Each weekend we highlight the most relevant stories Wired News has covered. To find out what's coming up, jump to The Week Ahead.
The techno tribe gathers: Much techno-yammering this week in Washington, where the annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference set up shop. True, CFP has lost some luster in recent years, but it's still a newsmaker.
There was, for instance, the odd sight of Clinton-hater Bob Barr joining civil libertarians to warn of privacy threats in the digital age. Later, conferees hashed over the obscure international treaty that makes protecting that privacy a challenge. And for sheer fireworks, the MP3 discussion couldn't be beat.
Phantom fracas: From Saturday, it's 39 days until The Phantom Menace opens in the United States. But it's a lot longer until the film hits Britain (another two months), so of course diehard fans there are planning trips to the colonies. Scoring a ticket once they arrive is another matter.
Wherever you are, if you can't wait for the 19 May opening, there's always the official book that accompanies the Star Wars prequel, coming out on 5 May. Caveat emptor: It reveals all.
Final frontierism: Space junkies convened in Colorado Springs for the National Space Symposium and three stories emerged: US aid to the Russian space program; the push to commercialize space; and new US government restrictions on launching satellites in foreign countries.
Geek youth: A group of high schoolers in Michigan designed a wearable computer. Said their teacher, sage-like: "Kids know more about certain things than adults."
Threads unravel: Portals jumped into free community services when the programming appeared to be an easy new way to grab eyeballs. But already, Netcenter has bowed out, irking users, Yahoo is struggling to maintain its service, and Deja News' communities are going buggy.
Cryptography's Holy Grail: "Absolutely secure" -- that's the phrase IBM researchers used to describe their new key-encryption method. They pulled off this neat trick by using quantum physics, which increases the number of possible keys by an exponential factor. The only question is, Who needs it?
Salon's new 'do: Salon magazine had a busy week. First it made the switch to Salon.com, buying the long-coveted Web address for an undisclosed but doubtless hefty price. Then it acquired The Well, one of the nation's oldest and most respected online communities.
Move over, Goliath: Forbes magazine put out its annual list of the nation's top 500 companies. Venerable GM reigned supreme, but tech firms advanced -- and all signs point to more of them crowding the list down the road.
Domain-name dominance: What's in a name? At least US$300,000, said an Arizona firm, putting Wallstreet.com up for auction with that hefty minimum bid requirement.
Serfs of Redmond: Microsoft said that it was expanding the number of temp agencies it goes to for workers, hoping that would push the competing firms to offer improved benefits. Worker reaction: Yeah, right.
Bulk buying hits the Web: In the follow-the-leader Web world, give credit to e-retailer Accompany for coming up with something different. By selling goods in 12-hour cycles and aggregating orders, it hopes to get cut-rate deals from manufacturers -- with the lower prices then passed on to customers.
They're heeeere: How many people are online? A United Nations report put the number at 30 million at the end of 1998, heading toward 200 million by 2000. Some called that estimate an undercount.
Help me, Big Brother: Nextel controls much of the $2 billion radio-dispatch market -- and contends that's the only way it can keep pace with its new wireless competitors. Not so, said an alliance of smaller operators, asking the Feds to stop a planned acquisition on antitrust grounds.
Death of bubble-in writer's cramp: Grad-school wannabes taking the Graduate Record Examination on Saturday will be the last to do so wielding No. 2 pencils. A move to computer-only testing is intended to make the exam more widely available and easier to administer, with built-in instant scoring.
Take me out to the Web site: Baseball returned from winter hiatus, and boy are a lot of Web sites glad. The sites make money off the game's companion fantasy leagues, first by charging owners up to $50 per team to manage their player statistics, then by throwing advertising at 'em.
Knowledge sharing: They're called RFCs -- that's Request for Comment -- and if they hadn't become a mainstay of Internet development, well, you probably wouldn't be online today. Thirty years after RFC1, Net pioneers celebrated the document process central to the success of Internet standards.
Launch difficulties: The Better Business Bureau's new online privacy-seal program has had some technical troubles. Oodles of troubles, according to user John Lucas. Footnote: Lucas is a board member at Truste, BBBOnline's rival.
One per house: Forecasters say that huge numbers of households will soon want to share data and Internet access. The latest to join the home-networking stampede was Intel, introducing its $99 AnyPoint system.
From on high: Swiss watchmaker Swatch said it will beam advertisements for "Internet Time," its global timekeeping standard, from an orbiting satellite. Ham operators were peeved that the messages would be available in a range of frequencies supposedly reserved for amateur communications.
Does not wear Nikes: It's a transposon, a gene that jumps within cells. So naturally, the scientists who made the discovery named it the Jordan gene. As in Michael.
Giving your bank the finger: A Virginia credit union said that it's having great success using a fingerprint scanner to identify customers. Although such biometric technologies have come down significantly in price in recent years, most banks are waiting for Y2K to pass before taking the plunge.
Truant alert: Sprint PCS is handing out wireless phones to Chicago teachers, who are using them to call home when a student is inexplicably absent. Sounds like a marketing stunt, but school authorities said it might actually make a difference. THE WEEK AHEAD
12 April, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT introduces "Oxygen," a $40 million, five-year project to explore a tech future beyond the desktop. For instance, there's the Handy21, "a portable universal device that looks like a cell phone but also has a small screen, a camera, a GPS module, an infrared detector, and a powerful computer."
13 April, Los Angeles: Microsofties in SoCal? Hey, it's the heart of the music industry, no better place for soggy Redmondites to announce the company's plans for delivering audio and video files over the Net. And maybe catch a few rays.
14 April, Sunnyvale, California: Advanced Micro Devices, after warning for months that sales would fall short of expectations, releases its quarterly earnings.
14 April, Atlanta, Georgia: Are you Linuxed out? No? Then get yourself to AIIM 99, where creator Linus Torvalds and a panel of expert types will debate the open-source operating system's merits.
15 April: It's tax day in the United States. Don't worry if you're broke and owe big. Just charge it!
