Digital cameras continue to boom
“NYT” story by Katie Hafner.

“This year, according to Infotrends, a market research firm in Boston, some 9.5 million digital cameras will be sold in the United States, compared with 15 million film cameras (disposable cameras are not included). In five years, the number of digital cameras sold is expected to double as the sale of film cameras declines. “

[…]

Those crossing over to digital are beginning to use cameras in ways they would not have considered with film. One of the biggest changes is the end result: just 12 percent of digital photos are ever printed, Mr. Pageau said. And that fact has altered the practice of compulsively organizing pictures into albums [~] or stashing them in shoe boxes.

“We’re beginning to take pictures not to keep them around, but to reach out and touch someone with them, to extend the moment, that sense of presence,” said John Seely Brown, the recently retired chief scientist at the Xerox Corporation and author of “The Social Life of Information.”

Dr. Brown cited the increasing practice of sending photos by e-mail as an example. “There’s a sense of using this to connect in the moment to someone else I want to touch,” he said. “I’m more concerned about getting it to them and touching them than in having a photograph I can put in an album.”

Beginning of the end for unregulated Internet search?
CNN story.

WASHINGTON (AP) –Internet search engines that take money from Web sites in exchange for prominent placement should make that practice clearer to Web users, federal regulators said Friday.

Many search engine Web sites, including AltaVista, LookSmart and AOL Search, give preferred placement to paid advertisers. The Federal Trade Commission said that prime space can confuse Web users who are looking for the best response to their search, rather than ads for sites that paid up front.

The commission’s decision came in response to a complaint from consumer advocacy group Commercial Alert, which is backed by activist Ralph Nader.

Six months after it crashed on launch, the UK census site is still down

The last word on Palladium

Ross Anderson has written an amazingly informative FAQ page about the background to Palladium.

Computing becomes just another utility?

This Financial Times story looks at the way companies are outsourcing IT as a way of coping with recession. And, just to underline the point, on Monday The Register reported that IBM has launched a pay-as-you-go service offering software resources over the Net.

Linux Virtual Services connects customers with Linux-based applications to IBM e-business hosting centres that provide managed server processing, storage and networking capacity on an on-demand basis.

Customers tap into “virtual servers” on IBM zSeries mainframes running Linux in a secure hosting environment, paying only for the computing power and capacity they require.

Half of UK population online each day

Jun 24 2002: Silicon.com reports that almost half the UK population goes online on a daily basis.

According to a new study by the Royal Bank of Scotland, 63 percent of UK Internet users who use the Net from either work or home, go online to look for information.

Around 20 percent of people go online to send of receive emails, while 18 percent of the UK[base ‘]s Internet users use the Internet to shop, and seven percent for online banking.

While shopping online is increasingly common in the UK, men are much more likely to make a purchase online than women. Around 54 percent of UK males have shopped online, compared to 43 percent of women.

The study also indicates that UK Internet users are increasingly less concerned about security risks online. Just 26 percent of respondents claimed they didn[base ‘]t bank online because of security risks.

Those who expressed the biggest concern about online security were in the 45 to 64-age category.

Internet privacy campaigner to become MS privacy officer

According to The Register, Caspar Bowden is to become Microsoft’s Privacy Officer. Hmmmm…..

NY Times story confirms AOL/Time-Warner letter to free wireless redistributors of their service: as noted a few days ago, AOL/TW notified a customer that his redistribution of their service over free wireless was a violation of their terms of service. They also insinuated and threatened other actions and problems. The NY Times story confirms that a number of people received these letters. In the general style of large firm paranoia versus small firm fleetness, enjoy the quote from the end of the story:

[80211b News]

Instructive UN stats on the digital divide

“Despite considerable progress in recent years, access to ICTs, notably the telephone, mobile phone, Internet and broadcast networks, remains unequally distributed[3]. There are, for example, more televisions in Brazil; more fixed line telephones in Italy; more mobile phones in Korea; and greater Internet connectivity in Luxembourg; than in the whole continent of Africa.” [Source.]

Bob Cringeley on Palladium
From I, Cringeley.

“This week, Microsoft announced Palladium through an exclusive story in Newsweek written by Steven Levy, who ought to have known better. Palladium is the code name for a Microsoft project to make all Internet communication safer by essentially pasting a digital certificate on every application, message, byte, and machine on the Net, then encrypting the data EVEN INSIDE YOUR COMPUTER PROCESSOR.

Palladium compatible hardware (presumably chipsets and motherboards) will come from both AMD and Intel, and the software will, of course, come from Microsoft. That software is what I had dubbed TCP/MS. The point of all this is simple. It may actually make the Internet somewhat safer. But the real purpose of this stuff, I fear, is to take technology owned by nobody (TCP/IP) and replace it with technology owned by Redmond. That’s taking the Internet and turning it into MSN. Oh, and we’ll all have to buy new computers.

This is diabolical. If Microsoft is successful, Palladium will give Bill Gates a piece of every transaction of any type while at the same time marginalizing the work of any competitor who doesn’t choose to be Palladium-compliant. So much for Linux and Open Source, but it goes even further than that. So much for Apple and the Macintosh. It’s a militarized network architecture only Dick Cheney could love.

Ironically, Microsoft says they will reveal Palladium’s source code, which is little more than a head feint toward the Open Source movement. Nobody at Microsoft is saying anything about giving the ownership of that source code away or of allowing just anyone to change it.

Under Palladium as I understand it, the Internet goes from being ours to being theirs. The very data on your hard drive ceases to be yours because it could self-destruct at any time. We’ll end up paying rent to use our own data! ”