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Each weekend we highlight the most relevant stories Wired News has covered. To find out what’s coming up, jump to The Week Ahead.
Adrift on privacy: Consumer advocates on both sides of the Atlantic said they don’t like an American plan to meet a minimum level of compliance with the European Union’s strict privacy-protection directive. And the EU itself isn’t buying the US’ “Safe Harbor” proposal. Trade war, anyone?
Ikonos, RIP: Space Imaging’s new satellite was supposed to send high-resolution images back to Earth for commercial sale. But alas, Ikonos never made it into orbit.
Sly move: Fox showed it is serious about broadband broadcasting, announcing a five-year deal to do news for At Home’s cable network. Earlier, Fox began delivering news to Road Runner, the second-largest broadband service.
Rocking the Web: MP3, the omnipresent digital music format, proved the catalyst for several news stories this week. Advocates and old-school industry types debated music’s digital future in New York; a newspaper reported that Alanis Morissette was going to post songs on MP3.com — not; and consumer electronics power Thomson said it would take a stake in MusicMatch, a maker of MP3 encoding and player software.
Finite numbers: Phone companies have been adding area codes at a furious pace recently, struggling to keep up with the increase in phones, faxes, and data lines. Now the number crunch has gotten so bad that three states want area codes for mobile phones.
Jay’s chin, clearly: NBC jazzed up the Tonight Show set and made its boldest leap yet into high-definition television, launching digital broadcast of the show. Now, if they could just get folks to watch.
By the grace of Fidel: Authorities are eavesdropping and use is limited. Still, email has come to Havana, and that’s a breakthrough.
Java pullback: Sun backed out of opening its Java programming language as an international standard, saying that Microsoft had bought off the body that would oversee it. Microsoft fairly guffawed at the charge. No word on what Sun will do now.
Seattle spin machine: Amazon shouted that it had bought Exchange.com, a seller of rare books and music, as well as consumer-software company Accept.com. But mindful of potential negative publicity, it barely whispered the news that it had acquired Alexa.com, which makes software that can tell Web sites who visited and how long they stayed.
Mom, have I got a deal for you: Hand Technologies is offering free or heavily discounted PCs to the first 10,001 people who agree to hawk its wares. Sounds like a perfect way to alienate friends, family, and neighbors — and blow 145 bucks while you’re at it.
The bleeding edge: The digital DJ is here, if here is Wolverhampton, England. Richard Eden says that his MP3 laptop setup gives him more freedom to mix — until the system crashes, anyway.
Forget fundamentals: With this market, the smartest thing to do is hitch your equities cart to that hard-chargin’ Internet team. Just do it. So said experts at the Hambrecht & Quist technology conference in San Francisco.
Swing low, sweet satellite: Iridium reported another staggering loss — $505 million in the first three months of the year. With cash reserves shrinking and new customers making themselves scarce, the satellite phone company’s prospects appeared more grave than ever.
Tech toxins, located: A new set of maps popped up on the Web, revealing where not to put down roots in Silicon Valley.
Bit bad: Melissa took a wider toll, but Monday’s CIH virus struck deeper. We’re talking hard drives gone. At least we’ve identified the culprit.
This is a test, only a test: Windows 2000 has been plagued with delays and still has no official release date. But Microsoft did release a beta version this week. One analyst said the move represents Redmond’s bid to keep customers from embracing competing operating systems.
Nature to the rescue: Not only do they pollinate plants and trees, but honeybees can also uncover land mines. That’s the thinking among government scientists, at least.
No small potatoes: With funding from the Albertson family (grocers made good) Idaho is super-wiring classrooms in 15 public schools. Dedicated high-bandwidth networks and customized software, no less.
Reality bytes: Compaq’s Andrew Cromarty, keynoting the EnterTech conference in Southern California, says that real-time, high-quality video won’t be coming to the Net for several years. In the meantime, low-bandwidth animations will be the only realistic way to convey human emotion in real time over the Internet.
Millennial law: Business interests backed caps on Y2K liability and trial lawyers fought those efforts. Free-marketeers and liberals warned that any limits would reduce the incentive for companies to take bug fixes seriously. Meanwhile, the Senate pondered and Clinton issued threats.
Y2K nuclear stall: A trade association representing US and Canadian electric companies says that the industry is lagging in making nuclear power plants Y2K-proof. Still, the work will be done by the time the big ball drops in Times Square. So they say.
Untamed frontier: Phone companies and ISPs in Alaska are squabbling over Internet telephony. This being Alaska, the tale includes a fight between roommates, a threat to kill a cat, and an eviction.
Big bad brother: A Texas Republican floated a proposal to stop the government from creating databases containing biometric information about citizens. Privacy advocates cheered, but what about crime and medical databases?
Bring on the competition: Domain-name registrar Network Solutions flubbed again, allowing unauthorized users to make changes to Web sites. Meanwhile, the contact information for many sites vanished.
End the competition: Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig is wondering if the open-source model in technology might suggest another way to conduct civil law. Open-source law — it does have a nice ring to it.
Code trouble, again: Redirects attached to “mailto:” links in Deja News postings landed the company in hot water. The service said it “isn’t monitoring who’s mailing who,” but the mere possibility had privacy types agitated.
Auction on hold: Oddly enough, the 1840 treaty that guarantees Maoris a piece of New Zealand’s natural resources doesn’t say anything about the 2-gigahertz-band radio spectrum. A tribunal tried to sort out the claims; the wireless industry stewed.
Ma Bell, looking spry: Not only has AT&T been dealing its way to a dominant position in broadband Net access, but it has also been making money, as its quarterly earnings released this week showed.
More earnings: The next-generation Dreamcast didn’t sell as well as Sega had hoped, resulting in a big loss; Amazon.com’s loss tripled, sending its stock — and others — into a tailspin. [[](undefined)](undefined)
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