Tuesday, April 22, 2003

Wow. South Korea's Hot Spots. 10.7 million households, or 70% of the total in a population of 48 million have fixed line broadband connections in South Korea. In the last 18 months, KT Corp, South Korea's biggest broadband and Wi-Fi player, has set up 8,500 wireless commercial local-area networks, or hot spots. That's more than half the world's total, according to international IT research firm IDC. Half the World's Hot Spots [Smart Mobs] 9:47:41 PM    comment []

Princeton: "Yesterday, Death Penalty Awareness Week began with a lecture by Ray Krone, the hundredth innocent man exonerated from death row after a wrongful conviction." [Scripting News] 3:52:45 PM    comment []

Students Lose Web Use in Copyright Case (AP) Penn State deprived 220 students of high-speed Internet connections in their dorms after it found they were sharing copyrighted material, the university said Monday. Basically, we received a complaint, said Penn State spokesman Tysen Kendig, who said he could not reveal who registered the complaint. Upon investigation, we found that the students had publicly listed copyright-infringing materials on their systems to other members of this network, he added. . . . I was kind of surprised at being caught, Jason Steiner, a freshman in aerospace engineering, told The Daily Collegian, Penn State's student newspaper. I was sitting there online and all of a sudden I wasn't, with no idea why. The sanctioned students all live in campus residence halls. They can still access their campus accounts from other computers. The connections to their dorm rooms will be restored once the copyrighted materials have been removed, Kendig said. 12:59:50 PM    comment []

Women among first computer specialists trained in Afghanistan (UNDP). Six women and 11 men graduated this month from the University of Kabul's new Cisco Networking Academy, earning the first industry-standard certification for computer networking ever offered in the country. The event was a milestone for Afghan women, shut out of public life by the former Taliban regime and its radical interpretation of Islamic law. I am now one of the first Afghan women with a world-class information technology certificate in Afghanistan, said Nabila Akbari, one of the academy's top students. My personal goal is to share this knowledge with other Afghans, especially Afghan women. I want very much to help my country build an advanced, high-tech networking system. 11:59:50 AM    comment []

Poor story on spam: Internet Is Losing Ground in Battle Against Spam. In the cat-and-mouse game of e-mail marketers and those trying to stop them, the spammers are still winning. By Saul Hansell. [New York Times: Business] Hansell lets us meet a charming pair of spammers, and we learn that they think we're whiners for hitting "DEL" too many times. But he focuses on "problems" that I regard as among the relatively solved--HTML text in spam, deceptive Subject: and From: lines, e.g. I mean, really, who doesn't know that spammers use deceptive Subject: lines or spoof e-mail From: lines? It's been the focus of lawsuits, it's so well understood. And good spam-detection and -filtering is going to take that into account and not rely overly on Subject: lines (except where some are known to be spammish). Missed opportunity, NYT. More here at A blog doesn't need a clever name on spam. 7:17:39 AM    comment []

I Said That?. Since I complained vigorously about this war before it started, it's only fair for me to acknowledge that many of the things that I worried about didn't happen. By Nicholas D. Kristof. [New York Times: Opinion] 7:09:33 AM    comment []

Useit.Com: Low-End Media for User Empowerment. Almost every Web usability study we've ever conducted found that low-end media forms are superior to high-end media forms. Even the few exceptions to these findings confirm the phenomenon underlying low-end media's superiority: users want to be in control. [Tomalak's Realm] Learn from this. 7:05:27 AM    comment []

The Napster backlash. When Savenapster.com founder Chad Paulson decided that the file-trading pioneer cared more about money than artists, he stunned the company by changing sides. An excerpt from "All the Rave." A file-trading ship of fools. Don't scapegoat greedy record execs for Napster's failure, says Joseph Menn in "All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster." The inept bunglers who ran the company have only themselves to blame. Both [Salon.com]. 7:03:42 AM    comment []

Implications in Arrest of Iran Journo-Blogger. The arrest of Sina Motallebi in Iran is, of course, a betrayal of human rights by a regime that routinely... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] 7:01:24 AM    comment []

3,000 Amateurs Offer NASA Photos of Columbia's Demise. In the days after the Columbia disaster, thousands of people contacted NASA to offer their firsthand reports, still photographs and video. By John Schwartz. [New York Times: Science] 6:59:51 AM    comment []

The Citizen-Scientist's Obligation to Stand Up for Standards. Confronting misconceptions is probably the single most important factor driving progress in science, and in a broader sense society. By Lawrence M. Krauss. [New York Times: Science] 6:58:54 AM    comment []

A New Wave of Wireless: 'WiFi' Networks Are Expanding Internet's Reach, Profit Opportunities. By Yuki Noguchi, Washington Post. 2:58:25 AM    comment []