Every week we highlight the most relevant stories Wired News of the past seven days. To find out what's coming up, click over to The Calendar of E-vents.
Who's not partying: District of Columbia police said they were taking extra precautions to guard against the possibility of New Year's terrorist attacks. They're being especially careful in light of the arrest last week of an Algerian man caught with bomb components at the Canadian border.
Also preparing for possible Y2K trouble -- but not expecting it -- were New York City and the Social Security Administration.
Volunteer organizations, for their part, are heeding recent State Department warnings that Americans abroad should plan for possible disruptions in transportation and power services over the New Year's period. So instead of cavorting on the beach with a bottle of Dom Perignon, World Teach volunteers in Ecuador, for example, will toast the New Year at home with their host families.
In Washington, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson tried to assure the public that gas will be plentiful as the world's odometer clicks from 1999 to 2000. The only way they'll be shortage, he said, is if folks needlessly fill up their tanks next week in anticipation of trouble.
And in Germany, the artist behind a Berlin New Year's Eve light show said he won't pull the plug on the controversial event. But he will make modifications to mollify critics who worried that it had Nazi overtones.
(BTW, for Wired News' coverage of the millennial madness, check out Y2K watch.)
A dot of their own: European Internet service providers said dot-com has turned into "an American top-level domain," and that's why they're pushing dot-eu for Western Europe. The European Commission is behind the movement, too, under the belief that it will "encourage cross-border electronic commerce within the EU."
Town for sale: Halfway, Oregon, said it was moving ahead with a plan to change its name to Half.com, in collaboration with a Philadelphia e-commerce startup. Company officials said the deal could include options such as six months of subsidized Net access for the town, stock in Half.com, free giveaways at the annual rodeo, or a call center located in the town.
Art vs. commerce The etoy-eToys war came to the United States. Surrounded by a dozen or so Santas and a thunderous marching band at New York's Museum of Modern Art, etoy reps and their supporters rallied against eToys and, at times, against the Web's increasingly commercial face.
And if you, too, hate eToys, don't type etoyssucks.com into your browser -- you'll only end up on the online toy giant's site.
Name game: The case of Mahesh Rao illustrated that a world with more than one domain-name registrar could be a confusing one. Rao was told by Register.com that the potentially lucrative name e-business.com was available, so he snatched it up. Problem was, Network Solutions had long ago handed out the ebiz name to someone else.
Trailblazer: Saying he "helped pave the way for the future," Time magazine named Jeff Bezos its Person of the Year. The 35-year-old Amazon.com founder called it an "incredible and humbling honor." Amazon's stock -- Bezos' biggest success, so far -- was up 3 bucks on the news.
Loose ties: Microsoft said it saw no connection between Windows 2000 and the Church of Scientology, but the German government -- which limits the church's activities severely -- is investigating anyway. Its beef is that the disk fragmentation technology in Win2K was developed by Executive Software, and Executive Software CEO Craig Jensen is a Scientology devotee.
New direction: America Online agreed to buy MapQuest.com for some US$1.1 billion worth of stock. The deal would provide the millions of AOL users with Web-based maps, directions, and traffic updates, and also boosts AOL's capacity to target local advertising and e-commerce promotions to its users.
The real story: Man on the Moon, the story of comedian Andy Kaufman's bizarre, short life, opened in theaters. But Wired News reviewer Jon Rochmis said the film has it all wrong. Yep, Kaufman lives.
Flirting with trouble: An informal survey on one major campus showed students to be clueless about the recording industry's crackdown against the distribution of copyrighted music by college servers. Download illegal MP3s? Yep, everyone's doing it, the kids said.
Spud patrol: A potato genetically engineered to contain a pesticide is OK with US regulators? Not a big surprise, then, that the National Nutritional Foods Association protested the Food and Drug Administration's procedure for approving genetically engineered foods and called for more thorough scientific evaluations to protect public health.
Out of line: The American Civil Liberties Union sued several law enforcement agencies who it said illegally shut down a video about a New Year's Eve military coup in Times Square. This is the case, you might recall, that got a perfectly well-meaning one-man Web hosting operation in trouble with the feds and free-speech advocates.
That's the week that was. For information on ongoing goings-on, click over to The Calendar of E-vents.
