Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Some Benton Headlines (urls embeded): DIAL-UP INTERNET GOING WAY OF ROTARY PHONES As recently as six months ago, a majority of Americans were using dial-up connections at home. Last year, 36 million American homes, or 52% of all households with Internet access, used dial-up services. That percentage is expected to drop to 40% at the end of this year. At the same time, cable and phone companies are expected to add 8 million broadband subscribers this year, bringing their total to 38.7 million. More people are dropping dial-up connections from services like AOL, MSN and EarthLink because so much Internet content -- music, videos, retail sites -- now requires high-speed connections for performance. For broadband sellers, getting those users as they convert to either a digital subscriber line or cable modem connection is crucial because they are harder to recruit once they sign up with a broadband provider and they are likely to order new services, like television plans. [SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Ken Belson] ONLINE ACTIVITIES & PURSUITS Two new research findings from the Pew Internet & American Life Project: 1) One out of six American adult Internet users (16%) have gone online to view another person or a place via a web cam. That translates into roughly 21 million people who have viewed material on web cams. And on any given day, about two million Internet users are checking out remote places or people by using webcams. 2) Eight percent of adult American Internet users say they participate in sports fantasy leagues online. That represents roughly 11 million people. And on a typical day, about 2 million Internet users are going online to oversee and check on their fantasy teams (Go SAHDies!). http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/159/report_display.asp http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/158/report_display.asp 'P.O.V.' ILLUSTRATES PBS' POINT-OF-VIEW STRUGGLE As a controversy over perceived bias swirls around the Public Broadcasting System, one of its most provocative series, P.O.V. — documentaries designed to communicate a point of view -- launches its 18th season tonight. Although P.O.V. suggests a bias, Cara Mertes, P.O.V.'s executive director, says the series is not about particular political viewpoints but a range of topics. “I don't ask my filmmakers what their political beliefs are. I wonder if the citing of PBS as liberal is saying anything that has a mix of ideas, that really promotes underserved communities and underheard communities. Do we label that liberal? What is really going on?” [SOURCE: USAToday, AUTHOR: Ann Oldenburg] 4:25:04 PM    comment []

Please Stop, You're Interfering With My Research: Astronomers have opinions about allowing cell phones on planes. What if biologists applied the same logic to human endeavors? By Ivan Oransky, in The Scientist. 4:24:59 PM    comment []

Since he became mayor of Tehran two years ago, Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad has not taken a holiday. He drives an old Peugeot, prays regularly and lives a simple life. On Friday Mr Ahmadi-Nejad, 49, takes on a leading figure of Iran's Islamic republic, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, 71, in a run-off ballot to decide the next president. Mr Rafsanjani's camp says the choice is between a pragmatist who believes in dialogue with the west and private enterprise, and a hard-line xenophobe who dislikes foreign investment. Mr Ahmadi-Nejad's strategy is to portray himself as a "Man of the People" - a sharp contrast to the life style Mr Rafsanjani and his family are alleged to lead. Mr Ahmadi-Nejad's supporters say he is a "fundamentalist", a man true to the egalitarianism of Iran's the 1979 Islamic Revolution. . . . Mr Ahmadi-Nejad's supporters . . . . emphasise that Mr Ahmadi-Nejad's sober attitude to running city hall is a model for running Iran. The atmosphere is focused - and clearly Islamic. There is calligraphy on the walls and women staff wear chadors, the head-to-toe covering. . . . With the revolution, Mr Ahmadi-Nejad joined the Basij, an Islamic militia, and worked as an engineer in the 1980-88 war with Iraq. His administrative talents led to posts in the west and north-west until, in the late 1990s he became governor-general of the northern province of Ardabil. Like many, he was frustrated at what he saw as weakening commitment to the revolution's ideals. In the run-up to Tehran's 2003 municipal elections, a group of fundamentalists formed Abadgaran ('Developers'), a list to challenge a council paralysed by in-fighting and corruption allegations. The poll ended a run of reformist victories in Iran. In 2004 fundamentalists nationwide took a similar approach to Abadgaran and won control of parliament after the disqualification of many reformist candidates. 9:23:58 AM    comment []

BNA News excerpts: MARYLAND COURT HEARS INTERNET ANONYMITY CASE A case making its way through the Maryland courts may determine how far companies can go to track down consumers who have written scathing comments about them on Web sites. In Forensic Advisors v. Matrixx Initiatives, now before the Maryland Court of Special Appeals, a pharmaceutical company is attempting to force a newsletter publisher to disclose his subscriber list. REGULATOR LAUNCHES INVESTIGATION INTO CREDIT CARD DATA LOSS Federal banking regulators said yesterday that they had started an investigation into CardSystems Solutions, the payment processor where a security breach has put millions of American cardholders at risk for fraud. The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, an interagency group of the five federal banking regulators, said the investigation began last week and is expected to take two to four weeks. ANTIGUA PUTS MONEY ON UK IN ONLINE GAMBLING BATTLE The Caribbean island state of Antigua and Barbuda is looking at strategic alliances with UK companies to boost its online gambling industry, as it combats a clampdown from US authorities who consider Internet betting to be illegal. New gambling laws in the UK were passed recently to regulate the booming Internet gaming industry. IRAN'S INTERNET CENSORSHIP AMONG STRICTEST IN THE WORLD The university-based OpenNet Initiative has released "Internet Filtering in Iran", a report that documents the degree and extent to which the Iranian government controls the information environment in which its citizens live, including Web sites, blogs, email, and online discussion forums. ONI's analysis finds that Iran's Internet filtering system is one of the world's most substantial censorship regimes. Coverage 9:23:53 AM    comment []

CNET is celebrating its tenth anniversary. In e-mail, I was just reminded of two of the earliest CNET columns. practicing deceit on a tangled Web (Douglas Rushkoff, 10/7/96) I've been feeling nostalgic lately. I miss the pre-World Wide Web Internet: the bulletin board conferences, chat rooms, text-only Usenet groups; the 1,200-baud-is- fast-enough situation that formed the fledgling virtual community. Today, as I visit the Web and click through its colorful pages, I find myself filled with a sense of loss. I go back to my old stomping grounds--the ancient newsgroups and IRC chats of the early days--and find them largely abandoned. Yet these are the places carrying what may be left of the Internet's soul. The promise of the Internet was manifold: self-expression, virtual community, and world peace...remember? The joy of going online was--and still can be--conversation. Whether in real-time chat rooms or posted discussion boards, contact was the hunger driving the expansion of the Net: communication with other people, exchange of ideas, and formation of new communities created in cyberspace. . . . Individuals and small collectives can certainly produce their own Web pages. In this sense, the Web provides a forum for self-publishing that TV and print, with their more expensive distribution channels, don't. But publishing--even self-publishing--is not the same as community. No, the Web, for all its graphical and navigational advantages over ftp and Gopher searches, has sidetracked us from some of the more culturally profound experiences available online. While it doesn't take any real space away from those who would choose conversation, its flashy graphics and new technology effectively drain our passion for participatory forums by seducing us back into passive absorption. Dear Netscape, part II: nice going! (Rafe Needelman, 10/22/96) Netscape is taking the fight beyond the browser and towards company networking (intranets) and the way people work together--not just the way they browse public information on the Web. A lot of people have complained that Netscape appears to be ceding the Internet browser battle to Microsoft, but after seeing what Netscape is up to, I no longer think this is true. What's good in a corporate workgroup, as it turns out, can also be good for the home Internet surfer. The cornerstone of Netscape's strategy is Netscape Communicator, a suite of Internet applications that includes Navigator 4.0. Navigator 4.0 has a bunch of cool new features that will help the browser rate more highly in reviews, no doubt. More on that in a minute. To my mind, the real news is that the cornerstone of Communicator is not the browser, but the radically new Netscape email client, Messenger. This dramatic shift is appropriate given Netscape's renewed corporate focus. Getting people talking to each other, after all, is what makes businesses work. Messenger integrates several forms of communication into one interface: email (of course); Internet newsgroups; and the Collabra Share group conferencing program (finally). The email program supports full HTML editing, and has a great address book. The address book, in fact, works across all the Communicator modules, including the Conference module (Web phone and whiteboard). 8:23:44 AM    comment []

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