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

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

“We’re here to introduce you to something incredibly cool – an online assistant that can help you out with whatever you’re doing, wherever you go on the Web. Deepleap is a free, Web-based application that provides simple, immediate access to content and services related

“When you’re looking at a word or a phrase on a Web page, or a Web site in general, you can use Deepleap to get additional relevant information, or save or email that information, without visiting dozens of other sites or launching multiple applications. Plus, you can do all sorts of fun and useful things like save items to a universal Wishlist, keep track of your Bookmarks from anywhere on the Web, do price comparisons, search any site… and of course there’s more – why would we stop there?”

“…the reality, right now, is that we’ve built Deepleap as a *platform* for doing this sort of contextual relating between sites, and what we’re demonstrating with the beta is more the general concept. So if you pop up Deepleap on an Amazon.com product page, for example, it will give you a set of tools based around buying a product — comparison shopping, reading reviews, etc. Or if you highlight the name of a movie, and activate it, that will bring up a series of movie-related options, like getting movie times for your neighborhood, or checking for the soundtrack at Reel.com. Find a selection of text that you like — an interesting quote, maybe? Highlight it, save it to the Deepleap web site. Useful tools, when you need them.”

“Most Internet retailers will go out of business by the end of next year because of funding problems and competitive pressures, said Forrester Research, a well-respected electronic-commerce research company.”

“”I think there are probably not going to be more than three leaders in each online-retail category,” said Forrester senior analyst Joe Sawyer.”

“a.No person may
1.Initiate any telephone call (other than a call made for emergency purposes or made with the prior express consent of the called party) using an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice,
i.To any emergency telephone line, including any 911 line and any emergency line of a hospital, medical physician or service office, health care facility, poison control center, or fire protection or law enforcement agency;
ii.To the telephone line of any guest room or patient room of a hospital, health care facility, elderly home, or similar establishment; or
iii.To any telephone number assigned to a paging service, cellular telephone service, specialized mobile radio service, or other radio common carrier service, or any service for which the called party is charged for the call; ”

“”We believe that the vast majority — perhaps 95
to 98 percent — of all dot-com companies will fail
over the next 24 months,” said Michael Fleisher,
president and CEO of GartnerGroup, in his
keynote speech kicking off the market research
company’s annual Spring Symposium/ITxpo on
Monday at the San Diego convention center.

Conversely, “virtually no traditional companies
will be able to survive without a significant
Internet component as part of its business
model,” Fleisher said. ”

“According to a new survey by Tamkang University’s Department of Mass Communications, the three million Taiwanese people who use WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) facilities on their cellular phones are dissatisfied with the cost, speed and range of services available.

Some 86.5 percent of respondents said that WAP services were too slow, while 85.5 percent
complained about the price.”

“Mike Malarkey, a business-development manager for the District-based educational Web developer Blackboard Inc., was in the middle of a meeting last Thursday when his Nokia cell
phone chirped, sounding a bit like the low-battery warning.

When he checked it after the meeting, he saw that the battery was fine, but he’d just received a text message on the phone’s screen–an advertisement for a Web site selling
cell-phone accessories. ”