Each weekend we highlight the most relevant stories Wired News has covered. To find out what's coming up, click over to The Calendar of E-vents.
Revisionist thinking: After warning investors last month to prepare for disappointing earnings, Apple posted a profit of US$90 million, in line with the adjusted expectations.
The company, suffering from a shortage of Motorola-produced chips for its new G4, also announced that it has been forced to reconfigure the line to offer machines at lower specs but for the same price -- and that it has turned to IBM to supplement production.
Our way: Priceline sued Microsoft's Expedia service because it allows bidding on hotel rooms, claiming that infringes on one of its three patents covering its name-your-price auction system. The case may or may not stall Priceline competitors, but it will certainly test the strength of so-called business-method patents -- an increasingly popular type of patent among the Internet entrepreneur crowd.
Tunes rule: "Music is increasingly important to the online experience," AOL spokeswoman Anne Bentley said, reflecting the view of all the portal players. They're battling each other in the music realm -- as well as labels and their distributors. And soon enough, the fight may come down to not who offers the best technology for the job, but who can give consumers the most attractive package.
Tension city: Meanwhile, the slow arrival of anti-piracy regulations -- and, thus, pirate-proof portable players -- yielded another digital music squabble. This week's dust-up had Thomson Multimedia, which makes the Lyra player, accusing the recording industry of trying to pass blame for consumers' potential illegal usage onto the player manufacturers.
Agreement in hand: Nokia and Palm struck a deal to bring the Palm OS to mobile phones, that much was clear. A bit fuzzy was what Symbian, the joint venture between Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson, and Palm's European arch nemesis, Psion, had going with Palm. Palm VP Mark Bercow tried to explain, in a Wired News interview.
Listening in: The FBI said an Internet's standards body should craft technology to facilitate lawful government surveillance. The bureau rendered this opinion in the wake of the Internet Engineering Task Force's decision to debate whether the ability to wiretap should be part of future Net standards.
IPO skeptic: A UCLA finance professor crunched the numbers and found that new stocks usually do much worse than the overall market. Ivo Welch, who tracks the year-to-year performance of newly public companies, said it's over the long haul that the IPOs falter -- and that's just the beginning of the sobering facts he's turned up on the IPO Resource Page.
Into thin Ethernet: The death of two climbers who were providing regular Web updates to the world had media types wondering how closely wilderness adventure ought to be followed in the digital age. As Outside editor-in-chief Hal Espen put if after a four-day, Web-updated mountain biking trip in Colorado, "It raises all sorts of questions about why we go into the wilderness."
In any language: Does a Spanish-language trademark for an Internet Web site infringe upon its English-language equivalent? That's the question that arose when the news and info portal WhatsHappenin.com sued its Spanish counterpart quepasa.com for trademark infringement. Sounds like a longshot, and one expert said it is.
Just a number: A plan to give personal identification numbers to the homeless created controversy in Seattle. Backers said that the IDs would help service providers know who they're dealing with and thus do a better job; detractors said they could also be used to discriminate against certain sub-populations of the homeless -- for instance, those with a long history of rehabilitation failures.
Bookmark this: You've seen 'em -- URLs longer than your arm. Admins said those long, ungainly, and downright ugly URLs are just a fact of life, even in an era of more elegant site presentations. "It's complex getting from point A to point B especially on something as convoluted as the Web," said Tony Rodrigues, director of Digital Music Group, a division of Ynot.com. "The more complex the directory structure, the longer the URL is going to be."
Gotcha: An expert on urban legends and folklore estimated that a phony Honda email has landed in the inboxes of perhaps a million people in the past month or so. The Honda hoax, which promises cash credit toward a new Honda just for passing the email along to a few friends, is the latest in a string of email "tracking program" chain letters that began in 1997 with a fake Bill Gates missive.
All the answers: ExpertCentral.com launched, promising users access to connoisseurs and specialists galore. "It's a place where people can go to find a real human expert to answer their questions," said Greg Schmergel, ExpertCentral's 30-year-old CEO. "It's a more natural way to answer questions than the other options you have on the Net."
Eye on Io: Spacecraft Galileo swooped within 380 miles of Io, a fly-by that could yield the most elaborate images ever seen of Jupiter's explosive moon. During the mission, which took place 372 million miles from Earth, instruments aboard Galileo were expected to record information about the chemistry, gravity, and magnetic properties of Io.
Auction war: AuctionWatch, which lets users view simultaneous auctions across several sites like eBay, Yahoo, and Amazon, said it would blow off a request from eBay to stop indexing items on its site. "Our company position is we believe we're complying with all applicable laws," said Kamini Ramani, AuctionWatch's vice president of corporate communications. "We believe this is public domain information."
Bug finder: Georgi Guninski unearthed another gaping security hole in Internet Explorer. The 27-year old Bulgarian bugmeister found a bug that lets a malcontent read the contents of documents that are on your hard drive. Maybe Microsoft should hire Guninski; he's now found 12 IE trouble spots.
FDA stop sign: Researchers at genetic research company Schering-Plough were told by the FDA to temporarily halt two experiments on colorectal and liver cancer patients because the tests had similarities to the therapy test that resulted in the death of 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger. Gelsinger died suddenly of liver and other organ failure four days after receiving an injection of therapeutic genes. The prime suspect in his death is the adenovirus vector, a virus that carries the genes into the body.
E-gun: House and Senate committee staff met to resolve different versions of a crime bill. One part of the legislation under discussion would require anyone trying to sell a firearm online to add a prominent disclaimer -- noting that transactions "will be made in accord with federal, state and local law" -- to a Web, email, or Usenet advertisement or risk up to one year in prison and a hefty fine. Gun-rights activists, as you might imagined, aren't pleased.
Bank of Redmond: Microsoft unveiled an e-wallet and announced that 50 Web vendors, including such heavyweights as Dell and Barnesandnoble.com, plan to use it. It could be the first step towards a future in which the bulk of online bucks travel through Microsoft, allowing the company to take a pricey toll, analysts said.
AOL, the target: America Online said it was investigating a rash of passward thefts conducted by way of malicious email sent from the free Web service OperaMail. Victimized AOL users who contacted OperaMail staff said the offending messages contained attached programs that sent passwords back to the sender.
E-paper delivery: Lucent and E Ink formed an alliance and hope to roll out displays integrating technology from Lucent within the next six months. The two companies will also collaborate on a new class of lightweight, flexible displays for cell phones and handhelds. As one expert pointed out, by dispensing with clunky power supplies and circuit boards, electronic paper may have a far-reaching impact on the design of electronic goods.
Super Powers: Warner Bros. said its multipath interactive adventure called The Menace of Metallo, a collaboration with Brilliant Digital Entertainment, harkens "back to the early days of movies. It's the old cliffhanger episode. You come back next week, you see the next web-isode." Viewers will have a choice in getting their Metallo fix, either paying for a CD-ROM that has the entire episode, or playing a streaming version of the interactive flick free at the Warner Bros. Entertaindom to be launched before the end of the year.
That's the week that was. For information on ongoing goings-on, click over to The Calendar of E-vents.
