connection.
If it sounds shocking, consider this: St. Louis-based Ameren Corp. and other utilities already are testing the technology, and many consider it increasingly viable.
This truly plug-and-play technology, if proven safe, has the blessings of federal regulators looking to bolster broadband competition, lower consumer prices and bridge the digital divide in rural areas.
Because virtually every building has a power plug, it ''could simply blow the doors off the provision of broadband,'' Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael Powell said last month.
For competition's sake, ''absolutely, we would applaud it,'' says Edmond Thomas, chief of the FCC's Office of Engineering and Technology.
''We're going to have an absolute stampede to move on this. This is a natural,'' said Alan Shark, president of the Power Line Communications Association, which includes Internet providers such as Earthlink as well as utility companies. ''It'll change the way we do business on the Internet.''
While existing providers of broadband through cable TV lines or phone wires consider the technology intriguing, they stress that talk of it has been around for years, with nothing to show for it.
Existing broadband providers such as St. Louis-based Charter Communications Inc., the nation's third-largest cable company, believe they have the edge because they are known commodities and can bundle high-speed Internet with video and even telephone service in some markets.
If ever deployed, power-line broadband ''certainly is competition, but we feel our product would stand up well,'' said David Andersen, a spokesman for Charter, which has nearly 1.1 million high-speed Internet customers.
Digital power lines are believed to be able to carry data at roughly the same speeds as cable or DSL lines. And because electricity is more prevalent in homes than cable or even telephone lines, a vast new communications infrastructure could be born overnight notably in rural areas, where broadband access has lagged.
There, the scarcity of potential subscribers hasn't justified the high cost of laying cable or building satellite towers. A December 2001 report by the FCC-created National Exchange Carrier Association estimated it would cost about $10.9 billion to wire all of rural America.
Even where broadband is available, many people have trouble justifying spending $40 or $50 a month for it, about twice the cost of popular dial-up services.
Now Ameren, which serves about 1.5 million electric customers in Missouri and Illinois, is studying whether its portfolio could include broadband over its medium-voltage distribution systems and, more importantly, if it'd be profitable.
Keith Brightfield, heading the project for Ameren, says it's too early to say when the company could deploy the technology, and the utility makes no claims it can deliver broadband cheaper than current providers. The goal, he said, is to be competitive at Internet access without losing focus on Ameren's bread-and-butter energy business.
Companies have found that turning power lines into a stable, high-speed system of data transmission is tricky. Network interference and such things as transformers and surge arrestors have hindered broadband delivery.
But over the past few years, Shark says, many of those hurdles have been cleared with improved technology. Brightfield says previous efforts to deploy the technology in Europe failed because their electric system differs from that in the United States.

Still, there's no shortage of skepticism.
''I think they're a long ways from proving it, let's leave it there,'' said Larry Carmichael, a project manager with the Electric Power Research Institute. ''The tests to date have been so small as far as looking at the financial and technical viability. It's still at the very early stage of development.''
The technology works like this: data is carried either by fiber-optic or telephone lines to skip disruptive high-voltage lines, then is injected into the power grid downstream, onto medium-voltage wires.
Because signals can only make it so far before breaking apart, special electronic devices on the line catch packets of data, then reamplify and repackage them before shooting them out again.

Other technologies use more elaborate techniques that detour the signal around transformers.
Either way, the signal makes its way to neighborhoods and customers who could access either it wirelessly, through strategically placed utility poles, or by having it zipped directly into their homes via the regular electric current. Adaptors at individual power outlets ferry the data into computers through their usual ports.
The nonprofit Douglas Electric Cooperative in Oregon, with more than 9,000 customers in a service territory the size of Delaware, hopes the electric Internet technology can complement the co-op's high-speed fiber-optic cabling, which is too pricey to extend to rural customers, said Mark Doty, a Douglas superintendent.
The co-op hopes to field test the technology as early as this summer nice timing for member Bart Exparza, who is fed up with his slow dial-up connection at his home deep in Oregon's tree-lined, mountainous countryside.
''Imagine the cartoon of a guy standing on top of his computer, pulling his hair out. That's me,'' the self-employed electrical contractor frets. ''I just roll my eyes and think, `Golly gee.'''

On the Net:
Ameren, http://www.ameren.com
Information Technology Association of America, http://www.itaa.org
Power Line Communications Association, http://www.plca.net
Electric Power Research Institute, http://www.epri.com

2003-02-10T19:33:00.000-08:00

Yahoo to launch paid Net video service

Yahoo is close to unveiling details of a paid, subscription-based Internet video service that will compete with a similar product from RealNetworks, according to sources familiar with the plans.
Sources said the company is preparing to introduce the service, called "Platinum Yahoo," by the end of March. An announcement could come as early as Wednesday during an event with Wall Street analysts and reporters. As previously reported, Yahoo last year began testing user appetite for such a product as part of a companywide effort to develop nonadvertising, subscription-based services.
Yahoo has been in discussions with television networks to become content partners in the new service, which could feature video clips from News Corp.'s Fox network, Viacom's CBS and Walt Disney's ABCNews.com, according to sources close to the negotiations. The sources cautioned, though, that deals have not been sealed and plans could change.
One source close to the discussions described the talks as "active," while another described negotiations with one network as "close to agreement."
Yahoo declined to comment. Fox and ABCNews also declined to comment. CBS did not immediately return phone calls.
The video service comes on the heels of a paid version of Yahoo's Launchcast Net radio service. The company last month said it will charge $3.95 a month for advertising-free programming. In addition, Yahoo last year partnered with the music label-backed online music subscription service Pressplay.
Platinum Yahoo will propel Yahoo into direct competition with RealNetworks, whose RealOne SuperPass has amassed 900,000 subscribers paying $9.95 a month. RealOne has content agreements with marquee partners including Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association, ABCNews, CNN and The Weather Channel.
Sources said Platinum Yahoo will be priced competitively to RealOne.
Eyeing analyst day
The creation of a streaming video service has particular significance to Yahoo under the leadership of Terry Semel, the former Warner Bros. studio head who became Yahoo's CEO in May 2001. Semel has been an outspoken proponent of the Web as a complement to existing media and entertainment franchises.
Indeed, the organization of content on Platinum Yahoo coincides with this view. Television networks would provide Yahoo with repurposed or exclusive clips from television shows, most likely reality programs, or offer video news packages that may have already aired on television, sources said.
A streaming video service also falls in the realm of Yahoo's broadband plans. The company is trying to catch the growing number of Internet users migrating onto high-speed broadband connections by offering them paid services.
Last September, Yahoo launched its co-branded digital subscriber line (DSL) service with SBC Communications. SBC's existing and new DSL subscribers will receive a customized Web browser programmed by Yahoo that also includes a list of premium services bundled into the offering.
Waiting for broadband
Meanwhile, Yahoo's Semel has said that the company expects to partner with multiple broadband providers to offer an enhanced version of its service. However, company executives have also couched these predictions by saying the SBC deal will be one of a kind in terms of the depth of their relationship.
Still, Semel told Wall Street analysts during Yahoo's earnings report last month that executives would shed more light on the company's broadband plans during analyst day. The centerpiece of this will be Yahoo's "bring your own access" service, a bundle of broadband-centric features that people with high-speed access can purchase for a monthly fee.

"BYOA" has become the strategy du jour among Yahoo and its competitors America Online and MSN. AOL and MSN have priced their services at $14.95 and $9.95, respectively. Two sources close to Yahoo said BYOA will be discussed during analyst day, but the price of the offering has not been set.

Yahoo already offered some hints of things to come when it began testing a premium service package called "Yahoo Plus." Sources say the company's BYOA offering will be an evolution of Yahoo Plus but declined to elaborate.
Selling premium services has been a priority for Yahoo to bolster its nonadvertising revenue stream. The company over the past year has witnessed its total subscriber base surpass 2 million, from people buying services such as extra e-mail storage, e-mail forwarding and personals, among others. Yahoo's DSL partnership with SBC is also expected to boost this number in the coming year.

2003-02-04T18:15:00.000-08:00

Wireless Companies Ask for Number Portability

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Customers should be able to transfer their telephone numbers when they cancel regular phone service and rely only on a cell phone, wireless providers have told U.S. regulators.
A cell-phone trade group filed a petition late Thursday with the Federal Communications Commission (news - web sites) declaring that newly drafted number portability rules should apply to local phone providers, as well as mobile phone companies.
The rules, scheduled to take effect this November, would allow customers to keep their existing phone numbers when they switch from one wireless provider to another. Existing regulations allow customers to keep their numbers when they switch from one "land line" provider to another and the FCC (news - web sites) has extended that obligation to the wireless world.
Wireless companies like Verizon Wireless and T-MobileUSA Wireless have lobbied hard against the measure, but have only been able to convince the FCC to postpone the implementation date several times.
They say companies will be forced to spend about $1 billion to accommodate number portability -- money better spent on new towers to improve coverage -- while the rules will not allow most "land line" customers to keep their phone numbers if they opt to rely solely on cell phone service.
The FCC should extend that requirement to all customers, the industry's top lobbyist said.
"Number portability is as unnecessary in the competitive wireless market as socks on a fish, but the FCC has made the situation even worse," said Tom Wheeler, president of the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association.
An FCC spokeswoman said the agency would examine the proposal and ask for public input. Any decision is not likely for at least several months, she said.
Responding to industry requests, the FCC has delayed implementation of the rules several times.
One lawmakers urged the FCC to avoid any further delays, noting that number portability will improve competition and service among wireless carriers.

2003-02-04T18:07:00.000-08:00

Amazon Beats Expectations of Analysts in 4th Quarter

n one of the toughest retail markets in years, sales at Amazon.com increased 28 percent, to $1.43 billion, in the fourth quarter of last year. And the online store, which had lost money in the first three quarters of 2002, posted a quarterly profit of $2.7 million.
Amazon's profits, excluding some accounting charges, substantially exceeded analysts' expectations, even as its sales growth accelerated. A year ago, Amazon had slowed its growth to focus on increasing its efficiency and stemming its losses.
Amazon attributed much of its growth to a renewed emphasis on price cutting, like free shipping for orders of $25 or more. The company said yesterday that it would make that offer — which had been presented as a test — a permanent part of its business.
Amazon said it had waived shipping charges of $30 million in the fourth quarter but received shipping fees of $121 million, implying that free shipping applies only on a minority of its orders.
"The strategy of increasing efficiency and lower prices, which works for Wal-Mart and works for Dell, is working for Amazon," said Anthony Noto, an analyst with Goldman, Sachs.
The company has also started expanding the goods it sells. Last November it introduced apparel items sold by dozens of other merchants. This year, it expects to add several categories, some with goods sold by other companies and some with merchandise in its own warehouses.
On a conference call with investors, Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon's chief executive, declined to discuss the financial results of the new apparel department. He did say, however, that the company processed orders for 153,000 shirts, 106,000 pairs of pants, 77,000 pairs of shoes, and 31,000 pairs of underwear. (Briefs outsold boxers, but not by a statistically significant amount, said Mr. Bezos, a former Wall Street trader.)
Amazon gets a commission of about 10 percent on apparel sales, industry executives have said.
A year ago, Amazon said its goal for 2002 was to generate a positive cash flow from operations, in contrast to a negative cash flow of $120 million in 2001. It exceeded that goal, generating cash from operations of $198 million. Amazon's cash and marketable securities increased to $1.3 billion at the end of the year, compared with $996 million a year earlier.
Amazon's reported profits include adjustments related to the movement of the euro, because it issued debt in euros, and adjustments tied to the price of its stock, because of the way it reissued some stock options. That has the effect of reducing Amazon's profits in periods when its stock price rises and bolstering them when the stock falls.

Using Amazon's pro forma calculation, which excludes these adjustments and some other items, Amazon had a net income of $75 million in the fourth quarter, up from $35 million a year earlier. That comes to 19 cents a share, well above the 14 cents analysts had expected.

For the full year, Amazon posted a pro forma profit of $66 million, in contrast to a pro forma loss of $157 million a year earlier. Amazon's 2002 sales were $3.9 billion, up 26 percent. For this year, Amazon predicted its sales would increase at least 15 percent and pro forma net profit would rise at least 74 percent.
Amazon has been able to revive its growth in the United States, which had stagnated in 2001 while rapid growth continued overseas.
In the fourth quarter, book sales in the United States increased 13 percent, to $606 million, compared with a 5 percent growth rate in 2001. In the United States, fourth-quarter sales of hard goods, which are primarily electronics, increased 21 percent, to $261 million, in contrast to a decline of 2 percent in 2001. International sales increased 76 percent, to $461 million, slightly less than the 81 percent growth in 2001.
Amazon makes money with books in the United States and with its international operations, but it loses money on its hard goods in the United States. The operating loss of $10 million for the hard goods in the most recent quarter was half that of a year earlier.
In 2001 "they didn't have the best brands and were out of stock a lot in electronics," Mr. Noto said. Last "year they had a better selection and were offering free shipping."
Amazon released its results after regular trading. Its shares ended regular trading at $21.79, up 62 cents, but fell 21 cents after hours.

2003-02-04T17:48:00.000-08:00

Networking Senate curbs Pentagon data-mining plans

Update WASHINGTON--The U.S. Senate on Thursday voted unanimously to slap restrictions on a controversial Pentagon data-mining program that critics say would amount to a domestic spying apparatus.
By unanimous consent, the Senate inserted a moratorium on the program into a massive spending bill, which was approved by a 69-29 vote late Thursday.
The vote represents an unusual triumph of privacy concerns over the Bush administration's arguments that the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) program would be useful for national security. If fully implemented, TIA would link databases from sources such as credit card companies, medical insurers and motor vehicle agencies in hopes of snaring terrorists
Final passage of the moratorium is not certain, however. Because the House of Representatives' version of the omnibus appropriations bill does not include any limits on TIA, a conference committee will have the final say.
"There's the potential for some minor changes," a representative for Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the amendment's author, said Thursday.
Wyden's proposal prevailed over a more modest plan championed by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. Grassley's proposed amendment said only that TIA must not be used for "domestic intelligence or law enforcement purposes."
On the other hand, the Wyden amendment--co-sponsored by Democrats including Dianne Feinstein of California and Patrick Leahy of Vermont--bans TIA after two months unless Congress receives a detailed report or President George W. Bush decides that a halt would "endanger the national security of the United States."
Thereafter, if the Defense Department or any other executive branch agency wishes to release TIA to be used on American citizens, it must seek "specific authorization" from Congress. Exceptions are "lawful" military activities conducted overseas, or intelligence operations that target non-Americans inside or outside the United States.
Wyden said in a statement that "as originally proposed, the Total Information Awareness program is the most far-reaching government surveillance plan in history. The Senate has now said that this program will not be allowed to grow without tough congressional oversight and accountability, and that there will be checks on the government's ability to snoop on law-abiding Americans."
Privacy worries about the Pentagon system, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), came to a head this week after the FBI indicated it wanted to use TIA domestically against U.S. citizens. In a letter to Grassley, Defense Department Inspector General Joseph Schmitz said the FBI is considering "possible experimentation with TIA technology in the future."
Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., said after the vote that he would continue to pursue a standalone bill that would also place restrictions on TIA.
In a statement posted last month on the TIA Web site, the Defense Department defended the project as privacy neutral.
"The DoD recognizes American citizens' concerns about privacy invasions," the statement said. "To ensure the TIA project will not violate the privacy of American citizens, the department has safeguards in place. In addition, (we) will research and develop technologies to protect the system from internal abuses and external threats. The goal is to achieve a quantum leap in privacy technology to ensure data is protected and used only for lawful purposes."
The TIA project became public in early 2002 when Bush chose Adm. John Poindexter, who was embroiled in the Iran-Contra scandal, to run DARPA's Information Awareness Office. But criticism of the project from privacy advocates and newspaper editorial pages has spiked in the last two months, with politicians becoming increasingly interested in TIA's details after the 108th Congress convened this month.
Groups like the U.S. Association for Computing Machinery, the professional association for computer scientists, had urged Congress to place limits on TIA. In a letter to the Senate on Thursday, ACM warned: "Because of serious security, privacy, economic and personal risks associated with the development of a vast database surveillance system, we recommend a rigorous, independent review of these aspects of TIA."

2003-02-04T17:30:00.000-08:00

Teen cleared in landmark DVD case

OSLO, Norway -- A Norwegian teenager has been cleared of DVD piracy charges in a landmark trial brought by major Hollywood studios.
The Oslo court said Jon Johansen, known in Norway as "DVD Jon," had not broken the law when he helped unlock a code and distribute a computer program enabling DVD films to be copied.
"Johansen is found not guilty," Judge Irene Sogn told the court. She said prosecutors could appeal against the unanimous verdict.
Johansen said after the ruling that he would celebrate by "watching DVD films on unlicensed players."
Prosecutors had asked for a 90-day suspended jail term for Johansen, 19, who developed the program when he was 15.
The teenager has become a symbol for hackers worldwide who say making software such as Johansen's -- called DeCSS -- is an act of intellectual freedom rather than theft.
DeCSS defeats the copyright protection system known as Contents Scramble System (CSS), which the entertainment industry uses to protect films distributed on DVDs.
Johansen created and published DeCSS so that he would be able to view DVDs on his Linux computer. He said the program meant the film industry no longer had a monopoly on making DVD players.
The prosecution was brought after a complaint was filed by the Motion Picture Association (MPA), which represents the major Hollywood studios.
The studios argued unauthorised copying was copyright theft and undermined a market for DVDs and videos worth $20 billion a year in North America alone.
But Johansen argued his code was necessary to watch movies he already owned, on his Linux-based computer, for which DVD software had not yet been written.

2003-02-04T17:21:00.000-08:00

Cell Phone Hell

Cellular telephone service is so bad that nearly a third of the customers surveyed are seriously considering switching companies, but there's no easy way to figure out which plans are best, Consumer Reports magazine said.
"Deciphering one plan is hard enough, but comparing plans from various carriers is nearly impossible," said Jim Guest, president of Yonkers-based Consumers Union, which publishes the magazine.
In addition, he said during a telephone new conference Monday, companies make it difficult to switch by refusing to let customers keep their phones or phone numbers when they move to another company - and by charging early termination penalties of up to $175.
A Federal Communications Commission regulation that would let customers keep their phone numbers when they switch is scheduled to go into effect in November. Sprint PCS spokesman Dan Wilinsky said his company was ready to meet that deadline.
But Chris Murray, Consumers Union's telecommunications policy analyst, said the companies had twice persuaded the FCC to postpone it and were trying to do so again.
Guest said cell phone companies were consistently unclear about startup fees, roaming charges, early termination penalties and even when night and weekends begin and what "nationwide" means, all of which can drastically affect a customer's bill.
Howard Waterman, a Verizon Wireless spokesman, said every new customer is sent a detailed explanation of the calling plan, with all terms defined carefully.
But Guest described the current state of the industry as a "cell hell" for consumers.
"The cell phone industry has made great strides in offering consumers sleek cell phones with the latest gee-whiz gadgets and gizmos, color screens, games, individualized rings and Internet access," he said. "But the cell phone industry is not providing the nuts and bolts - the basic services consumers depend on."
The most essential of those basic services, he said, is the ability to make a 911 call. But the magazine found that emergency cell phone calls often failed because they were limited to one company's signal, even if a rival's signal was stronger in the area.
Waterman took issue with that claim, saying, "We treat 911 calls with the utmost priority. ... Our policy is 'find a signal, period,' even if it's a competitor's signal."
The magazine said a survey of 21,944 subscribers found numerous complaints of dead zones, busy signals and dropped calls. It compared service in six cities - New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and San Francisco - and found that Verizon Wireless led the ratings in each.
Wilinsky, of Sprint, which finished last in four of the cities, said the results are "old news," especially for Sprint.
Consumer Reports suggested that customers do some homework before signing on with any carrier, including:
Seek recommendations from neighbors and business associates to find out which company's service is best where the customer will be using it.
Decide on a plan before deciding on a phone.
Take advantage of the usual two-week trial period.
Review the bill carefully each month.
Consumers Union is an independent nonprofit organization whose mission since 1936 has been to test products, inform the public and protect consumers, according to its Web site. Its income comes from sales of Consumer Reports and other services and noncommercial contributions and grants.

2003-02-04T17:08:00.000-08:00

Yahoo passes paid subscriber goal

Internet media company Yahoo met its goal to end the year with 2 million paying subscribers ahead of schedule in early December, its chief executive said Monday.
Speaking at a Morgan Stanley investment conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., Terry Semel said the company exceeded its target last year, though he did not provide a precise figure.
Yahoo has increasingly emphasized premium services such as career listings, personal ads and custom e-mail packages as a way to diversify its sources of revenue and expand its reach beyond the basic advertising that had been its hallmark
In early December, Semel, speaking at an investment conference in New York, said the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company would surpass that 2 million subscribers goal.
Semel, monitored via Webcast from the Morgan Stanley conference, also addressed the planned acquisition of search software company Inktomi, a $235 million deal that was announced Dec. 23.
"We did it for fundamental reasons," Semel said. "The ownership of the index does give us greater flexibility and control over the services that we create online."
In a question-and-answer session after his presentation, Semel declined to comment on the potential impact of the Inktomi deal on Yahoo's search partner, Google, or on Overture Services, which sells paid search listings.
After the Inktomi deal was announced, analysts widely speculated that it would give Yahoo a way to abandon its partnership with Google.

2003-01-27T05:13:00.000-08:00

Coming this year to a station near you: eBay TV

PALO ALTO, Calif. (Reuters) — Internet auction giant eBay and Sony Pictures Television plan to pipe an eBay-inspired TV show into U.S. living rooms in the second half of this year, an eBay spokesman said Thursday.
Silicon Valley-based eBay and its partner — a unit of Japan's Sony — have come up with an hour-long program that they will syndicate to local stations, a Sony Pictures Television spokesman told Reuters.
EBay-TV will have a magazine-style format that's a cocktail of existing shows such as Entertainment Tonight, Ripley's Believe it or Not and Antiques Roadshow. Live auctions are not seen as part of the programming.
Among other things, shows might focus on unique auction lots and profile quirky eBay sellers or buyers.
EBay-TV's host will be Molly Pesce, formerly of Comedy Central's The Daily Show hosted by Jon Stewart.
Stations that pick up the show are expected to earn a commission on all items sold through Web sites designed for the stations by eBay. The Web auctioneer will also pay $6 for every person who joins eBay via a television station Web site.

2003-01-27T05:10:00.000-08:00

Kasparov, Computer Talk Smack

NEW YORK -- Fear not, humans.

We're not completely clueless, and Garry Kasparov plans to prove it.
Kasparov, the chess grandmaster beaten in a match by computer Deep Blue six years ago, said Thursday he is proud to represent humanity in the latest battle of man vs. machine.
"I'll try to prove that the human race isn't hopeless," Kasparov said during a press conference in New York.
Kasparov is taking on Deep Junior, currently the world's best computerized chess player, in a match billed as the ultimate battle between wetware and software.
In this match, Kasparov will pit his skills against a chess-playing program instead of a machine like Blue specifically built to play the game.
"But this competition isn't just a game," Kasparov said. "It is also a scientific experiment that is very important for the whole human race."
Programmers Amir Ban and Shay Bushinsky spoke for Deep Junior. They figure that as long as there are no unexpected catastrophes, such as a power failure, Junior will kick human butt.
"This match will demonstrate that computers are able to understand abstract concepts," Bushinsky said. "And that they can think as crazy as humans do."
Junior's programmers said that their creation can not only think in the abstract, it's also coded to take risks. Prior to Junior, chess-playing computers tended to assume the safest move was the best move.
Junior isn't as fast as Blue. It can calculate the potential outcome of about 3 million moves per second, compared with Deep Blue's 200-300 million.
Kasparov said he can calculate the potential of about 3 moves per second at best, "but they are the best moves."
Kasparov is expected to battle like an elegant martial arts master, whereas Junior plays chess as if it's engaging in a street fight, Ban said.
Kasparov said yesterday that the real challenge when playing as a human against a computer isn't lack of brain power.
"The problem is emotions. Computers don't feel the pressure, they don't get tired or hungry," Kasparov said. "But it is just that lack of imagination which gives humans the edge." Kasparov said he has prepared for this contest partly by playing against the version of Deep Junior that won the chess championship last summer.
Junior's code has been tweaked since then, and Ban and Bushinsky can reprogram Junior between but not during the matches.
If Kasparov plays a stealthy game, instead of a purely tactical one which Junior can easily recognize and counter, experts believe the human could humble the machine.
Kasparov and Junior will battle in a six-game, almost two-week contest held at the New York Athletic Club.
The contest will start at 3:30 p.m ET on Sunday. All the matches can be viewed in real-time on Wired News, accompanied by commentary from two American grandmasters, Yasser Seirawan and Maurice Ashley.
Kasparov will receive $500,000 whether he wins or loses. The winner will get $300,000, the loser $200,000. If the match is tied, each contestant will receive $250,000. Junior's programmers will handle their protégé's winnings, should the software prove that humans are indeed hopeless.

2003-01-27T04:53:00.000-08:00

Senate curbs Pentagon data-mining plans

Update WASHINGTON--The U.S. Senate on Thursday voted unanimously to slap restrictions on a controversial Pentagon data-mining program that critics say would amount to a domestic spying apparatus.
By unanimous consent, the Senate inserted a moratorium on the program into a massive spending bill, which was approved by a 69-29 vote late Thursday.
The vote represents an unusual triumph of privacy concerns over the Bush administration's arguments that the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) program would be useful for national security. If fully implemented, TIA would link databases from sources such as credit card companies, medical insurers and motor vehicle agencies in hopes of snaring terrorists.
Final passage of the moratorium is not certain, however. Because the House of Representatives' version of the omnibus appropriations bill does not include any limits on TIA, a conference committee will have the final say.
"There's the potential for some minor changes," a representative for Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the amendment's author, said Thursday.
Wyden's proposal prevailed over a more modest plan championed by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. Grassley's proposed amendment said only that TIA must not be used for "domestic intelligence or law enforcement purposes."
On the other hand, the Wyden amendment--co-sponsored by Democrats including Dianne Feinstein of California and Patrick Leahy of Vermont--bans TIA after two months unless Congress receives a detailed report or President George W. Bush decides that a halt would "endanger the national security of the United States."
Thereafter, if the Defense Department or any other executive branch agency wishes to release TIA to be used on American citizens, it must seek "specific authorization" from Congress. Exceptions are "lawful" military activities conducted overseas, or intelligence operations that target non-Americans inside or outside the United States.
Wyden said in a statement that "as originally proposed, the Total Information Awareness program is the most far-reaching government surveillance plan in history. The Senate has now said that this program will not be allowed to grow without tough congressional oversight and accountability, and that there will be checks on the government's ability to snoop on law-abiding Americans."
Privacy worries about the Pentagon system, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), came to a head this week after the FBI indicated it wanted to use TIA domestically against U.S. citizens. In a letter to Grassley, Defense Department Inspector General Joseph Schmitz said the FBI is considering "possible experimentation with TIA technology in the future."
Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., said after the vote that he would continue to pursue a standalone bill that would also place restrictions on TIA.
In a statement posted last month on the TIA Web site, the Defense Department defended the project as privacy neutral.
"The DoD recognizes American citizens' concerns about privacy invasions," the statement said. "To ensure the TIA project will not violate the privacy of American citizens, the department has safeguards in place. In addition, (we) will research and develop technologies to protect the system from internal abuses and external threats. The goal is to achieve a quantum leap in privacy technology to ensure data is protected and used only for lawful purposes."
The TIA project became public in early 2002 when Bush chose Adm. John Poindexter, who was embroiled in the Iran-Contra scandal, to run DARPA's Information Awareness Office. But criticism of the project from privacy advocates and newspaper editorial pages has spiked in the last two months, with politicians becoming increasingly interested in TIA's details after the 108th Congress convened this month.
Groups like the U.S. Association for Computing Machinery, the professional association for computer scientists, had urged Congress to place limits on TIA. In a letter to the Senate on Thursday, ACM warned: "Because of serious security, privacy, economic and personal risks associated with the development of a vast database surveillance system, we recommend a rigorous, independent review of these aspects of TIA."

2003-01-27T04:25:00.000-08:00

2003-01-23T20:36:00.000-08:00

Porn Strategy: Share and Snare
The porn industry is learning a lesson the music industry refuses to hear: Piracy doesn't have to be a dirty word.

As recording industry officials sing dirges over a 2002 music-business sales slump and press ahead with lawsuits against file-sharing network platforms such as Kazaa, pornographers see an opening.
"You can't beat them, so you ought to join them," said Exploit Systems CEO Scott Hunter. "These are your most valued customers, the people who come specifically into your arena and say they want X, Y and Z. This is the most inquisitive, most important community possibly in the history of business."

Hunter's company has developed software that helps content providers put their legitimate versions of material being pirated onto the file-share networks in such a way that it overwhelms the pirated versions of the same material.

The software also influences the search engines of Kazaa, Gnutella and Limewire so that if a user searches certain keywords, they'll be more likely to find the legitimate version of the file they're seeking and download that.

When users try to open up the legitimate editions, though, they may be forced to pay for it and be sent to the porn company's homepage, or they may be allowed to watch it for free provided they ask for identifying information the company can use later for marketing purposes.

"If 15 percent of the roughly 150 million people on these networks are willing to pay for the content, that's 20 million customers," Hunter said. "It's foolish of any business to deny themselves the opportunity to make that sale."

FalconFoto CEO Gail Harris sees the wisdom of this approach.

"We're willing to give away a few images, and then if you're interested in more, we have a whole archive of hundreds of thousands of images that you can subscribe to see," says Harris, whose company provides photos of naked people to several porn magazines including High Society and Barely Legal, and boasts an online library of more than 1 million adult images.

"What we have is a captive audience of people we know are interested in our product because they went out seeking it themselves. Many of them are willing to pay for it, too."

FalconFoto has aligned itself with Playa Solutions, a company that promises to "wrap" content that is posted on the Internet in such a way that the content provider can set the rules of how it is used. Playa's approach is to flood the file-share networks with the legitimate content on purpose in what is known as "viral marketing."

Playa Solutions founder Jason Tucker insists the music industry could easily apply this technology. For instance, a record label could spread a clip of the new Britney Spears single before it's released and force those who listen to it to visit the official Spears website -- where they can buy a copy of the album.

The Recording Industry Association of America refused to comment on the prospect of learning anything from the pornography business, a stance that reflects the business' uneasiness with anything that would legitimize the concept of copyright infringements. One music official said privately that porn customers are seeking an immediate gratification that they'll pay for, whereas music consumers aren't quite so desperate for their fix.

Hunter and Tucker disagree, noting that devotees of singers and bands would also be willing to pay for the material -- if only someone would ask them.

"What we have to do is to modify behavior so people will purchase this way, not take this way," Hunter said. "They don't pay because they've never had to. But now it's time to make some order out of the chaos -- and it's a wonderful chaos."

2003-01-23T20:34:00.000-08:00

Rosen Waves Bye to RIAA
Hilary Rosen, the U.S. recording industry's head lobbyist who waged a high-profile battle against Napster and music piracy, is resigning at the end of the year.

In a statement, Rosen cited personal reasons for leaving the Recording Industry Association of America, where she has served as chief executive since 1998.
"During my tenure here, the recording industry has undergone dramatic challenges and it is well positioned for future success. I have been extremely proud to be a part of this industry transition," Rosen said. "But I have young children and I want to devote more of my time to them."

She said the RIAA board will conduct a formal search for a replacement.

Rosen's departure comes as the organization sought to soften its image among Internet consumers, many of whom viewed the RIAA and Rosen personally with antipathy over incessant pressure for crackdowns on sharing digital music over the Internet.

The group recently set aside a simmering dispute with leading technology companies by agreeing to oppose any government efforts to build locking controls into future generations of entertainment devices.

Technology companies have complained that such controls, which would hamper consumers' efforts to share movies and music, are too expensive and complex.

Rosen was an independent consultant before joining the RIAA in 1987. She also is a founding board member of Rock the Vote, an organization aimed to get younger people more politically involved.

2003-01-23T20:32:00.000-08:00

Canadian Net pharmacies draw scrutiny of U.S. drug companies

CALGARY (AP) — A few months ago, Dave Robertson had eight employees in the 800-square- foot office of his new Internet pharmacy business.

Today, Robertson's crossborderpharmacy.com has 150 workers and 20,000 square feet of office space, serving an ever-expanding customer base that he says numbers close to 100,000 — nearly all of them U.S. consumers seeking cheaper Canadian medicine.

Scores of new, rapidly growing Canadian operations are filling prescriptions sent from south of the border, capitalizing on the disparity of drug prices between the North American neighbors.

The business worries pharmaceutical giants like GlaxoSmithKline, which wants to shut down operations like Robertson's. Drug makers, as well as regulators, say they worry about the proper medical supervision and quality controls.

Canada regulates drug prices as part of its national health care system, while the market dictates pricing in the United States. Many popular medications for chronic conditions such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol can be bought in Canada at less than half the U.S. price.

Rough estimates put the number of Canadian companies in the business at 80 or more, and total annual revenues are believed to be as high as $650 million. Precise figures are unavailable because the companies are privately held and the situation changes daily.

Just ask Robertson, 39, a pharmacist who designed industry software until realizing the potential of reaching a U.S. market of aging citizens with diminishing medical insurance benefits and coverage.

He started crossborderpharmacy.com last fall in Calgary, and it has blossomed into separate departments for receiving telephone and Internet queries, filing information, consulting with U.S. doctors and patients, and filling and shipping orders.

One 50-by-30-foot room used to hold most of the administrative departments. Soon it will become an addition to the dispensary, where pharmacists and their technicians fill orders in plastic bags for shipment to the United States.

"Basically we cut a hole and move a wall and we have another dispensary," Robertson said. "It's an evolution. It's a never-ending process."

He might as well have been talking about the entire industry, which has taken the traditional mail-order system of delivering medicine to rural areas and applied it to a much more lucrative cross-border business.

Lower Canadian drug prices have attracted U.S. customers for years, with busloads of senior citizens from communities near the border making weekend trips to Canada to stock up.

Manitoba pharmacists were the first to market by Internet, extending service far beyond bordering states. Ronald Guse, registrar of the Manitoba Pharmaceutical Association, said Wednesday the latest figures indicate there are about 40 such operations in the province.

The flow of drugs to the United States is raising the potential for problems in supply to Canadians, Guse said. A rural hospital lost its pharmacist to one of the new operations, creating a vacancy difficult to fill, he said.

Guse's association is studying possible guidelines for prescriptions to make sure they are valid under Canadian regulations.

The Canadian companies generally have Canadian-licensed doctors who rewrite U.S. prescriptions submitted by Americans, satisfying regulatory requirements in most provinces.

Some provinces, including Manitoba, require doctors writing prescriptions to personally consult with patients, and Guse questioned how that can be done by a physician handling hundreds of prescriptions a day.

At crossborderpharmacy.com, there are five or more pharmacists on duty at any one time to oversee prescriptions, and the company tries to contact every customer by phone, Robertson said.

"We require a U.S. prescription. We do have the U.S. prescription reviewed by a Canadian physician to have it rewritten, but you cannot purchase medication here without having a primary care U.S. physician," he said.

GlaxoSmithKline, citing concerns about proper medical supervision, has told the Canadian wholesalers and retailers it supplies that they must provide assurances they are not selling drugs to the United States. If they don't, Glaxo will stop supplying them.

It originally set a Jan. 21 deadline for complying but backed off Tuesday, saying it was working on a plan to ensure that customers still get enough drugs for Canadian consumers.

In response, Canadian pharmacies have banded together in associations and threatened lawsuits alleging unfair practices and trade violations. They say the issue is not quality of care but the money that GlaxoSmithKline sees going to Canadian companies.

Dave Adams, 56, who lives in the Los Angeles area and gets his Zocor medicine for high cholesterol from crossborderpharmacy.com, is like many U.S. consumers who dismiss product safety concerns.

The Zocor he gets from Canada is made by the same company — Merck — that made the supplies he used to buy in California. But now he pays $256 for a 90-day supply instead of $648.

"You can say all those things you want, but my cholesterol is the same" whether the prescription is filled in the United States or Canada, he said.

2003-01-17T21:26:00.000-08:00

Living Off The Flat of the Land
From televisions to computer screens, manufacturers
are going flat (good news for many lower backs out there,
if nothing else). Over the next four years, the
global output of flat panel displays is projected
to grow by 21% annually.

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-979658.html

Mac introduces a 17-inch screened laptop and
a new web browser.
http://www.business2.com/articles/web/0,1653,46313,00.html

Two major retailers will test out smart shelf
technology. Microchips and scanners enable the
shelves to keep track of inventory.
http://news.com.com/2100-1017-979710.html

This may sound like a throwback to the frothiest
days of the boom. A company is creating an online
virtual world called There.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/fun.games/01/08/being.there.ap/

2003-01-17T21:21:00.000-08:00

A Clear Signal?
Times haven't been too good for online radio
webcasters. Increased royalties have endangered
the small players and the majors are turning off
their streams to cut what they see as unnecessary
costs. Clear Channel just pulled 150 of their
200 stations offline. Overall, there are fewer
stations online today than there were several
years ago.

http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,57134,00.html

Microsoft introduces the smart watch.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/09/technology/09SOFT.html

With everyone getting a cell phone, what will become
of the pay phones on corners throughout the
world? In Canada, some phone booths are being
converted into wireless hubs.
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,405456,00.html

A new software package may make it possible
for viewers to remove all R rated content
From a DVD that they are watching. {One assumes
that the same technology could be used to fast-forward
to the good parts!}
http://www.msnbc.com/news/857154.asp

2003-01-17T20:49:00.000-08:00

Spanking the Three Year-Old
Things could be happier at AOL/TW during this
their third anniversary. The company's value has
dropped dramatically since first they met and
the new year will bring more write-downs, more
layoffs and more cutbacks (and one can only hope,
more finger-pointing). The traditional gift for a
third anniversary is leather. The only question
is who to spank first {Ted, wait your turn...}.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37437-2003Jan10.html

What are the hot, new tech devices?
http://www.msnbc.com/news/857086.asp

Among the hot new, technologies getting attention
at C.E.S. is FM radio.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-980055.html

Is online auction fraud worse than we thought?
http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,42194,00.html

2003-01-17T20:48:00.000-08:00

Dividended We Stand
Microsoft surprised investors with a modest
dividend (and a stock split). But they also
surprised some by reducing targets for 2003.

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-981148.html

Sun posted their largest quarterly loss ever.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/17/business/17SUN.html

Ebay comes in with solid earnings.
http://www.EcommerceTimes.com/perl/story/20497.html

In a move expected by many observers, AOL-TW
named CEO Richard Parsons as Chairman.
http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/business/cnn/0103/17parsons.html

The makers of Blackberry have friends in high
places. Members of Congress are major Blackberry
users and they're doing what they can to help
the company avoid a pending injunction.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3417-2003Jan16.html