A Study's Verdict: Jury Awards Are Not Out of Control
A comprehensive study of nearly 9,000 trials across the country has found that judges award punitive damages about as often as juries and generally in about the same proportions.

The role of judges in awarding punitive damages was "surprisingly prominent," the study found, adding that moves to limit punitive awards by juries "may be a solution in search of a problem."
The study, believed to be one of the largest of punitive damage awards, challenges widely held ideas about jurors' decisions that have influenced state judges, legislators, Congress and even the United States Supreme Court.

Jury punitive damage awards, which are intended as punishment, have been a focus of particular criticism because of occasional huge awards that critics say have no relation to compensatory damages, which are intended to pay injured people for their losses.

A draft of the study, provided by the authors, said that judges and juries each awarded punitive damages in about 4 percent of the cases in which plaintiffs won.

The study, to be published in March in the Cornell Law Review, analyzed court statistics on 8,724 trials in 45 large trial courts across the country. It was conducted by two Cornell professors, Theodore Eisenberg and Martin T. Wells, and three analysts from the National Center for State Courts, an independent research group in Williamsburg, Va.

By showing that judges and juries generally have similar views of punitive damages, the study suggested that juries may be far less arbitrary than is widely believed, said Neil Vidmar, an authority on jury issues at Duke Law School who was not involved in the Cornell research but was familiar with it.

"It is novel," Professor Vidmar said, "because the conventional wisdom is juries are irresponsible, incompetent and don't know how to make an assessment."

The study is expected to be controversial not only because it concludes that jurors may be more rational than they were believed to be, but also because it contradicts other research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/06/national/06LEGA.html?pagewanted=all

Susan Calcari
Susan Calcari 1956-2001

Susan Calcari was born on June 25th, 1956 in Iron Mountain, Michigan -- the daughter of Robert and Carol (Oien) Calcari. She graduated near the top of Iron Mountain High School's class of 1974 and went on to graduate with honors from Michigan Technological University in 1978. Shortly after graduating, she moved to San Francisco, where she began her career.

Susan was the founder and Executive Director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Internet Scout Project, which publishes the Scout Report and does research related to online resource discovery. The Scout Report is one of the Internet's longest-running and most respected publications.

From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2001. http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/about/susan.html

Unmasking the Poor

The poor are pretty well hidden from everyone except each other in the United States. You won't find them in the same neighborhoods or the same schools as the well-to-do. They're not on television, except for the local crime-casts. And they've vanished from the nation's political discussion.

Hiding the poor has been quite a trick, because there are still millions upon millions of them out here. And despite all the rosy scenarios we've been fed — the end of welfare as we know it, rising tides lifting everybody's yachts — they're not doing very well at all.

This has been made clear in a new report from the Economic Policy Institute in Washington and in Barbara Ehrenreich's latest book, "Nickel and Dimed."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/30/opinion/30HERB.html

ZDNet: Smart Business | What's Next
What's Next
The Editors of Ziff Davis Smart Business, Ziff Davis Smart Business
August 2001
E-business reality check: Barry Diller, Sam Donaldson, Mohan Sawhney, Ted Nugent, and other innovators on the future of the Next Economy—and how to profit from it.
http://www.zdnet.com/smartbusinessmag/stories/all/0,6605,2781480,00.html

Overcome by Slavery
The resonance of the Jefferson- Hemings affair provides a reminder of how much slavery has become part of contemporary politics. Bill Clinton realized this early on; hence the debate over The Apology and his appointment of the Commission on Race and Reconciliation. Congress has also gotten into the act, mandating that Civil War battle sites supervised by the National Park Service address slavery. Disputes over the Confederate flag and Confederate History Month have roiled politics in South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Virginia, and California has required insurance companies to divulge if they have ever insured slave property. Finally, there is the matter of reparations, which has found advocates in some of the nation's prominent litigators.

It would be comforting to conclude that recognition of slavery's importance to the development of our economy, politics and culture has driven Americans to a consideration of the past. But there clearly is more to the current interest in slavery. There is a recognition that American racism was founded in slavery, and a general, if inchoate, understanding that any attempt to address race in the present must also address slavery in past.

This attempt has become imperative as American society perceptibly grows more segregated, the benefits of economic growth are unevenly and unfairly distributed among races, and a previous generation's remedies for segregation and inequality are discarded as politically unacceptable.

In short, behind the interest in slavery is the crisis of race. The confluence of the history of slavery and the politics of race reveals that slavery has become a language, a way to talk about race, in a society in which blacks and whites hardly talk to each other at all. In slavery, Americans have found a voice to address some of their deepest hurts and the depressing reality of how much of American life — jobs; housing; schools; access to medical care, to justice and even to a taxi — is controlled by race.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/13/opinion/13BERL.html

ShopGuideNews
Forrester Research analyst George Colony said, "News, sports and weather imparted on static Web pages offer essentially the same content presented on paper, which makes the online experience more like reading in a dusty library than participating in a new medium."
http://www.shopguide.com/news/article_report3_06-27-01.asp

Tassini v. New York TimesFindLaw for Legal Professionals
The links are to the full text of the majority opinion upholding Freelancers rights re: publication in electronic databases
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=00-201

Virus Searches for Pornography The new virus, which is called VBS.Noped.a, searches the target's machine for what it suspects may be child pornography and reports the names of files to the police. There are no reports of police officials acting on such results, and antivirus software companies say it has not yet been distributed widely and is at relatively low risk of damaging computers.

Technically a worm, the virus is of unknown origin and was spotted by computer security companies on May 22. It arrives as an attachment to an e-mail message titled, "FWD: Help us ALL to END ILLEGAL child porn NOW." When a recipient opens the attachment, child pornography statutes appear on screen. The program then searches the user's hard drive for picture files that have pornographic-sounding names and then sends an e-mail message and a list of suspect files to a law enforcement agency picked at random from the program's database.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/11/technology/11VIRU.html?pagewanted=all

Gore Talks High Tech in Washington
"There is no technological silver bullet that's going to solve a problem unless it is used by people who understand its capabilities and are willing to make changes in their actions,'' Gore said in a speech at the Communications Solutions Expo.

Gore drew a parallel between the use of information technology and the introduction of electric motors a century earlier. While electric motors were superior to steam engines, productivity did not increase until managers built new factories along a horizontal rather than vertical axis and changed work habits to take advantage of the new machines.

"You learn more and have more opportunity for growth from experiences that are setbacks than from the experiences that are smooth sailing. One of the first lessons you learn is that smooth sailing really is better,'' Gore said.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-tech-gore-dc.html?pagewanted=all

New Economy: Pact Raises Competition Questions
The contract — between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, and VeriSign Inc., — is the latest turn in a long, complicated process that continues to raise questions over whether the government's decision to move from a monopoly to market competition has truly opened the field to other players. An equally important issue has faded: whether the public has benefited from the new system.

Unlike the I.R.S., Icann is not a government agency; it is a nonprofit corporation with a limited policy mandate. But critics, including some in Congress, say it overstepped its boundaries in renegotiating the contract with VeriSign through proceedings largely shielded from public view.

The main concern with the contract is that it allows VeriSign to continue operating the registry database for dot-com addresses and collect a fee of $6 a year for every dot- com address registered, while also competing with other companies in selling those addresses to the public. Under an earlier contract, Network Solutions, which has since been acquired by VeriSign, would have been required to sell either the registry database or its retail division, on the theory that operating both was a conflict of interest.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/21/technology/21NECO.html?pagewanted=all

When a Test Fails the Schools, Careers and Reputations Suffer
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/21/business/21EXAM.html?pagewanted=all

Right Answer, Wrong Score: Test Flaws Take Toll
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/20/business/20EXAM.html?pagewanted=all

The Standard: Don't Know Much About a Science Book Why do our eighth-graders do so poorly in
math and science compared with students
around the world? Why is it that 80 percent
of U.S. high-school graduates never go on
to take a college physics course? Why do so
many American graduate schools attract
more foreign students than U.S. citizens to
their science and engineering programs?

One reason is that the science textbooks found in most American classrooms are, in a word, atrocious. They are riddled with errors, sloppy thinking and glitzy illustrations that illustrate little in the way of actual science. We shouldn't be
surprised that American children are turning away from science when their introduction to it is at best incoherent.

Final Report
Without a clear-cut author or pair of authors to “define” the text or give it direction, these texts fail miserably. Committees produce mush and it is very difficult to find anyone with the authority to make corrections. Instead of being able to deal directly with authors we dealt with “editors” and got answers to our concerns about inaccuracies such as “Well we have to make the science simple,” “We don’t think that your qualifications are good enough,” and “Our experts disagree with you.”

ShopGuideNews
Online Cigarette Sales are Smokin' A research briefing from Forrester warns that much of the online tobacco purchases are coming from kids - but not for long.

In the days before the Internet, teenagers looking to buy cigarettes often had to talk an older friend into purchasing them or attempt to bluff their way past a cashier intent on verifying their age. Now, teenagers can point and click their way to a nicotine fix, often without verifying their age, even though tobacco sales to minors are as illegal online as they are in the real world.

Much of the Internet cigarette market is shrouded in vagueness. Many of the sites are run from Indian reservations, which are free to set their own retail regulations, but some are not. Analysts say they have no idea of the size of the total market or even what the biggest companies are. "You get the feeling many of these are fly-by-night," said Preston Dodd, an analyst with Jupiter Communications, a research firm specializing in Internet commerce.
http://www.shopguide.com/news/article_report1_05-16-01.asp

New Economy: Behind Bars, a Market for Goods
During the 12- month period ended June 30, 1999, the Federal prison population rose 9.9 percent, the largest yearly gain ever reported. The incarceration rate has tripled since 1980.

To some, these figures are a national embarrassment. To others, they represent a marketing opportunity. Particularly in consumer electronics.

Take headphones. They are a ubiquitous feature of prison life, given the potential for conflict over noise and music preferences. Indeed, headphones are required by some corrections departments and are popular items in commissaries and mail-order catalogs that sell directly to inmates.
New Economy: Behind Bars, a Market for Goods

The First World Hacker War
After last month's collision of an American spy plane and a Chinese jet, hackers in the United States and China began defacing Web sites on both sides of the Pacific. Then Chinese hackers, led by a group called the Honkers Union, declared war.

The White House's site was shut down for hours, computers at the California Department of Justice caught a virus and the eastern Ohio's Bellaire School District site played the Chinese national anthem while displaying China's fluttering red flag.

Most attacks involved cybergraffiti. American hackers tended to be insulting ("Slouching Tiger, Ridden Dragon" was slapped on a Chinese site); Chinese hackers, righteous ("We are ready to devote anything to our motherland, including our lives" was left on several American sites).
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/13/weekinreview/13BOXB.html?pagewanted=all

News: Wired U.S. homes drop in 2001
The study, conducted by Telecommunications Reports International, found that the 0.3 percent decline to 68.5 million was partly because of the shrinking number of free Internet service providers. That said, the number of households paying for Internet access rose 8 percent, according to the telecommunication media group's report.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5082502,00.html

Maybe They've Been Reading “Neuromancer”?

News: High-tech vigilantes face legal threat
In the U.S., firms are increasingly
using hacking tools to attack the
systems of hackers. Thirty-two
percent of Fortune 500 companies
have installed counter-offensive
software, according to a survey by
security consultancy WarRoom
Research. Tactics include launching
Trojan horse attacks to damage and
disable a hacker's computer, and
automated scripts that can erase an
attacker's hard drive or hijack e-mail.

However, Sommer pointed out that
such measures could cause
companies to break the law. "There
is no clear line between cyber defense
and attack," he said. If a company
launches a counter-attack after
detecting a hacker, it could inflict
damage on a third party--because
hackers often launch attacks via other
companies' systems. This raises
issues of legal liability for any
damage caused, though the law in
this area is still unclear.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2716730,00.html

F.C.C. Wants Higher Fines for Phone Monopolies
At a hearing earlier this year, Mr. Powell laid out his philosophy to lawmakers: "I might give you a better benefit of the doubt, but when you cheat, I'm going to hurt and hurt you hard."

The commission is charged with carrying out the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which sought to break up local phone monopolies held by the regional Bells and allow new companies to enter and compete. The act requires the Bells to lease and open up parts of their networks to competitors.

The agency can fine companies that deny rivals access up to $1.2 million for each violation.

For dominant phone companies with multibillion-dollar revenues like the Bells, "this amount is insufficient to punish and to deter violations in many instances," Mr. Powell wrote in a letter to the heads of the Commerce and Appropriations Committees in both houses.

He recommended increasing the amount to $10 million a violation "to enhance the deterrent effect of commission fines."

The commission should be able to award punitive damages, legal fees and costs in formal complaint cases, he wrote.

He also suggested that the statute of limitations on investigating an accusation — currently one year — be extended.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/08/technology/08PHON.html?pagewanted=all

Big advice, small price - Apr. 30, 2001
Should you serve on an advisory board? Susan Stautberg offers four reasons to do it.
1. Build your network.
2. Associate with innovative group. Advisors chosen for brainpower, not position.
3. Establish relationships with decisionmakers at the company.
4. Prepares you to later serve on corporate board
http://cnnfn.cnn.com/2001/04/30/sbrunning/q_jane_col/index.htm.

New Economy: Privacy Concerns for Google Archive
In Usenet's original incarnation, messages posted to newsgroups disappeared within weeks, replaced by other comments on the same topic in what was perceived as an ongoing electronic conversation. When Deja.com, then called Deja News, began archiving messages in 1995 and making them searchable, there were protests by those who felt the bulletin boards were never intended to be permanent.

In response, Deja made it possible for users to exclude their postings from its archive by typing the phrase "X-No-archive: yes" at the beginning of a message. With that change, and as Deja subsequently shifted its business model toward consumer- written product reviews and trimmed its public Usenet archive, the privacy issue faded to the background.

Google's acquisition of the archive, however, not to mention a mass-audience popularity that Deja never achieved, may revive some of those privacy concerns. Although Google may be preserving an important historical resource — an effort that some have lauded — the company is also making the record of this "human conversation" accessible in ways that its participants may not have been able to anticipate.

Some of the messages on Usenet involve caustic personal attacks — or equally vitriolic defenses against those attacks. Others display ill-conceived opinions, rash statements or embarrassing late-night rants. And all of it is now searchable by entering a key word, a date range or a name. Postings include a name and e-mail address; the text of messages can also be searched to see if someone is mentioned by name.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/07/technology/07NECO.html?pagewanted=all

Segregation Growing Among U.S. Children
Though, over all, blacks and whites live in slightly more integrated areas now than they did in 1990, the segregation of their children worsened in the decade, according to the analysis by researchers at the State University of New York at Albany.

The conflicting trends between children and the overall population reflect the continuing exodus of white families with children from cities to largely white suburbs, leaving more childless whites to live in more integrated neighborhoods, researchers said. They noted that settings that forced racial integration, like college dormitories, did not include children.

The findings carry unsettling implications for race relations in a nation that, while more racially and ethnically diverse than ever, still has several major urban areas where white and black children are interacting less frequently.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/national/06DESE.html?pagewanted=all

U.S. Scientists See Big Power Savings From Conservation
Their studies, completed just before the Bush administration took office, are at odds with the administration's repeated assertions in recent weeks that the nation needs to build a big new power plant every week for the next 20 years to keep up with the demand for electricity, and that big increases in production of coal and natural gas are needed to fuel those plants.

A lengthy and detailed report based on three years of work by five national laboratories said that a government-led efficiency program emphasizing research and incentives to adopt new technologies could reduce the growth in electricity demand by 20 percent to 47 percent.

That would be the equivalent of between 265 and 610 big 300-megawatt power plants, a steep reduction from the 1,300 new plants that the administration predicts will be needed. The range depends on how aggressively the government encourages efficiency in buildings, factories and appliances, as well as on the price of energy, which affects whether new technologies are economically attractive.

Another laboratory study found that government office buildings could cut their own use of power by one-fifth at no net cost to the taxpayers by adopting widespread energy conservation measures, paying for the estimated $5 billion investment with the energy savings.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/national/06CONS.html?pagewanted=all

ZDNet: Story: Are all hackers nasty, intrusive evildoers? Not necessarily
Outsmart the hackers regardless of their intent. Patch your applications today. For peace of mind, I use this free software update service from ZDNet. So should you.
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2714430,00.html

News: Lawyers slam FBI 'hack'
According to court documents filed in the case, the FBI and Department of Justice lured two suspected Russian hackers to Seattle with job offers at a fictitious security company. After monitoring the duo's connection to two servers in Russia, the FBI used the suspects' passwords to download incriminating data from those servers.
The tactic is likely to be challenged in court; if it is deemed lawful, the precedent could allow law enforcement and intelligence communities free rein to hack foreign computers. In addition, such a ruling could provide a legal loophole for other countries to break into U.S.-based computers in search of data that could aid their own investigations.
"It's extremely dangerous just to throw the door open--it will be a free-for-all," said Jennifer Granick, clinical director for the Stanford University Center for Internet and Society. "It won't just be individuals (hacking each other). It will be corporate espionage."
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5082126,00.html

10 Tips for Growing New Business From Old Clients

Slashdot | Netscape Says No RSS 0.91 For You The problem here is that the RSS format was written in XML and used a DTD (document type definition) that was stored on the Netscape servers. Whenever *someone* *somewhere* tries to parse a RSS file the Netscape server is queried for the file and the RSS file is validated against it. So now that Netscape removed the file people don't get to see the RSS summary but get an error instead.

What could be done is putting a copy of the file on an alternate location and changing all RSS files to match the new URI... well, this could be done if it weren't for the fact that Netscape copyrighted the RSS DTD... the only sollution left is to change to the updated RSS format which doesn't depend on Netscape.
http://slashdot.org/articles/01/04/28/2119211.shtm

O'Reilly Network: Oh My! Netscape [May 01, 2001]
My.Netscape, a personal portal sporting hundreds of channels carrying content from individual providers, has shed its free content and become YAM*, Yet Another My.*. In the process, they also broke RSS 0.91.
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/263

MPAA v. 2600 - Brief of Amici Curiae in Support of Appellants and Reversal of the Judgment Below
SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT

It cannot seriously be argued that any form of computer code may be regulated without reference to First Amendment doctrine. The path from idea to human language to source code to object code is a continuum. As one moves from one to the other, the levels of precision and, arguably, abstraction increase, as does the level of training necessary to discern the idea from the expression. Not everyone can understand each of these forms. Only English speakers will understand English formulations. Principally those familiar with the particular programming language will understand the source code expression. And only a relatively small number of skilled programmers and computer scientists will understand the machine readable object code. But each form expresses the same idea, albeit in different ways.
http://cryptome.org/mpaa-v-2600-bac.htm

Does an Anti-Piracy Plan Quash the First Amendment?
The fair use doctrine under copyright law permits uncompensated use of copyrighted works in some circumstances, such as in teaching, research and news gathering. Thanks to fair use, a reporter can quote portions of a newsworthy letter in an article and a scholar can use parts of a poem in a dissertation.

But there's a related question that has never been settled by the courts: Does fair use, which has its roots in the First Amendment, entitle the scholar, reporter or others to gain access to the copyrighted work in the first place -- -- especially when the material is guarded by a technological device designed to prevent digital piracy?
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/27/technology/27CYBERLAW.html?pagewanted=all

When Online Hearsay Intrudes on Real Life
"It's becoming harder and harder to draw a distinction between the real world and the virtual world," said Lauren Weinstein, creator of an online discussion group called the Privacy Forum. "They've become so intertwined now that most of the same problems and risks that we associate with the real world are coming from the virtual side — and a whole lot of them that nobody thought of."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/22/technology/22GOOG.html?pagewanted=all

News: Security expert: 'We are losing the battle'
"The future of Internet security is not very good," Schneier said. "New methods are being invented, new tricks, and every year it gets worse. We are not breaking even. We are losing the battle."

The reason not to panic, Schneier says, is that we have to accept the poor state of security and work to mitigate the risk of attacks rather than try to prevent attacks altogether -- an impossible task.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2705973,00.html

DMNews.com | News | Article
Six months after Direct Marketing Association president/CEO H. Robert Wientzen announced a multimillion-dollar privacy consumer education campaign, the effort has yet to see daylight.
http://dmnews.com/cgi-bin/artprevbot.cgi?article_id=14558

DSL Modem Flaw Could Jeopardize Network Security - CERT
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/164401.html

FSB: Bush to Small Biz: Share the Load
In the 2002 budget that President George W. Bush formally submitted to Congress on April 9, the SBA's funding was slashed by $360.5 million to $539 million. He plans to achieve some of that savings via an old Clinton-administration cost-cutting theme: cutting subsidies for 7(a) guaranteed loans and having lenders and loan recipients make up the difference by paying higher fees.

The President's plan would also cut federal funds provided to the nation's network of Small Business Development Centers and introduce fees of $10.75 to $11.00 an hour for counseling provided to small firms by an SBDC counselor, after a free first hour. President Bill Clinton had also tried to assess new counseling fees in the past, but Congress enacted legislation in 1997 that barred that move. So a new law would be required to allow the new SBDC fees to be imposed. Federal funding of the SBDCs is matched by state money.
Other cost-cutting measures proposed by Bush include moving certain disaster-assistance programs to other federal agencies.
http://www.fsb.com/fortunesb/articles/0,2227,1555,00.html

FSB: Win the Loan You Need
The annals of small business history are filled with stories of entrepreneurs who got turned down by banker after banker for a loan. Getting the big brush off is almost a rite of passage.

But it doesn't have to be that way. By understanding how the lending process works, you can fast track your loan application. Use this arsenal of advice to position your company to get the credit you need.
http://www.fsb.com/fortunesb/articles/0,2227,1552,00.html

Spirits maker serving free start-up cash - Tech News - CNET.com
Scotch whisky maker Johnnie Walker's Keep Walking Fund will award a total of $500,000 in grants to entrepreneurs, organizations and individuals in September.

The fund plans to give up to $100,000 per grant recipient. And while that amount may be small compared with the investments companies would receive from angel investors or venture investors, entrepreneurs will not have to give up any equity in their companies.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-5578314.html?tag=cd_mh

FSB: Attract New Business Now
Just because the economy is uncertain, it doesn't mean you can't continue to grow your business. With a solid game plan, you can insulate your company—and your bottom line—from the ups and downs of the stock market.

Direct Marketing Diva: The Art of Winning Referrals
Get your customers to send new accounts your way.

Net Guys: Expand Your Customer base
Use the Internet to reach consumers around the world.

Net Guys: Direct marketing for the Internet Age
Put these powerhouse techniques to work for your business.
http://www.fsb.com/fortunesb/articles/0,2227,1558,00.html

Fortune.com
1. Household E-Budget Crunch
2. Rebirth of Voice
3. Going for Rapid Returns
4. The End of Privacy
5. Gigabit Ethernet Rocks
6. eBay
7. Stick With Storage
8. Wireless E-Mail
9. The Three-Network Web
10. Beyond the Box
http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?doc_id=200846&channel=artcol.jhtml&_DARGS=%2Ffragments%2Ffrg_morestories.jhtml.1_A&_DAV=artcol.jhtml

Law Professor Sees Hazard in Personalized News
Filtering software will allow consumers to create a personalized media diet catering to their tastes, the forecasters contend. Whether it be a steady stream of world news, baseball statistics or politically conservative editorials, intelligent filtering software will make focused information delivery possible.

The ease and speed with which citizens get information in the digital era expands democracy, he argues, but the Internet simultaneously makes it all too easy to customize media experiences, narrowing readers' minds and souls.

"Democracy requires at least two things: that people have common spaces where they can share experiences some of the time, and that people have unanticipated, un-chosen exposures to ideas and other people," Sunstein, 46, said recently …
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/technology/13CYBERLAW.html?pagewanted=all

ZDNet: Story: Protect yourself! A pair of lethal viruses lurks on the horizon
One of the earliest, and most famous, virus to damage a PC's BIOS is Chernobyl, or CIH. The CIH virus, triggered on the anniversary date of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, April 26, infected more than a million PCs in Korea and resulted in more than $250 million in damages. Be aware. CIH is still around, and its second anniversary is in two weeks.

Similar to CIH is another virus called Kriz. Triggered on December 25, Kriz clears the information in the BIOS. If you have the Kriz virus, Symantec has a tool to remove it. Even if you don't have Kriz, its threat still lingers. This past December, several antivirus companies noticed that Kriz had piggybacked with other, newer viruses such as Bymer. That's yet another reason to keep your antivirus signature files up to date.

Now there's a more sophisticated virus called Magistr. Because it is a mass mailer, like Melissa, Magistr can spread quickly. Since it changes its subject, body, and attached file names with each new infection, Magistr can also be tricky for antivirus software to detect. What started as a trickle of reports worldwide has become a steady stream. Within the last month and half, Magistr has climbed from obscurity to the penultimate position on the MessageLabs top threats list.
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2706608,00.html

Mass Victimization Net Crime Not Far Off - Gartner Mass victimization crime, or online theft from thousands of people simultaneously by one individual, is less than two years away and the perpetrator will probably get away with it, researchers predict.

Such global online theft is inevitable via converging technologies and poorly equipped international law enforcement authorities, according to Gartner Inc. [NYSE:IT]

"Using mundane, readily available technologies that have already been deployed by both legitimate and illegitimate businesses, cybercriminals can now surreptitiously steal millions of dollars, a few dollars at a time, from millions of individuals simultaneously," Gartner Research Fellow Richard Hunter said in a news release. "Moreover, they are very likely to get away with the crime."
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/163928.html

For Some Reason Black Unemployment Always Iis and Always Has Been Twice White Unemployment

Job Loss in March Biggest in 9 Years
The unemployment rate took another tick upward, to 4.3 percent from 4.2 percent in February and 3.9 percent in October, as the Labor Department's job figures, announced yesterday, finally reflected the parade of layoffs and hiring freezes since last fall. Job losses in March, as they have been for months, were concentrated in manufacturing. But this time, job gains elsewhere were no longer sufficient to offset the cutbacks.

Blacks are suffering the most from rising unemployment. Their unemployment rate was 8.6 percent in March and averaged 8.1 percent in the first quarter, up from 7.5 percent in the fourth quarter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/07/business/07ECON.html?pagewanted=all

Top 25 Most E-Mailed Articles From the New York Times Most popular articles sent by NYTimes.com readers in the last 24 hours.
http://ea.nytimes.com/cgi-bin/poppage

The trouble is, these filters are dumb: they can't tell the difference between a sexual solicitation sent by e-mail and a news story about restrictions on online pornography or between a computer virus and a story about a computer virus.

Compressed Data: Law Newsletter Has to Sneak Past Filters
There is nothing wrong with David Carney's spell-checker. It is on purpose that in his e-mail newsletter, Tech Law Journal, he misspells words like sex (sez) and pornography (pormography) and camouflages the names of computer viruses. If he did not, he explained last week in an editor's note, his journal would never get past the computers at readers' offices that screen incoming e-mail messages for references to sex or network security.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/02/technology/02FILT.html?pagewanted=all

Medical Fees Are Often Higher for Patients Without Insurance
A New York gynecologist says he gets $25 for a routine exam for a woman insured by Group Health Insurance and charges $175 for the same exam for a woman without insurance.

"It's horribly ironic," said Paul Menzel, a professor of philosophy at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash. The care of the poor once was supported by the wealthy and the insured, but now the opposite is happening, he said. "It is the people who are most provided for, not the people who are least provided for, who get the benefit of cost-shifting," Professor Menzel said.

In a medical emergency, uninsured people can get care, even if they walk away from their bills. But if it is not an emergency, doctors and hospitals may insist on payment, often requiring a deposit in advance. As a result, some uninsured people struggle for years to pay medical bills and others put off seeing a doctor until minor problems become major ones.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/02/national/02INSU.html?pagewanted=all

Justices Consider Status of Digital Copies of Freelance Work
There was considerable debate throughout the argument about what actually happens when publishers transmit an issue to Lexis/Nexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. that is also a defendant in the case, for inclusion in its electronic database. Justice Stephen G. Breyer said the outcome might depend on whether "the whole electronic analog of the entire paper is transmitted at one instant" or "article by article."

Mr. Tribe said that while a separate electronic file was created for each article, so that the articles can be identified and retrieved, "the technology shouldn't obscure what's happening." The entire newspaper is essentially transmitted at once, he said in an effort to bolster the view that inclusion in a database does not change the basic concept of an issue of the newspaper.

He said the freelancers' view of the law "is really quite a Luddite theory, that putting this stuff in a way that the 20th and 21st century has to have it is an infringement."

But Mr. Gold argued for the freelance writers that "the preparation of the article files as separate article files" for transmission to the database was itself the first in a chain of multiple copyright-infringing acts. It was the "equivalent of printing each article as an individual article that can be combined with any of a million others in a new work," he said.

If that is an accurate description of the transformation from print to database, the publishers would be infringing the freelancers' copyrights because under the law, in the absence of an agreement to the contrary, authors retain their individual copyrights even as the publisher of a collective work like a newspaper or encyclopedia holds the copyright to the complete product or a revision of it. Publishers hold the copyright on individual articles produced by staff writers, as opposed to freelancers.

Since the mid-1990's, publishers have generally required freelance authors to waive their copyright in any electronic republication. So this case, New York Times v. Tasini, No. 00-201, has little implication for current practice in the publishing industry. But if the publishers lose, they face the prospect of considerable financial liability for past copyright infringement. The issue has been joined in new lawsuits filed recently by freelancers against publishers around the country.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/technology/29WRIT.html?pagewanted=all

Chicago Tribune | Opinion -- THE AD WAS WRONG
From the 1860s to the 1930s, under the Homestead Act, the U.S. government gave away about 246 million acres for some 1.5 million homesteads. Researcher Trina Williams estimates that today 46 million Americans are current beneficiaries of this wealth-generating giveaway, from which black families were largely excluded.

Until desegregation in the 1960s, whites had exclusive access to most critical resources for building wealth. For example, after World War I the Air Commerce Act gave the new air routes to white-run companies.

Access to wealth-generating mineral deposits and radio and television airwaves was reserved for whites. Access to homeownership was limited by anti-black discrimination.
http://chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/perspective/article/0,2669,SAV-0103250290,FF.htm

Chicago Tribune | Opinion -- THE AD WAS WRONG
In an 1860s Boston speech, the white abolitionist Wendell Phillips made the case for major reparations, saying, "There is not wealth enough in all the North to compensate this [African-American] generation--much less the claim it has as heir to those who have gone before."

He added, "Agriculture, cities, roads, factories, funded capital--all were made by and belong to the Negro." The great black leader Frederick Douglass made a similar case.

At an 1865 Republican convention, Rep.resentative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania called for taking hundreds of millions of acres from former slaveholders to provide compensation to those enslaved. Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts called for land grants to those enslaved because legal equality did not eradicate disparities in wealth-generating assets.

Notions of liberal control of the media notwithstanding, details about the price African-Americans have paid for nearly 400 years of oppression have rarely been published. That price remains high. Today, on the average, black Americans live 6 or 7 years less than white Americans, and black families average about 10 percent of the wealth of white families.

Such inequalities are substantially the result of centuries of racism. In a major book, "The Wealth of Races" (1990), economic experts estimate the current value of labor stolen from African-Americans. Two scholars estimate the current worth of the slave labor expropriated from 1620 onward as at least $1 trillion.

For part of the segregation period, 1929-1969, another scholar estimates the cost of labor discrimination against black Americans at $1.6 trillion.

Another researcher estimates the loss from post-segregation discrimination in employment as at least $94 billion for just one year in the 1970s. The accumulated economic loss for African-Americans since the 1600s is likely in the trillions of current dollars, and such calculation does not include the non-monetary costs.

The federal government is heavily implicated in giveaways to whites.
http://chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/perspective/article/0,2669,SAV-0103250290,FF.html

Paranoid Lately? You May Have Good Reason
DURING the endless presidential election, every time-honored institution — from the Supreme Court to the Democratic and Republican leadership to the voting booth itself — fell under mass suspicion. Soon enough, the phrase "the unsuspecting public" became a contradiction in terms: the public did a whole lot of suspecting.

The public suspected that one or both parties had exhibited questionable judgment in their post-election antics. The publicsuspected that behind the scenes, the nonfictional characters dwelling on televised deserted islands might be even nastier to each other than they are on camera. The public suspected that in some states, a chipmunk could steal a Social Security number and have no trouble receiving a credit card. Paper shredders became popular holiday gifts.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/weekinreview/25BADE.html?pagewanted=all

Warning From Microsoft on False Digital Signatures
The Microsoft Corporation warned computer users today that someone posing electronically as a company executive had fooled VeriSign Inc, a provider of digital signatures, into issuing fraudulent electronic certificates in Microsoft's name.

The false documents could potentially be used by software virus writers or other vandals trying to trick unsuspecting users into running hostile programs on their computers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/23/technology/23SOFT.html?pagewanted=all

Workplace: Laid Off and Locked Out of Your PC
Who owns the personal data that employees routinely store on their office computers? And what rights do departing workers have to retrieve their intellectual "belongings" before they are escorted out of the building?

The answers may surprise some workers. The statutes and court rulings that protect a person's physical-property rights do not generally apply to electronic property. That means an employee who is unexpectedly ushered out of his office can appeal to the law to retrieve his sales awards, baby pictures or golf clubs, but not his personal files stashed on a hard drive.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/21/technology/21HARD.html?pagewanted=all

Cryptologists Discover Flaw in E-Mail Security Program
If confirmed, the flaw would allow a determined adversary to obtain secret codes used by senders of encrypted e-mail.

The program, called P.G.P. for Pretty Good Privacy, is used by human rights organizations to protect vulnerable sources, by corporations to ensure secure communications and by millions of individual users.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/21/technology/21CODE.html?pagewanted=all

How Did They Value Stocks? Count the Absurd Ways
Among the harsh realities one stands out. Of all the hot air generated during the great bull market of the late 1990's, none propelled stock prices further than the notion that new economy stocks were a breed apart and should not be held to stringent, old economy investing standards. Internet companies and cutting-edge telecommunications concerns, after all, were revolutionizing the world. So, the thinking went, their share prices deserved equally radical valuation methods. Out went traditional methods used by securities analysis that prized earnings. In came freewheeling measures of worth, like revenue growth, Web site traffic and even customer "share of mind."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/18/technology/18PERF.html?pagewanted=all

InternetNews - Web Developer News -- Flaw Uncovered in TCP A security hole in one of the Internet's most basic
protocols -- discovered by security consulting
firm Guardent Inc. -- leaves the door open for
potentially devastating network attacks that
would be difficult to defend against, detect or
trace.
http://www.internetnews.com/wd-news/article/0,,10_710891,00.html

KeenSpace.com - Free Online Comic Webhosting
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Juries Find Their Central Role in Courts Fading
"Why have a jury at all?" one former juror, Michael
McCarthy asked bitterly in an interview.

Mr. McCarthy said he and his fellow jurors were
outraged in December when a Houston judge told
them that Texas' tort-reform law would require a
reduction of more than $100 million in an award
they had given the family of a pipefitter killed in an
industrial accident at a Phillips Petroleum plastics
plant in 1999.

The worker, Juan Martinez Jr., died when highly
volatile chemicals exploded in a 500-degree fireball.
The jury concluded that the accident had resulted
from lax safety measures at the complex, which had
experienced three explosions over 12 years,
including one that killed 23 workers and injured
132 others in 1989.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/02/national/02JURY.html?pagewanted=all

Privacy's Guarded Prognosis

…a woman promoting
pharmaceuticals showed up in his office two years
ago armed with juice and bagels for the office staff
and a printout from a computer database for him.

"After the preliminary niceties, she asked me if I
wanted to see a list of my perimenopausal patients
who were not on estrogen replacement therapy," Dr.
Sheehan recalled…

It is still not common for doctors to keep patient
medical records in electronic databases. All told,
only about 5 percent of all doctors' offices do so.
But most hospitals keep laboratory results and
insurance and prescription information in computer
databases, as do pharmacies and insurance firms.
And as data is exchanged, it can be used in
unforeseen ways. The woman who visited Dr.
Sheehan worked for a company running a
pharmaceutical benefit program, so it could have
collected the data about Dr. Sheehan's patients from
claim forms.

Marketing is not the only way patient information
may be put to unexpected uses. Medical information
could also be used to deny insurance coverage, or
even employment, to someone. Another concern is
identity theft because Social Security numbers and
birth dates are commonly used to identify patients.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/01/technology/01MEDI.html?pagewanted=all

Tips for Avoiding Computer Crime

Tips for Avoiding Being a Victim of Computer Crime
Copyright 1999-2000 by Ronald B. Standler
http://www.rbs2.com/cvict.htm

Judges Voice Doubt on Order Last Year to Split Microsoft
In Monday's arguments, the judges expressed deep
skepticism about the government's central theory —
that the company illegally maintained a monopoly
in computer software. With today's comments, the
judges cast fresh doubt that the order by Judge
Thomas Penfield Jackson would survive the appeals
court's review.

In three hours of oral arguments today, the judges of
the United States Court of Appeals for the District
of Columbia Circuit, pilloried Judge Jackson for
granting interviews with the news media, including
The New York Times, before the case was
completed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/28/technology/28SOFT.html?pagewanted=all

The Atlantic | Mar 2001 | Don't Call Us | Owens
Don't Call Us

Why the FBI isn't hiring black women

by Jack Owens
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/03/owens.htm

ClickZ : The End for Search Engines?
The impending closure of Go only
underscores the dramatic changes that
have been taking place among the major
search engines over the past few months. Money is tight; new revenue is being sought anywhere, and no one seems guaranteed a future. Will your favorite search engine be around tomorrow? For searchers, such losses could mean less diversity in search results. For Web marketers, a consolidation could mean less likelihood of being found. It's scary-sounding
stuff, and no one knows the answers. However, a look back can provide us with some perspective on how the future may unfold.
http://www.clickz.com/article/cz.3405.html

New Economy: Online Companies' Customer Service Is Hardly a Priority
So far, more than six million people have registered to use the service. But for all that PayPal knows about its customers, it is remarkably guarded about its own contact information.

There is no street address, phone number or e-mail address listed among the contact information on PayPal's Web site — just a post office box in Palo Alto, Calif., and a form to submit a question electronically. PayPal does not even have a phone number available through directory assistance. (There is a phone number for customer service on the site, but it takes some dedicated digging to find it.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/19/technology/19NECO.html?pagewanted=all

In an Uncertain Climate, Philanthropy Is Slowing
In recent years charitable giving has reached new highs, and many organizations, from the American Heart Association to the American Friends Service Committee to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, say they have not yet felt any sign of the weakened economy.

But the decline in foundation assets may herald widespread trouble. Foundation giving almost tripled over the last decade, to $20 billion — support that is especially crucial to nonprofit organizations in lean economic times, when individual and corporate donations dry up.

But several prominent foundations lost a substantial share of their asset value over the last year, the Chronicle survey said. With the shakeout in technology stocks, for example, the assets of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, in Los Altos, Calif. — invested almost entirely in the stock of Hewlett-Packard and its spinoff, Agilent — dropped 25 percent, to $9.8 billion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/19/national/19CHAR.html?pagewanted=all

Glacier Loss Seen as Clear Sign of Human Role in Global Warming
The vanishing of the seemingly perpetual snows of
Kilimanjaro that inspired Ernest Hemingway,
echoed by similar trends on ice-capped peaks from
Peru to Tibet, is one of the clearest signs that a
global warming trend in the last 50 years may have
exceeded typical climate shifts and is at least partly
caused by gases released by human activities, a
variety of scientists say.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/19/science/19MELT.html?pagewanted=all

Head of U. of California Seeks to End SAT Use in Admissions

“Let me describe how I came to make these recommendations. For many years, I have worried about the use of the SAT, but last year my concerns coalesced. I visited an upscale private school and observed a class of 12-year- old students studying verbal analogies in anticipation of the SAT. I learned that they spend hours each month — directly and indirectly — preparing for the SAT, studying long lists of verbal analogies such as "untruthful is to mendaciousness" as "circumspect is to caution." The time involved was not aimed at developing the students' reading and writing abilities but rather their test-taking skills.

What I saw was disturbing and prompted me to spend time taking sample SAT tests and reviewing the literature. I concluded what many others have concluded: that America's overemphasis on the SAT is compromising our educational system.” -- Speech Excerpt

In a letter Dr. Atkinson sent to the University of California's faculty senate today and in a speech he will give here on Sunday to the American Council on Education, an advance copy of which the school released tonight, Dr. Atkinson criticized the reliance on SAT's to rank students for admission to schools, saying that they are "not compatible with the American view on how merit should be defined and opportunities distributed."

If adopted, the proposed move to abandon the SAT's, taken by more than 1.2 million high school seniors applying for college each year, is expected to echo throughout the world of higher education. It follows similar moves by smaller schools, including Bates, Bowdoin and Mount Holyoke colleges, to make SAT's optional.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/17/national/17TEST.html?pagewanted=all

e-commerce press
The Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce announced today (February 16, 2001) that the estimate of U.S. retail e-commerce sales for the fourth quarter of 2000, not adjusted for seasonal, holiday, and trading-day differences, was $8.686 billion, an increase of 67.1 percent (± 4.3%) from the fourth quarter of 1999. The fourth quarter 2000 estimate increased 35.9 percent (± 2.8%) from the prior quarter. The third quarter 2000 estimate was revised from $6.373 billion to $6.393 billion.

Total retail sales for the fourth quarter of 2000 were estimated at $856.2 billion, an increase of 4.2 percent (± 0.5%) from the same quarter a year ago and up 5.4 percent (± 0.3%) from the third quarter of 2000.

E-commerce sales in the fourth quarter of 2000 accounted for 1.0 percent of total sales compared to 0.6 percent of total sales in the fourth quarter of 1999. E-commerce sales in the third quarter of 2000 were 0.8 percent of total sales.
http://www.census.gov/mrts/www/current.html

Ghetto Life 101: Radio Documentary by Sound Portraits
In March, 1993, LeAlan Jones, thirteen, and Lloyd Newman, fourteen, collaborated with public radio producer David Isay to create the radio documentary Ghetto Life 101, their audio diaries of life on Chicago's South Side. The boys taped for ten days,
walking listeners through their daily lives: to school, to an overpass to throw rocks at cars, to a bus ride that takes them out of the ghetto, and to friends and family members in the community.

The candor in Jones and Newman's diaries brought listeners face to face with a portrait of poverty and danger and their effects on childhood in one of Chicago's worst housing projects. Like Vietnam War veterans in the bodies of young boys, Jones and Newman described the bitter truth about the sounds of machine guns at night and the effects of a thriving drug world on a community.
http://www.soundportraits.org/on-air/ghetto_life_101/

Teenagers Try Online Learning This is not the high school that most people know
or remember, but for a growing number of teenagers
and their parents, fully accredited online courses
have become an attractive alternative to going to
school.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/technology/15SCHO.html?pagewanted=all

Genome Analysis Shows Humans Survive on Low Number of Genes
Their principal discovery is how few human genes there seem to be. Textbooks have long pegged the number of human genes at around 100,000, but with the sequence of human DNA units in hand the two teams have found far fewer than expected. Dr. Venter says he has identified 26,588 protein-coding genes for sure and another 12,000 possible genes. The consortium says there are 30,000 to 40,000 human genes. Both sides prefer the lower end of their range, since their methods of gene discovery tend to predict more genes than they believe exist.

The low number of human genes — say 30,000 — can be seen as good for medicine because it means there are fewer genes to understand.

The impact on human pride is another matter. Of the only two other animal genomes sequenced so far, the roundworm has 19,000 genes and the fruit fly, also a standard laboratory organism, 13,000. Both teams devote part of their huge articles to discussing how it is that humans are more complicated than simple invertebrate animals even though they possess not that many more genes.

Despite these face-saving efforts, human self-esteem may be in for further blows as genome analysis progresses. Dr. Venter said he could find only 300 human genes that had no recognizable counterpart in the mouse. The mouse, though a fellow mammal, last shared a common ancestor with people 100 million years ago, time in which many more genetic differences might have been expected to develop.

Given the minor difference between man and mouse, Dr. Venter said he expected the chimpanzee, which parted company from the human line only five million years ago, to have an almost identical set of genes as people but to possess variant forms of these genes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/11/health/11GENO.html?pagewanted=all

WebTop Search Rage Study
How long is too long until searching the web drives people crazy? On average, 12 minutes, the survey found. The survey also shows that if searching could provide results in 3 minutes or less, only 7 percent of people would be frustrated.

How long does it take before you get frustrated searching the Web for accurate information?

Longer than 15 minutes
49%
11-15 minutes
13%
6-10 minutes
15%
4-5 minutes
12%
2-3 minutes
3%
1 minute
1%
0-30 seconds
3%
Don't know
4%


In a separate question, "Do you feel that Web searching could be more efficient?," the vast majority said yes: 86 percent. Only 9 percent felt things were fine as they are.

WebTop http://www.webtop.com/
http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/01/02-searchrage.html

Going the Way of the Victrola
The same expanding technology that improves the capabilities of the PC also shrinks the size of the old recording hardware. Singers can use tiny microphones made of lightweight plastic. The sound quality will get better and you'll soon be able to buy them wherever batteries or blank cassettes are available. The daunting multitrack tasks that once could only be accomplished in the recording studio are now possible at home using innovative music software. Computerized mixing boards can already do more than the giant, complicated boards still found in most recording studios. The art of sequencing and sampling might well become a substitute for musical instruments, requiring a new sort of virtuosity.

Still in an embryonic stage, the making of music on the PC should eventually produce work rivaling that made by today's recording artists and composers — even surpassing them. The use of the PC isn't just a hobby anymore. The musical geniuses of tomorrow won't even have to leave their homes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/11/technology/11WAGE.html?pagewanted=all

Strike the Band: Pop Music Without Musicians
Once mere "records" of musical events, recordings were now something much more exotic and autonomous, painstakingly layered
confections. But even after multitrack recording had severed music making from real time, somebody still had to play that guitar.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/11/technology/11SCHE.html?pagewanted=all

Students, Mindful of Columbine, Break Silence to Report Threats
Psychologists from the Secret Service, with whom Mr. Modzeleski works, found that in almost three-quarters of 37 school shootings since 1974, the assailant told someone in advance about his plan, almost always another student.

That means many school shootings could be averted if students shared information with teachers, administrators or parents, said Marisa Reddy, a director of the Secret Service's Safe School Initiative.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/10/national/10RAMP.html?pagewanted=all

The Scout Report - February 9, 2001 Google Now Indexes PDF Files
http://www.google.com/
The indomitable Google has recently begun indexing content in .pdf files, allowing searchers a significant peek into
the "invisible Web," the large area of online content not covered by most search engines. PDF files are differentiated
by a [PDF] label and instead of a cached version, Google provides a link to a plain text version of the document.
Keeping a plain text version allows Google to apply its PageRank technology and integrate .pdf content with normal
search returns. Test searches did not turn up a large number of .pdf files, but adding "pdf" to the query produced a
more significant proportion in the returns, although they were not always the majority. [MD]
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/report/sr/2001/scout-010209.html

Selection of Net Suffixes Defended Vinton G. Cerf, the chairman of
the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers, or
Icann, said that the selection of
new suffixes, also called generic
top-level domains, last fall was
essentially an "experiment." The
objective, he said, was to proceed
slowly and get a "test case" of how
the new domains influence the
market.

But Dr. Cerf admitted that there
was room for improvement. "We
need to re-examine the procedures
that we used," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/09/technology/09ICAN.html?pagewanted=all

Kafkaesque? Big Brother? Finding the Right Literary Metaphor for Net Privacy
The slogan is great to toss around at conferences
and parties. But people who take books and ideas
seriously might well ask: is Big Brother -- the
personification of an all-seeing totalitarian
government depicted in George Orwell's novel
"1984" -- the best metaphor to describe the privacy
problems of the Internet Age?
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/02/technology/02CYBERLAW.html?pagewanted=all

How to Create a Shortage In a Skilled-Labor Market
TO alleviate apparent shortages of computer programmers, President Clinton and Congress have agreed to raise a quota on H-1B's, the temporary visas for skilled foreigners. The annual limit will go to 200,000 next year, up from 65,000 only three years ago.

The imported workers, most of whom come from India, are said to be needed because American schools do not graduate enough young people with science and math skills. Microsoft's chairman, William H. Gates, and Intel's chairman, Andrew S. Grove, told Congress in June that more visas were only a stopgap until education improved.

But the crisis is a mirage. High-tech companies portray a shortage, yet it is our memories that are short: only yesterday there was a glut of science and math graduates.

The computer industry took advantage of that glut by reducing wages. This discouraged youths from entering the field, creating the temporary shortages of today. Now, taking advantage of a public preconception that school failures have created the problem, industry finds a ready audience for its demands to import workers.

This newspaper covered the earlier surplus extensively. In 1992, it reported that 1 in 5 college graduates had a job not requiring a college degree. A 1995 article headlined "Supply Exceeds Demand for Ph.D.'s in Many Science Fields" cited nationwide unemployment of engineers, mathematicians and scientists. "Overproduction of Ph.D. degrees," it noted, "seems to be highest in computer science."

Michael S. Teitelbaum, a demographer who served as vice chairman of the Commission on Immigration Reform, said in 1996 that there was "an employer's market" for technology workers, partly because of post-cold-war downsizing in aerospace.

In fields with real labor scarcity, wages rise. Yet despite accounts of dot-com entrepreneurs' becoming millionaires, trends in computer technology pay do not confirm a need to import legions of programmers.

Salary offers to new college graduates in computer science averaged $39,000 in 1986 and had declined by 1994 to $33,000 (in constant dollars). The trend reversed only in the late 1990's.

The West Coast median salary for experienced software engineers was $71,100 in 1999, up only 10 percent (in constant dollars) from 1990. This pay growth of about 1 percent a year suggests no labor shortage.
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/09/biztech/articles/06lessons.html?pagewanted=all

Cyber-Serfdom
Then there was the panel about the 21st-century corporation, during which participants described this age of
digital Darwinism in chilling terms: The key to winning in business today is adapt or die, get wired or get
killed, work 24 hours a day from everywhere or be left behind. Finally, during the question time, Howard
Stringer, chairman of Sony America, stood up and said: "Doesn't anyone here think this sounds like a vision
of hell? While we are all competing or dying, when will there be time for sex or music or books? Stop the
world, I want to get off."
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/30/opinion/30FRIE.html?pagewanted=all

Violence Finds a Niche in Children's Cartoons
A pug-nosed thug kicks in an elderly
storekeeper's face. Then he punches a
young heroine in the eye and cracks her in
the small of the back with a heavy bar stool. Her
limp frame collapses to the ground as he stands over
her with his gun drawn and pointed at her head.

Two young boys are in a fistfight on a moving
boxcar. A friend tries to intervene. But an older and
very respected boy advises: let the fight continue.
Sometimes, he says, friends need to bare fists in
order to strengthen the bonds of friendship. They
resume.

A little girl karate-kicks another little girl so hard
that she flies through the air. Her head smashes into
a cement post. She is knocked cold.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/28/business/28TOON.html?pagewanted=all

ClickZ : Top Reasons for Abandoned Online Purchases
Apparently online retailers are losing approximately $3.8 billion in revenue due to the fact that four out of five consumers give up before completing an online purchase.

The reasons given for abandoning purchases are varied. Of consumers who bailed out of a purchase, 52 percent said that too much data was required.

http://clickz.com/cgi-bin/gt/article.html?article=3178

A Vision for Books That Exults in Happenstance
… the World Wide Web, contrary to gloomy predictions, may be the best thing to happen to literature and book publishing since Gutenberg. While publishers tear their hair out over slender profit margins and worry that the Internet will be the end of books as people know them, Mr. Epstein says he believes that the Web will save the book business, enable books to be published more cheaply, and bring bigger royalties for corporations and authors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/13/technology/13EPST.html?pagewanted=all

streamingmedia.com : business - technology - content
Once the nesting ground for a pre-pubescent South Park, the Web has become a bastion for animation. Contributor Steve Tanner tells us how animation has made its mark as the dominant form of entertainment content on the Web.
http://www.streamingmedia.com

Do You Stream in Color?

Then You Need This Website

streamingmedia.com : business - [technology] - content Creating Rich Media with QuickTime, Part I
http://www.streamingmedia.com/tutorials/view.asp?tutorial_id=107

Link Analysis Can Help (or Harm) Your Web Site

Search engines look not just at your site but at other sites that link to yours. The search engines count those linked sites toward your site's ranking.

All other factors aside, if one site has 10 sites linking to it and another has 500, the one with 500 does better in search engine
rankings. But that's not all.

http://www.workz.com/content/2094.asp

Something to Make You Go Hmm…

internet.com's Electronic Commerce Guide - EC Tips : Don't Try This at Home

Before you go ahead and buy the entire "Web Design for Dummies, Idiots, Novices and Amateurs" collection, realize that there is a better method for approaching this important component of your e-business.

Using a professional Web designer could add a tremendous amount of value to your online appearance. For instance, did you know that it has become a standard to click on a company logo to be taken back to the home page? Or it could be counter-productive to the efficiency of the site to make each click yield a new browser window?

Those are the type of details that contribute to the sum product of the Web site. A professional designer will invoke industry standards while incorporating the personality of the e-business to create a unique and efficient site.

http://ecommerce.internet.com/solutions/ectips/article/0,1467,6311_548951,00.html

An Interview with Paco Underhill Author of “Why We Buy”

BW Online | January 4, 2001 | "E-Commerce Failed on Its Own Merits"

Almost everything I predicted two years ago in terms of why we buy has come true. The Internet bubble has burst. And the things that sell well on the Web generally have no taste, feel, or smell. The Web has succeeded where there's a fundamental, profound disconnect between the manufacturer and the bricks-and-mortar retail chains. For example, books, where publishers are imminently closer to the authors than the reading public. Music, since the labels are closer to the producing artists than to the consumers. Movies. Pornography. And stocks.

People also felt the Net was going to be some global community, and that's proven not to be true. The future of the Web isn't global -- it's local. It's a way on a very tactical level for people to facilitate their lives as the technology exists wherever they are. For example, here in the U.S., we have a wonderful delivery system for products: mail, FedEx, UPS. Whatever criticisms we may level at it, it's remarkably effective and remarkably cheap. We have a nation that's spread out, and retail has to follow where people live.

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/jan2001/nf2001014_088.htm

A Source for Firewall Reviews on ZDNet

ZDNet: Sm@rt Partner: Personal Firewalls Personal Firewalls
By Matthew P. Graven, PC Magazine
January 3, 2001 4:46 PM ET

While you browse the latest headlines or purchase a cashmere sweater on the Web, some hacker could be lurking in the background, stealing your credit card numbers or rifling through the data stored on your system. Simply put, your Internet connection is a wide-open path to your PC that anyone connected to the Web with malicious intent and technology skills can skulk down. Broadband connections, because they're always on, are most vulnerable, but dial-up access also carries risks.

http://www.zdnet.com/sp/stories/main/0,10228,2669359,00.html

Hemming in the World Wide Web
If the Internet is anything, at least according to its prophets, it is a place without boundaries. Real world geography, with tiresome passports and tedious border checkpoints, does not matter.

This is not an appealing notion to many of the world's governments, which would much prefer to control the flow of information across their national borders, just as they try to control the flow of everything else, from people to money. Their distaste for borderlessness, in fact, may soon give cyberspace the same jigsaw-puzzle appearance as the terrestrial world.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/07/weekinreview/07GLAT.html?pagewanted=allb

The Y2K Issue Shows Up, a Year Late The Y2K computer problem hit Norway's national railroad a year later than expected.

The problem was discovered when none of the company's 16 new airport express trains or 13 high-speed, long-distance Signatur trains would start early in the morning of Dec. 31.

Apparently, the computers on the trains did not recognize the date, something not anticipated by experts who had checked the systems thoroughly before Jan. 1, 2000, a spokesman for the train manufacturer said.

The problem was quickly solved temporarily by resetting the computers to Dec. 1, 2000, and the trains started upon ignition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/03/world/03NORW.html

The Search Engine Report, January 3, 2001, Number 50 Survey Finds Search Engine Referrals Low

New statistics from WebSideStory's StatMarket service show that search engines generate only 7 percent of traffic to web sites, far below the leading methods of direct navigation or following
links. The low figure is very surprising, because other surveys have consistently found that people report search engines as one of the top ways they find web sites.


The StatMarket survey found that either direct navigation or using bookmarks was the most popular way of reaching web sites, generating 47 percent of traffic. Following links was the
second most popular, generating 46 percent of traffic. Included in the links total were clicks on banner ads.

The statistics are gathered by measuring traffic to 200,000 sites that use WebSideStory's HitBox tracking service. These sites include everything from large businesses, to hobbyists, to porn
sites. The statistics are as measured on Dec. 17, 2000.

(A longer version of this article is available to Search Engine Watch "site subscribers." Learn more about becoming a site subscriber at
http://searchenginewatch.com/about/subscribe.html?source=0101ser-smkt)
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/sereport/current.html

The Search Engine Report, January 3, 2001, Number 50 Paid Submission & Other Changes At NBCi

NBCi has rolled out a paid submission service that allows faster review of sites for inclusion into its main directory. In addition, the service, formerly known as Snap, has also made some
changes to how sites are listed in its results.
(A longer version of this article is available to Search Engine Watch "site subscribers." Learn more about becoming a site subscriber at
http://searchenginewatch.com/about/subscribe.html?source=0101ser-nbci)


Go Gains Paid Inclusion System

Go.com has become the second major crawler-based search engine to roll out a paid inclusion program. Its new US $199 "Premium Service" will add any URL submitted to its crawler-based
results within 48 hours and revisit that URL on a weekly basis, for one year.
(A longer version of this article is available to Search Engine Watch "site subscribers." Learn more about becoming a site subscriber at
http://searchenginewatch.com/about/subscribe.html?source=0101ser-go)

LookSmart Ups Basic Submit Price

The price of LookSmart's "Basic Submit" service has been increased from $79 to $99. Basic Submit guarantees that a site will be reviewed within eight weeks for possible inclusion into the directory.

Pay For Placement?
http://searchenginewatch.com/resources/paid-listings.html

You'll find past articles about the LookSmart program and similar paid submit systems on this page.



http://www.searchenginewatch.com/sereport/current.html

ZDNet: Sm@rt Partner - Disclosure Revisited
Sm@rt Partner: Very briefly, what is the disclosure debate all about, and why has it been so divisive?
Marcus Ranum:There are a few reasons I think my views are so unpopular. One, security practitioners are curious people and tend to be control freaks, so they really want to know what's going on. Two, there are a lot of folks out there who are trying to have their cake and eat it, too. Really what these people want to do is have all of the privileges and practices of being hackers with none of the downside. They want to play, they want to act tough, they want to go to DefCon and dress like goths. They want to do all of this nonsense, and they also want to get paid big salaries and be treated like responsible practitioners. I'm trying to call them on that, and they get defensive.
http://www.zdnet.com/sp/stories/column/0,4712,2664306,00.html

CNET.com - News - E-Business - For 2001, futurists are being a bit on the shy side "I predict the Internet...will go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse," Bob Metcalfe, inventor and 3Com founder, said in 1995.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-4238476.html"