Bayosphere

It’s January 1, 2000 in Auckland, Sydney and Tokyo, but early in the morning New Year’s Eve in California. SiliconValley.com has dispensed with the usual format to do an ongoing weblog of events as the new day moves around the world.

This is a new era in more ways than one. I’m jazzed.

Office Pool in Silicon Valley

My New Year’s Eve column is my homage to William Safire of the New York Times, who does this every year. It’s a multiple-choice quiz about events in the coming year. My predictions are at the end.

Y2K Not Entirely a Non-Issue?

They don’t seem to be all that serious, but some Year 2000 computer glitches are becoming apparent, Perl programming guru Tom Christiansen tells me in an e-mail I’ve posted here.

Brett Glass, a programmer and writer who isn’t given to techno-paranoia, just sent me a detailed note about potential problem for people who are synchronizing various kinds of electronic equipment to the government’s atomic clocks.

“I’m concerned that people could get caught short by this,” he told me.

eToys: Celebrating Too Soon?

Wired News reports that eToys, the online toy store, didn’t completely back off from its war against the etoy.com site, after all.

The First Major PR Gimmick of 2000

From a press release I just received:

NEW YORK (December 29, 1999) – XseeksY.com (www.xseeksy.com), the first online relationship network for men and women, will launch on New Year’’s Eve in Times Square, becoming the first newborn .com of the millennium.

To advertise the launch to live spectators and a worldwide television audience, XseeksY.com will premier a campaign in two highly visible sites, the Condé Nast Building and the ABC JumboTron™™, throughout the 25-hour Times Square 2000 Celebration. XseeksY.com is dedicated to being the lead provider of editorial content, news, features and commerce opportunities for men and women looking to begin or enhance their personal relationships.

The contents of this post have not been recovered from the archives yet.

The encryption method used to scramble DVDs to prevent piracy is ridiculously weak. Naturally, it has been cracked. 2600 magazine reported this and posted the cracking software. The DVD industry, which is rich as well as paranoid, has sent its lawyers after everyone who’s putting up the code, including 2600.

You can argue about whether the act of cracking the enryption scheme was legal or not. You can even argue about whether sites should be liable for posting the code, assuming it’s actually illegal.

But the industry has gone way over the line. According to a copy of the complaint, posted on a Web site protesting the industry’s moves, the lawsuit also attacks Web sites that merely put links to the code. This is an attack on the foundation of the World Wide Web, not to mention a broadside against free speech itself.

A court hearing will be held Wednesday morning in Santa Clara County, California. Several Web sites are calling for a protest. I don’t endorse piracy. I do endorse a protest of the DVD industry’s outrageous tactics.

To better understand the entertainment industry’s lunacy and arrogance in the DVD-encryption matter, read this solid analysis by cryptography expert Bruce Schneier. Bruce is founder and chief technical officer at Counterpane Internet Security Inc.

You may also want to let the DVD Copy Control Association know how you feel. That’s the trade association responsible for this kill-the-messenger lawsuit. Here’s a link to the association’s “Contact Us” Web page.

Hard Disks and Home Audio

The blending of information technology and consumer electronics continues, anyway. The latest intriguing move is from a company called Request Multimedia, which just announced a deal with Quantum Corp. to create “the first component designed to store, organize and play up to 300 hours of CD-quality digital music.”

A Gift From Redmond

My colleague, Mike Langberg, got this piggy bank in the mail yesterday from Microsoft. It was part of a package that included Microsoft’s new tax-preparation software. As far as I can tell, it isn’t really made of silver, though. Not even Microsoft is that crass in the way it deals with journalists.

The accompanying software CD-ROM is interesting. It’s another copy of the tax software, and Microsoft invites the buyer to give it away to a friend. Looks like Intuit and its TurboTax product, which have a massive market share, are in you-know-who’s sights.

Given Intuit’s share — close to monopoly status by any measure — it’s good to see some competition here. If Microsoft manages to capture another market by giving away the product, however, it would bring to mind another little business tactic that got certain folks in trouble in federal court recently.

It’s not quite shades of Netscape, though. As far as I know, Microsoft hasn’t declared tax-preparation software to be an integral part of the operating system…

(Note: In the original version of this posting I mis-identified Intuit’s tax product — thanks to the alert reader who corrected me.)

My List of Not so Great Stuff

I’ve been compiling my 1999 “lowlights” in the technology world. They’re in my Tuesday column.

The Internet stock bubble has been obvious for some time. But this story about LinuxOne’s IPO from the Wall Street Journal (via ZDNet) may be the ultimate cautionary tale for anyone willing to view the phenomenon realistically.

Are investors really this foolish?

A Highlight I Didn’t Forget

One of my personal highlights of the year was starting this online column, and one of the coolest parts of the process has been the ability to update the site from a Web browser. This is part of an ongoing transformation, in which we’re learning to create content on the Web, for the Web.

It didn’t make the annual highlights list that ran in my newspaper column, however. Dave Winer wondered why. He’s man behind the company that created Manila, the software we’re using to publish eJournal. It’s a fair question.

We’ve been posting from Web browsers onto the Web — and from old-fashioned Internet-connected terminals onto the Net– in other ways before now, such as Newsgroups and Web-based discussion groups. Tech companies have been turning server software into applications we run from our browser clients, meanwhile.

Some of the potential coalesced this year. Dave and his team took the process to a higher level, adding much more sophistication and possibilities for those of us doing the posting. I’m grateful for this enhanced ability, and have said so in my column several times this year. I expect to keep saying so in this space, as the product’s capabilities grow.

It was a very close call as to whether to put Manila and other software of this kind on my highlights list. I didn’t for two reasons. I didn’t want to seem self-indulgent, talking yet again about the online column in the newspaper. I’m also fairly sure that 2000, not 1999, will be the breakthrough year for such technology. I expect to see a bunch of new tools that will take this kind of content creation to a much higher level — tools that use the sophistication of the client more than Manila is able to do today. The Userland Software folks, along with Microsoft and other smart companies, are working on this right now. I can barely wait to see what they come up with.

It’s been a peaceful, reflective holiday weekend. Hope you had a happy holiday, too.

My bosses asked me to think about the future in my Sunday column. So I did.

My List of Not so Great Stuff

I’ve been compiling my 1999 “lowlights” in the technology world. I’ll be printing a list on Tuesday in the newspaper. Here are a couple of the items I’ll be mentioning. As always, if you have suggestions, let me know.

I am with family this weekend, and will not be updating this journal until Sunday. I wish all of you a blessed, joyful holiday season.

Random Acts of Kindness

A clever holiday greeting card just arrived in my e-mail inbox, from a prominent company in the technology business. Along with the greeting, the message included the following stern warning:

This message is for the named person’s use only. It may contain confidential, proprietary or legally privileged information. No confidentiality or privilege is waived or lost by any mistransmission. If you receive this message in error, please immediately delete it and all copies of it from your system, destroy any hard copies of it and notify the sender. You must not, directly or indirectly, use, disclose, distribute, print, or copy any part of this message if you are not the intended recipient. (Name of sender deleted), and each of their subsidiaries each reserve the right to monitor all e-mail communications through its networks. Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the message states otherwise and the sender is authorised to state them to be the views of any such entity.

Maybe someone should tell the lawyers to lighten up, at least once a year…

Patently Common Sense

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is exhibiting uncharacteristic common sense with its decision to review a patent it granted for a Year 2000 bug fix, the Washington Post reports. The patent has been widely ridiculed by critics of the patent system, as it’s widely believed to cover an “invention” that wasn’t new.

The patent office is a mess, as I’ve said before. It’s understaffed, underfunded and overworked. It grants absurd patents all the time, many of which go to software and Internet companies, at an incalculable cost to the economy in the long run.

This review, while welcome, is also shameful. It should never have been necessary in the first place.

Y2K Auction Foolishness

It was a clever move of some entrepreneurs to register the year2000.com domain name a while back. The owners say the site has been profitable for them.

Now they want to make it even more profitable — by auctioning the domain name to some sucker — I mean, entrepreneur — willing to pay at least $1,000,000. That’s right, a million bucks.

I don’t doubt that someone will spend this kind of money. These are Internet-bubble times, after all.

But if I had $1 million, I would never use it this way. Here’s why.

The reason I and many other people visited this site in the past was to see a roundup of topics related to the Y2K computer glitch. I found the site a bit alarmist, though not as much as some, and mainly used it to follow links to the long list of Y2K-related news articles. I never, ever noticed the advertising — like many people, I’ve trained myself not to see Web ads for the most part.

As of early next year, barring a general collapse of life as we know it, I’m going to stop visiting this site. And so will just about everyone else. Like Cinderella’s magnificient coach that carried her to the ball, this site seems likely to turn into something of a pumpkin when the new year arrives, or soon after.

Whoever buys the site is going to have to remake it into something worth visiting for all new reasons. A million dollars is a lot of money to spend before you even begin.

Ooops…Porno Guys Love Typos

In my posting about the Year2000 Web site earlier today, I left out the final zero in the date when I created a hyperlink to the site. An alert reader who clicked on it let me know where it took him: to a pornography page.

That’s all too typical. Porn sites are infamous for registering domain names that are almost the same as more mainstream sites. So when hapless users mistakenly type in the wrong address, missing one letter or transposing others, they’re transported to porn pages. Or, when someone like me mistakenly creates a mis-named link, ditto.

I wish the porn folks wouldn’t do this kind of thing. It doesn’t make them any friends. And I truly doubt it makes them any money.

For years, Corel Corp. has been one of the software industry’s great mysteries. Some things don’t change.

In my experience, Corel has been dependably undependable. I recall, back when I was using the OS/2 operating system, how Corel was going to ship OS/2 versions of its software but didn’t deliver — something, to be fair, that happened a lot in those days with other companies. Then Corel promised a Java version of the office suite, and didn’t deliver. The reasons were understandable, but observers learned to take the company’s comments with a large grain of salt.

Corel’s flagship graphics products are still among the best, but the company took on a monumental task when it bought the WordPerfect line of products from Novell several years ago.

I use the WordPerfect word processor a fair amount. It’s a lot like the company, in my experience — flashy, but somewhat unpredictable, even flaky. At least it doesn’t regularly crash and eat my work the way Microsoft Word has been doing lately on another computer.

Lately Corel has jumped on the Linux bandwagon in a huge way, writing a Linux version of WordPerfect and, eventually, the entire WordPerfect Office suite. Corel is even selling its own distribution of the operating system. (I’m planning to try it, and will let you know what I find.)

Given the potential Linux is showing as a desktop operating system, this isn’t a bad idea, but it’s yet another long shot. Linux is not a magic bullet for Corel. Why? Because, among other things, Sun Microsystems is giving away Star Office, a suite that runs on several operating systems including Linux. Yes, Star Office is aimed more at Microsoft and Windows, but Linux competitors could lose in the process.

Investors have been nutty for all things Linux in the past few months. Corel’s share price has rocketed, partly on speculation that it might be bought by Red Hat Inc., the high-flying company selling Linux and services.

A few days ago, however, Corel’s chief financial officer resigned. Today, the company issued what’s known as a “profit warning” — saying things weren’t hunky-dory after all. The stock collapsed, as so often happens after such warnings.

Maybe it’s true, as some say, that hope springs eternal. Corel seems to be counting on it.

It’s been another amazing year in Silicon Valley and the tech world at large, full of highlights and lowlights. My Tuesday column lists the former, as I see them.

What do you think were the tech lowlights of the year? What companies and/or executives screwed up? What government types made our lives worse? Let me know.

Tripping Linda

Tripp: verb, to betray a friendship, typically by means of surreptitious surveillance, esp. audio tape.

Linda Tripp’s last name has become a verb, and an ugly one. For the rest of her life, her name will be synonymous with betrayal. What she did was loathesome.

Now she’s being prosecuted, in a plainly political way, for her acts. Yes, she broke the law. And yes, we need laws to protect privacy. But when politics turns into prosecution, we are all in danger.

The one benefit of this case is the attention it’s drawn. As William Safire said in a recent New York Times column (free registration required), “The famous Tripp taping of her conversations with Monica, further publicized by this witch hunt in Maryland, may do a lot of good for privacy in America.”

But let’s be clear: This is a witch hunt. The state charges are improper because they are political, and because Tripp is being singled out for a crime that is almost never prosecuted. If she is convicted, the Maryland prosecutors should stop right there and ask for no jail time or fine. Tripp has been punished enough.