Wired News The Future: Read All About It
"Welcome, youthful seekers, this is your lucky day. We know what the future holds -- some of us have even been there -- and we're dying to fill you in.

The best part is this glimpse into 2001 comes at a price that even you downsized dot-commers can afford. It's free. So hold on to your stock options and start reading. The future is almost here. You might as well know what you've signed up for."

News.Com Tech year in review, haiku style
"The end of the year is a time of reflection. This week, News.com staffers took a break from journalism, at least for a nanosecond, to write poems that summarized the year in technology.

Some themes that were on their minds: plummeting stocks prices, layoffs and the dot-com shakeout. They tried haiku, limiting themselves to five syllables for the first line, seven syllables for the second line and five for the third line.

Should News.com staffers stick to their day jobs? You decide."

SFGate New-Economy Magazines Can Learn From Old-Economy Mistakes Famed editor Felker sees trouble in relying on image advertising
"As the new-economy magazines that rode the dot-com boom and bust this year ponder their future, it could be worth their while to consider the lessons of history.

Clay Felker, a legendary figure in the magazine industry in part for his role in establishing New York magazine, sees some parallels between what's happening to books like Business 2.0 and Red Herring and the fate of one of his earlier ventures, Manhattan Inc."

SatireWire 2000: THE INTERNET YEAR IN REVIEW
"Do you remember a time when Napster was going to change the world, and the Microsoft trial was almost entertaining? Remember when Priceline was a $90 stock? Or even a $10 stock? How about $2? We didn't either, but after extensive research, SatireWire is proud to bring you the Internet Year that Was, a blatantly revisionist reminiscence that promises to be really painful if you're still holding Fogdog.com."

The New York Times First Cells, Then Species, Now the Web
[requires 'free' registration]
"As the Internet continues to proliferate, it has become natural to think of it biologically — as a flourishing ecosystem of computers or a sprawling brain of Pentium-powered neurons. However you mix and match metaphors, it is hard to escape the eerie feeling that an alien presence has fallen to earth, confronting scientists with something new to prod and understand.

The result has been an eruption of papers scrutinizing this artificial network and concluding, to many people's surprise, that it may be designed according to the same rules that nature uses to spin webs of its own. The networks of molecules in a cell, of species in an ecosystem, and of people in a social group may be woven on the same mathematical loom as the Internet and the World Wide Web."

redux [07.27.00]
MSNBC Experts probe Net’s natural defenses
"The Internet’s organic structure explains why it’s so resistant to random failures, but researchers now say those same features make it vulnerable to cyberattacks. The findings could help security experts strengthen weak links in the Net’s chain.

"They found that samples of the World Wide Web didn’t have a random structure: Instead, the connections exhibited a hierarchy similar to that found in naturally occurring networks such as trees and living cells, with a small proportion of highly connected nodes branching off to a large number of less connected nodes. The structure was the same at different scales, meaning that the results could be extended to the Web as a whole, they said."

"Although the structure is particularly well-suited to tolerate random errors, it’s also particularly vulnerable to deliberate attack, they said. If just 1 percent of the most highly connected Internet routers or Web sites are incapacitated, the network’s average performance would be cut in half, said Yuhai Tu of IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center.

“With only 4 percent of its most important nodes destroyed, the Internet loses its integrity, becoming fragmented into small disconnected domains,” he wrote in a commentary published in Nature."

Nature : Science Update The missing links
"In an exponential network, there is a well defined ‘average connectivity’ for the nodes: most are connected by a certain number of links, and only a very few differ substantially from this average.

Barabási’s team says that there is another common kind of network that has hitherto been neglected: the ‘scale-free’ network, in which there is no meaningful average number of links - no ‘scale’ to it, in other words. In a scale-free network the number of nodes with a given number of connections simply declines as that number of nodes increases. Many nodes are linked to the network via just one connection; fewer have two, even fewer have three, and so forth. Unlike an exponential network, there remain small but significant numbers of nodes with many connections."

"...a cyber-terrorist armed with a map of a scale-free network could deliberately focus their attack on the few most highly connected nodes. Knocking just a few of these out would disable just about all flow of or access to information for other users, breaking up the webs rapidly into isolated fragments. This is the Achilles’ heel of the net, say the researchers, and defences against e-terrorism need to concentrate on making key nodes invulnerable."

The New York Times Opinion The Christmas That Comes to the Door
[requires 'free' registration]
"I was 9 when I experienced my first North American Christmas. I was at a loss to describe my reaction because my English wasn't very good, but later I realized the word I had been looking for was "bummer." That's because I had the disadvantage of having experienced eight Latino Christmases before that first Anglo one.

A Latino Christmas is a wonder to behold, because of what family means in Latin America."

GainesvilleSun Good greed?
"Diamonds rings and fruitcakes. Dancing Santas and singing fish. Robodogs and Playstation 2."

"Jim Twitchell thinks that stuff really is what the holidays are all about. And he doesn't mind.

"Waste is a vital part of Christmas," he says. "It's about people giving other people useless objects, the kind of stuff the economists call 'dead weight.'"

Online Journalism Review Hunter Thompson, Online Columnist
"In the spring of 2000, if you had to bet on which publication would be running a new Hunter S. Thompson column by year's end, the choice would be easy: Ted Fang's new San Francisco Examiner. Not so. How the man who launched a thousand newspaper careers ended up at ESPN.com."

New Scientist Webcams and videophones may hamper social communication
"Webcams and videophones may hinder communication, rather than improve it, says a British psychologist."

""Until recently, all psychological theories concerning the phone and the internet stressed what you lost when you couldn't see the person. My research has found that it isn't what you lose when you talk over the net that's important - it's what you gain."

Slashdot.Org Rethinking The Virtual Community: Part One
"Less than a decade ago, the Virtual Community was one of the most powerful ideas emanating from the Net, and BBS's and the nascent Internet were already providing glimpses of a better world to come. Proponents are a lot wiser -- and sadder -- now. Can the Virtual Community survive adolescent flamers and the dotcom era? Yes, but it will have to be dramatically reconceived."

3rd Annual ARCUS Award for Arctic Research Excellence Inuit in Cyberspace: Practising and Constructing Computer-mediated Space
"Research on the use of Internet or Cyberspace in relation to off-line space and sociality is uncommon to address in Arctic anthropology. The general research that does actually deal with Cyberspace, however, focuses more on strict on-line behaviour without much concern for dynamics between on-line and off-line space and sociality. Thus, naturally avoiding the physicality of the Arctic regions, it leaves the research reported in this paper to approach a rather new area. While most of the on-line Cyberstudies undertaken deal with American or European users, they unintendedly create and sustain universal ideas that, however, do not necessarily apply to all Internet-users. Often they focus on Cyber-space as if it was a single social vacuum without any recursive bonds to Lifespace and physical space; operating in a mental paradigm, that assumes people to be without cultural differences in Cyberspace.

However, as this paper will argue, the world, the conceptions of it and use of space within it, be it Cyberspace or physical space, are clearly more than vacuums of mental space."

Netfuture Bill Gates' New Concerns
"One of the salient facts about the globalizing culture of high tech, symbolized by the increasingly monocultural Silicon Valley, is its remarkable provincialism. It's a provincialism akin to that of the interstate highway traveler and the air traveler: the culture of highway rest stops and airport shops is "global" in only the thinnest of senses, its primary function being to conceal the cultures of the globe rather than to engage or cultivate them. This function is carried to a new extreme by the almost solipsistic isolation and immobility of the cybertraveler, which can be compensated for only through an intense (and often foregone) inner effort to reach out imaginatively and sympathetically.

What has led Gates to break through some of the provincialism of the high- tech culture appears to have been his responsibility (shared with his wife, Melinda) for billions of philanthropic dollars."

redux [11.03.00]
The New York Times Bill Gates Turns Skeptical on Digital Solution's Scope
[requires 'free' registration]
"As the "Creating Digital Dividends" conference drew to a close in Seattle recently, the final speaker arrived and started asking skeptical questions. The premise was that "market drivers" could be used "to bring the benefits of connectivity and participation in the e-economy to all of the world's six billion people," according to conference materials, but the speaker would have little of it.

"I mean, do people have a clear view of what it means to live on $1 a day?" the speaker, William H. Gates, asked. "There's no electricity in that house. None.""

Pacing the room, waving his hands, he conjures up an image of an African village that receives a computer.

"The mothers are going to walk right up to that computer and say, My children are dying, what can you do?" Mr. Gates says. "They're not going to sit there and like, browse eBay or something. What they want is for their children to live. They don't want their children's growth to be stunted. Do you really have to put in computers to figure that out?"

SiliconValley.Com Online retailers look at potential of micropayments
"Should Beenz be redeemable for Flooz? If so, how do such Beenz-Flooz units translate to Mojo bucks? While we're on the subject, will Compaq's MilliCents ever be convertible to IBM Micro Payments?

These are the questions vexing big thinkers of the e-shopping world."

O'Reilly Network The Case Against Micropayments
"Micropayment proponents have long suggested that micropayments will work because it would be great if they did. A functioning micropayment system would solve several thorny financial problems all at once. Unfortunately, the barriers to micropayments are not problems of technology and interface, but user approval. The advantage of micropayment systems to people receiving micropayments is clear, but the value to users whose money and time is involved isn't.

Because of transactional inefficiencies, user resistance, and the increasing flexibility of the existing financial framework, micropayments will never become a general class of network application. Anyone setting out to build systems that reward resource providers will have to create payment systems that provides users the kind of financial experience they demand - simple, predictable and easily valued. Only solutions that play by these rules will succeed."

I'Cringely I'll Gladly Pay You Tuesday
"PayPal's use of plain old dollars and its ability to send money to anyone with an e-mail address set it apart from the earlier payment systems. To that point people had to get together and agree on what system they would use for payment, then both had to be registered for anything much to happen. PayPal took more of the Western Union approach -- that if you were told that some money was waiting for you down at the Western Union office, you'd find a way to hike down there and get it. For PayPal recipients, hiking down means registering as users. It's free. It's actually better than free since full registration scores you a five-dollar bonus, as well as another five-dollar bonus to whomever refers you or is the first to pay you using the system. And that's how PayPal actually began operations last October -- with 24 employees sending small gifts of money to their friends."

ZDNet Let's cough up the cash for Web content
"The Web is going through its own Great Depression as big sites continue to go belly-up. Meanwhile, revenue from banner ads drops because many of the banners are linked to...other dot-coms.These ominous signs do not foretell the death of the Web. But sooner or later the free lunch has to end. Information wants to be free, but information providers want to be paid."

"The Web is not one of those magical plants that can grow in midair. It needs cash to live."

The Big Panda Dime
"hi, this is bryan, the guy who runs big panda. i've started to ask for dimes on my home page."

"this is not a scheme to make crazy internet money. nobody's going to make a bazillion pennies. this is about readers and writers gaining control of the web.

this already exists in the real world: you can pay a dollar or two for a fanzine. on the internet, it can be much cheaper. it can even be a penny.

"how do you pay a penny on the internet? paypal is a popular way for sending tiny bits of money through email. ebay people use it a lot. there are other systems, but paypal is the most popular. i set up my paypal to accept dimes. i could have asked for pennies.

so i hope you now understand why i'm asking for dimes. i don't expect to make any serious money, but i do hope to educate people about the value of paying just a penny for the web sites you love."

The Big Panda Wow
"hi, this is bryan, the panda guy. i'm writing in astonishment at the response to my call for dimes. i've already received more dimes than i ever expected. maybe i was right. maybe people would rather pay a penny than see another ad for CASINO MONKEY CREDIT CARD INTERNET PERSONALS.

frankly, i'm not sure how to respond."

New Scientist Surf like a Bushman
"WHICH OF THESE activities occupies more of your time: foraging for food or surfing the Web? Probably the latter. We're all informavores now, hunting down and consuming data as our ancestors once sought woolly mammoths and witchetty grubs. You may even buy your groceries online.

But in an odd sort of way, Internet shopping has brought us full circle. According to researchers in the US, the strategies you use when you surf the Web are exactly the same as the ones hunter-gatherers used to find food. You may be plugged into the information superhighway, but deep down you're still a caveman."

First Monday Information Seeking on the Web: An Integrated Model of Browsing and Searching
"The research presented here suggests that people who use the Web as an information resource to support their daily work activities engage in a range of complementary modes of information seeking, varying from undirected viewing that does not pursue a specific information need, to formal searching that retrieves focused information for action or decision making. Each mode of information seeking on the Web is distinguished by the nature of information needs, information seeking tactics, and the purpose of information use. The information seeking tactics characterizing each mode were revealed by recurrent sequences of browser actions initiated by the information seeker. Thus, undirected viewing is characterized by starting and chaining actions; conditioned viewing is characterized by differentiating, browsing, and monitoring actions; informal search is characterized by differentiating and localized extracting; and formal search consisted of systematic, thorough extracting.

Overall, the study suggests that a behavioral framework that relates motivations (the strategies and reasons for viewing and searching) and moves (the tactics used to find and use information) may be helpful in analyzing Web-based information seeking. The study also suggests that multiple, complementary methods of collecting qualitative and quantitative data may be integrated within a single study to compose a more nuanced portrayal of how individuals seek and use Web-based information in their natural work settings."

Interaction Archtitect The Skeptical Internet User Does Not Search
"Our exploratory user study on the use of a major portal site in Belgium shows that a category of "skeptical Internet users" has abandoned searching the web. The skeptical Internet user has made a return-on-investment evaluation of his Internet experience, and has come to the conclusion that the return on some sites is just not worth the investment of his personal time and energy."

"The skeptical Internet user did not come to the Internet because of his innovative attitude. His motivation is not to learn and use the Internet. Instead he is motivated by the Internet's promise of offering value: comfort of living, entertainment, getting things done in a more convenient way. While he did get some of that, he also got a lot of discomfort: long download times, navigational and structural complexity, inconsistency, unpredictable behavior, disappointing value."

redux [10.10.00]
Media In Transition What is Information? The Flow of Bits and the Control of Chaos
"Information science operates with a binary logic of reflection which results in multiple paths, but these paths are always circumscribed by laws of combination (Deleuze, & Guattari, 1987). In this manner the fragmented space and time of information flows is reordered and directed toward specific objectives. But the objectives of information processing within the capitalist dynamic are not end points-- they are aimed at an accumulation of knowledge that is always an impetus for further accumulation, for multiplying the flow, opening out into every horizon. But this flow is at the same time stored up in a central memory which traces the exact paths of this flow, connecting geographic spaces and matching up the temporal locations of dispersed market centers. This central memory system functions through command trees, centered systems and hierarchical structures that attempt to fix possible pathways of the network and thus to limit the possible variations immanent in the network. The definitions of information formulated within information science and information economics derive from and serve this modeling of the system. As we have seen, information defined as nonsemantic discrete bits flowing across space and then directed and stored substantiates information as the object of control. Thus, the enemy of the information scientists and economists is heterogeneity, disorganization, noise, chaos. They want an uninterrupted flow, but at the same time a destruction of the unnecessary. This encloses or territorializes information; it becomes a part of capitalism’s mapping of space and time. But what we have found is that information’s function is precisely to disorganize, interrupt, to remain itself and at the same time to disperse. Information may, in fact, be a keyword connecting the phenomenon we have examined, but not as an element, nor as a content, but as a heterogeneous remapping of space and time. If the information society is to be our society, let it be disorganized."

Context Magazine Smart Homes? A Stupid Idea
"A blind enthusiasm for technological advances is a very costly habit to indulge. It ignores the real nature of peoples’ busy lives, the scarcity of their attention, and the rising irritation we all have with devices that clutter our homes and confuse us. Yet, periodically, companies manage to convince one another that some big new trend is simply unstoppable. The last time this happened was in the postwar period when the hot theme was convenience. So, firms rushed to sell us electric knives and can openers, mixers, ice cream makers, electric knife sharpeners, and popcorn poppers. Did this deliver on the promise of convenience? No way.

"Smart homes" aren’t inevitable. Homes will continue to get smarter, of course. But they will do so by being more responsive to our activities—directly, respectfully, gently, in ways that amuse and beguile. Above all else, in ways that are gracefully accommodating. If you want to build a really hot product, start there."

redux [10.21.00]
The Standard Home on the Web
"Home networking is nothing new. Homes are already thoroughly wired for lighting, security, phones and more. The Internet home will connect all of the in-home networks, then connect each with any number of outside networks. For the fridge to talk to the computer, at least two networks – the home electrical network into which the fridge is plugged, and the telephone, firewire or wireless network into which the computer is connected – need some way of interfacing. And if the fridge needs to send you e-mail at work, it needs some way to communicate outside the home network.

But the obvious question is, do consumers want all this interconnectivity? Will we ever really need our fridge to e-mail us that our milk is past its prime?”

"After IBM ran a series of ads in which a dishwasher repairman shows up at a home because the dishwasher contacted him for service, Parks Associates held focus groups to gauge reaction to the commercial. "Consumers absolutely hated that," says Scherf. "People want more control of their lives, not less; they want to be the one to make the call, not the dishwasher."

redux [06.27.00]
News.Com Keep it simple, Handspring co-founder urges
"As founder of both Palm and Handspring, which makes a PDA (personal digital assistant) based on Palm's operating system, Hawkins referred to his own misconceptions of the device market, as well as to industry-wide missteps, many of which were driven by misreading consumer needs and interests, he said.

"It's not so easy to do," he said. "People get swept up in conventional thinking, which is often wrong."

Hawkins pointed to the idea that computers should adapt to people intelligently as an example of such misguided thinking. Rather than expecting so-called smart devices, designers should create practical tools that people will want to learn to use, like the keyboard, he said."

ZDNet Smart Homes, Dumb Ideas
"I've been getting a lot of press releases lately from newcomers to the computing scene who expect to make a killing when the "smart home" comes into its own. This pipe dream has been floating around the business for years and always reemerges during boom times when people are rich and can't seem to figure out what to do with their disposable income. There's nothing like wasting your money on a smart home.

The idea sounds reasonable on the surface: Create an energy-saving home that monitors itself and make everything networked and coordinated. But the basic idea always expands into something silly."

OReilly.Com Dialog with an Internet Toaster
""Why haven't you given me any new scripts to run for the past two months?" whined my toaster.

I was so surprised I almost dropped my Wheaties on the floor. It didn't bother me that the toaster spoke out of turn; I had installed the adaptive interface as a lark when I got the thing six months ago. What threw me was simply how many months had passed since I became bored with writing scripts to rotate English muffins or adjust the top-brown feature to the thickness of the cheese.

"Hardware problems," I said to gain time. Jeez, what was the world coming to--how could I let my own toaster make me feel guilty?"

redux [06.15.00]
Fast Company Design Vision
""We know how to do amazing things," [Thackara] says, "and we're filling the world with amazing devices. But we cannot answer the most important question: What is this stuff really for?""

"The time has also come, he says, to shift some of the focus of innovation away from work and toward everyday life. The early users of digital devices are almost always business users, so product designers have a natural inclination to create and design products with the workplace in mind. But that tendency can make for bad design, especially when those products migrate beyond business. People put up with technical difficulties in their work lives that they would never tolerate in their personal lives. So forget "personal" computing, Thackara says, and embrace "social" computing. "As computing migrates from ugly boxes on our desks to something that suffuses everything around us, a new relationship will emerge between what's real and what's virtual, what's mental and what's material. There are few limits to the number of services that we could develop if we simply took an aspect of daily life and looked for ways to make it better.""

redux [04.13.00]
The New York Times A Chip in Every Pot
[requires 'free' registration]
"Russell Robertson was grappling with an unusual assignment.

As an industrial designer, his mission was to figure out how kitchen appliances will be designed when, as he put it, "the fridge talks to the coffee pot."

His eyes twinkled as he spoke, but he was not kidding about the basic concept. In fact, while the idea may have once sounded ridiculous, predictions of the advent of such devices are now becoming almost clichéd."

"But predicting whether a technology will be adopted is critical for companies that want to succeed, or even survive, in the marketplace. The ones that can figure out what will be deemed useful, superfluous or downright ridiculous will win. And today, as tiny, wireless computer systems are being perfected and the Internet is allowing the distribution of data in seconds, dozens of appliance manufacturers are betting that some sort of pervasive-computing devices will come to be considered as necessary as a telephone. The trick, for them, is to figure out which ones."

""But one of the main reasons that companies with new products stumble, Professor Utterback said, "is that they fail to appreciate or investigate the marketplace." Many companies simply ask, "What can we do with the technology?" And once they determine what they can do, he said, they assume that people will want it."

Bad Subjects Beyond Copyright Consciousness
"Today's received ideas about intellectual property can be distilled into two major threads: technology killed copyright, and copyright is anachronistic in networked culture. Both of these notions are simplistic and ahistorical, and I'll try to argue that they're shortsighted. What we really ought to be talking about is access to works. Access is related to copyright, but is really more fundamental to our freedom to think and experience. I'd like to propose an expanded access scheme and offer an example of small steps that are being taken in that direction."

"At the Internet Archive, a nonprofit headquartered in San Francisco, a small group of engineers backed by a philanthropist are trying to create a new paradigm for access to archival material, in this case historical film from my own archives. By doing this, we're making a concrete move toward building an IP preserve."

redux [07.08.00]
CNN.Com Company aims to preserve Web history
"The Internet provides a unique glimpse into the lives of ordinary people, much like newspapers of old, but little is being done to preserve Web pages for future historians. One non-profit company is trying to change that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

redux [07.27.00]
Free Software Advocacy Against intellectual property
"The original rationale for copyrights and patents was to foster artistic and practical creative work by giving a short-term monopoly over certain uses of the work. This monopoly was granted to an individual or corporation by government. The government's power to grant a monopoly is corrupting. The biggest owners of intellectual property have sought to expand it well beyond any sensible rationale."

"This chapter outlines the case against intellectual property. I begin by mentioning some of the problems arising from ownership of information. Then I turn to weaknesses in its standard justifications. Next is an overview of problems with the so-called "marketplace of ideas," which has important links with intellectual property. Finally, I outline some alternatives to intellectual property and some possible strategies for moving towards them. "

"Intellectual property is supported by many powerful groups: the most powerful governments and the largest corporations. The mass media seem fully behind intellectual property, partly because media monopolies would be undercut if information were more freely copied and partly because the most influential journalists depend on syndication rights for their stories."

"Another problem in developing strategies is that it makes little sense to challenge intellectual property in isolation. If we simply imagine intellectual property being abolished but the rest of the economic system unchanged, then many objections can be made. Challenging intellectual property must involve the development of methods to support creative individuals."

MIT Technology Review Kurzweil vs. Dertouzos
"In our September issue, Michael Dertouzos wrote a column, "Not by Reason Alone," that took Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems to task for a piece Joy had written in Wired. In his Wired article, Joy argued that humanity should renounce certain lines of research, including nanotechnology, because of the dangers they pose. Dertouzos argued that Joy's view was flawed because his predictions were based on reason which, taken alone, is an inadequate guide to the future. Dertouzos' column drew an impassioned response from Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines. We print Kurzweil's letter and Dertouzos' rejoinder."

redux [08.28.00]
MIT Technology Review Not by Reason Alone
"In a recent Wired magazine article, Bill Joy argued that the consequences of research on robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology may lead to “knowledge-enabled mass destruction...hugely amplified by the power of self-replication.” His medicine: “relinquishment...by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.” I don’t buy it.

What troubles me with this argument is the arrogant notion that human logic can anticipate the effects of intended or unintended acts, and the more arrogant notion that human reasoning can determine the course of the universe."

"I suggest we broaden our perspective to the fullness of our humanity, which besides reason includes feelings and beliefs. Sometimes, as we drive the car of scientific and technological progress, we’ll veer because our reason says so. At other times we’ll follow our feelings, or we’ll be guided by faith. Most of the time, we’ll steer with all three of these human forces guiding us in concert, as they have guided human actions for thousands of years. As we do so, we should stay vigilant, ready to stop, when danger is imminent, using our full humanity to make that determination. If we do so, our turning point will be very different from where it may seem today, based on early rational assessments...that have failed us so often. Let us have faith in ourselves, our fellow human beings and our universe. And let’s keep in mind that our car is not the only moving thing out there."

redux [03.12.00]
Wired Magazine Why the future doesn't need us.
"Biological species almost never survive encounters with superior competitors. Ten million years ago, South and North America were separated by a sunken Panama isthmus. South America, like Australia today, was populated by marsupial mammals, including pouched equivalents of rats, deers, and tigers. When the isthmus connecting North and South America rose, it took only a few thousand years for the northern placental species, with slightly more effective metabolisms and reproductive and nervous systems, to displace and eliminate almost all the southern marsupials.

In a completely free marketplace, superior robots would surely affect humans as North American placentals affected South American marsupials (and as humans have affected countless species). Robotic industries would compete vigorously among themselves for matter, energy, and space, incidentally driving their price beyond human reach. Unable to afford the necessities of life, biological humans would be squeezed out of existence. "

redux [06.01.00]
Reason Joy, to the World
"... Joy is worried, really worried–20,000 words and five months of writing worried–that 21st-century technologies threaten to make human beings extinct. The threats are intelligent robots, nanotechnology (the ability to build things on the atomic level), and genetic engineering. All of them, he acknowledges, offer wonderful advantages, but they are, in his view, simply too dangerous to develop. We should stop investigating these ideas, he argues, before they become uncontrollable realities."

"Bill Joy is a lot smarter than I’ll ever be. But he is also incredibly foolish, in the parochial, reality-dodging way that geniuses sometimes are. And he is willing to sacrifice an awful lot of other people’s lives and liberty to his fantasies of power and control.

If—then statements are a staple of computer programming. Here’s one to consider: "If we could agree, as were headed, and why, then we would make our future much less dangerous–then we might understand what we can and should relinquish." (Emphasis added.) How, exactly, does a species of more than six billion intelligent individuals, with their own plans and purposes, agree on anything? Joy imagines the world as a small, technological elite and assumes away the problems of politics. He and his friends will just get together and agree on what to do."

Feed Simple Minds
"For nearly five decades, artificial-intelligence researchers have tried to build robots of human-level intelligence. In 1956, Allan Newell and Herbert Simon, creators of the first artificial-intelligence program, predicted that machines would soon be capable of understanding and translating spoken language, composing classical music, and inventing new mathematical theorems. This would happen, they said, by 1970.

Recent predictions about the trajectory of machine intelligence have been no less heady. Futurists speculate that robots will soon clean our houses and baby-sit our kids. They will run factories and fight in wars. There will be robot sonnets, robot paintings, robot symphonies. They will surpass us in intelligence and inherit the earth.

Canadian roboticist Mark Tilden calls this scenario "Attack of the Killer Robots" and dismisses it as pure fantasy. Unlike most AI researchers, Tilden isn't interested in creating a robot as intelligent as a human being. He just wants to build one that's as smart as your average bug."

The Economist Online but off-target
"Nearly a year after the deal was announced, American antitrust officials have given their blessing to the proposed merger between America Online, the world’s biggest Internet service provider (ISP), and Time Warner, a giant media conglomerate. To secure approval, the two companies have had to offer concessions that put into question the merits of the merger"

The New York Times Analysts See Strength in AOL Time Warner's Size
[requires 'free' registration]
"With the tough restrictions imposed by the Federal Trade Commission, falling stock prices and the clouded economic outlook, America Online and Time Warner face some significant speed bumps as they try to achieve their grand visions of being the media company for the new century.

But while these impediments may slow the companies, they do not fundamentally alter the ability of the unified AOL Time Warner to take advantage of its combined power in broadcasting, publishing, film, music and the Internet, analysts and executives said yesterday."

redux [04.11.00]
USA Today AOL to newspapers: Your future is online
"America Online's president sees home entertainment and communications as a collection of boxes. The TV set is the ''tell-me-a-story box.'' The personal computer - ''the manage-your-life box.'' The CD player? ''The give-me-a-mood box.''

The roles for those machines may be quickly evolving and the lines between them blurring. But Bob Pittman still sees plenty of room in American life for the newspaper out in the mailbox."

"In remarks that were part pep talk, part cautionary tale, he said practitioners of the written page can thrive in the new communications age if they are aggressive about getting their content online and don't defy a consumer-driven Internet culture that wants more and more at little or no cost."

redux [03.21.00]
Online Journalism Review A Post-Mortem, With Great Prejudice, of the Online Journalism Conference
"The choice of Sacks as primary attraction of a journalism seminar -- he's senior vice president and general manager of America Online -- was controversial enough to make one editor of Online Journalism stay home in protest. Yet it was strangely invigorating to hear this smug megacorporation executive lecture on his own importance, and how all journalists will play by AOL/Time-Warner's rules from now on, because, as Sacks said, "We're the biggest guys. We're big, and we're bad."

""If our goal was to publish bad magazines, by the way, we could have done that without a $120 billion merger." Before Sacks finished, he had happily proclaimed, "We do no original news," and described the new world of reporting as "an integrated consumer experience." Gives you an idea about how AOL might cover a famine."

Freedom Forum AOL-Time Warner merger raises questions about journalism, concentrated ownership
“AOL has been ethically challenged throughout its existence,” wrote Mercury News technology columnist Dan Gillmor... “I hate to see Time Warner, which has had its own ethical troubles but generally shows high journalistic standards, fall into such hands."

"“[W]hen the biggest online company controls the biggest traditional media company, you'd be wise to turn to other sources for reliable information on, for example, e-commerce and its biggest players,” wrote Gillmor."

Salon Come together, right now, over P2P
"Nelson Minar built a moral challenge into the distributed computing software developed by his company Popular Power. Users who agree to let their computers join the start-up's peer-to-peer network have a choice: They can earn about $5 per month by selling their CPU power to businesses; or they can donate their shiny new Apple G4 Cube to nonprofit tasks, receiving nothing but the warm fuzzies that result from doing good deeds.

But there's a twist. No matter whether users choose to be greedy, benevolent or something in between, they'll still end up contributing processing power to both for-profit and nonprofit clients. Minar designed the system so that even libertarian Ayn Rand fans who click the "maximize payment" option and utterly disdain charity will still end up donating at least some time and effort to helping scientists find a better flu vaccine. And vice versa."

redux [10.09.00]
FightAids@Home Overview
"Now more than ever, you are needed to help in the fight against AIDS. In the mid 1980's HIV infections reached epic proportions and have since continued to rise at alarming rates. Nearly twenty years later, technology has reached a point where you can make a difference by contributing the idle processing time of your PC.

Here is how it works:
To support FightAIDS@Home, you simply download a free software program from Entropia that runs "in the background" on your computer. FightAIDS@Home processes information (in this case using AutoDock) and calculates prospective targets for drug discovery. Basically, what this means is that FightAIDS@Home uses idle processor cycles that would normally be wasted. FightAIDS@Home captures the otherwise wasted cycles of your PC and applies them to model the evolution of drug resistance and to design the drugs necessary to fight AIDS. When your computer has finished a FightAIDS@Home computation, the FightAIDS@Home results are packed up and sent back to Entropia, ready for Scripps researchers to collect and analyze them.

Then when you are using your computer and it needs cycles, FightAIDS@Home simply and automatically turns those resources back over to the program you are using.

Download FightAIDS@Home now so your PC can start making a difference!"

ACM CrossRoads The SETI@Home Problem
"The SETI@Home problem can be thought of as a special case of the distributed computation verification problem: "given a large amount of computation divided among many computers, how can malicious participating computers be prevented from doing damage?" This is not a new problem. Distributed computation is a venerable research topic, and the idea of "selling spare CPU cycles" has been a science fiction fixture for years.

In real life, distributed computation has been used since at least the late 1980's to create "farms" of machines for rendering 3-D images. Farms allow graphic artists to create large images without needing to buy a supercomputer. More recently, the needs of scientific computation have led to the creation of frameworks such as Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) and Beowulf, which make it easier to distribute computations across many machines. The machines involved are usually owned by the same entity and a machine is either "good" or "bad" if it is operating or malfunctioning. There are no blatantly malicious machines.

The Internet makes it possible for computation to be distributed to many more machines. However, distributing computing around the internet requires developers to consider the possibility of malicious clients."

"The general study of secure multiparty computation has produced much interesting work over the last two decades. Less well studied, unfortunately, are the tools and techniques required to move the theoretical results to the real world. The old dream of massively distributed computations is finally coming true, and yet our tools for building and analysing real systems still seem primitive. The challenge of the next few years will be to bridge this gap."

redux [08.09.00]
BBC Screensavers could save lives
"Your computer could be helping to save lives when you are not using it to play games or surf the internet.

Instead of it sitting idle, it could be taking part in scientific experiments being distributed across thousands of computers on the internet.

Drugs to beat cancer and flu are starting to be tested in simulations split up and run on personal computers that would otherwise be doing nothing useful." [via slashdot.org]

PC Magazine New Apps Exploit Connectivity
"A natural complement to distributed file-sharing capabilities is distributed computation. The idea behind distributed computation is that a really big problem gets split into discrete, independent chunks, which are then parceled out to individual computers whose owners have volunteered their idle processor time to the cause. In aggregate, the users' computers form a sort of distributed supercomputer. The concept was first popularized by U.C. Berkeley's SETI@Home project, a 1999 PC Magazine Technical Excellence finalist that's now been downloaded by more than 2 million users. Though SETI@Home is a single-purpose tool designed solely to scour radio-telescope signals for signs of extraterrestrial transmissions, you can expect to see general-purpose mechanisms for distributing all kinds of massive computations. United Devices, for example, is a company that will use distributed computing for projects in areas such as bioinformatics research, drug design, and climate studies."

redux [07.22.00]
The Standard Distributed Computing Goes Commercial
"The distributed-computing model could be one of those rare cases where capitalism and pure scientific research mesh. Not every lab can afford to pay $200,000 for an eight-processor Origin 2000 SGI supercomputer, much less $1 million for a 40-processor machine, says David Fenstermacher, director of scientific computing for the medical school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (Fenstermacher is also acting director of the campus' Center for Bioinformatics and a United Devices adviser.) And even the most powerful supercomputers need time to process data.

A project that would take several months on a supercomputer – creating a 3D model of a protein's linear be accomplished in much less time using thousands of distributed computers"

redux [04.05.00]
Wired Researcher Borrows from Napster
"A researcher working on the Human Genome Project is using Napster technology, and he's not looking for T3 connections to download Moby.

Dr. Lincoln Stein, an associate professor of bioinformatics at the Cold Spring Harbor Lab in New York, is investigating ways to use Napster-type technology to allow scientists to share their discoveries of the genome.

"I was very interested when I saw Napster," Stein said. "It has a similar architecture (to what we use now), but it allows for 'peer-to-peer' data exchange and it dawned on me that it would be marvelous for our annotation system.""

Wired Magazine One-Half of a Manifesto
"For the last 20 years, I have found myself on the inside of a revolution, but on the outside of its resplendent dogma. Now that the revolution has not only hit the mainstream, but bludgeoned it into submission by taking over the economy, it's probably time for me to cry out my dissent more loudly than I have before.

And so I shared the following thoughts with the members of Edge.org, many of whom are, as much as anyone, responsible for this revolution, one which champions the ascent of cybernetic technology as culture. That first "One-Half of a Manifesto," as technology manifestos sometimes do, quickly blossomed across other Web sites and beyond.

The dogma I object to is composed of a set of interlocking beliefs and doesn't have a generally accepted overarching name as yet, though I sometimes call it "cybernetic totalism." It has the potential to transform human experience more powerfully than any prior ideology, religion, or political system ever has, partly because it can be so pleasing to the mind, at least initially, but mostly because it gets a free ride on the overwhelmingly powerful technologies that happen to be created by people who are, to a large degree, true believers."

The Edge One Half Of A Manifesto: Part II
"Jaron Lanier responds to Reality Club comments on the .5 Manifesto by George Dyson, Freeman Dyson, Cliff Barney, Bruce Sterling, Rodney Brooks, Henry Warwick, Kevin Kelly, Margaret Wertheim, John Baez, Lee Smolin, Stewart Brand, Rodney Brooks, Lee Smolin, Daniel C. Dennett, Philip W. Anderson."

Salon Artificial stupidity
""Software is brittle," he says. "If every little thing isn't perfect, it breaks. We have to have an honest appreciation for how little progress we've made in this area."

On the surface, Lanier's stance appears to resemble that of Joy, the influential programmer who used the pages of Wired magazine to condemn Moravec and others for desiring to build sentient machines without acknowledging the apocalyptic dangers. But Lanier ultimately takes quite a different tack. Joy condemned science for what it could do; Lanier condemns it for failing to recognize what it can't. Lanier's upstart argument yields a uniquely here-and-now version of computer science ethics and an entirely different, but equally frightening form of what Lanier calls "Bill's version ... of the Terror.""

redux [10.13.00]
NetFuture THE TROUBLE WITH UBIQUITOUS TECHNOLOGY PUSHERS (PART 3)
"If we do not pay attention to the difference between the computational abstraction and the human reality in the simple cases, nothing will require our attention to those differences in the "higher" cases.

Further, the more you automate, the more you tend to reduce the affected contexts to the terms of your automation, so that the next "higher" activity looks more and more like an automatic one that should be handed over to a machine. When, finally, the supervisor is supervising only machines, there's no reason for the supervisor himself not to become a machine.

So the idea that automation relieves us from grunt work in order to concentrate on higher things looks rather like the opposite of the truth. Automation tends continually to reduce the higher work to mechanical and computational terms. At least, it does this when we lose sight of the full reality of the work, reconceiving it as if its entire significance lay in the few decontextualized structural features we can analogize in a machine. (In a machine-driven world, we are always pressured toward this reconceptualization.) But if, on the other hand, we do not lose sight of the full reality of the work, then the "lower-level" stuff may look just as much worth doing ourselves as the "higher" -- in which case we have to ask, "What, really, is the rationale for automating it?""

redux [08.28.00]
MIT Technology Review Not by Reason Alone
"In a recent Wired magazine article, Bill Joy argued that the consequences of research on robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology may lead to “knowledge-enabled mass destruction...hugely amplified by the power of self-replication.” His medicine: “relinquishment...by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.” I don’t buy it.

What troubles me with this argument is the arrogant notion that human logic can anticipate the effects of intended or unintended acts, and the more arrogant notion that human reasoning can determine the course of the universe."

"I suggest we broaden our perspective to the fullness of our humanity, which besides reason includes feelings and beliefs. Sometimes, as we drive the car of scientific and technological progress, we’ll veer because our reason says so. At other times we’ll follow our feelings, or we’ll be guided by faith. Most of the time, we’ll steer with all three of these human forces guiding us in concert, as they have guided human actions for thousands of years. As we do so, we should stay vigilant, ready to stop, when danger is imminent, using our full humanity to make that determination. If we do so, our turning point will be very different from where it may seem today, based on early rational assessments...that have failed us so often. Let us have faith in ourselves, our fellow human beings and our universe. And let’s keep in mind that our car is not the only moving thing out there."

redux [06.01.00]
Reason Joy, to the World
"... Joy is worried, really worried–20,000 words and five months of writing worried–that 21st-century technologies threaten to make human beings extinct. The threats are intelligent robots, nanotechnology (the ability to build things on the atomic level), and genetic engineering. All of them, he acknowledges, offer wonderful advantages, but they are, in his view, simply too dangerous to develop. We should stop investigating these ideas, he argues, before they become uncontrollable realities."

"Bill Joy is a lot smarter than I’ll ever be. But he is also incredibly foolish, in the parochial, reality-dodging way that geniuses sometimes are. And he is willing to sacrifice an awful lot of other people’s lives and liberty to his fantasies of power and control.

If—then statements are a staple of computer programming. Here’s one to consider: "If we could agree, as were headed, and why, then we would make our future much less dangerous–then we might understand what we can and should relinquish." (Emphasis added.) How, exactly, does a species of more than six billion intelligent individuals, with their own plans and purposes, agree on anything? Joy imagines the world as a small, technological elite and assumes away the problems of politics. He and his friends will just get together and agree on what to do."

SFGate Dot-Com Downturn Taking a Toll on Trade Publications
"For ink-stained wretches, the irony was delicious: Internet companies weren't making money, but the print publications that covered their exploits were practically minting the stuff.

As Internet firms hit their day of reckoning, however, the glossy magazines that grew fat on their success are now tightening their belts."

"A stack of the six magazines from June weighed 10 pounds. A stack of current issues of the same six magazines weighs 5 pounds.

"It's pretty clear the day of the ultra-fat book may be over. It's just a question of how painful it will be," said Ned Desmond, president and editor of eCompany."

redux [06.14.00]
Wired About Those Fat Net Mags
"Lugging around a couple of magazines that cover the Internet and technology industries might qualify as a workout these days, with their bulked-up editorial staffs churning out a record number of pages to keep up with demand for advertising space.

The trend, which shows little sign of slowing despite a nascent dot-com shakeout, has at least some industry watchers wondering if these publications are growing a pace that may be setting them up for a big letdown -- just like some of the once high-flying companies they cover. "

""We believe it's not a good thing being a fat 400-to-500-page vehicle. We don't think readers want that," said Steve Thompson, senior vice president and group publisher of the Industry Standard."

redux [03.21.00]
Salon My dot-com business mags have fallen on me and I can't get up!
"It's no great mystery what's fueling the ungainly growth in these magazines. "There's a huge information overload going on right now," says venture capitalist Andrew Anker, a partner at August Capital. "It's being driven by marketers trying to spend dollars, not by users saying 'I need this content.'"

Web companies spent more than $700 million on magazine advertising alone last year. That's 348 percent more than they did in 1998, according to Competitive Media Reporting. Plus, with almost $25 billion flowing from venture capitalists into Net companies in 1999, 66 percent more than the previous year, there's a lot of business-to-business advertisers itching to reach the newly cash-rich dot-commies who need to quickly find somewhere to put all that capital to work."

""Are we too big? Of course, we're too big," says Jason Pontin, editor of the Red Herring, which is putting out a whopping 488 pages in April. "I recognize that we're getting uncomfortably large.""

The New York Times Mobile Web Remains a Promise
[requires 'free' registration]
"The mobile Internet has been promoted as the Web untethered, unstrung and unwired: the content of the World Wide Web available anytime, anywhere on a cell phone, hand-held computer, laptop or pager.

In the United States, at least, consumer response to slow-loading services like sports scores and stock quotes on tiny cell-phone screens has been anemic."

"So perhaps it should come as no surprise that apostles of the mobile Web compare its growing pains to the early days of the Internet, when the network of networks was the domain of computer scientists, engineers and researchers. Back then, navigating the Web was daunting."

MSNBC Plenty Wrong With WAP
"Try this experiment: pick up your newspaper and find the weather forecast for your area. Note how long it took you. Look up the listings for the movie theater closest to you. Find a sports score. In each case, record the elapsed time."

NOW TRY THE same thing on a mobile telephone using a technology called Wireless Application Protocol, or WAP, to access the Internet.

You already know the result, don’t you? Everything will take longer the second way."

Alertbox WAP Field Study Findings
"Following a UK field study, 70% of users decided not to continue using WAP. Currently, its services are poorly designed, have insufficient task analysis, and abuse existing non-mobile design guidelines. WAP's killer app is killing time; m-commerce's prospects are dim for the next several years."

"Mobile services must target users with immediate, context-directed content. General services like shopping are less likely to succeed in the mobile environment. Indeed, in the list of services bookmarked by users, shopping hardly figures at all; sports and entertainment are the two big categories.

Killing time is a perfect application for mobile devices because they are readily available when users are waiting around for something to happen. At the bus stop? Play a short game. In line for something? Read a paragraph of gossip. Stuck in traffic that doesn't move? Check the scores of your favorite teams."

ClickZ Give WAP a Chance
"We don't need to be told that WAP has not yet set the world on fire, especially when we've only seen the tip of the mobile Internet iceberg.

It's been obvious to most in our industry that WAP has not lived up to everyone's expectations. It's been oversold; the public is feeling let down -- it is not the "mobile Internet" promised by BT Cellnet and company; and the digital media industry has been quick to turn about-face and join in WAP bashing. But we believe there's been too much negativity, and the overselling has now hindered acceptance of the positives that have undoubtedly come out of the "2G" explosion.

There are some types of WAP services and sites that are genuinely useful."

redux [08.13.00]
The Standard Deconstructing the Web
"The Web is disintegrating into bits. When the dust settles, what's important for a successful long-term strategy is not Web site design but the flexibility of your information architecture."

"New Internet devices and applications are different not only because they are designed to do different things, but also because the mindset of the person who uses them influences the kind of interaction that makes sense. You cannot shove a Web page onto a cell phone's tiny screen. Even if you could, it wouldn't make sense from the user's point of view. The information I want delivered to my cell phone is different from what I want on my home computer. Web pages are designed for sedentary, reflective use. The phone is for urgent, short communications."

UIDesign A WAP On The Knuckles
"The knives are out for WAP technology. Following the huge hype of the last 12 months, it's becoming apparent that it just isn't delivering. Naturally, the naysayers have now become the "told-you-so-ers". However, the disappointment of WAP technology needs some more careful analysis. The industry deserves a good wrap on the knuckles. Much of what has happened was avoidable. Will the lessons be learned?"

"The biggest single mistake was to take the view that an internet enabled phone is a general purpose device. It was an easy mistake to make. A computer with web browser was a general purpose device. You can use it to surf any web site. A phone is also a general purpose device. You can use it to call any number. However, when you put the two together, the combination is limited. To be completely general purpose it would need to have a keyboard, a full size screen and a phone transceiver built in together. It would need to be both a computer and a phone, i.e. a laptop with a phone built in. Current WAP Phones are still phones, but they are NOT computers in the sense of a PC. This was the first mistake - marketing the device as if it was a computer.

A WAP Phone is an "invisible computer" or it ought to be. A WAP Phone thought of as an invisible computer, becomes an information appliance. Furthermore, each different form factor of WAP Phone is a different information appliance. The whole industry failed to realize this. Information appliances should be designed for a specific purpose or a limited set of purposes. In other words, with current technology, the "walled garden" approach was correct providing what was inside the garden made sense for the specific information appliance, as a single product."

redux [06.15.00]