I know that Bob Cringely gets up people’s noses, but I really like his approach to WiFi. And if you lived like me in a village that was a communications black hole, you would too. This particular column has some interesting stuff about how some smart guys are providing broadband in Starbucks without having to ask Starbucks’ permission — or sharing the revenue with them!

It turns out, though, that the folks at O’Reilly can’t quite bring themselves to believe Cringeley’s claims about his revised home broadband set-up. They also have a nice account of how they made a high-gain antenna from a coffee can.

Financial Times report on the BT ‘hyperlink patent’ case.

‘If the court finds that patent number 4,873,662 on “Information handling system and terminal apparatus” does give BT rights over hyperlinks, its victory would be embarrassing, albeit lucrative.

BT admits this apparent goldmine lay unnoticed for decades before being unearthed in a routine trawl of its intellectual property portfolio.

Any chance to exploit the patent in Europe had gone by the time BT woke up to its significance. But a delay in issuing the patent in the US means it does not expire there until 2006.

If BT wins its case, its delay in latching on to the potential of the patent may anger shareholders. ‘

Yet more on the BT ‘hyperlink patent’ case. The patent [No 4, 873,662] is dated October 10, 1989. The application was filed on August 15, 1980 and there is some reference to 1976 — though this seems to be in relation to a British patent. Something strange here…

Michael Kinsley is leaving Slate.

More on the BT ‘hyperlink patent’ case.

Wired News: Judge Dubious About Link Patent. But a federal judge with a laptop on her desk warned that it may be difficult to prove that a patent filed in 1976, when today’s Internet was barely imagined, somehow applies to modern computers. “The language is archaic,” said U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon. “It’s like reading Old English.” [Tomalak’s Realm]

As an Irish citizen, I’ve never taken that much interest in the British royal family — they’re not my problem, as it were. But the flood of photographs of the Queen and her late sister unleashed by the latter’s death has reminded me that they and I have one thing in common — an admiration for the Leica M-series rangefinder camera. Whenever they wanted to take a picture, out came the M4s with 50mm Summicrons. But then, they can afford that kind of exotic stuff…

Google in a Box!

The Google Search Appliance integrates hardware and software to create a plug-and-play solution that takes minutes to install and can be maintained easily by one administrator. More details here.

SF-Gate report on how Larry Lessig, James Boyle & Co have come up with a new ‘commons’ licence.

“In a boon to the arts and the software industry, Creative Commons will make available flexible, customizable intellectual-property licenses that artists, writers, programmers and others can obtain free of charge to legally define what constitutes acceptable uses of their work. The new forms of licenses will provide an alternative to traditional copyrights by establishing a useful middle ground between full copyright control and the unprotected public domain. ”

NYT piece on the likely fallout from the French Yahoo! decision, which is currently on appeal in California.

‘Regardless of the appeal’s outcome, nations seeking to control potentially harmful speech that arrives from offshore are seen as almost certain to use the French precedent to bolster their efforts.

“They will not be tempted to do it — they will do it,” said Jack Goldsmith, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who frequently writes about Internet legal matters and is the author of a coming book, “Reining in the Net,” about how countries are putting borders in cyberspace.

That is what frightens Alan Davidson, a lawyer with the Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet civil liberties group in Washington. The French Yahoo ruling “really puts free expression and communication in jeopardy on the Net,” Mr. Davidson said, warning that online speech could sink to a single country’s lowest-common- denominator standard. ‘

Internet in half of US households

(And two million new users go online each month.)

BBC Online report. Thursday, 7 February, 2002, 01:04 GMT

More than half of America’s households are connected to the internet, according to a Department of Commerce report.

The study, A Nation Online, which uses census data to track internet usage, found that 143 million Americans, or 54% of the population, were using the internet as of last September, up 33% on three years ago.

US internet usage

45% of Americans use e-mail
36% search for product and service info
39% make online purchases
35% search for health information.

Two million people were going online for the first time every month, the report said. Among younger people, internet usage is even higher.

Nine out of 10 school-age children have access to computers either at home or at school, according to the 96-page report.