HTMLGOODIES EXPRESS ™
September 4, 2000– Newsletter #96

Greetings, Weekend Silicon Warriors,

Did you hear

Compaq has received permission to build the world’s fastest computer. The thing will be the size of a basketball court and contain 12,000 CPU chips. It’s expected to be able to perform up to 30 trillion operations per second. The name? What else? Q.

E-books are going to be the wave of the future apparently. Simon & Schuster and Penguin have announced they will offer a list of titles that readers can download and read on Palm Pilots, eBook, Glassbook, Microsoft Reader, or several other personal devices. You just head to your local online bookstore and download the book from there.

Amazon.com is getting into the car selling business. Under the name Greenlight.com, Amazon will make automobiles available to their 23 million users. It’s a risky venture in a climate where car selling sites are not doing as well as was expected. One of the promising sites, CarOrder.com, went under last month.

Internet trading of copyrighted materials has hit another industry hard. This time it’s the needlepoint industry. For years people would buy needlepoint patterns and trade them but now with the Internet, the process has gotten out of hand. Jim Hedgepath, president of Pegasus Needlepoint Originals, has said his business has dropped over 40 percent in just the past few years.

Now onto today’s topic

Let me ask you a question

It is just me, or is the WWW a WWW of deceit these days? I ask that question because while I was going through my favorite news sites for this week’s newsletter I kept running across story after story where people were either bilking money for themselves or being bilked out of their own money. If it wasn’t money, users were being tracked, or lied to. Ugh. What a depressing week.

Let me give you a couple of examples:

TRUSTe is a privacy advocate organization dedicated to privacy. Did you know that they are now under the microscope because they have started using cookies to track and profile their own site visitors?

Internet trading of copyrighted materials has hit another industry hard. This time it’s the needlepoint industry. For years people would buy needlepoint patterns and trade them but now with the Internet, the process has gotten out of hand. Jim Hedgepath, president of Pegasus Needlepoint Originals, has said his business has dropped over 40 percent in just the past few years.

The FTC and New York State are suing numerous pornography sites because they billed clients for services that at first they claimed were free. We’re talking millions here.

A cybersquatter is under investigation by the World Intellectual Property Organization because he is blackmailing a ton of companies by having purchased their domain plus the word sucks.

In the battle of dotCom IPO’s only Yahoo! has done well enough to still be considered a best bet to buy. Yahoo was the only company that made a serious profit. In fact, many analysts proclaim Yahoo was the sole reason the NASDAQ rebounded on July 12th.

Hackers nailed one of Britain’s largest Web banks, Egg, for a pile of pounds in the six-figure range.

A man attempted to extort a million dollars from Waltham software by proclaiming he would post their latest code to the Web if he wasn’t paid.

NAPSTER. Carnivore. A Pokemon Virus. It never seemed to come to an end.

Man oh Man. Look out for the Web, don’t go there after dark.

Can it really be that bad out there? Maybe it is. Not two hours ago, I was in my university’s Web Committee meeting and we were going over the rules regarding how to handle students who post naughty things to their Web site. We talked about copyright issues and a whole lot of other topics that just depressed me.

I started to wonder if the Web was really all things bad lately or if that was just the stories I was running into on my favorite sites.

So, I set out to make myself feel better. No one should be depressed on a Friday afternoon. Becausewell…because it’s Friday afternoon. What better reason to not be depressed? I was going to hit the Web hard until I found an uplifting story.

Let’s see

CDNow shareholders bring lawsuit against the company for allegedly providing bad informationno that’s not it.

MP3 blames AOL for music piracyno. Not that one either.

Three out of four Internet companies could run out of cash before the end of the quarter. Nope.

UK study claim cyber crime will rise dramatically over the next few years. Uhhhhh.no.

Ah. Here we go.

The state of Pennsylvania has begun to offer free long distance learning classes. That’s good.

Here’s another over half the houses in the US have computers hooked to the Internet. OK.

California has passed an anti-cybersquatting law. Alright!

Airlines have decided to post passenger rights online. That’s cool.

Intel has attempted to take the NAPSTER negative and turn it into a positive. They call it peer-to-peer computing. The concept is that networked computer can share data, storage, and even CPU power over a network system. You can even read about the idea at www.peer-to- peerwg.org.

Finally, The AVB Vmouse will be out soon. It’s a basic computer mouse except it wiggles like a real mouse when your computer makes a noise. Why do I want one of those?

OK.

I feel better.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

That’s that. Thanks for reading. I feel much better now.

Joe Burns, Ph.D.

And remember: With all of the wildfires burning in the western U.S., I thought I’d tell you that the famed character Smokey the Bear was, at one time, a real bear. Smokey was a cub found during a forest fire in New Mexico.