Index to, and
footnotes for, 2001 columns
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| No
columns on 16,23 or 30 December (well, a chap has to have a holiday sometime!) |
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| Links
for column of 09
December 2001 ....................................................... |
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| Chris
Raettig's account of how he came to create the corporate anthems
site is here.
He has also added the story of his communications with KPMG. For an MP3 of the KPMG anthem try here (though I suspect that even as you read their lawyers are trying to get it removed). |
Wired
had a
good report about the story.
The KPMG 'disclaimer' is here. |
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| Column
of 02
December 2001 ........................................... |
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| Links
for column of 25
November 2001 ....................................................... |
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| For details of The Myth of the Paperless Office, see here. | |||||||||
| Links
for column of 18 November 2001 ......................................................... |
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| S.A.
Mathieson has a
very useful article on the proposed new legislation in Guardian
Online.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pond, the authorities are also writing themselves blank cheques, regardless of the impact on civil liberties. |
The
text of the new 'Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security' Bill is here.
For information about the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, see the Foundation for Information Policy Research. |
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| No column for 11 November 2001 ................................................ |
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| Links
for column of 04
November 2001 ................................................................... |
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| There is quite a lot of practical advice on managing e-mail available on the Web. Here's a piece entitled "Managing the E-Mail Explosion" for example. There's some good stuff on LearnTheNet. The University of Texas librarians have also taken a long look at how to manage e-mail records in the longer term -- a big problem for many companies. | Thanks to Ian Stevenson for this quote from the IEE News 01-02-96:"It is a strange paradox that the infotech revolution is making it harder to communicate. As the cost, in terms of time, effort or money, of sending a message approaches zero, the number of messages sent will approach infinity. As the number of messages approaches infinity the time available to consider each approaches zero. At the limit an infinite number of messages will be dispatched and receive zero attention. You may think this logic is flawed but there are already those who are only too well aware that the easier it is to communicate the harder it is to get any one to listen, They are people who work in the junk mail business." | Some
'data' about e-mail (garnered from Gerry
McGovern's newsletter): * In September 2001, IDC predicted that there will be 1.2 billion email mailboxes by 2005, up from 505 million in 2000. It also predicted that by 2005 there will be 36 billion person-to-person emails sent worldwide every day. * In July 2001, Ferris Research predicted that 2001 would see a 50 percent rise in the number of emails business users would receive, with further growth of between 35-50 percent during 2002. * In July 2001, a Gartner study stated that business users receive an average of 22 email messages a day, and spend an average of 49 minutes every day managing their email. Gartner stated that much email is not relevant. It compared unproductive email to, "being killed by friendly fire. It's like carbon monoxide. It's colorless, odorless". * In May 2001, Support.com published a survey of IT professionals globally which found that email software caused the more problems than any other software application. Even
before the current crisis, the US Congress was drowning in
e-mail. According
to one Congressional task force, "First, the volume of e-mail to congressional offices has risen dramatically
over the past two years. The number of e-mail messages reaching the House
of Representatives, for example, rose from 20 million in 1998 to 48 million
in 2000, and it continues to grow by an average of one million messages per
month. The heavy e-mail traffic generated by the recent nomination of John
Ashcroft as U.S. Attorney General slowed Senate servers to a crawl, causing
delays in e-mail delivery that lasted hours - and, in some cases, days. This
flood of e-mail has been fueled by the ease and speed of online communications,
the electorate's growing interest in national politics, and the grassroots
activities of lobbyists and e-businesses that are electronically motivating
the public to 'make their voices heard in Washington.' Unfortunately, these |
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| Links
for columns of 21
October 2001 and 28 October 2001 .................................................................................... |
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| For information on the alternatives to Microsoft software, see Living Without Microsoft. | The Guardian also ran a useful piece by SA Mathieson on some alternatives to Microsoft programs. | For the grisly details of how XP's 'product activation' works, see here. | Guy Clapperton has written about how the new Microsoft licensing system will affect small businesses. And here is the report on what UK Big Business thinks about it | ||||||
| Links
for column of 14
October 2001 ................................................... |
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| Eavesdropping
on search engines: Metaspy provides a window into MetaCrawler. Questioning of Search.com can be observed here. And you can peek at what people are asking AskJeeves.com by clicking here. Google's Zeitgeist page provides an on-going summary of what people are interested in. |
Google's
Zeitgeist page for the week of the attacks is archived here.
There is a fascinating article in First Monday, a peer-reviewed online journal, which discusses the significance of Google in the aftermath of the attacks.
|
The Pew Internet report on how US citizens used the Net to react to the WTC attacks is here. | Jon Katz wrote a characteristically interesting essay on Slashdot arguing that 'The Net is now our serious news medium'. | ||||||
| Links
for column of 07
October 2001 .................................................... |
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| Lovely piece in the Economist about Blair's Churchill Lite act. Excerpt: 'It was always understood that New Labour was saving the big stuff for its second term. Voters had been primed to expect Mr Blair to organise a transport initiative here, a public-private partnership there. Some worthwhile changes had been expected in the | procedures
for adopting children. There might even be a referendum on joining
the euro. But this—this is ridiculous. The only plausible
explanation for Mr Blair's planet-transforming peroration from
Brighton is that the poor man has let the war against terrorism go
to his head. Worst of all, Mr Blair thinks it all hangs together.' |
For background on the SSSCA see here and here. The text of the Bill is here. | In an interesting new book, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity, Siva Vaidhyanathan presents a clear and historically based argument against the push to transform American intellectual property law into a new zone of zero tolerance. | ||||||
| Links
for column of 30 September 2001 ........................................................ |
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| Jack
Straw's carpet-chewing outburst can
be heard on the Radio 4 Today site, thanks to the miracle
of RealAudio. (But remember you will need to download and
install the free
Real Player software to listen to it.)
For everything you ever wanted to know about the RIP Act see the FIPR archive. |
According to this piece by Duncan Campbell in the Guardian, the WTC terrorists made extensive use of unencrypted email, precisely because they knew that encrypted communications might have triggered an alarm. | The rumour that Bin Laden & Co. use steganographic techniques was first reported in USA Today, but doubts have been cast on the conjecture by one academic study. (Note: you will need free Acrobat Reader software to read this report.) | Apart from the civil liberties objections to the burgeoning surveillance craze, there is the argument that wall-to-wall surveillance simply won't work. At a conference in London this week, security expert Bruce Schneier made this point forcefully. "The Stasi collected data on four million East Germans, roughly one fourth of their population", he reminded his audience. "Yet they failed to predict the fall of the Berlin Wall because they invested too heavily in data collection and too little in data interpretation and human intelligence". | ||||||
| Links
for column of 23
September 2001 ........................................................ |
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| Examples of sloppy reporting of the Nimda threat. Here's a BBC report: New virus infects the internet. "A new computer worm has spread quickly via the internet, assaulting not only personal computers but network servers as well.." . Note: no mention of Microsoft in the opening para. And here's Wired -- an outfit which ought to know better -- making the same mistake with a piece headlined Scary Hybrid Internet Worm Loose. | Interesting review of Windows vs. Linux as a desktop system. Carried out by a consultant for a commercial client, the conclusion was that the client's organisation could get the same functionality and save $10,000 on its IT costs. Wonder when this penny will drop with the UK's Microsoft-obsessed public authorities. | Here is Steve Gibson's account of the security holes in Windows XP. | Here is David Pogue's review of Windows XP. | ||||||
| Links
for column of 16
September 2001 ........................................................ |
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| Wired had an interesting story about how ordinary people used the Net to communicate and in the process provided a new kind of coverage that we haven't ever seen before. | Some sites gathered eyewitness accounts. And here is a page constructed entirely from images sent from all over the world by ordinary web users. (Thanks to Quentin Stafford-Fraser for this.) | I
received this astonishing e-mail
from Jonathan Wallace on Wednesday. The Internet Archive in collaboration with Alexa Internet, and SUNY, Library of Congress and UWashington is archiving pages and sites relating to the terrorist attacks in the NY and DC. Where we are archiving sites and pages all the time, we are concentrating the crawlers to make sure there is a solid historical record of this time. |
And,
as I said, the Net didn't fall apart under the strain. Quite
the reverse, in fact. There are a lot of ways of measuring
Internet performance, of course, but here's a
graph from one of the monitoring services which shows how
packet-loss rates changed over the critical days.
Nice to see that, the morning after my column was published, the New York Times agreed. Great minds etc... |
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| Links
for column of 09
September 2001 ........................................................ |
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| 802.11b technology has now got to the point of being a consumer product. The Wireless Ethernet Compatability Alliance -- the nearest thing 802.11b has to an industrial consortium -- lists 47 companies (including some major players like Dell, Intel, Compaq and HP) which offer 802.11b products. Boxed 'Starter sets' for home networks are now sold by high street retailers like Dixons and PC World. | The
WECA site has some useful
resources, including some
technical papers on the technology (for which you will need
Adobe Acrobat Reader -- available free from Adobe).
Here's an innovative ISP in Maine which is using 802.11b to provide broadband access to customers who are beyond the reach of ADSL or cable. Other companies doing much the same thing include one with the evocative name GetOnTheAir.com! The company providing access in Starbucks is MobileStar. |
I
use Orinoco
kit, but the nicest implementation is Apple Airport
technology. Every iMac and iBook comes with a built-in
802.11b antenna (you just have to add a card).
Security is an issue because it's easy (by definition) to eavesdrop on a wireless network. The technology comes with two levels of encryption, but many users don't even bother to use that, as this article suggests. And there's been some recent research suggesting that the built-in encryption can relatively easily be broken. |
My
guess is that the built-in encryption provides enough security for
ordinary domestic use. I wouldn't use it if I were a law firm or a
bank. But then they can afford 'proper' wired networking!
For me, though, the most exciting thing about 802.11b is its possibilities for community use. My interest in it was first sparked by this article in Salon. The Seattle Wireless project is a typical example of how enlightened techies are using their expertise to widen broadband access to people who cannot afford ADSL or cable modem charges. And the movement towards these 'symbiotic networks' continues to grow. |
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| Links
for column of 26
August 2001 ............................................... |
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| Salon (which is based in San Francisco) was in a great position to keep tabs on the dot-com boom. Here's a lovely piece about the rise of the 'asset auction' business following the crash. "What", wonders the reporter, wandering through the lots on sale, "did they do with this stuff?" | Here's
Amy
Standen's article on the dot-com Aeron fetish.
And a useful quote from John Maynard Keynes. "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". |
And if you really want to buy a Herman Miller chair, try here. | |||||||
| Links
for column of 19 August 2001 .................................................. |
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| Ed
Yourdon wrote a
nice little piece summarising what he saw as the essence of Fred
Brooks's achievement.
Fred's home page is here. |
The Mythical Man-Month is published by Addison Wesley. The publication details are here. After 25 years, Brooks produced a revised and expanded edition. | Here are some short excerpts from Chapter 1. And there's a useful brief summary of each chapter here. But in the end the only thing to do is get the book and read it for yourself. | |||||||
| Links
for column of 12 August 2001 ..................................................... |
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| IBM has a tribute to the PC on its site. | The San Jose Mercury News (Silicon Valley's local newspaper) ran a nice series reflecting on the two decades of the IBM PC. | There was a nice piece in the LA Times reminding us that 1981 was also the year when Apple began work on the really revolutionary personal computer -- the Macintosh. | |||||||
| Links
for Column of 05 August 2001 .................................... |
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| StarOffice
can be downloaded from
here -- but it's such a huge download that you'd be better
paying around £30 for a CD containing all the software. Dan Gillmor, the distinguished technology columnist of the San Jose Mercury News has been running an interesting discussion about what's involved in living without Microsoft software. |
The company that is developing AbiWord is here. The current version is 0.9.0. and you can download it free from here. Paul Maritz, Microsoft's senior vice-president of platforms and applications, described it under oath as a "very high-quality word processor"! But that was when he was hoping to persuade Judge Jackson that Microsoft faced serious competition, so perhaps one should take the claim with a pinch of salt. AbiWord still lacks some important features of MS Word, but it's getting there. | ||||||||
| Links
for column of 29
July 2001 .............................................. |
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| Here's
the New York Times report
of Dmitry Sklyarov's arrest, and the same paper's account of how
Adobe started
to back off. Here's the Wired story of the arrest. You can download the PowerPoint file of Sklyarov's Defcon presentation from here. |
Some
time ago, Larry Lessig wrote a
wonderful essay on the Alice in Wonderland licencing terms Adobe
tried to impose on its e-book of Alice in Wonderland -- which
originally included the stipulation that the e-book was not to be
read aloud! Here's the text of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. |
The 'Boycott Adobe' site is already up and running. And if you decide that you do not wish to use Adobe PhotoShop (or just can't afford the £550 it costs), why not try the Open Source (and free) alternative -- the GIMP? It does more or less everything PhotoShop does, and for some tasks is actually better. The curious name stands for 'Graphical Image Manipulation Program'. | |||||||
| Links
for column of 22
July 2001 ........................................... |
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| Doc Searls is one of my favourite Internet commentators. Here's his take on Passport and Hailstorm from his column in Linux Journal. His title: "Whose hand is that in your pocket?" | The best critical piece I've been able to locate on the architecture and implications of Hailstorm is written by the inimitable Clay Shirky. The title says it all: "Hailstorm: Open Web Services Controlled by Microsoft". | Microsoft's
White
Paper (tech jargon for technical outline) on Hailstorm
makes fascinating reading. Larry Lessig, a long-term and perceptive critic of Microsoft, has argued in his column in the Industry Standard, that there are tensions within the company which could eventually induce it to behave in a less domineering way. Thanks to Ernie Eban for pointing me to this link. |
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| Column of
15
July 2001 .................................. |
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| Links
for column of 08
July 2001 ......................................... |
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| Clay Shirky, one of the most perceptive Internet commentators around, has written several insightful articles on the 3G madness. Here's one. And another. And yet another. | The Economist has been admirably acerbic about the Telcos' 3G gamble from the beginning. Here's a brisk editorial on the subject. And here's a piece on the technical and other difficulties of rolling out 3G networks. | ||||||||
| Links
for column of 01
July 2001 .................................... |
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| Cass Sunstein's Home Page is here. Interestingly, it includes links to people who do not agree with him -- though it seems that he might have been encouraged to do this by some negative vibes! | This is the site he did for the book. There are also some favourable reviews, and some critical ones. | Eight years ago Sunstein published Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech (Free Press, 1993). He's also co-authored a book (with Martha Nussbaum) on human cloning, | |||||||
| Links
for Column of 24
June 2001 ..................................... |
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| For
an account of the 'Honeypot' experiment see Bruce Schneier's piece here,
or this
piece from ZD news. There was also an
informative piece in the New York Times which linked Steve
Gibson's account of the security holes in Windows XP with the
San Diego research into DDOS.
The most illuminating books I've found on the centrality of IP in the digital age are James Boyle's Shamans, Software and Spleen and Lawrence Lessig's Code: and other laws of Software (Basic Books, 1999). Here's the first chapter of the Lessig work. James Boyle maintains a good list of his publications on his home page. |
The
paper describing the UCSD research into the extent of DDOS attacks
is here
but you will need the (free) Adobe
Acrobat Reader to view it.
For details of Ross Anderson's magisterial book, plus a sample chapter, see here. Bruce Schneier wrote the foreword. For details of Schneier's own book on security, Secrets and Lies, see here. Need a firewall? There are various starter products available on the Net and elsewhere -- see this, for example. Or this. |
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| Links
for column of 17
June 2001 ...................................................... |
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| Interactive Week carried a wonderful column by Connie Guglielmo explaining the Smart Tags concept and sending it up brilliantly. "Microsoft is considering adding a feature to Windows XP (link to Microsoft XP order info page), due out Oct. 25, that would take users to links predetermined by Microsoft (link to favorable article about Microsoft). The Smart Tags feature automatically scans the Web pages that a Windows XP user browses, and then inserts new links beneath certain words, like the names of companies, products or whatever. If the user clicks on that Microsoft-created link (link to Bill Gates' speech on how Microsoft innovation benefits consumers), a new browser window opens with more links to Microsoft owned-sites (links to MSN, HotMail, Microsoft.com and Expedia.com) or other sites and Web pages chosen by the company." | The
Smart Tags story was first
broken by Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal.
Here's a
terrific column by Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News
about how Microsoft's appetite for world domination remains
undimmed. According to a source who ought to know, Smart Tags will be disabled by default -- i.e. users will have to switch on the feature. Phew! We'll see on October 25 when the final copies ship. Grisly details department: Steve Gibson's analysis of the security risks raised by Windows XP starts here and continues here.
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| Links
for column of 10
June 2001 ....................................... |
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| LinuxUser
magazine originally broke the story. The article is here.
Here's the Microsoft Press Release crowing about their capture of the government's flagship site.
|
There
was a
typically abrasive article about the Gateway in The Register
-- the online magazine which describes itself as 'the hand that
bites IT'!
Try the 'Gateway' site for yourself. But make sure you have the right operating system and browser! Dell has been crowing about its sterling contribution to the Gateway. (Warning: it's a 655 kb .pdf document and you will need Acrobat Reader to see it.) |
Alan
Mather, of the e-Envoy's office, made this
response to some of the criticisms of the Gateway site. He says:
"Work is beginning on providing extended browser support on a wider variety of operating systems....What we have concentrated upon is making this world-leading initiative available to as many as possible as quickly as possible."
And the e-Envoy himself was so annoyed by my column about the Gateway site that he penned this response. |
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| Column of 03 June 2001 | |||||||||
| Links
for Column of 27 May 2001 ..................................................... |
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| For a summary of the Forrester report, see their site. | Clay Shirky has written a number of very insightful articles on the significance of the Peer-to-peer revolution. See here for a good example. Tim O'Reilly has also published an intriguing 'meme map' in which he tries to position P2P in a wider context. | The best book on P2P is Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies, edited by Andy Oram and published by O'Reilly Associates. The publisher is organising another conference on P2P in September. | |||||||
| Links
for column
of 20
May 2001 .................................................... |
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| For an entertaining analysis of why the PC's days are numbered, see Donald A Norman's book The Invisible Computer, MIT Press, 1998. | |||||||||
| Column of 13 May 2001 | |||||||||
| Links
for column of 06
May 2001 ..................................................... |
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| Microsoft seems to be getting really rattled about the Open Source movement. Here's a speech by Craig Mundie, a senior Vice-President of the company, attacking the movement, and in particular its central licensing philosophy. | Andrew
Leonard, an expert on the Open Source movement, wrote
a nice piece in Salon debunking Mundie's arguments. And John Markoff of the New York Times wrote up a telephone interview he conducted with Mundie the day before his speech to the Stern School of Business at New York University. |
In a nice piece about Microsoft's increasing irritation with Open Source, the Economist published an acute dissection of the essence of the company's position on the issue. | |||||||
| Links
for column of 29
April 2001 ...................................................... |
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| Here's the text of Edward Felten's statement, explaining why he and his colleagues did not feel able to present the paper outlining the results of their research into digital watermarks. | Predictably,
though, the text of the paper leaked
onto the Net. The whole thing started with an Open Letter from the SDMI folks challenging the computer science community to remove the watermarks. The RIAA later denied that it had threatened the scientists, but the letter, written by Matthew Oppenheim, head of litigation for the Recording Industry Association of America, reads in part: "Any disclosure of information gained from participating in the public challenge would be outside the scope of activities permitted by the agreement and could subject you and your research team to actions under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act." Here is some background from the Princeton scientists on the whole affair. |
The
scandal has been covered extensively in some media outlets.
Here's is the BBC
Online report. And here is John
Markoff's piece from the New York Times. (Free
registration required.)
Thanks to the many readers who pointed out that it is the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) not the RIAA that is suing the computer magazine '2600' for publishing the DeCSS code. Mea culpa: but it's difficult to get so much as a cigarette-paper between the MPAA and the RIAA positions on intellectual property. |
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| Column of 22 April 2001 | |||||||||
| Column of 15 April 2001 | |||||||||
| Column of 8 April 2001 | |||||||||
| Column of 1 April 2001 | |||||||||
| Links
for column of 25
March 2001 ........................................................ |
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| Here is Microsoft's announcement of Hailstorm | Hailstorm was subjected to, er, a hailstorm of media comment. Here's Wired's coverage. And Dan Gillmor's sceptical observations (from his WebLog). | And an insightful piece from one of Bill Gates's local papers. | |||||||
| Links
for column of 18
March 2001 ....................................................... |
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| The Patent Office decision on software patents and business method/process patents is reported here. | Larry Lessig has written widely about business process patents. Here is one of his columns from the Industry Standard. | ||||||||
| Column of 11 March 2001 | |||||||||
| Link
for column of 4
March 2001 .................................................... |
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| There's an excellent short biography of Claude Shannon here. | |||||||||
| Correction
for column of 25
February 2001 ..................................................................... |
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| Note: the claim in this week's published column that Hotmail still runs on Open Source software is incorrect. Hotmail ran on BSD Unix when Microsoft bought the company and continued on that basis for some time. It now runs on Microsoft IIS and Windows 2000. I did spot the error before publication, but my attempt to correct it obviously failed. :-( | |||||||||
| Column of 18 February 2001 | |||||||||
| Column of 11 February 2001 | |||||||||
| Column of 4 February 2001 | |||||||||
| Column of 28 January 2001 (Not on Observer server, for some obscure reason.) | |||||||||
| Column of 21 January 2001 | |||||||||
| Column of 14 January 2001 | |||||||||
| Column of 7 January 2001 | |||||||||
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© John Naughton 1999,2000,2001. Nothing in this Web page should be construed as offering investment advice. Information is posted here to supplement my column in the London Observer in the hope that additional links and background will be of interest to readers. If you are seeking advice or information about online investment, pay off your credit card bills first and then consult The Motley Fool. If you want to know where the World Wide Web is headed, buy a crystal ball.