VHS Memories Parade Into Your DVD Vault

VHS Memories Parade Into Your DVD Vault
By WILSON ROTHMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/13/technology/circuits/13basi.html

LIKE other families, we had a camcorder when I was growing up in the 1980's, but my father wasn't one of those video guys who would amass hours of soccer games and science fairs. No, my friends and I are largely responsible for the most memorable videos. Sadly, certain projects like our "Star Trek" sendup are believed lost for good, or taped over, but I still have one tape, dating from seventh-grade English class, labeled "NBC Nightly News."

Based loosely on Tom Brokaw's newscast, that collection of skits featured a towheaded Robin Leach, a book-reading Siskel and Ebert who appear to suffer from attention-deficit disorder, and overdramatizations of middle-school lit like "The Chronicles of Narnia." The tape itself is getting on in years, and with each viewing the decay advances, not to mention the risk of its being chewed up by the VCR.

Hoping to preserve it for eternity on DVD and make copies for my now-grown-up co-stars, I tested devices that convert analog video to digital MPEG-2 format and then took a look at the latest crop of DVD burners.

Microsoft and Google: Partners or Rivals?

Microsoft and Google: Partners or Rivals?
By JOHN MARKOFF and ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/31/technology/31net.html

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 30 - Wall Street is not the only one wooing Google. Microsoft is as well.

Google, the highflying Silicon Valley Web search company, recently began holding meetings with bankers in preparation for its highly anticipated initial public offering as it was still engaged in meetings of another kind: exploring a partnership or even a merger with Microsoft.

According to company executives and others briefed on the discussions, Microsoft - desperate to capture a slice of the popular and ad-generating search business - approached Google within the last two months to discuss options, including the possibility of a takeover.

With Cable TV at M.I.T., Who Needs Napster?

With Cable TV at M.I.T., Who Needs Napster?
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/27/technology/27mit.html

Two students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a system for sharing music within their campus community that they say can avoid the copyright battles that have pitted the music industry against many customers.

The students, Keith Winstein and Josh Mandel, drew the idea for their campus-wide network from a blend of libraries and from radio. Their effort, the Libraries Access to Music Project, which is backed by M.I.T. and financed by research money from the Microsoft Corporation, will provide music from some 3,500 CD's through a novel source: the university's cable television network.

Brazil Becomes a Cybercrime Lab

Brazil Becomes a Cybercrime Lab
By TONY SMITH
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/27/technology/27hack.html

SÃO PAULO, Brazil, Oct. 26 - With a told-you-so grin, Marcos Flávio Assunção reads out four digits - an Internet banking password - that he has just intercepted as a reporter communicates via laptop with a bank's supposedly secure Web site.

"It wouldn't matter if you were on the other side of the world in Malaysia," said Mr. Assunção, a confident 22-year-old. "I could still steal your password."

While impressive, Mr. Assunção's hacking talents are hardly unique in Brazil, where organized crime is rife and laws to prevent digital crime are few and largely ineffective. The country is becoming a laboratory for cybercrime, with hackers - able to collaborate with relative impunity - specializing in identity and data theft, credit card fraud and piracy, as well as online vandalism.

Free Web Hosting

check this out. a web developer friend sent me this and it looks like a real deal. went to their parent site, etc. they are a european web hosting company that is trying to enter the US market.
http://www.united-internet.de/
http://www.united-internet.com/content/ir/analystenstimmen.html

anyway, the deal is three years free hosting. 500Mb of space. and 5Gb of traffic. free for three years. i guess they've calculated that instead of paying for advertising to launch in the US, they'd get better word of mouth by using the money to fund free services.
http://order.1and1.com/xml/static/Home;jsessionid=77750C9799411B11C53C065DAE03B822.TC60b

Seductive Electronic Gadgets Are Soon Forgotten

Seductive Electronic Gadgets Are Soon Forgotten
By KATIE HAFNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/15/technology/15GADG.html

Adam Lipson cannot decide which of the many gadgets he bought in the last couple of years proved most useless.

Perhaps it was the microscope that hooked up to his computer. Then again, maybe Mr. Lipson, 42, would choose the universal remote control that came with a manual as thick as a Russian novel. But that would be shortchanging the Webcam — a video camera that transfers images over the Internet — that he used once, stashed in a closet and finally threw away.

Music File Sharers Keep Sharing

Music File Sharers Keep Sharing
By AMY HARMON with JOHN SCHWARTZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/19/technology/19TUNE.html

Despite the lawsuits filed last week against 261 people accused of illicitly distributing music over the Internet, millions of others continue to copy and share songs without paying for them.

Last week, more than four million Americans used KaZaA, the most popular file-sharing software, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, only about 5 percent fewer than the week before the record industry's lawsuits became big news. One smaller service, iMesh, even experienced a slight uptick in users.

Crackdown May Send Music Traders Into Software Underground

Crackdown May Send Music Traders Into Software Underground
By SAUL HANSELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/15/technology/15DARK.html

Some people may well be intimidated by the 261 lawsuits that the music industry has filed against Internet users it says are illegally sharing songs.

But hundreds of software developers are racing to create new systems, or modify existing ones, to let people continue to swap music — hidden from the prying eyes of the Recording Industry Association of America, or from any other investigators.

File-Sharing Battle Leaves Musicians Caught in Middle

File-Sharing Battle Leaves Musicians Caught in Middle
By NEIL STRAUSS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/technology/14MUSI.html

Since the Recording Industry Association of America began its campaign against file-sharing services and unauthorized song swapping online in 1999, it has offered one chief justification for its actions: downloading songs is stealing money from the pockets of musicians.

But the musicians themselves have conflicted responses to file sharing and the tactics of the association, a trade group that represents record labels, not the musicians themselves, who have no organization that wields equal power.

Whatever Will Be Will Be Free on the Internet

Whatever Will Be Will Be Free on the Internet
By STEVE LOHR
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/weekinreview/14LOHR.html

THE recording industry's long-running battle against online music piracy has come to resemble one of those whack-a-mole arcade games, where the player hammers one rubber rodent's head with a mallet only to see another pop up nearby. Conk one, and up pops another, and so on.

Three years ago, the music industry sued Napster, the first popular music file-sharing network on the Internet. That sent Napster reeling, but other networks for trading copyrighted music — KaZaA, Grokster, Morpheus and others — sprang up. Last week, in the latest swing of the hammer, the Recording Industry Association of America filed 261 lawsuits against individual file sharers, which will surely make some of their estimated 60 million compatriots think twice — for now. Earth Station Five, a company based in the West Bank, surfaced recently with claims of being at war with the industry association. It promises the latest in anonymous Internet file sharing. Its motto: "Resistance is futile."

Since Gutenberg's printing press, new technologies for creating, copying and distributing information have eroded the power of the people, or industries, in control of various media. In the last century, the pattern held true, for example, when recorded music became popular in the early 1900's, radio in the 1920's and cable television in recent years.

Former Dot-Commers Are Adjusting, Painfully

Former Dot-Commers Are Adjusting, Painfully
By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/24/business/yourmoney/24DOTC.html

IN 2000, when Michael Drexler was 61, he walked away from a 40-year career in traditional advertising to join Media- smith, a young agency that specialized in Internet ads. But he found the small start-up company "too limiting," so a year later he signed on as chief executive of Optimedia International, the well-established media buying arm of the ZenithOptimedia Group.

To hear him tell it, his brief foray into dot-com land taught him a huge amount about how to harness the Internet's power for clients. Yet he is certain that Optimedia hired him in spite of, not because of, his stint at Mediasmith.

Blogs in the Workplace

Blogs in the Workplace
By WILLIAM O'SHEA
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/07/technology/07NECO.html

For Nicholas Tang, the deluge of work-related e-mail messages became overwhelming. "It got to the point where I was getting hundreds of e-mails a day, sometimes more than a thousand," said Mr. Tang, director of operations at Community Connect, a company in New York that operates AsianAvenue.com and other online communities with an ethnic focus.

For several years Mr. Tang viewed this daily surge of e-mail messages as an unpleasant but necessary part of his job managing a team of eight engineers. Then, a few months ago, he began using an alternative to e-mail, a Web log.

Information On-Ramp Crosses a Digital Divide

Information On-Ramp Crosses a Digital Divide
By BARNABY J. FEDER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/08/technology/08DIVI.html

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — Children who show up this month for basketball camp at the Carl Russell Recreation Center here will find some unexpected drills on their schedule.

Aaron Bailey, the recreation center's director, plans to take advantage of breaks in the hoops action to send the campers to the center's newest addition, a computer room stuffed with 10 refurbished computers, all with high-speed Internet connections. The aim is to help make the youngsters as agile on computers as they are on the courts. "I might even send the campers in before I let them play basketball," Mr. Bailey told a visitor recently.

Mr. Bailey's center is being linked to 35 other sites around Winston-Salem — recreation centers, churches in the city's poorest neighborhoods, libraries, schools and a homeless shelter — in the first phase of WinstonNet, one of the most advanced and broadest efforts yet by public and private groups in an American city to bridge the so-called digital divide between the haves and have-nots.

Online Dating Sheds Its Stigma as Losers.com

Online Dating Sheds Its Stigma as Losers.com
By AMY HARMON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/national/29DATE.html

Of the 120 men she traded messages with online in her first four months of Internet dating, Kristen Costello, 33, talked to 20 on the telephone at least once and met 11 in person. Of those, Ms. Costello dated four several times before realizing she had not found "the one."

It is one of the first lessons learned by many in the swelling ranks of subscribers to Internet dating sites: soul mates are harder to come by than dinner and a movie. But like a growing number of single adults, Ms. Costello, a fourth-grade teacher in Florham Park, N.J., remains convinced that the chances of finding her life partner are better online than off.

Is Google God?

Is Google God?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/opinion/29FRIE.html

Since 9/11 the world has felt increasingly fragmented. Reading the papers, one senses that many Americans are emotionally withdrawing from the world and that the world is drifting away from America. The powerful sense of integration that the go-go-globalizing 1990's created, the sense that the world was shrinking from a size medium to a size small, feels over now.

The reality, though, is quite different. While you were sleeping after 9/11, not only has the process of technological integration continued, it has actually intensified — and this will have profound implications. I recently went out to Silicon Valley to visit the offices of Google, the world's most popular search engine. It is a mind-bending experience. You can actually sit in front of a monitor and watch a sample of everything that everyone in the world is searching for. (Hint: sex, God, jobs and, oh my word, professional wrestling usually top the lists.)