Message-Id: <55206A473154D011924D0020AFF7ACB553CA1D@mail1.oulan.ou.edu>
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 09:21:29 -0600
From: "Swisher, Bob" <bswisher@ou.edu>
To: "'it-fyi@ou.edu'" <it-fyi@ou.edu>
Subject: Edupage, 20 January 1998
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Edupage, 20 January 1998. Edupage, a summary of news about information
technology, is provided three times a week as a service by Educom, a
Washington, D.C.-based consortium of leading colleges and universities
seeking to transform education through the use of information
technology.
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TOP STORIES
Will Programmers Replace Lawyers?
The Web Improved By 10-20%
The Web At 1.5 Million Bits A Second
ALSO
Spam War Update
A Method To AOL's Madness
WILL PROGRAMMERS REPLACE LAWYERS?
Civil libertarians are saying that a new technical filtering standard
called PICS (Platform of Internet Content Selection) developed by the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to facilitate the filtering of Web-based
information is giving that group too much power. Barry Steinhardt of
the American Civil Liberties Union says: "The W3C is taking on a
quasi-governmental role, and to the extent that the standards it adopts
become the basic standards of the Internet, it will have more influence
than most national governments will have. These are not mere technical
standards that engineers should be establishing. This platform raises
fundamental questions about free speech, and that debate should occur in
public." But W3C director (and WWW-creator) Tim Berners-Lee says that
the intent of the technical standard "is certainly not as a tool for
government control, but as a tool for user control, which will indeed
reduce the pressure for government action. Most of the people who are
working on the Web are not doing it because they have a frantic urge to
program. They're doing it because they have a vision of how society
should be improved. The difference is, now people can make social things
possible by creating technology, whereas before, to make social things
possible, really all you could do was make laws." (New York Times 19
Jan 98)
THE WEB IMPROVED BY 10-20%
Intel is ready to offer Internet service providers "Quick Web
Technology" that uses data compression techniques to allow speeding up
of customer access to graphics by 10-20% (though at the loss of some
graphic quality). Customers would pay about $5 more in monthly services.
The technology also improves speed by allowing the service providers to
"cache" or store copies of Web pages locally once they are downloaded by
users, so that when the customer calls them again they can be obtained
directly from the service provider rather than the Web site that
produced them. (Wall Street Journal 19 Jan 98)
THE WEB AT 1.5 MILLION BITS A SECOND
Compaq, Intel, and Microsoft are teaming up with major local phone
service providers GTE and fourof the Bell companies (all except
Bell-Atlantic) to develop technology that would improve Internet access
to a speed of 1.5 million bits a second. The new ultrafast modems would
use ordinary phone lines but would remained connected to the Net at all
times without the need to dial a service provider and without
interfering with normal voice conversations over the same line. The
project will be based on DSL ("digital subscriber line") technology.
(New York Times 20 Jan 98)
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SPAM WAR UPDATE
As soon as Sanford Wallace and Walt Rines, well-known senders of
unsolicited mass mailings ("spam") over the Internet, found a new
service provider, antispammers immediately flooded the provider with
phone calls, e-mails and threats. "All of the sudden we get all these
complaints saying you're harboring basically spam hell - the devil,
himself. They threatened to put us on a blacklist and made it seem like
they were going to cut off our sites at their routers and crack down on
how we can get our information out to the world." An executive at the
upstream provider of the company hit by the antispame attack says:
"There are two kinds of terrorists in this: the spammers and the
antispammers, and I'm not sure which camp is more objectionable to deal
with." (News.Com 19 Jan 98)
A METHOD TO AOL'S MADNESS
When an interviewer complained that he kept getting free disks ("I have
23 floppies and 2 CDs from AOL"), America Online CEO said, "Well, don't
you have friends to give them to?" Interviewer: "It just doesn't make
sense that you keep sending this stuff." Case: "Well, it does make
sense. Maybe we're stupid, but it does make sense. There are probably
better ways to distribute software in the long run. For example, in the
last few years, we've been successful in getting AOL built into just
about every computer - built into Windows 95, built into Macintosh - as
well as in partnering with everybody. So the need to mail out disks has
diminished somewhat. But we do track you through these programs. And
the economics of it works terrifically well. So there is a method to
the madness." (Washington Post 19 Jan 98)
Edupage is written by John Gehl (gehl@educom.edu) and Suzanne Douglas
(douglas@educom.edu). Telephone: 770-590-1017
Technical support for distributing Edupage is provided by Information
Technology Services at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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