Bad news for TV moguls — kids rather like the Net!
A new study from Statistical Research indicates that one third of children in the US would choose the Internet over other media, if they were restricted to one choice. This would worry me if I owned a TV network. Interesting also that, overall, boys preferred Internet and television, while girls preferred the telephone and radio.
Cybercrime doubles with increased Internet usage
FT story
“A survey of 1,000 UK companies showed that 44 per cent suffered a significant security breach last year – up from 24 per cent in 2000. ” But according to this survey, most online fraud (46%) in the US occurs on auction sites.
Signs of intelligent life in BT – contd.
According to the Financial Times, BT is planning to plug the gap in its broadband offerings for us poor rural consumers (who cannot get ADSL) with a satellite service. But it only offers 256 kbps download and POTS 56k upload and requires a �400 satellite dish. Roll on WiFi!
More AOL Time Warner woes
NYT story.
“Investors took Mr. Pittman’s return as confirmation of their worst fears about the America Online division, and AOL Time Warner’s shares fell last week to a low of $19.60 on Thursday, before rebounding slightly on Friday, with unusually high trading volume. Reports surfaced that the Janus fund group, which specializes in rapidly growing companies and AOL Time Warner’s largest shareholder, was selling tens of millions of shares, presumably because it had lost confidence in the company’s growth prospects.
Investors are most worried that technology and the market are passing AOL by. It remains the undisputed king of dial-up Internet access over phone-line modems, called narrowband. But it does not seem to have yet mastered the next generation of high-speed, or broadband, service, which has been dominated by cable systems and phone companies.
Broadband services were supposed to be one of the biggest benefits from the combination with Time Warner, which owns the nation’s second-largest cable company. Lots of Time Warner’s data and entertainment could be offered up over fast digital pipes, according to the deal’s rationale. But there is little to show for this supposed synergy so far. ”
The new imperialism
For most of us, the notion of a sovereign state free to do whatever it likes within its own borders has become a ‘given’. It’s what paralyses the international community when faced with humanitarian crises. But, post September 11, influential voices in the UK and US administrations are beginning to think the unthinkable. In Britain, Robert Cooper is a senior diplomat who has helped to shape Tony Blair’s calls for a new internationalism and a new doctrine of humanitarian intervention which would place limits on state sovereignty. This article contains the full text of Cooper’s essay on “the postmodern state”, which seems to be the clearest articulation of this emerging geopolitical philosophy. Its significance derives from the fact that Cooper’s is the brain behind Blair’s policy. This is what Blair and Dubya would think if they were smart enough.
P.G. Wodehouse said that being in Manhattan was ‘like being in heaven, without the bother and expense of dying.’
The rise and fall of the Investment Analyst
Lovely Observer column by my colleague Frank Kane.
“Quite simply, the age of the professional investment analyst attached to a bank is over. The email and the internet has not only spelled his doom by exposing his real investment judgement (as in the Merrill case), it has also empowered the rest of us.”
My column on the slide in AOL Time Warner is here.
Google releases the Google API: what does this mean for us?
Dan Gillmor’s explanation.
“Google, the search engine company, has released the Google Web APIs. API stands for Applications Programming Interface. This is a big deal.
First, it means that programmers will be able to easily create Google searches inside other programs, eliminating the need to go to the Google Web page for queries. No one knows for sure what this means yet, but the possibilities are endless.
Second, it ratifies in a big way the somewhat misunderstood notion of Web services, the idea of computers talking to other computers (on our behalf) to get things done. The Google API is a simple, and obvious, Web service. Obvious, that is, now that they’ve done it.
Nelson Minar, one of the Google engineers responsible for this breakthrough, acknowledges that there are some restrictions on what third parties can do with this new tool (or toy). For example, there’s a 1,000-search daily limit, and the search engine will return 10 results per search.
But Minar says he and his colleagues can’t wait to see what people come up with. I can’t, either. This is cool, in the extreme.”
Daft websites department
Lovely column by Henry Norr.
“WAY OUT WEB SITES: If you don’t follow CNET’s news.com or slashdot.org, you may have missed one of the more amusing chapters in the story of Microsoft’s efforts to take over the server market.
Late last month, the company joined with Unisys, an old mainframemaker that now peddles systems with Intel chips and Microsoft software, to launch a marketing campaign designed to win corporate tech managers away from Unix, the dominant operating system for high-end servers.
The centerpiece of the campaign is a Web site called “We have the way out” (www.wehavethewayout.com), where — in exchange for name, phone number and e-mail address — you can download white papers and other materials extolling the virtues of Unisys’ hardware and Microsoft’s software and none-too-subtly dissing Unix and its close cousin Linux, the basis of competing products from the likes of Sun Microsystems and IBM.
The site, however, had been up only a few hours when some inspired geek thought to check it out at Netcraft (www.netcraft.com), a free service that reports on what OS and Web server are running at any address you enter.
Lo and behold, the machines serving the anti-Unix propaganda were themselves running on FreeBSD, a freely distributed Unix derivative, and Apache, an open-source Web server for Unix-based systems.
When Cnet and other sources broke this news last Monday, I thought it might just be an April Fool’s prank, but that was not the case, and to Microsoft and Unisys it was no laughing matter: They quickly shut the site down.
When it came back a day later, it was running on — wait for it — Windows 2000 and Microsoft’s Internet Information Server.
For the Unix and Linux crowd, though, the fun was just beginning. As soon as it was converted to Windows, the site began to malfunction, delivering blank screens to users who tried to check it out. Microsoft’s PR agency says the problems were due to “in-depth security checks.”
“With the publicity around the site, we felt it would have been a magnet for hackers, and quite frankly, we didn’t want to give them the satisfaction,” spokeswoman Erica Munson said.
It took the site’s operators two days to do their checks, but since Thursday, it has apparently been working properly.
Meanwhile, a Linux company called LinuxFreaks.com has set up a counter- propaganda page called “We have the way in” (www.wehavethewayin.com), which offers links to Unix and Linux information, not to mention much prettier pictures than the Microsoft-Linux site.
Yet another site along the same lines is set to open this morning at www. weknowthewayout.com. ”