Author Archives: Dan Gillmor

Speaking at Novell, President Clinton said he’d support laws promoting consumer privacy on the Net. His support seemed tentative — limited to financial and medical records — but even this small progress is good news for those who care about … Continue reading →

The likely Republican presidential nominee looks unfavorably (Financial Times) on the Microsoft antitrust suit. By sheer coincidence, he did this at a campaign stop in Washington state. The Senator from Microsoft, Slade Gorton, said (and wasn’t contradicted by Bush), “I … Continue reading →

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

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 →