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WEBLOG.01.02 After months of Internet rumors and a proliferation of websites in his honor, the "Tourist of Death" has apparently been unmasked. Wired News (www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,48397,00.html) reports that the man in the black cap and glasses pictured atop the World Trade Center is a 25-year-old Hungarian who wants to be known only as Peter.
The digitally doctored photo, which zipped around the Internet within hours of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was originally mailed to a friend as a joke, Peter told Wired. Peter said he pasted a jetliner into a 1997 picture of himself taken on the World Trade Center's observation deck. After e-mailing it to a few friends, he forgot about his Adobe Photoshop gag. But the snapshot took on a life of its own. It became a Web meme, a rapidly proliferating idea passed among millions on the Net. Soon, websites such as TouristGuy.com and TouristofDeath.com sprang up with more sightings of Peter, including inside President Kennedy's limousine in Dallas and alongside the USS Cole. A Brazilian man first claimed to be the Tourist of Death, but Peter's friends then quickly identified him as the photo subject in a Hungarian news site. City Hall rebuilt on the Internet The city of Dallas has launched www.dallascityhall.com, a revamped Web portal designed to allow residents to get mundane chores accomplished online rather than in line. Driver's license renewals, building inspection scheduling, and city employment applications can all be handled via home computer. More services, including paying water bills online, are planned for this year. "The new website is designed to be more user-friendly and simple to navigate, and many pages are available in Spanish as well as English," said acting Mayor Mary Poss. Net notes Microsoft users, beware. Your system may need patching if you use Internet Explorer 6.0 or one of the most recent versions of Windows. With IE 6.0, a weakness in the coding could allow attackers to have full run of your machine after simply viewing a malicious Web page or e-mail. See the patch at www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS01-058.asp. For those with Windows 98 or later, the Universal Plug and Play feature could lead to your computer serving as a zombie for Net-wide attacks. See the alert and patch at www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/security/bulletin/MS01-059.asp . CNet has posted a wonderful look back on development of the Web on occasion of the 10th anniversary of the first U.S. Web page (news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-201-8182805-0.html). Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of modern graphical Web interfaces, reminisces about designing the first Web protocols and predicts that the next Web revolution will be led by the Semantic Web, a system of organizing information for the sharing and processing of Web data across a variety of programs and applications. Compiled from staff and wire reports
WEBLOG.12.01 | |
More than $200,000 in cash and prizes were handed out to video game
competitors at the Cyberathlete Professional League's World Championship
staged Dec. 5-9 in Dallas.
The competition (
www.thecpl.com) attracted 2,000 gamers from around the world to the
Hyatt Regency. In the end, a team of Texans won second place and $25,000
in a tournament featuring the multiplayer first-person shooter game
Half-Life Counter Strike.
The Texas Xtreme3 team included Brian Ray, 18, of Austin; Sean Morgan,
19, of Denton; Kyle Miller, 18, of Germantown, Tenn.; and Ronald Kim,
18, Bobby Moyini, 18, and Dustin Porter, 22, all of Dallas.
Johnathan "Fatality" Wendel, 20, a previous CPL champion from Lee's
Summit, Mo., won the Aliens vs. Predator 2 tournament and drove home a
custom-built $40,000 2002 Ford Focus ZX3.
Elsewhere, more than 400 computer gamers from 37 countries competed in
the first World Cyber Games (
www.worldcybergames.org) in Seoul, South Korea. The globe's best players
of Quake III, Starcraft: Brood War and other popular online contests
competed for five days before more than 50,000 visitors.
Korea ranked first, winning seven medals. The United States finished a
distant fourth.
More Americans take joystick controls
Jupiter Media Metrix reports that 46.7 million wired computer users in
the United States played a PC-based game in October 2001, up 10 percent
from 42.4 million users in January 2001.
The company also estimates that 45 percent of U.S. consumers who own a
video game system plan to buy a new console or handheld game device for
the holidays.
Jupiter analysts forecast that the number of households with an
Internet-connected game console will increase to 12.3 million by 2006,
up from 700,000 households in 2000.
AT&T Broadband subscribers find glitches
The latest problem involves the Autoupdate.exe file used to help migrate
service to the new network. According to Internet news group chatter,
the Windows version of the program periodically triggers firewall
software as it attempts to "phone home" to an Internet server.
AT&T Broadband spokeswoman Sarah Eder said the program provides the
company a means of sending software updates to customers of its cable
Internet service. Each time the computer is started, the utility
connects to a remote AT&T server to check for updates and will prompt
users before installing software, she said.
"We're not doing anything to anyone's computer or configuration without
their permission, and we're certainly not monitoring their online
activity," she said.
Net notes
Wednesday marked the 10th anniversary of the first U.S. Web page,
created by Paul Kunz, a physicist at the Stanford Linear
Accelerator Center.
After years of procrastination and millions spent to cripple
Napster, Big Music has introduced an Internet subscription music
service. For $9.95 a month, music fans can buy limited monthly use of 100
downloads and 100 music streams using the new RealOne player from
RealNetworks (www.real.com). There are plenty of catches. RealOne allows access to a library of
about 75,000 songs, but they include only those under the control
of the MusicNet partnership - Warner Music, EMI, and Bertelsmann's
BMG. Another service, the oft-delayed Pressplay, holds rights to
the talent signed with Sony and Vivendi Universal. RealOne subscribers also can't move music from a computer to a
portable MP3 player or burn tracks to a CD. To maintain access to
anything downloaded, they must keep a RealOne Music subscription. Trials of the MusicNet system have proved reliable and speedy,
features not always evidenced by free competitors Kazaa and
Morpheus. But some experts say that may not be enough to entice mass
audiences to pay. Says a study by Jupiter Media Metrix: "The
ability to copy songs freely and to move them to portable devices
are paramount to users." The force is with eBay's charity auction Star Wars fans have opened bidding for movie props and other
collectibles donated by series creator George Lucas as part of
eBay's Auction for America, benefiting victims of the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks. Lucasfilm rarely offers archive items for sale
to the public but decided to participate in the charity auction
after a request from eBay, Lucas Licensing president Howard Roffman
said. The charity auction comes as traffic at the official Star Wars
website, www.starwars.com, has ballooned with the online release of
the movie trailer for Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. MusicMatch updates desktop jukebox MusicMatch has released an updated version of its award-winning
desktop jukebox MusicMatch 7.0, available for download at
musicmatch.com, lets users easily manage hard-disk music
collections and create better CDs using its enhanced
volume-leveling feature. It also lets users move tracks to most
portable MP3 players from within its interface, a convenient
feature touted by heavy MP3 users. MusicMatch operates Radio MX, a highly customizable, $4.95 monthly
streaming service that now offers Classical Radio for streaming
full-length works by history's greatest composers. ReplayTV maker is undaunted Lawsuits by television networks and Hollywood movie studios won't
keep Sonicblue from shipping its ReplayTV 4000, a personal video
recorder that allows users to trade stored programs over the
Internet. Sonicblue said it is shipping the new models despite
three copyright infringement lawsuits filed in U.S. court in Los
Angeles. The major broadcast television networks, along with Disney
and Paramount, contend that an Internet-connected ReplayTV 4000
enables users to share recorded video with other owners of the
device, creating a Napsterlike sharing of copyrighted video. Compiled from staff and wire reports
Those nasty little elves are back.
Kewlbox.com – new home of the Dallas-based Internet game creators who
brought you Elf Bowling, Bovinator and Furious George – has released Elf
Balls, an addictive, free game that can be played online or by download.
In the 2001 release, Kewlbox founders Dan Ferguson and Mike Bielinski
introduce a heckling new elf, Oliver, who chides and snipes at users as
they attempt to arrange Christmas balls across the game interface.
Last weekend alone, the Dallas duo reported more than 100,000 people
downloaded the game or played it online at www.kewlbox.com. Elf Balls,
then, is on pace to outstrip the incredible popularity of Elf Bowling,
which attracted 7.6 million players.
Mr. Ferguson reports the company had plans to release Elf Bowling 3, but
lost control of the product in a complex set of business transactions.
"We went through a tough couple of years," says Mr. Ferguson.
AT&T to dump cheap ISP service
Cheap Internet services are disappearing as fast as dot-com start-ups.
AT&T's $4.95 Internet service, i495, will be shuttered in January and
its subscribers moved to one of the company's higher-priced WorldNet
plans, the company says. The i495 plan has been available since July
2000. Subscribers received up to six e-mail addresses and 60MB of Web
storage space for personal data with the i495 service, and AT&T
subsidized its $4.95 plan for 150 hours of monthly Internet use with a
floating banner ad.
The softness in the advertising market has either killed or transformed
most free services this year, and advertising prices couldn't support
the cost of keeping i495 afloat either, said Janet Wyles, an spokeswoman.
"It's simply a matter of economics," she said. "The world has changed
dramatically in a year."
GameCube sales roar, Nintendo announces
Nintendo says its GameCube platform is the fastest-selling of the
next-generation systems. The company said it sold more than 500,000
units during the first week of availability. That's twice the rate of
Microsoft's Xbox system and 25 percent faster than Sony's PlayStation 2,
which debuted last year.
Net Notes
Sirius Satellite Radio, one of two new satellite radio broadcasters,
says it will launch Feb. 14 in leading metropolitan markets.
The Federal Trade Commission has warned more than 70 e-retailers not to
make quick shipment promises that they cannot keep in the coming holiday
shopping season. By law, companies that can't keep promises to ship
merchandise within 48 hours are required to give customers the option to
cancel orders.
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| WEBLOG.11.01 | |
Two of the most prominent services that allow untraceable Web browsing
have shut operations. This month, SafeWeb turned off its free privacy
service. Last month, ZeroKnowledge.com closed its Freedom Network.
Although other services, including Anonymizer.com and IDZap.com, remain
up and running, some civil libertarians worry that the federal
government might be applying pressure to rid the Internet of
identity-cloaking programs since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Company spokesmen, however, said their decisions were strictly business.
SafeWeb had unsuccessfully sought a contract with U.S. government
broadcaster Voice of America to set up computer servers aimed at routing
Chinese Web surfers to sites their government had censored. When that
venture cratered, so did the service, company officials said.
At 2-year-old ZeroKnowledge, executive vice president Austin Hill said
the company's subscription privacy products just never took root with
mainstream Web users, making it impossible to continue operations.
Warning issued on Media Player
Olympic video better be authentic
NBC, which has the rights to broadcast the games in the United States,
has paid more than $280 million to the Salt Lake Organizing Committee to
show the games on television. To make sure NBC retains exclusive rights,
a company hired by Olympic officials will monitor the Web to make sure
competition video is not shown. It will also attempt to enforce bans on
using Olympic symbols or sponsor brands without their permission.
Harry Potter conjuring sales
They include the Harry Potter boxed set of books; the Harry Potter and
the Sorcerer's Stone computer game, video game and book; and the Harry
Potter Levitating Challenge game.
DVD players are also being gobbled up in record numbers, Amazon reports.
Last year, the company sold more than 40,000 DVD players during the
holiday season. From Nov. 9 to Nov. 19 this year, orders for DVD players
were up more than 75 percent from the same period last year, the company
says.
Net notes
Catching up with Windows - and Lindows
Sales of the new Windows XP operating system have been brisk but may not
cause Microsoft executives to levitate in rapture. Some estimates show
the new OS – the one television ads promise will send users flying
through life like Superman – surpassed the early sales of the
forgettable Windows Millennium Edition but fell short of Windows 98's.
In the first three days after its introduction Oct. 25, Windows XP sold
more than 300,000 copies in retail stores, says NPD Intelect Market
Tracking, a research firm. That is well ahead of the inaugural three-day
total of about 200,000 for Windows ME in September 2000, say NPD
estimates, but well below the 400,000 copies of Windows 98 sold in its
first three days in 1998.
Lindows strives for user-friendliness
Two days before XP hit store shelves, the former CEO of MP3.com, Michael
Robertson, said his team of developers would release Lindows preview
versions this year. The WINE Linux project (Wine Is Not An Emulator)
currently allows Linux computers to run Microsoft Office and other
Windows programs but requires a copy of the Windows OS to set up.
Lindows is creating a buzz because it apparently will require only a
copy of a Microsoft program, not the OS itself. Mr. Robertson says the
finished product will sell for $100 or less and run smoothly on older
PCs.
If it's true, can a Microsoft lawsuit be far away?
Mac iTunes installer wipes data off drives
Those who have already suffered losses should contact Apple at
1-800-SOS-APPLE, where tech support people will tell you how to get back
some of what you've lost.
AOL.com remodels site with 7.0 flair
ID-hiding services exit the Internet
Two of the most prominent services that allow untraceable Web browsing
have shut operations. This month, SafeWeb turned off its free privacy
service. Last month, ZeroKnowledge.com closed its Freedom Network.
Although other services, including Anonymizer.com and IDZap.com, remain
up and running, some civil libertarians worry that the federal
government might be applying pressure to rid the Internet of
identity-cloaking programs since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Company spokesmen, however, said their decisions were strictly business.
SafeWeb had unsuccessfully sought a contract with U.S. government
broadcaster Voice of America to set up computer servers aimed at routing
Chinese Web surfers to sites their government had censored. When that
venture cratered, so did the service, company officials said.
At 2-year-old ZeroKnowledge, executive vice president Austin Hill said
the company's subscription privacy products just never took root with
mainstream Web users, making it impossible to continue operations.
Warning issued on Media Player
Olympic video better be authentic
NBC, which has the rights to broadcast the games in the United States,
has paid more than $280 million to the Salt Lake Organizing Committee to
show the games on television. To make sure NBC retains exclusive rights,
a company hired by Olympic officials will monitor the Web to make sure
competition video is not shown. It will also attempt to enforce bans on
using Olympic symbols or sponsor brands without their permission.
Harry Potter conjuring sales
They include the Harry Potter boxed set of books; the Harry Potter and
the Sorcerer's Stone computer game, video game and book; and the Harry
Potter Levitating Challenge game.
DVD players are also being gobbled up in record numbers, Amazon reports.
Last year, the company sold more than 40,000 DVD players during the
holiday season. From Nov. 9 to Nov. 19 this year, orders for DVD players
were up more than 75 percent from the same period last year, the company
says.
Net notes
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| WEBLOG.04.01 | |
Try to stump Guess the Dictator or
Is it me or is even the idea of CIA's Homepage for Kids
Before boarding the plane for that vacation
Since we're winging it, Avian Fashions
More pet stuff. Mystic Dog Newf offers horoscopes
If you find any of these sites perturbing, look at
Never once gave a thought to collecting Pepsi bottles
The Weekly Weird newsletter shares interesting
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