This January the US Attorney General's office finally pinned the tail on its befuddled two-and-a-half-year investigation of Phil Zimmermann. Zimmermann will not be prosecuted for the international export of Pretty Good Privacy, his popular encryption software that is regard- ed as munitions by the US Customs Service. Problem is, after this colossal waste of time, the Justice Department will still point the finger at Zimmermann's impregnable code - and continue to use outdated export laws as excuses to investigate privacy enablers.Someone should clue in Attorney General Janet Reno to the fact that even straightforward attempts to legislate the Net are doomed. Determined pragmatists like Zimmermann will always find a way around proposals like key escrow, which ultimately undermine privacy. Assistant US Attorney William Keane, the lead prosecutor on the Zimmermann case, maintains that there's not "someone with a bag over their head at NSA calling the shots." Well, you could have fooled me.
- Roderick Simpson
Welcome to Phase Two of the Internet Initial Public Offering frenzy. Last year Phase One brought us the extraordinary multi-billion dollar debut in the public markets of companies such as Netscape Communications Corp. and Spyglass Inc. which put a graphic face on the Web. It also included public offerings from companies supplying the basic connection (UUNet Technologies Inc., NetCom Online Communications Services).In Phase Two, companies building the service economy on the Web will, as the investment bankers say, "realise their value." Look for Internet IPOs in the first half of 1996 from companies that help us navigate (Lycos Inc. and Infoseek Corp.), and those that aid monetary transactions (CyberCash Inc.). CyberCash has already filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to sell US$30 million (£19 million) in stock, and our tea leaves tell us that Infoseek and Lycos aren't far behind. Start the countdown to Phase Three of IPO Frenzy - content providers - playing next autumn at a brokerage near you.
- Ned Brainard
It seems as though everyone is building virtual worlds that let people chat over the Net. The problem? They're a lot like sanitised shopping centres, with tight controls over "bad language" and the appearance of avatars.The surprise is that the one exception comes from Time Warner. Introduced last November, Time Warner's The Palace allows users to speak without fear of censorship and to fully customise their avatars.
Among the first people to become regulars were Mac pirates who used The Palace as a hangout to discuss the latest wares. But today you're more likely to run into graphic artists from the New York Web community. Finally, these artists say, an escape from text-based MUDs!
- Steve G. Steinberg
Surely there are a lot of people out there who are on the lookout for a form of online anarchy that falls somewhere between industrial-level hacking and e-mailing protests to the local radio station. That's what volunteer group Free World Dialup (FWD) were hoping when they sent out a request for people to help operate the servers for their latest cheap international telecoms trial.FWD have developed a program which allows Net users to connect to "real" phones. The project went through beta over the new year, and will finish its full two-month trial on March 15th. According to Alex Balfour, Global Contact Manager, "without FWD, and the impetus to drive people to rudimentary data packet transfer, people will continue to pay high tariffs for international calls. The benefits of increased bandwidth will be supplied to high-margin users like companies and those prepared to pay for services like video-on-demand, while those who just want low-cost communication will have to wait in line. FWD will precipitate cheap telecoms for the friends and family brigade, and will bring more people to the Net."
- James Flint
The movie industry's traditional reliance on overseas couriers - once the only way to ship film shot on location between editors in Hollywood and special effects specialists in London - is on the wane. Soho-based film effects company Cinesite has set a new trend, installing state-of-the-art equipment which enables them not only to receive rushes, create special effects and transmit finished work digitally but to conduct daily transatlantic conferences with creatives in London and L.A.Also connected is a paintbox which allows anyone to pause and highlight shots for discussion. This was a daily occurrence during the five months Cinesite worked on Lawnmower Man 2, which opens in the UKin March. Creative director Gareth Edwards believes the practice is likely to become more commonplace: "Increasingly, we are approached to work with a director from script stage, using naturalistic effects to stretch production budgets further."
- Meg Carter
Gerd Grüneis and his team at ART+COM in Berlin have created T_Vision, the ultimate globe. A large projection screen displays an image of Earth, created by assembling a variety of satellite data in a Silicon Graphics Reality Engine. The interface is a sphere about one metre in diameter, like a giant trackball. For large-scale motion, spin the sphere and the globe on the screen rotates in response. For navigation at finer levels of resolution, there's a 3-D mouse.From 80 miles up, you can observe cloud patterns, which are constantly changing as the system downloads weather data in real time. A touch of the mouse and you can "fly" to any spot on Earth for a detailed view. In Berlin, the image is precise enough that you can see people and cars on the Kurfurstendamm.
- Tom Bestor
In a laid-back warehouse in San Francisco, the Wild Brain animation house is working on episodes of an HBO series, Spawn, based on a comic book, and a new Dr. Seuss CD-ROM from Living Books. "Animators are in demand right now," says President John Hays. "Like the Bauhaus movement of the 1920s, today artists are a big part of changes that are happening in society."- Bob Parks
The latest tech holy grail is an inexpensive, hi-res flat screen. While most R&D labs are still tinkering with liquid crystal display technology, a research team led by Walt de Heer and André Chatelain from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne are aiming to leapfrog them all by using microscopic "nanotubes."Invented in 1991, nanotubes are tiny graphite needles less than 1 micron in both length and diameter. According to phycisist de Heer, "They work like lightning rods in reverse." When arranged on a Teflon sheet and blasted with voltage, nanotubes behave similarly to current display systems but use less power, are cheaper to produce, and will easily surpass the clarity of the LCDs typically used in laptops.
Will this mean a sharp, clear, paper-thin screen for your PowerBook? "We do not have a display yet," de Heer admits, "but if all goes well, I think we're looking at about five years."
- Michael Behar
Waiting for the bus - particularly at this time of year - is no fun at all. But according to London Transport research, if you know how long you'll have to wait, the waiting time seems to pass more quickly. Hence the Countdown project, a trial scheme which has attached scrolling displays to over 350 bus stops on 30 North and West London routes. Amazingly, 64 per cent of passengers in one survey thought that the bus service had become more reliable after Countdown was installed, even though the time and frequency of buses hadn't changed at all.Microwave transponders in 750 buses enable central computers to keep track of the position of each bus, and to calculate an average traffic speed between each of the stops along a route. Using this information, the expected arrival time of incoming buses can be forecast and transmitted via leased lines to the bus-stop displays. So desperate are transport authorities for anything that can improve the public image of their bus services that the Countdown virus looks set to spread. A new scheme is currently ramping up in Park Royal - the first to be partly financed with private investment - and similar schemes are planned for Glasgow, Liverpool and Southampton.
- Tom Standage
Just days after CompuServe banned access to 200 Usenet newsgroups because of pressure from the Bavarian government, Duncan Frissell, a New York lawyer and privacy consultant, posted an elegant proof of the axiom that "the Net sees censorship as damage and routes around it."His proof took the form of step-by-step instructions for reading those banned newsgroups through the CompuServe Network - even if you live in Germany. It goes like this:
1. Use the CompuServe Dialer, available free with a CompuServe account, to establish a PPP connection to the Internet.
2. Download one of the freely available Usenet readers such as Free Agent for the PC ( ftp.forteinc.com/pub/free_agent/fagent10.zip) or NewsWatcher for Macs( ftp://ftp.acns.nwu. edu/pub/newswatcher/newswatcher-211. sea.hqx).
3. Find an Internet site that offers public access to Usenet. (There's a list of such sites at http://dana.ucc.nau.edu/~jwa/open-sites.html).
4. Point your Usenet reader to the chosen address, sit back, and enjoy the pictures from alt.binaries.erotic.senior-citizens - brought to you by the CompuServe Network. More detailed instructions are available at http://www.cs.umass.edu/~lmccarth/cypherpunks/banned.html.
- Steve G. Steinberg
The latest project of ArtAIDS Web site veterans Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie is a "http://doric.bart.ucl.ac.uk/web/Nina/Tour/home.html ">Hypertext Journal" on which they will document their daily experiences as they retrace the original route taken in 1773 by Boswell and Johnson for their classic Journey to the Western Isles.But instead of the quill and ink of Boswell and Johnson's day, Pope and Guthrie plan to gather information using video, still photography and sound recordings, putting the results onto the Web every evening with their laptops. The Web pages will contain a mix of artistic pieces and documentary footage, and the artists hope that the site will help refigure existing concepts of travel.
Pope and Guthrie also hope to foster the active participation of a global audience, with extracts of emailed responses to the project being published daily.
- Tom Loosemore
March 4th sees the launch of "Channel," a forum for training artists and curators in Net-based visual arts being set up by London's Art and Technology Centre (Artec) at http://www .artec.org.uk/channel/. For Pete Best, Channel's co-ordinator, "the idea is to get this country's artists and galleries online." To achieve this, Artec are inviting as many galleries as possible to participate and extending an open invitation to many others.With artistic residencies up for grabs and workshops and an online conference in the pipe- line, Channel should prove popular. But doesn't such a large-scale project run the risk of becoming institutionalised? "Channel will be non-hierarchical and decentralised," explains Artec director, Frank Boyd. "We don't want to be seen as some kind of national host, but rather as a channel for collaboration between creative people, a facility, although we will offer a server with space when it's needed." Which all sounds rather promising, especially for those artists and galleries who don't have access or can't afford computer equipment. Now there will be no excuses.
- Eddie Harrison
Visit the Natural History Museum's Web site ( http://www.nhm.ac.uk/museum/tempexhib/VRML/pictures.html) armed with a VRML browser and you can download your own fossil. A handful of specimens, including this trilobite, have been digitised using a 3-D scanner that combines a laser, a rotating platform and a lot of mathematics to construct a model accurate to within a fraction of a millimetre. And if you've got access to a sintering machine - a kind of 3-D photocopier - you can even output the data in the form of a life-size polycarbonate replica of the real thing.Last year, hundreds of bones were digitised using the same system following a legal ruling that required US museums to return the skeletons of thousands of native Americans to native American communities for re-burial. Now the Natural History Museum is experimenting with the technology as part of its scheme to construct a permanent virtual exhibit.
- Tom Standage
If all the world's musos got together to choose a king, they'd probably pick Tod Machover, head of the Hyperinstrument Group at the MIT Media Lab. In the last ten years Machover has been responsible for an incredible range of whimsical innovations in music tech, ranging from the "sensor frame" (played by passing one's hands through empty space) to "joystick music," in which the audience get to shape the evolution of a musical performance through a kind of sonic driving game. Along the way he's also composed numerous operas, including one based on the work of Philip K. Dick. Geek or what?Now Machover, who has worked with the likes of Yo Yo Ma and Peter Gabriel, is bringing his hyperinstrument roadshow to London, as part of Now You See It, a festival about the future of music taking place between March 7th and 10th at the South Bank Centre - phone +44 (0171) 960 4242 for details. The fun also includes several dance works performed in the theatre aisles, and prog rock tech-head Robert Fripp demonstrating Soundscapes, the next generation of his legendary Frippatronics tape-loop fx system.
- Hari Kunzru