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If there's one thing that the politicians interviewed in this month's Wired agreed on when we spoke
to them, it's that there is a danger of "moral panic" over the Internet. As this issue reached completion,
it became clear that such a moral panic was already well underway, with a shrieking cover story in
The Observer following on from a quieter and more serious threat - an attempt to remove more than
100 often sexual newsgroups from the news servers that British Internet service providers (ISPs) run.
The moral panic is at hand - infuriating, saddening, laughable, wrong-headed and dangerous. Child sexual abuse is a terrible crime, one that rightly retains the power to shock whole nations, as Belgium recently discovered. It also retains the power to shift newspapers in large quantities, as The Observer wished to prove. Its "news" story held up to opprobrium Clive Feather, the woolly-jumpered associate director of Demon Internet, and Johan Helsingius, head of the Helsinki-based anonymous remailer penet.fi, as "Pedlars of Child Abuse" and "... key links in an international paedophile chain." Mr Feather's crime is to argue that Demon should not be treated as a publisher responsible for the images that appear on Usenet newsgroups. The Observer is outraged. The police, too, are deeply displeased. As The Observer mentioned, on August 9th, most of Britain's ISPs got a letter from Chief Inspector Stephen French of the Metropolitan Police Vice Unit, a man who, it seems, has made a little list. On this list were 133 Usenet newsgroups that, the boys in blue had decreed, harboured illegal pornographic material. Either the ISPs would remove them, or the police would get heavy, at a time and in a manner not yet specified. As Superintendent Hoskins, one of French's men, told the Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) a while back, doing nothing is not an option. The Met's little list contained the obvious suspects, such as alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.children (ask yourself - if you were committing the nastiest crimes around, is this a newsgroup you would post to?). It also contained alt.sex.fetish.tickling, and alt.homosexual, a newsgroup better known for earnest discussions of homosexual issues than for arrays of kiddie porn. Presumably it all looks equally pervy to the police - "presumably" because details of how the list was compiled, and how it is to be enlarged, have not been forthcoming. |
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Chief Inspector French did not mince his words. "We hope, with the cooperation and assistance of the industry and your trade organisations, to be moving quickly towards the eradication of this type of newsgroup from the Internet." What "type" of newsgroup? Well, whatever the authorities choose.Jim Dixon, director of Bristol-based ISP VBCnet, summed up the situation succinctly. "The net effect is that five policemen in London, without any technical expertise or political mandate, are making up the law as they go along, legislating for the whole world." And a once fine newspaper sees fit to aid them unquestioningly. The rout has clearly begun.
It has all been enough to worry the ISPA, which represents 60 out of over 140 ISPs. When the ISPA met with the police, it pointed out that any newsgroups banned in the UK could still be found using any one of the hundreds of public news servers available worldwide (over 250 are listed on www-und.ida.liu.se/~c95danze/public.html). But the police wouldn't listen. Then the association suggested acquiescing to the Met's censorious demands. Then it backed down in the face of angry member ISPs. The ISPA is contemplating holding an EGM (Emergency General Meeting) of its members over the issue of censoring Usenet groups in October or November. Its chairman, Shez Hammil, attacked the uncooperative Demon for The Observer's benefit.
What Demon, this magazine and most other people who've given it any serious thought want is simple. Under the Telecommunications Act of 1984, British Telecom and other telecoms companies are granted immunity from prosecution if illegal material should be transmitted over their networks. Many ISPs want the same protection, arguing that it is impossible for them to monitor the contents of the entire Internet.
This would require a new law. The current legal status of the ISPs is murky, to put it mildly. Are they acting as publishers, since they are "distributing" illegal material under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, as Angus Hamilton, a lawyer at J. P. Malnick well-versed in the muddy waters of obscenity, argues? Or is the case less clear cut, on the basis that newsgroup content is neither homogeneous nor static, as Mark Gould, a law lecturer at the University of Bristol, suggests?
More than twelve months of discussion on uk.legal has failed to bring about consensus - and no judge has yet been called upon to make a ruling. A test case might seem in order - but the length of time needed to run such a case could mean ruin for the ISP involved, whatever the verdict. And the fact that the definition of obscenity in English law is notoriously hard to pin down would not help.
Worse than muddying the waters regarding ISPs, though, is confusing Net regulation with child pornography. In many ways, the issue is simple: paedophile networks should be pursued to the limits both of the law and of technology, whether this be on or - as it mostly is - off the Net. In Holland, for example, several alleged posters of illegal child porn face the possibility of a newly-upgraded sentence of four years if found guilty of posting such material; that's one way to deal with the problem
The Dutch authorities have tried to get netizens to help, setting up a hotline for surfers to report child pornography found on the Net (see www.xs4all.nl/~meldpunt/meldpunt-eng.htm). If those posters of illegal material are traced to Holland, they face prosecution. Tracing may be difficult, but it is by no means impossible. Warrants have, on occasion, opened up the secrecy of Finland's famous anonymous remailer. The scientologists have managed it, and The Observer admits that six searches with warrants found no illegal material. As Wired went to press penet.fi closed temporarily for reasons unrelated to The Observer article.
In fact, the Internet may be helping. There is little doubt that international child-molesting networks pre-dated the Internet. The awakening of interest in their use of the Internet shows how the network of networks opens things up, revealing what was previously hidden. Unfortunately, as it does so, the Net itself takes the blame. The Dutch have already demonstrated that the pan-national nature of the Internet can serve those seeking to catch child abusers as well as it serves the child abusers themselves. But the British police appear not to understand, let alone be prepared to use to the full, all the tools the Net puts at their disposal to track down child abusers. Now there's the real scandal.
- Additional reporting by Gabriel Ratcliffe
Beneath the streets of Paris is a vast network of sewers, cellars, catacombs and ossuaries - a dark mirror-image of the City of Light. You can reach it from the crypt of Notre Dame, the lake under Opera, the sewers by the Tour Eiffel - or, best of all, the cemetery at Pere Lachaise, where the ghost of Jim Morrison, no less, will be your guide. If, that is, you are using a CD-ROM called Obscura. But this is not just another strange adventure game. It is a strange and stylish front-end for an on-line service called Deuxieme Monde.Launching in September, courtesy of Canal Plus Multimedia, Deuxieme Monde aims to offer a complete virtual Paris in which subscribers not only have an avatar but also a flat complete with bathroom in which to change or dress said avatar. Once logged on and registered, you become a member of one of seven "families" of other users, and Deuxieme Monde's plans for subsequent generations raises the grim spectre of online sibling rivalry and virtual in-laws.
A videophone in your flat allows you to ring other characters in the Deuxieme Monde phone book, allowing for one-to-one chat. And agreements with real-life ticketing agencies and retail outlets will mean that if you wander into a virtual shop, you can use the service to order, and pay for, real cinema tickets or goods when you're tired of wandering the sewers in search of companionship. The company promises a 3D modelling system more advanced than anything ever seen, and is a looking to create similar models for Tokyo, Berlin and New York.
- Steve Shipside
After four years of siege, tentative reconstruction is underway in Sarajevo, and the city is slowly opening up to the outside world. In June, a joint project among International Humanitarian Aid Concern (iHaC), a group of Internet utopians calling themselves the WOW Foundation and technical-support company AL Digital, dispatched three men with an SGI Iris and an Apple Quicktake camera to Sarajevo to help things along by establishing Bosnia's first Web server.Free Web space will be offered to aid organisations, academics, students, local companies and bands; on the test site now are pages for Bosnia's Front Models agency and the Mine Action Group . The site is not aimed specifically at Bosnian readers; rather it hopes to put a different spin on accepted images of the city. Yet according to the UN's Simon Davies, still working on the project from Sarajevo, "of the mail sent in response, a lot more than we expected was from Bosnian refugees or workers who had fled the country during the war. Many said it was great to be able to 'see' streets that they had lived in; others recognised friends and asked us to send messages."
During the siege, the Zamir store-and-forward email network kept Sarajevo connected, albeit erratically (see "Wired Bosnia", Wired 2.01). Bosnia's war-ravaged telephone system is in a state of extreme disrepair, while smaller towns are, as Davies puts it, "still under a communications siege". As well as providing email and newsgroup access to Sarajevo's academic community, he hopes the project will incorporate reports from more isolated spots like Tuzla and Bihac, while HTML tutorials for local Bosnians will enable them to make the site their own: "We'll be able to set up a system here that locals can use for their benefit.... I'd like to see them take the initiative. They've had enough of being preached to."
- Matthew Collin
"First we acted locally, and now we sell globally. Does that make sense?" Well, yes - especially when it's really true. And it most definitely is for Hans Meinel, commercial manager of Greenland's national telecoms provider, "TELE Greenland" . The company is now selling globally, opening a new office in Manila to further its successes in south-east Asia. And it has acted locally to bring an extraordinary digital communications network to one of the sparsest populations in the world.Until recently, only one country - Iceland - had built an entirely digital national phone system. But last month, Greenland became the second. In 1965, the country's only link to the outside world was a weak, unstable system of short- and long-wave radios. Now all 57,000 Greenlanders, spread across more than two million square kilometres of snow-covered island, have the opportunity to move straight from a fish-based economy to a bit-based one.
The country's 80 phone exchanges are linked either by digital satellite or, along the more populous west coast, by a 2,000km, 34Mbps digital radio backbone. The radio link incorporates 30 unmanned repeater stations, powered by a combination of thermoelectric, wind and diesel generators. 2,000 users - twice last year's count - are served by a mobile system, and there are already 500 Internet subscribers, a number growing at a similar rate. Mr Meinel and his merry men are justifiably proud - and looking around for new worlds to conquer.
- Tom Loosemore
The dogs of war - or at least the hounds of the hunt - were let loose in Brighton in August. Pavilion, a local ISP, received warning from Janet George, chief press officer of the British Field Sports Society (BFSS), that a site hosted on its server was "passing off" as an official BFSS site. The email continued, "Our solicitors advise us that unless this site is removed immediately, we should take action to obtain an injunction and damages from your client and yourselves."To which the only appropriate response would seem to be a scornful, "Come on if you think you're hard enough." The offending site, entitled "HTTP://www.pavilion.co.uk/david-pearce/killkick.html">British Field Sports Society: Killing for Kicks" , was a classic anti-hunting riff - if a little mild by the standards of the genre - written by anti-bloodsports campaigner David Pearce. What the BFSS objected to was that, using some search engines, a surfer looking for BFSS would come across Pearce's site before the BFSS's own.
Pearce, it seems, had been diligent in putting keywords into the "META" tag that search engines use to index a site's interests; the BFSS hadn't. Hence the absurd letter to Pavilion, which - though "it wobbled for a few days", according to Pearce - stood firm. Instead of proceeding to sue and be damned, the BFSS got its HTML-ing right - in spades. Its META tags now contain multiple repeats of its own name to convince those little Web-bots that this is the one true site for those that really, really care about the finer points of tearing living flesh to shreds for fun.
- Tom Loosemore
The machine, an ADIC 448 tape robot, looks like a cross between a jukebox and an extra-tall dishwasher. Brewster Kahle pokes at the keypad, and suddenly it whirs to life with 2 terabytes of data storage - just the thing for backing up a coupla million megabytes of bomb data at Los Alamos or TRW Corp.'s credit history of the world. Kahle, founder of the legendary supercomputer company Thinking Machines, has another idea. "With a little compression," he says, "the whole World Wide Web should still fit pretty nicely onto one of these."There's been talk before of archiving the Net - from Microsoft corporate visionary Nathan Myhrvold to cyberpunk novelist Bruce Sterling. Earlier this year, Kahle, 35, started doing it with a shoestring Internet archive set up in a renovated US Army hospital in San Francisco's Presidio. "It's like the early days of television," says Kahle, who last year sold WAIS Inc, his pioneering networked data company, to AOL for US$15 million (£10 million). "Unless someone starts saving it, with every day that passes we're losing the record of one of the great turning points in human history."
Kahle's idea is to build a freely accessible, non-profit archive with a commercial arm to develop software aggressively for manipulating terabyte-level data. "Imagine having a great, living library of all human knowledge, including all the tools to exploit it. You don't have time to read all the books in the world. Your computer does."
There are some formidable challenges, he admits, starting with traditional copyright and privacy law. And then there's the question of whether even terabyte-crunching tape robots can keep pace with the Internet's wild growth. "When everyone's Camcorder is on the Net," Kahle says, "obviously, we won't be able to keep up. But that's no reason not to try to save as much as we can."
- Spencer Reiss
Is finance fractal? All over the world, researchers are trying to use the geometry of self-similar shapes (irregular-yet-somewhat-even things like mountain skylines or choppy waves) to understand how money moves around. Companies like Olsen & Associates in Zürich and the Prediction Company in Santa Fe rely on them to guide investments; academics at the University of Basel recently used them to develop an analogy between the workings of foreign-exchange markets and the kind of turbulent flows you find in liquids when energy is pumped through them. Latest on the scene is Keith Still, of the Middlesex firm FMIG, whose "Orchid Fractal" algorithm, developed to predict the way that crowds of people move (see Wired 2.04), may do much the same for crowds of money.A few months ago Still started applying Orchid to some dollar/yen tick data provided for him by Sean Emery of the US investment analysis company Future Logic Trading Group (FLTG), trying to find short-term correlations. After weeks of research, in an example of scientific discovery that comes straight from folklore, he typed the wrong numbers into his computers - setting one of his parameters hundreds of times too high - and went off to get a cup of coffee. When he returned, the computer had found correlations in data up to 30 days apart - unheard of in such a complex waveform.
Stunned, Still repeated the process with five more sets of data and got similar results each time. The next day, he was on a plane to meet with the heads of FLTG, which has now offered him £1 million up front to work in the US; at least two other organisations prepared to double that offer have approached him and his partner, Mark Briggs.
"What we've got here is either two strings of half a million coincidences apiece, or something pretty bloody interesting," says Still.
Incredibly, Still's algorithm consists of a mere five lines of code. But although he seems to have stumbled across the "how", it may well take a decade before either he or someone else works out why this algorithm works the way it does. And then, he thinks, we'll really be trucking; because the principles of the algorithm should apply to all large, interactive dynamic systems, predicting financial markets might be just the beginning.
- James Flint
She has the head and reptilian hair of the Gorgons - riot grrrls who turned men to stone, of whom Medusa was the only mortal member; the upper torso and arms of the Discobolos - Greek sculptor Myron's famous discus-thrower; and the stomach and legs of Venus. She's interactive sculpture Lautriv Chromagnon Medusa - medusas being the snaky hair, Cro-Magnons being the earliest humanoid artists, chroma being colour and lautriv being virtual, backwards. Artist Franz Fischnaller is not one to leave an idea unrecomplicated.It's not obvious at first sight what this over-determined android actually does. You have to gaze deep into her eyes to get an idea - through a pair of crystal lenses into a 3D internal display. The prototype I looked into offers a hypertextual skim around the figure of Medusa in myth, literature and art, navigated by means of a joystick cunningly hidden in the centre of the discus Medusa is holding. Later versions should be broader, deeper and sexier, and will hopefully squash the viewer's nose slightly less.
The Lautriv Chromagnon Medusa, says Fischnaller, comes into her own "wherever it is important to look through the eyes of a machine made in our likeness, rather than staring at a box." He is convinced that "a different kind of curiosity is engaged when you gaze into someone's eyes." In museum foyers, for example, she could act as an interactive museum guide, allowing us to home in on objects, exhibition halls or the contextual beef behind the displays, as the mood takes us.
The idea, says Fischnaller, is to "integrate the senses, to allow true interaction." This might consist, for example, of a real-time video dialogue with a visitor in another room of the museum, via "Medusa's Mirror", a reflective surface which turns out to be a video monitor complete with closed-circuit camera, connected to the Medusa in the entrance hall.
Like his sculpture, Fischnaller is a bit of a hybrid. Despite the name, he's Italian - born in the predominantly German-speaking province of Bolzano. After attending art and design courses in Italy, Germany and the US, he started to become interested in "the integration of art and science, the prospect of truly interactive works." He set up his company F.A.B.R.I.CATORS in 1993 to design interactive installations for businesses and cultural institutions.
Previous projects have included the "Interactive Cyber Tie", an installation that allowed you to make your own tie by selecting and merging various images, and then print the result on cotton or silk. His next project, the Multi Mega Book, has been commissioned by the ZKM Centre for Arts and Media in Karsruhe, Germany, for its new Media Museum, due to open next year. Its pages, four metres high and three wide, are made of transparent plexiglass in which low-resolution LED panels have been embedded. Images or text are highlighted by pressing arrows or selecting certain key words which appear in a control panel on a curving console in front of the Book. Speakers and a triangular screen above the Book transmit information on the pages or themes selected - so that the visitor can gen up on the early history of printing, for example, before viewing the exhibits.
Next up: digital skin. Fischnaller is working on extending the visual concept applied in his Medusa to the other senses, starting with touch. "The technology and the materials which would allow us to manufacture intelligent skin already exist," says Fischnaller. "It should be possible to create a sister for the Medusa whose whole body is sensitive to touch." Now that would be a novel way of getting around a museum....
- Lee Marshall
It's not your run-of-the-mill cybercafe. From the street - Shaftesbury Avenue, just over the road from Les Mis - it looks empty and chromey and small. It isn't packed with people dropping in on their way home from the office to play networked Doom or check their email. It has no carrot cake. And it's not run by eager young entrepreneurs. It's run by distinctly staid Hoskyns, the UK arm of European computer-services giant Cap Gemini Sogeti. And it's entirely there for the PR.The Hoskyns cybercafe is a womb-like environment in which company executives - presidents, VPs and CEOs - can come and feel relaxed about computers. They can ask the naive and even stupid questions that they might not feel comfortable asking of their own employees to a nice unthreatening photographer or actor.
It's a set on which Hoskyns' well-heeled clients play out a comforting little Web charade; Hoskyns informs them, rewards them for their custom and cements their trust. And all concerned think that it does the job - even if the whole idea seems oddly cocoon-like. But where to now? No one can yet say. Even with only two companies visiting per day, Hoskyns has already provided such guided Web tours to nearly all interested client companies, so its chrome-and-glass caff may prove to be a strictly temporary affair.
- Liz Bailey
Hard to believe, but true nonetheless; Maurice Saatchi has more to think about than exactly what title to take in the House of Lords. In between efforts to get the Tories re-elected, the man who brought us the '80s is trying to get wired.Saatchi launched his new Megalomedia project earlier this year, with the aim of investing in and buying up small entrepreneurial companies and encouraging them to work together. That work includes developing new services, software and content for a variety of media; so far, the stock-market listed company owns digital visual-effects recruitment companies, and holds stakes in magazine publisher Forward Publishing and in Channel Cyberia. It plans to launch "the world's first online classified advertising service", confusingly called net.tv, by Christmas.
Saatchi's vision is of a network of companies, each able to tap into a central war chest (now standing at £5 million) to develop new projects. But unlike other big fish eager to bite themselves off a piece of the digital future, Megalomedia insists that success will depend on each remaining small and independently-minded.
Chief executive Christopher Parker says that newspaper publishers fear the death of print, while advertising agencies dread the demise of the conventional ad campaign. "Most big businesses looking at how to make money out of online publishing, CD-ROM or interactive TV approach it from a defensive position." All too often, he says, the end result is an irreconcilable culture clash: "The big corporates' approach soon drives out the innovators who get frustrated and leave."
The Saatchi way is very different, he insists. While each Megalomedia component will have the security of shareholder backing (and, thanks to Maurice's involvement - City interest) autonomy will be encouraged. "The aim is to establish the UK's leading network of new media organisations - a large, fast, flexible creative entity of complimentary businesses."
Megalomedia's clients will be diverse - not just advertisers but publishers, software programmers and games designers; anyone, in fact, who wants to move into the Digital Age. net.tv, for example, will involve newspaper groups. Each group will pay to have their classified ads included for net.tv users to access online. "The best way of describing it is like a gateway - bridging old media and new, allowing people to pass through and move forward," Parker says. "A safe stepping stone across the chasm."
But can Saatchi's New Age approach really please both the online entrepreneur and the City investor? Traditional investors are put off by evolving technologies and business plans that never even make it onto the back of an old envelope. Even so, Parker and his pals remain unperturbed. Investment in innovative businesses that are profitable today will balance "blue sky" operations selected with an eye on future gain: "The sort of hitech company that in ten years time would be worth £50 million ... or nothing."
Evolving technologies do not pose a problem, he adds. "Not only do we not know which will stand the test of time, we don't care. Overall, the market will grow. For us, that's enough. If you're not allied to one technology but remain flexible, you'll be there at the end. It's a question of hedging your bets." Every Megalomedia business will be run by people who "don't see us as employers or regard themselves as employees", he adds; these industries attract people who want to be their own boss. "Their priorities are simple: to be creative, make money and have fun. Exactly where Maurice is coming from."
- Meg Carter
Tired
Wired
Chris Evans Duracell Batteries Voicemail hell Engaged signals Biological Clocks Frozen ova Linen Polyurethane-coated linen Area 51 The M25 Independence Day Guy Fawkes night RealAudio Shockwave streamed audio Mad cows Worried sheep Professional futurists Amateur situationists Cable modems Satellite modems Rollerblading Rollerball Remastered Star Wars Reduced Star Wars Alcoholic lemonade Belgian fruit beer
Attacks on Internet privacy took an international step forward at the G7 summit in Paris this July, where politicians and officials from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Canada, Russia and the US agreed that there was a "risk of terrorists using electronic or wire communication systems and networks to carry out criminal acts and the need to find means, consistent with national law, to prevent such criminality."Their response is to push for encryption systems that allow "lawful government access to data and communications in order, inter alia, to prevent or investigate acts of terrorism, while protecting the privacy of legitimate communications." That is, provisions for secrecy that don't allow - secrecy.
With pieces of TWA 800 fresh on the bottom of Long Island Sound, it was a perfect opportunity to push for such powers - powers that security agencies of all sorts have been thirsting after for years. The fact that there is little if any evidence to justify such a push was simply ignored. When a Wired reporter asked US Attorney General Janet Reno whether she knew of specific cases of terrorists using encryption, she flatly replied, "No, I don't." Later, a US Justice Department official told Wired that he knew of "one instance" of international terrorists using encryption, but declined to provide details.
Realising the significance of the G7's first concrete pronouncements on encryption, the Net community was immediately up in arms. "What the G7 have called for is a way to read all messages sent by terrorists. The only way they can achieve this is to have some way of reading messages sent by anyone. What the G7 are demanding is that the privacy of all communications be compromised in the name of protection from terrorism," said an international coalition of online civil liberties organisations.
At the Paris summit, the G7 asked the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development to finish its crypto report by February. The OECD will discuss encryption in September, after Wired goes to press, and will probably recommend something like the EC's (unofficial) position on "trusted third party" systems (see Wired 2.08). That raises worrying concerns about friendly governments using each other's foreign intelligence agencies to monitor domestic messages in which they have an interest but which they cannot obtain legitimately. The US and UK each have long histories of such favours.
The good news for civil libertarians is that getting to a consensus in the G7 will not be easy. Existing international law varies widely: France currently bans all forms of private communications encryption entirely, while Japan's constitution prohibits all wire tapping. "This is the first of what I expect will be many attempts to coordinate international policy about Net-related activities," says David Post, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Centre. "It's not clear that the international institutions can react quickly eno ugh to really be effective." They almost certainly can't be effective against terrorists using encryption anyway, as an encrypted message can be hidden. But protracted muddle does not mean there may not be swift, illiberal action.
- Kenneth Neil Cukier
Amid the great Wall Street feeding frenzy over all things digital, the E-data Corporation is taking a seat at the last supper of capitalist gluttony. It all started with a group of Nasdaq hacks who saw the latent potential in US Patent No. 4,528,643, granted to computer scientist Charles C. Freeny back in 1985. The patent envisions an electronic distribution system that covers any point-of-sale transaction involving the purchase of digital data products, including software, music, fonts, digital images and video.Of course, that covers just about every form of commerce conducted over the Internet. Now, having purchased Freeny's patent, E-data is suing 43 companies for patent infringement, including big fish such as CompuServe, Broederbund, Ziff-Davis and Waldenbooks.
"I was asked to look at the patent by a group of investment bankers," recalls Arnold Freilich, president and CEO of E-data. "We then acquired the patent after we obtained control of E-data. At the time, there was virtually no on-demand electronic distribution system, so I was amazed by the vision expressed in the patent."
Amazed, no doubt, by just how easy it is for a corporation with a lame-duck product to make a mint on someone else's intellectual property. In its latest ploy to persuade "infringers" to start shelling out cash, E-data sent amnesty packages to 75,000 companies. The amnesty program gives companies until August 31st, 1996, to buy a licence for the E-data patent ... or else. Adobe and IBM have already caved in and paid their dues, which involves sending the company an annual renewal fee plus an "affordable" check based on e-commerce revenue.
"Our files are growing every day, and we continue to watch all areas of the market with vigilance," Freilich asserts. "We will continue to vigorously enforce our patent's claims, but our amnesty gives companies the perfect opportunity to line up for a licence instead of a lawyer."
Of course, even without a licence, you can still get in on electronic commerce - if you don't mind waiting a while. Mark your calendar: E-data's killer patent expires on January 10th, 2003.
- Shoshana Berger
As if Usenet didn't have enough problems with censorious adults (see "alt.sex.scandal") it's now facing another of the traditional problems of adolescence - alarming growth spurts. An average news feed now runs to more than four gigabytes of data each day, so European ISPs - facing bills of up to £200,000 a year for land lines carrying Usenet traffic - are looking skyward instead.UUNET Pipex, Europe's largest ISP, has teamed up with satellite- data-communications specialist SatNet to transmit Usenet news via satellite. The service, which launches in late October, offers a 2Mbps connection beamed up from UUNet Pipex's news server in Docklands. The satellite footprint stretches from Portugal to Belarus.
Usenet news fits the ideal satellite traffic profile perfectly, and the available bandwidth allows room for further expansion in traffic. Maria Porto, international marketing manager at UUNet Pipex, says that ISPs across Europe have been swift to recognise the benefits of receiving their news from on high. "They can't go wrong - ISPs can now free up expensive land lines for better Web access. It also lets them receive news as soon as it hits UUNet's servers."
- Tom Loosemore
"Burda Mourns Loss of Leading Figures", read the headline on Europe Online that topped an article describing the death in a plane crash of several of German media group Burda's senior executives. But it might easily have been the service provider's own obituary. A few days earlier, on August 9th, a Luxembourg court had declared the company bankrupt - a bankruptcy that Burda's decision to stop bankrolling Europe Online's debt, a leading figure that had nearly reached US$40 million (£26 million), had only hastened.Europe Online's short, unhappy life had been beset by poor organisation, mismatched partnerships without specific expertise and bickering from the shareholders once the service was underway. But its basic problem was simple. Neither its customers nor its owners knew what Europe Online really was - which is why, said the wags, the latter group outnumbered the former.
Burda first conceived of Europe Online as a private network along the lines of AOL or CompuServe, using a system put together by AT&T. The coming of the Web meant all that had to change. But the change never really worked.
"It's a harder business to get into than most people imagine," says Jack Davies, president of AOL International. "America Online has been at it for eleven years. And we readily admit we made almost every mistake you could possibly make." AOL launched in Europe last November with its German partner, Bertelsmann AG, and quickly overtook Europe Online - as did almost everyone else. Europe Online's final customer base of 25,000 was minuscule, considering that in the month of July alone, over 27,000 German households signed up for Internet service. Europe Online died in a booming market. According to Durlacher Multimedia Ltd, the number of Internet users in Western Europe is set nearly to double annually to the end of the century. The European Commission estimates the online world will be a $6.5 billion-a-year marketplace by 2000. At one point the same EC thought that Europe Online might be so big as to damage competition in that marketplace, patched together as it was from the disparate parts of the biggest publishing groups and telecom companies in Europe, including Matra Hachette Multimedia of France, Burda and Pearson plc of Britain. Not to mention AT&T. But no matter how big you are, failing to offer any clearly defined benefit to your customers is a shortcut to bankruptcy.
- Kenneth Neil Cukier
Will Microsoft really take over the Web? Wired says, don't burn your copy of Netscape just yet.Microsoft is arguably now the strongest single commercial force on the Web. It offers a daunting array of Web technologies - some acquired externally, many built in-house - with which it can compete on an equal footing with Netscape (and, for that matter, anyone else) and quite possibly win the competition hands down. Even given Microsoft's nigh-limitless resources, being such an impressive presence on a boat that, just a year ago, analysts were sure you'd missed, is impressive. But is it worrying? Is Microsoft actually poised to take over the Web? If so, does it matter? And what can be done about it?
Bill Gates has the gift of writing off expensive failures while learning from them; he used it to the full in ditching Microsoft's plans for proprietary networks and embracing the Web. As a result, Microsoft has built a completely new business based on its core Windows technology. At its heart is Windows NT, the heavy-duty operating system that has turned out to be a solid and very popular Web platform for both the Net and the increasingly lucrative intranet market. NT is rapidly becoming the server platform of choice in the corporate market, replacing Netware- and Unix-based systems at an alarming rate: estimates vary, but most put sales for 1996 at between 8 and 10 million units, rising to 25 million or so in 1997.
Windows NT 4.0, the latest version, is easy to set up and configure, speaks TCP/IP fluently and is thoroughly Windows. This makes it an attractive Web-server platform, especially since it comes with Microsoft's Internet Information Server (100,000 copies given away to date). Despite a nagging suspicion that Microsoft may have tried to cram too many features into NT 4.0, it gives the company a route into the Webbed world that no one else can match.
Microsoft has also licensed the Java code from Sun; it's created a complete development environment for writing Java applets, even holds its own Java developers' conferences. Acquiring eShop, the much-admired online shopping software that Netscape wanted, has given it another edge over the browser kings. Microsoft will sell it with its commerce server software, providing an all-in-one package for online merchants.
And it's also targeting the most obvious bit of Netscape's business - the browser. Internet Explorer 3.0 does more or less everything a Netscape browser does, but uses less RAM. And it's free, while the Netscape navigator is free to individuals but costs companies US$49 (about £30). To date, Internet Explorer has grabbed between 10 and 15% of the browser market, once exclusively Netscape's. Deals with ISPs and online companies should rapidly increase that percentage; most of the UK's ISPs have now adopted Internet Explorer 3.0 over Netscape's browser.
But Microsoft's most valuable asset is its control over the desktop, by means of the Windows OS. In the future, Microsoft's browsers will simply come with every PC. The next mainstream version of Windows will include the browser as an integral part of the desktop, which is itself the key to using the computer - and thus the network. Netscape could probably build a browser that does many of the same tricks. But over time, Microsoft's ability to distribute its browser and any other piece of software along with the nuts and bolts of the OS will assure that it always has a foothold.
The end result looks like a world in which Microsoft sells more soft- ware than anyone else. Like today's world, that is. Despite several attempts from its many competitors and the dozens of companies with axes to grind, nobody has yet been able to persuade America's Federal Trade Commission to take anti-trust action against Microsoft. Indeed, but for a minor glitch over the failed Intuit buy-out last year, Microsoft would still have an entirely clean sheet.
It is true that some companies were steamrollered, as Microsoft grew. But this doesn't mean all future contenders with a head start on Microsoft will fail. The fact that Lotus 1-2-3 was once as dominant in its field as Netscape Navigator is today provokes thought, but there is no immutable law saying that Microsoft will always win. So long as it doesn't own the Web itself (ie doesn't own and control the Web's technical standards), we can carry on lining Bill's pockets, knowing that we could line someone else's if we wanted to, because others can, and will, compete.
The genuine fear is that that choice itself might be lost. The FTC has not yet slapped Microsoft's wrists, but that doesn't mean the company hasn't engaged in anti-competitive practices, nor that it never will; Microsoft's applications group, blessed with an intimate knowledge of forthcoming operating systems, has a substantial advantage when developing new products.
On the face of it, such things will be impossible on the Web; it is OS independent, and the important standards - HTML and TCP/IP - are in safe hands. Java, now the hottest property on the Web and the biggest threat to Microsoft's potential hegemony, is administered by its owner Sun, and short of Microsoft buying Sun, is likely to stay that way.
Unfortunately, Netscape has already shown that, with enough market share, you can manipulate the standards. It added tables, people started using them, and the official standard had to catch up. A year from now, Microsoft may have the volume required to do such things.
But even that will not leave Microsoft as dominant on the Web as it is on the desktop. Some will never embrace it, and the logic forcing them to do so will never be as strong as is the logic of the Windows PC. Independent standard setters will have much more power on the Web than they could have had on the PC, even if they can occasionally be railroaded. Java will prove difficult to dislodge, no matter how effectively Microsoft deploys its competing, much-vaunted ActiveX technology.
The Web's sheer size and diversity will continue to stimulate competition and growth, making it difficult for any single company to dominate. What will attract new users to one piece of software is how well it supports all the other cool stuff out there. That'll keep even Microsoft on its toes.
- Sean Geer
Stingfo
Any utterly useless piece of information about a celebrity (after Sting's new CD-ROM).
MIDIot
A fool who thinks he can make better and better music with bigger and bigger toys.
Gimming
Getting far too involved with unimportant or technical details of something, to the detriment of actually getting anything done. "I spent the whole morning gimming about the background colour of my new homepage..."
Shlipping
Putting product releases back a few months in order to finish them. (Stressed developer to marketing manager: "We will definitely shlip the product in three months.")
Zen Mail
Email messages that arrive with no text in the message body.
Seagull Manager
A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, shits all over everything, then leaves.Thanks to Daniel Pemberton, John Mathieu, Mondo Martin, Jef Davis, Tom Standage and Gareth Branwyn.