Monthly Archives: February 2000

I just received an e-mail from the press office of Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore, saying that UCITA, probably the most anti-consumer legislation in years in this nation, has passed and will become law in Virginia. It gives software and Internet … Continue reading →

Two reports over the weekend told stories of the so-called New Economy’s rise over the Old Economy. The former, you surely know, is the dot-com world. The latter is everything that came before, and the former seems to be overwhelming … Continue reading →

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

Tara Calishain let me know that Amazon, the online retailer, is turning into Exhibit A for the disfunctional patent system. She pointed to a TechWeb reports that Amazon has won a patent on affiliate programs. The patent refers to “an … Continue reading →

The juxtaposition is delicious — and instructive. The Register, a superb online technology news site based in London, reports that CeBIT, the huge German technology trade show, is treating online journalists as second-class citizens. But it was The Smoking Gun, … Continue reading →

See Wired News today. I’d quibble with the assertion that content is king on the Net, which has yet to be proved, but it’s a good piece otherwise. More Bad News from the Privacy Front I’ve been making it a … Continue reading →

The personal computer marketplace is a collection of horizontal slices — CPU, OS, graphics hardware, apps, etc. Intel and Microsoft own many of those slices, but no company owns them all. This isn’t the way it was in the mainframe … Continue reading →

The apologists for the H-1B visa program, which brings tens of thousands of high-tech workers into the U.S. each year, won’t be able to ignore this scathing investigative report in the Baltimore Sun. Is MCI-Sprint Merger Anti-Competitive? Of course it … Continue reading →

Last week in Silicon Valley, Microsoft launched Windows 2000 and Symbian, the mobile-phone companies’ operating system partnership, held a developers conference. These events were about platforms — the foundations from which technology empires are built. Actually, I don’t much like … Continue reading →

FBI Director Louis Freeh, who wants to restrict your right to use strong encryption that law enforcement can’t break, now thinks it’s a fine idea to apply federal racketeering laws (Register story) to hacking. Before you applaud, consider what this … Continue reading →