Flux
Publishing Is Murder: So the Post and the Times "did the right thing" by publishing the Unabomber's ravings, mumbling something as an aside about how the DOJ put them up to it. Now that they've proved murder is the currency of vanity publishing, the entire text has finally appeared where it has always belonged: on the Web. Check out /special/unabom and help catch the bastard.
Net Set: Remember when no one paid attention to the Net, and every telco and cable company was going to build its own version of the information superhighway? Now everyone is proclaiming the Net as the I-way's salvation. It's gone so far that Bell Canada, in a move of supreme arrogance, attempted to trademark the term The Net. After a few days on high broil, they recanted.
The I-way Can Wait: TCI - whose chief claimed in these pages ("Infobahn Warrior," Wired 2.07, page 86) that he would single-handedly build the infobahn by 1996 - has decided the real deal is high-speed Internet service. TCI's "Summit" (Subscriber Media Management Technology) system will feature "almost instantaneous access" to the Net, rolling out this fall in a test phase (we've heard that one before) and nationally in 1997.
net.stupidity: Posing as adult perverts and innocent teenagers interested in anonymous sex, the FBI spent two years investigating potential pedophiles on AOL, where they discovered - surprise! - there are some sick bastards out there. But two years and scores of disturbing court orders later, what have the feds learned that they didn't already know? Excuse us while we clear our throats and ask, Would this make the front page of The New York Times if it had nothing to do with computers and online services? We didn't think so.
Surprised?: A recent survey of online users by The Online Research Group, a subsidiary of O'Reilly & Associates (www.ora.com/survey), found that women now comprise 34 percent of the online community. Earlier surveys had pegged the figure around 15 percent.
More Surveys: A joint TBWA Chiat/Day and Business Wire survey on children found some heartening results: 65 percent of responding kids say they spend more time on their home computers than in front of the TV (take note, Ovitz). And 81 percent of those with online connections say they wish they could spend more time surfing the Net. The Number One reason to go online? To have fun.
diarrhea.com: Remember Joshua Quittner's story on how McDonald's let him grab its corporate domain ("Billions Registered," Wired 2.10, page 50)? Well, someone over at Procter & Gamble must have been reading, because the company recently completed a full-court spam, securing domains for every conceivable P&G product and - get this - every affliction and body part the product is intended to treat. Yup, they've got headache.com, pimples.com, even badbreath.com - more than 90 domains and names in all. In retrospect, they look pretty smart: the InterNIC domain clearinghouse recently imposed a US$100 charge for each new setup, with a $50 annual fee in perpetuity. Procter & Gamble got in under the deadline and saved almost $10,000.
Broken Windows: If Apple were a tree, it'd be marked for clear-cutting by a press convinced that Windows 95 works. But that's not keeping Apple devotees from having some fun. A bumper sticker recently sighted in the Silicon Valley area: "Windows 95 = Macintosh 89 + 8 megs."
Microsoft's Shadow: In August, the Seattle Post Intelligencer refused to run an ad for CompuServe that dissed The Microsoft Network as "still under construction." The paper's claim of a policy not to carry ads for online services, since it plans to have its own, rings a bit hollow: the same ad ran in USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, all of which have their own online services.
