Each weekend, we highlight the most relevant stories Wired News has covered. To find out what's coming up, jump to The Week Ahead.
At Home, not alone: The At Home-Excite merger leaked on Monday, came down on Tuesday, and was still being discussed on Wednesday. In Net time, that's a story that won't quit.
Industry bigs were impressed with the deal. As you'd expect, Excite's VP of commerce was particularly enthusiastic, saying it represented a "tectonic shift" for the Internet.
How so? Well, the partners think a combination of At Home's fat pipes with Excite's merchant partners will bring the world its first online infomercial, among other marketing marvels. And analysts saw the friendly face of Excite leading At Home and the broadband-by-cable industry to a vast expansion.
Then there's the AT&T factor. Through its merger with TCI, At Home's largest stockholder, AT&T might be the ultimate beneficiary of the deal. Said one observer: "AT&T really has hammered on getting all the distribution pieces of the puzzle." It was enough to make a traditional ISP beg for relief.
Finally, for former NASA engineer Milo Medin, the technology brains behind At Home from the start, the deal brought him one step closer to his dream to "bring packets to the people."
This year's model: Onsale said it will sell computer gear at wholesale, making its profit off processing charges and advertising sales. That's a business model that could wreck Amazon.com's hopes of boosting its margins by branching out into big-ticket tech stuff.
COPA on trial: The government's latest attempt to regulate who sees what on the Web got kicked around in a Philadelphia courtroom, the much-wired Judge Lowell Reed Jr. presiding.
The case took a surprising twist when the sentinels of the First Amendment -- that would be the American Civil Liberties Union -- wanted to shut the courtroom doors to protect their co-plaintiffs' financial information. The government later asked for the same favor.
The ACLU-led gang fighting the law attacked the requirement that those viewing adult material register with a credit-card number. Most people just won't do it, they said. And another problem: Just what is or isn't restricted material?
But from the government's perspective, porn is porn, it's everywhere on the Internet, and there are plenty of easy ways for users to register to see it.
Now batting, Microsoft: The plaintiff began its case, disputing the foundation of the government's antitrust charge: that the company has a monopoly on operating systems.
A fresher Microsoft story, however, emerged at the grassroots level. Seems Linux heads are encouraging people who don't use the Windows OS preloaded into their computer to ask for a refund.
Cracking up: Your average hacker is quite the social misfit -- a freak, really. So sayeth psychologist Marc Rogers, raising hackles at the annual RSA Digital Security Conference.
John Gilmore took less than a day to unscramble the message and win this year's DES Challenge at the conference. That busted the old record, beat a one-day deadline, and demonstrated again that the encryption exportable under US law is dog doo doo, relatively speaking.
RSA anti-conference: Before the corporate big shots gathered, Bay Area Cypherpunks held a typically solemn and orderly gathering, where members gently shared views on marketing and other topics.
Collecting the dough: Yeah, in a lot of ways it is easier to start an online retailing business than a brick-and-mortar one. But there are issues to consider. For instance, did you know that banks are reluctant to give merchant credit-card accounts to budding e-commercialists?
It's everywhere: A quarter-million copies of the South Park Nintendo 64 game sold out in nine days. And somehow, a typically crude excerpt of the show found its way onto 100,000 copies of a Tiger Woods PlayStation CD, forcing a big recall.
Outed: Homosexual was pulled from the Webster-Merriam online thesaurus after somebody objected to the listed synonyms -- fag, faggot, fruit, homo, and invert among them. The company says it's merely extending to "sexual minorities" the policy of not listing racial minorities.
Still in the fight: Cisco began answering the Lucent-Ascend merger, promising a gizmo that will let communications carriers send voice, video, and data traffic through public or private networks. Details? Nope. Delivery? Couple of months. Observers were not awed -- yet.
Making the grade: A movement is afoot to develop a standardized test of computing and Internet prowess that reaches beyond the ranks of certified comp-sci geeks. These are, after all, skills that employers are keen on.
Still in school: College textbooks online seems such a natural, it's surprising that the heavyweights are actually upstart independents. But watch out -- Barnes & Noble has plans.
News from the north: In Canada, a digital storage tax was put on hold; the government appealed a provincial court ruling that said possessing kiddie porn is no crime; and power companies pronounced themselves A-OK for Y2K. THE WEEK AHEAD
25 January, San Francisco: Sun started talking about it last summer. Now it lets the new networking technology Jini out of the bottle.
25 January: The Gay Financial Network goes daily.
26 January, Seattle: Microsoft lawyers try again to convince a judge that they aren't reaming temps. Last time, the judge didn't buy their argument.
27 January: Audio Explosion launches Mjuice, a consumer site that will sell downloadable, secure MP3 files.
28 January, Washington: The Federal Communications Commission meets in open session on a number of Net-related issues.
