Each weekend we highlight the most relevant stories Wired News has covered. To find out what's coming up, jump to The Week Ahead.
Promise keeper: A couple of months ago, Amazon.com vowed it would "take action" against the overseas e-commerce operation that borrows the company's name and bills itself as "Greece's Biggest Bookstore." This week it dropped the hammer, alleging in a lawsuit that Amazon.gr "tried to extort us in a thinly veiled shakedown." Amazon.gr promised a countersuit, saying the online retail giant hacked into its Web site.
Sorry, you have no trademark: A federal judge said America Online doesn't have a trademark on the email announcement, "You have mail." This was a victory for AT&T, whose WorldNet Internet access service wanted to use expressions like "you have mail," "IM," and "buddy list," all terms that echo popular names of key AOL email and communications features.
Digital evolution: Don't tell the Kansas board of education, but researchers have created electronic organisms that can mutate, self-replicate, and adapt by natural selection in a new computer program that simulates evolution. "It shows that evolution is at least possible, and it definitely shows that evolution does work," said Charles Ofria, research associate in the Center for Microbial Ecology at Michigan State.
Getting to know you: Levi's opened a new store in San Francisco that features big-screen video, electronic art, digital audio, and high-speed Net connections. It's also got the means to find out a lot about customers, right down to their very fingertips and bust sizes. The better to do direct-mail campaigns, turns out.
Not just a game: Microprocessor designers were treated to a tantalizing demonstration of the ultra-realistic, lifelike graphics power of Sony's next-gen PlayStation console. And they were blown away. Meanwhile, the International Digital Software Association, along with six major game publishers, filed suit against three hacker groups that are allegedly capable of churning out pirated software on an industrial scale.
Dreamcast add-on: Sega said its Visual Memory Unit will do a lot more than save games and characters. The VMU has a small LCD display, which fits into the Dreamcast controller and will be used to display confidential information to individual gamers, such as play-calling during sports games. "Sega Sports NFL 2K" will be one of the first games to take advantage of this feature.
Ink-stained insider: Remember Chris Nolan? She's the tech gossip columnist who was bumped off her beat earlier this summer for profiting from an inside investment. Now her take on the incident is out in the new issue of Fortune. Even better, Wired News got hold of a scathing letter to the editor she penned to her employer, the San Jose Mercury-News, but that the paper refused to publish.
Crackable: A member of BetaNews.com discovered a glitch in MSN Messenger that gives easy access to user passwords. But someone has to physically be at the user's computer and initiate the Hotmail log-in process from MSN to get at the magic words, so there's no risk of being violated over the Net.
Microsoft also ran into problems with its alternative to MP3. Almost as soon as Window Media Audio was released, cracking software that removes all playback restrictions began making its way around newsgroups and IRC sessions.
In other MP3 news: Hardware developer X10 launched MP3 Anywhere, a wireless kit that can transmit MP3 songs from a PC to a stereo up to 100 feet away. This comes on the heels of the company's earlier product, DVD Anywhere, a similar product for broadcasting DVD movies from a PC to a television.
God works in strange ways: Kris Haight of Newport, New Hampshire, who has run the godlovesfags.com site for about six months, said he received an anonymous email this week, telling him to "pay close attention to the godshatesfags.com Internic information over the next few days." The next thing Haight knew, control of godshatesfags.com was his, through no action of his own.
Teaching tech: North Carolina mandated that public-school students pass a computer literacy exam to earn a high school diploma. This first-of-its-kind rule sounds like a good idea, but critics said the goal should be to teach students how to apply computer skills in the real world, not how to pass a test.
Reaching out: ICANN, the public-private group that's assuming control of the Internet naming system, found itself in hot water again. Published email suggested the group is nearly broke, and looked to a White House official for funding-raising help. ICANN officials acknowledged they need money, but said they didn't ask anybody to do anything illegal.
Can't teach a sense of humor: A University of Chicago student is leading a boycott of online student bookseller Ecampus.com. Emily Hunt says an ad campaign by the company "portrays students as slothful, immature, and unintelligent." Among the ads that irked was one in which a couple of students sit in a dorm room watching a third burp the alphabet.
Burning Man or bust: Think how much planning goes into the average trip to Burning Man. Now imagine the logistics of creating and carting art installations out to the playa. Why do they do it? As one guy put it, "This is our life, our therapy, our religion, our way to leave a mark. That's why we do it."
Made for TV: BottleBots drew engineers, games enthusiasts, and lots of kids to watch homemade robots duke it out in Long Beach. Thousands showed up for the sessions, leaving some folks wondering if the rock 'em, sock 'em competition might have a future as a spectator "sport."
That's life: How much are your stock options worth? How about the guy's in the cubicle next to you? Compensation analysts said that the topsy-turvy market is creating wide paper-value disparities within companies. And that can spell t-r-o-u-b-l-e.
Still, the market's ups and downs haven't turned people off toward stock options. In fact, executive search firms said larger companies are finding it difficult to recruit employees from new tech firms "because of the stock options [start-ups] can offer."
Justice browsing: An attempted-murder trail in Florida was the first to be broadcast on the Web by the judicial system itself. Legal observers said the webcasts serve the public interest, and do so without creating the hype and showmanship of televised trials.
VC in the valley: Venture capital firms doled out record sums in the second quarter, and Silicon Valley Net start-ups were the biggest beneficiaries. So said The Money Tree, a quarterly survey of venture capital firms conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers. And for those who are somehow still missing out on this bonanza, MIT's Entrepreneurship Contest is a good way to get noticed.
Sail away: Geophysicist Robert Winglee, designer of a craft that would employ a huge plasma field to fly through space, said he'd like to see a mission to the Kuiper Belt, a mysterious area on the edge of the solar system believed to be the source of comets. The amazing thing is, it wouldn't take the long to get there -- his theoretical M2P2 has a maximum speed of 180,000 miles per hour, about 10 times the speed of a space shuttle.
Wireless in Seattle: One of the highlights of the MobiCom 99 Conference was the unveiling of Uppercase's anticipated electronic book technology. Microsoft, the event's sponsor, also put its own research on parade, including some enticing goings-on called Project Tempo, Project Radar, and MindNet. THE WEEK AHEAD
22 to 24 August, Aspen, Colorado: Last year, Lawrence Lessig and Ira Magaziner made news at the Progress and Freedom Foundation's Aspen Summit. Magaziner is back for this year's version, along with a gondola-lift load of digitech movers and shakers. At The St. Regis Apsen.
23 August: Mir's crew returns to Earth, and because the Russian Space Agency is broke, the station will remain unmanned -- for the first time since 1987 -- until at least February 2000. Among the three men due back is Sergei Vasilyevich Avdeyev, whose cumulative total of nearly two years in space is a record.
23 to 25 August, New York City: As the telecom world shifts radically, Telecom Business 99 Conference tries to sort it all out. At the Javits Convention Center.
24 August, San Francisco: E-business is the topic for this, the latest from NRW Salon, the "thinking-person's party." At 111 Minna Street Gallery.
24 to 26 August, Houston: With the International Space Station in development, NASA and private industry convene for the Habitation Module Commercialization Conference. There, they'll "actively pursue the ideas that businesses may have for using a living area in space for profit-driven motives." At the Johnson Space Center.
