Monthly Archives: December 2003

CD-Rom Business Cards. Huh?

I know I may be missing something here, but what is this all about business cards on a CD Rom? Newsweek reports increased sales of these things — either full size or credit card sized and shaped — which people hand out at trade shows: “General consensus in the biz world: why spring for color… Read More »

The Virtual World Gets Surprisingly Lifelike

The Sims Online – an Internet-only world where ordinary folk can take on another persona and interact with other folk virtually — seems to be exhibiting all the signs of the real world, with a twist. Salon carries an article about a Sims community called Alphaville, and some of its citizens, including an academic called… Read More »

The Future Of The Net

Newsweek takes a look (via TechDirt) at a future Internet controlled by corporations and governments through Digital Rights Management, secure chips and micropayments. It’s an interesting article, and makes me ponder some interesting supplementary questions: Are spammers, for example, the enemy of ordinary Internet folk, or virtual Robin Hoods eluding corporate control of the web?… Read More »

The Year Of The Worm

Nothing new in this, but a fascinating summary of this year’s viruses, and a sober reminder of how tricky it’s all getting: F-Secure’s review of 2003 makes for interesting reading. This for example, on how the Slammer worm caused so much network traffic: In theory, there are some 4 billion public IP addresses on the… Read More »

More On Google’s Masterplan

BusinessWeek pick up the theme of Google taking on the world. With the ability to track shipments and airplanes in real time via Google, the search engine keeps eyeballs on its website longer. But “Google is providing this new shipment tracking service even though it doesn’t have a partnership with FedEx. Rather, Google engineers have… Read More »