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Dear Subscribers:

Here's our lineup for this final full week in January:

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Web News Briefs

  1. Busy protecting our privacy

    There's a lot of activity right now at both the state and federal levels to protect US citizens' privacy - online and off. According to USAToday, at least a dozen states are trying to stop banks from sharing information with affiliates, more than 20 plan to take on health-record privacy, several states are trying to stop Internet companies from selling personal information obtained by following customers' surfing patterns, and a handful of states are either already regulating spam (junk email) or starting down that road. At the national level, the Bulletin of the US Internet Industry Association reports that the Supreme Court has ruled that states can be prohibited from selling personal data from drivers licenses to marketers and corporations.

    Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission has picked its privacy and security advisory panel and - ironically, Wired News points out - one of its members represents NetNoir.com. Wired says that the site, which targets an African-American audience, "asks visitors for their home addresses, birthdates, and telephone numbers but does not have a posted privacy policy saying what it will do - or won't do - with that info." The site says it will post the statement as soon as it's approved.

  2. Arizona: Filter at public universities?

    Arizona's legislature doesn't want students at public universities to access sexually explicit material on the Internet. At least one legislator doesn't. According to Wired News, Republican Rep. Jean McGrath, chair of the powerful House Public Institutions and Universities Committee (and an Arizona State alum), has proposed two pieces of legislation. One requires public universities to restrict Net access to educational purposes, the other requires the installation of filtering software on university computers. "Neither bill applies to privately-owned computers attached to the campus network in dorm rooms," Wired reports. In 1997 university faculty members reportedly challenged a similar law in Virginia, but the law was upheld. What do you think? If Representative McGrath's legislation does pass, does it violate free speech in Arizona, as some would argue? Please email us your thoughts, via feedback@netfamilynews.org.

  3. What credit card companies are doing

    We thought you might be interested in reading about what credit card companies do (or don't do) with consumer credit card numbers in the case of fraud. Remember the big story about the extortionist who stole 300,000 credit card numbers from CDUniverse.com? Well, the San Francisco Chronicle looked into what Discover, American Express, Visa, and MasterCard did about it. This useful piece taught us something about how credit card companies work, as well as what they'll do under extraordinary circumstances and why.

  4. Uncle Sam tackles online hate

    Both the action and the approach taken are unprecedented, according to the Nando Times. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development has charged a man with violating the Fair Housing Act in running a Web site that threatened a housing activist. The site, which is no longer online, published a picture of Bonnie Jouhari - who helped people file discrimination complaints under the housing act and chaired the Hate Crimes Task Force for her county - called her a "race traitor" and carried an animated picture of her office being blown up by explosives. "Although authorities have taken steps against people who send threatening email or post threatening messages, experts said HUD's action is believed to be the first by a federal agency against a Web site," the Nando Times reports.

  5. Still more women online

    The Internet is definitely no longer a male stronghold. By the end of last year women represented 49% of Internet users, according to the Nando Times. A similar, Reuters, report in Yahoo! put the percentage at 47% for last quarter, and 50% during December. In any case, that's up from 43% in the first quarter of 1998. Marketers say women's portals such as iVillage.com and Women.com are popular in this demographic, but so are Web retailers and bargain-finder and coupon-offering sites. Analysts say that makes sense because women make 75% of purchases made in regular-old shopping malls. Does this sound sexist to you? Do you use the Internet to shop? Do email us.

  6. Aussie government follows up

    The Australian Broadcasting Authority has gone ahead and ordered that some Web pages be taken down. The host site complied. The country's new Online Services Act - "one of the most ambitious efforts anywhere by a democratic government to control online content within its borders," writes Wired News - went into effect January 1. The ABA has received fewer than 10 complaints so far, one reportedly rejected and another to lead to another take-down order soon. Electronic Frontiers Australia, a free-speech watchdog organization, said it plans next month to find out more about criteria the government uses in rating Web content by making a Freedom of Information request.

  7. Intel to train (many) teachers

    The company plans to spend $100 million over the next three years to help integrate computers and the Internet into the classroom. According to the New York Times, the company "will give $75,000 cash grants to nonprofit training centers that will offer teachers a 40-hour instructional program." How many teachers? This year 10,000 teachers in Northern California, Oregon, Texas, and Arizona. Next year 40,000 teachers in 10 more regions or states and, in 2002, 50,000 teachers throughout the US. Reportedly, they will be joined by 300,000 teachers in 19 other countries during the three-year program.

  8. DSL reality check

    Wired News says "DSL" stands for "darned stupid line." If you already have this form of high-speed Internet connection and are frustrated, go to the discussion board at dslreports.com and vent. :-) Anyway, Wired says there have been a lot of complaints from new DSL users, and of course DSL providers say the central cause of their troubles is that so many people are signing up all of a sudden. They can't be all wrong, however. Wired cites Yankee Group research showing "300,000 residential DSL subscribers at the end of 1999 with a projected total of 900,000 subscribers by the end of 2000. That's up from virtually none in 1998 when the service was largely unavailable."

    As for dialup, the Associated Press (via the Boston Herald) says people are signing up for free ISP service in droves, but not all are actually using it. They apparently see it as backup, leading to concerns among free ISPs about actually making money on advertising that these users are supposed to see. Hmm.

  9. Top (and bottom) e-shops

    In a post-holiday survey, Ernst & Young looked at which sites turned out to be e-shoppers' favorites last year. Two of the favorites also showed up in the sites-that-disappointed list! Here are the two lists: Starting with the favorite and going down from there, the best-liked sites were Amazon.com (32%), eBay (6%), Buy.com (5%), eToys.com (5%), and BN.com (5%). Most disappointing were ToysRUs.com (13%), BestBuy.com (3%), Buy.com (3%), eToys.com (3%), and Walmart.com (3%). Do you like any of these sites? Do email us.

  10. Hello Kitty does PCs

    Move over, Barbie (we wrote about Barbie PCs last fall). Wired News calls it "the cuter computer." But this cute, silver-colored little $900 computer - with the Intel 400Mhz processor and 4.3GB hard drive - is better than the year-old, all-business-all-the-time PC we have in our office (even if it does have whiskers)! Marketers CharacterPC and Sanrio, the Japanese company that creates Hello Kitty products, think it's the logical next step for customers as they mature beyond little pink and clear plastic cases carrying play makeup and cute school supplies. The cuter 'puter is being test-marketed in Hong Kong before it's sold throughout Asia, then in Europe. Wired says it won't hit the US till next Christmas. Do you have a child in your house who'd like such a machine, or do you think "cute" has a smaller market in the US than in other countries? Email us your thoughts.

    For the grownups among us, Compaq just announced an even cheaper PC with similar features, minus the whiskers. Like Dell and Gateway's "legacy-free" machines, the iPaq will sell for about $500, only it's aimed more at the corporate market. According to ZDNet, "legacy-free" means "the abandoning of older computer technologies that add cost and complexity." What's left is a PC with a 500MHz Celeron chip, 64 MB of RAM, and a 4.3GB hard drive, but it's not for hard-core gamers. "Gamers … would appreciate the ability to add high-performance graphics cards, extra drives and large amounts of memory to a PC," says ZDNet, which you can't do with these "slimmer" models.

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Net-music news keeps comin'

As Pooh would say, the digital-music debate keeps getting curiouser and curiouser! Last week we reported on just the latest evidence that music is undergoing a tectonic shift - morphing from product to service. It's a shift affecting everybody involved in music, people who make it, distribute it, market it, and consume it, online and offline. This week news of yet more litigation would bear that out! (No pun intended, Pooh.)

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is suing MP3.com for copyright infringement in providing its new Instant Listening and Beam-it services, according to the Associated Press via CNNfn. The services basically turn music from a product into a service. Consumers can upload music they've purchased on CDs to their personal collection at MP3.com or buy a "license to listen" to music already stored at MP3.com and add it to their playlist, then listen to it instantly from any place through any device with which they connect to the Net.

The services seemed like smart ideas on MP3.com's part for two reasons: They make Net-based music more accessible and convenient for the listener, and they seemed to help MP3.com avoid more litigation from a recording industry that's very touchy about users downloading and sharing music they haven't paid for. These technologies, it seemed, were all about already-purchased music. So, we thought, the piracy issue doesn't even enter in. But from reading…

…it looks like a new issue has come up. The industry association's copyright-infringement claim is about the database that "lives" at MP3.com - the database users help build by uploading music from the CDs they've purchased. Because MP3.com makes money as a result of hosting that database, the RIAA apparently believes MP3.com is violating copyright laws and needs to purchase a license to host the database.

This ongoing story keeps getting more interesting, as well as curiouser, because it's about how, when the Internet becomes a factor in any industry or institution, all the balls get thrown up in the air again. Last week the story was about how the Net affects music consumers. This week the story's about ownership. The Internet is raising the question of who owns the music (or at least the license to it) - the consumer who bought the CD and uploads the tunes to her playlist at MP3.com or MP3.com, which owns the "space" where the music is stored? That's what this latest law suit seems to be about. Or maybe it's about record companies hoping to make more (or lose less) money with the Internet, from consumers as well as from the Web sites that store the consumers' tunes. (See a Wired News report about record companies citing losses of $4.5 billion a year from piracy worldwide, including on the Internet.)

If any of you get a different reading on the Internet's impact on music, or if you have another example of how the Net shakes things up, do email us.

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Napster's trials, another music merger

And here's another music-related company facing legal troubles: Napster, a chat-based music-sharing technology about which we wrote in our in-depth Net-music feature last month. According to CNET, not only is the recording industry suing (saying Napster's fostering a black market in digital music), universities are cracking down on Napster use by students. For example, Oregon State University says Napster is "hogging" 5% of the university's bandwidth, CNET reports. So Napster's banned there. Napster's also being "hit" from the other side. CNET reports that a student at Stanford University has put documentation about how Napster's software works up on his Web site, so Napster's code can be cloned. The student, David Weekly, has refused to comply with Napster's request to take the documentation down.

In other music news, AOL/Time Warner will be even bigger now, with Time Warner's purchase of the EMI record company. "The EMI tie-up will catapult a $160 billion combined AOL/Time Warner into becoming the pre-eminent distributor of music on the Internet," according to Reuters, via CompuServe. Here's Wired News's version of the story. And check out a thorough New York Times analysis that explains how and why the recording industry is "cocooning" at this point in history.

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A subscriber's comment on MP3s

In response to our MP3.com report last week, subscriber Toby in Quebec comments on both the Instant Listening Service and the limits of MP3 compression:

"Hello. Thanks for the news about MP3.com's plan to sell a license to listen, not a CD or other physical object. It seems a natural development, well adapted to the medium.

"There are lots of advantages to such a system. You could save money by canceling your license for music you don't listen to any more. The system would free up the space a CD collection takes up at home, as well as make it easier to find what you want to hear. It will very likely sell.

"Unfortunately, I can't be optimistic about its interest for me. This is because I can't yet see such a system delivering high-resolution files. MP3's file sizes are small enough for practical Web transfer now, but their lousy compression is just unacceptable to me. The bigger file sizes of 16/44.1 PCM (conventional CD) data or Sony's new SACD format are likely to pose problems for such a distribution system, at least for the majority of us who don't have T1 lines. For me, the thrill of music is precisely in the details that get thrown out with compression schemes such as MP3. The emotional experience of live music can be summoned up by a good recording on good equipment, but only if the details of the information are complete. MP3.com's idea's time will have come for me when it can deliver them.

"Thanks and best wishes... Toby"

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Net primer for the President (and the rest of us)

It starts with a simple question - "What is the Internet (And What Makes It Work?)" - and the answer is really quite readable. We're referring to a new and growing, very basic Internet backgrounder for the President - not to mention everyone aspiring to that office, plus Congresspeople, policymakers, business executives, and other high-level people. We're telling you about it because we think students of history, public policy, and media studies might find it very useful, too.

The authors of "What is the Internet…?" are actually "authors" of the Internet - two of its technical founding fathers, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn. "They feel strongly that efforts should be made at top policy levels to define the Internet," according to Wired News.

Maybe among presidential candidates too! According to the New York Times, all those burning questions raised by the biggest Net-related merger yet have been falling on deaf ears out on the campaign trail. "America may be plunging into a new global economy at warp speed, but the major presidential candidates would rather talk about ethanol subsidies than the future of the Internet," writes David Sanger. On the other hand, a contributor to Wired News said tech issues have been much on candidates' mind in Iowa. Who to believe?!

As for the rest of us, here's a much more nuts 'n' bolts explanation of "How Web Servers and the Internet Work". We highly recommend this service from HowStuffWorks.com. Our thanks to FamilyEducation.com for pointing us to it. If you find either of these sites useful, do email us your thoughts.

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That does it for this week. Have a great weekend!

Sincerely,

Net Family News


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