The Tomorrow Weblog

The Tech Year So Far
by Dan Gillmor, San Jose Mercury News
Google, Oracle, Mars, voting.

They're Not Worthy
by Lawrence Lessig, Wired News
Why extend the copyright on works that no longer have commercial value?

Cities Should Control Their Wi-Fi Fates
by Carol Ellison, eWeek
Pennsylvania has given Big Broadband too much control over municipal wireless installations. Other states should not repeat the error.

Why The Web Is Often Woeful
by Bill Thompson, BBC News
Too much of today's wired world is based on old computer science and technical compromises that are no longer necessary.

'05: Think Hot Zones, Hybrids And VoIP
by San Jose Mercury News

The BitTorrent Effect
by Clive Thompson, Wired News
Movie studios hate it. File-swappers love it. Bram Cohen's blazing-fast P2P software has turned the Internet into a universal TiVo. For free video-on-demand, just click here.

Go Ahead, Just Try To Disappear
by David Colker, Los Angeles Times
Global positioning technology on mobile phones and other devices can track errant workers, teens or even pets. The price is privacy.

Despite Wal-Mart's Edict, Radio Tags Will Take Time
by Barnaby J. Feder, New York Times
Wal-Mart's experience so far has served as a reminder that creating the future is not all that easy.

The Year Search Became Personal
by Alfred Hermida, BBC News
There is no shortage of companies vying for the loyalty of web searchers, offering a wealth of different services and tools to help you find what you want.

E-Mail Doesn't Take A Holiday
by Joyce Cohen, New York Times
However tough it is to return from vacation, it's tougher still to return to an e-mail in-box filled with hundreds, or even thousands, of messages that have piled up in your absence.

Notebooks To Slim Down In New Year
by John G. Spooner, CNET News.com

What Bloggers Can Learn Four Journalists
by Steve Outing, Poynter
Bloggers could better protect themselves if they took a few pages out of the reporter's notebook.

Mashboxx Aims To Make File Sharing Legit
by David McGuire, Washington Post
The big difference is that Mashboxx will be the first peer-to-peer network to use SnoCap, the music-licensing service founded in 2002.

The Electronic Library
by New York Times
There are some serious concerns. One is about copyright. Another is the well-being of the books themselves.

Cellphones In Flight: The Story Is Data, Not Chatter
by Joe Sharkey, New York Times
"The real interest and opportunities lie in using our mobile phones or BlackBerrys for text messaging, e-mail and even the Internet."

Google Patches Desktop Search Flaw
by Ryan Naraine, eWeek

The Friendster Of Photo Sites
by Katharine Mieszkowski, Salon
On the photo-sharing site Flickr, instant and unlikely communities spring up around a wild universe of images, from cats and grocery day to giving birth.

Google's Two Revolutions
by Steven Levy, Newsweek
The goal is to have everything at your fingertips, instantly available to anyone who wants to see it.

Rice University Computer Scientists Find A Flaw In Google's New Desktop Search Program
by John Markoff, New York Times
THe glitch is what computer scientists call a composition flaw — a security weakness that emerges when separate components interact.

Small Company Has Big Peer-To-Peer Dreams
by Michael Hill, Associated Press

Digitized And Brought To Life
by Leslie Walker, Washington Post
New imaging allows miracles detailed and deeply personal.

The War Against Retail Return Abuses
by Evan Schuman, eWeek
Using databases to prevent return abuses pits a U.S. Senator against a database vendor, with national retailers caught in the middle.

Questions And Praise For Google Web Library
by Felicia R. Lee, New York Times

Airborne Cell Phones? No Way!
by Reuters
Potential of scores of passengers talking on mobile phones during a lengthy flight has many travelers worried that their last quiet haven from such conversations will evaporate.

Search Spotlight Pans To Video
by Matt Hicks, eWeek
After years of taking a back seat to easier-to-crawl HTML pages, multimedia files are beginning to gain respect among search engines.

What's Next For Google
by Charles H. Ferguson, MIT Technology Review

Flexible Plastic Book Scanner
by Gizmodo
This will allow archivers to get into the cracks of old and fragile books without cutting apart the spine.

Ten Years Later, The Web Gets A Blueprint
by Paul Festa, CNET News.com
Celebrating its 10th anniversary this month, the Web's leading standards group published what it called a seminal document on first principles.

Desktop Search New Target For Viruses?
by Munir Kotadia, CNET News.com
Security experts are warning that virus writers could use new desktop search tools to make their malicious software more efficient.

Mini Drive Survives School Of Hard Knocks
by Michael Kanellos, CNET News.com
Finally, a miniature hard drive you can drop on the sidewalk.

The Year Shoppers Left The Mall Behind
by Don Oldenburg, Washington Post

Google Adds Major Libraries To Its Database
by Stephen Olsen, CNET News.com
Google will expand its ability for searching books by working with Stanford and Harvard Universities, among others, to digitize out-of-print and copyrighted works.

Britons Growing 'Digitally Obese'
by BBC News
Gadget lovers are so hungry for digital data many are carrying the equivalent of 10 trucks full of paper in "weight".

Ellison's Deja Vu Moment
by Charles Cooper, CNET News.com
Keeping the best and the brightest now becomes Ellison's top priority.

What's Next For Dan Gillmor
by Oh Yeon Ho, Jean K. Min, Kang In Kyu, Todd Thacker, OhmyNews
The venerable tech writer talks about his plans to leave old media for a new media venture.

M.I.T. Technology Review Adopts More Serious Tone
by Victoria Shannon, New York Times
Now Technology Review, which was introduced in 1899 with such titillating headlines as "The Function of the Laboratory" and "Applied Science and the University," is getting a makeover with help from a refugee of the latest tech bubble.

The Gadget Gap: Why Does All The Cool Stuff Come Out In Asia First?
by Jeff Yang, San Franciso Chronicle
Call it the gadget gap or the device deficit — call it what you will, as long as you recognize that, where cool high-tech stuff is concerned, America is light-years behind its counterparts in the Far East.

The Shlemiel Way Of Software
by Scott Rosenberg, Salon
Author Joel Spolsky talks about what Microsoft has in common with his grandparents and what Isaac Bashevis Singer has to do with code-generating schemes.

Password Imperfect
by Robert Lemos, CNET News.com
For years, Microsoft has hammered away at the security flaws in its desktop operating system. Now the company is looking to plug another security hole: weak passwords.

The Call To Voice
by Eric S. Brown, MIT Technology Review
Voice over IP may be built upon broadband, but it doesn't need to follow the same anti-competitive path. In fact, the VoIP business could remain wild and wooly (and cheap).

What's Wrong With RSS Is Also What's Right With It
by David Berlind, ZDNet
This story is about us users just trying to get something to work.

Epson Eyes Electronic Paper
by Paul Kallender, IDG News Service

Young Consumers Pose Tech Challenges For Retailers
by Evan Schuman, eWeek
Running the technology operations for a billion-dollar retail clothing chain is difficult enough during the holidays, let alone if most of your customers are too young to get their own credit cards, or even drive.

A Library And Cinema In Your Pocket
by Doreen Carvajal, New York Times
The increasing power of cellphones is fast shaping innovative forms of compact culture: micro-lit, phone soap operas and made-for-mobile dramas that can be absorbed in less time than it takes to flick through a book introduction.

Beating China's Google Censors
by Red Herring
While activists complain, entrepreneurs act.

Spyware On My Machine? So What?
by Michelle Delio, Wired News
Not all web surfers think spyware is a problem. Some say the snoopy software is a fair trade-off for free applications, even with the intrusion into their computers and lives.

Beijing Loves The Web Until The Web Talks Back
by Tom Zeller Jr., New York Times
The rise of China's Internet hinted at more freedoms, but it also promised the govenment a new and effective means of monitoring its citizens.

Bootstrapping The Semantic Web
by Jon Udell, InfoWorld
Tim Berners-Lee's quest to give the Web meaning receives aid from unexpected quarters.

Generation Raised With Internet Grows Up
by Martha Irvine, Associated Press

College Life 2.0
by Alexander Rafael and Emily Anderson, Newsweek
The rapidly accelerating pace of technological innovation has transformed life on college campuses from one generation to the next. Universities in 2005 will operate in a radically different way than they did just five years ago.

False Promises About Ending Spam
by Charles Cooper, CNET News.com
When it comes to combating the spam pandemic, there's the appearance and there's the reality.

Broadband Challenges TV Viewing
by BBC News
The number of Europeans with broadband has exploded over the past 12 months, with the web eating into TV viewing habits, research suggests.

The Search For Science
by Deborah Asbrand, MIT Technology Review
Google's new search service will open not just the world of scientific research but also the enclave of pricey journals.

Fight For Public Domain Goes On
by Katie Dean, Wired News
Archivists who want to digitize "orphan works" — books, movies and films that are no longer commercially viable but remain under copyright — lose a court battle. But they vow to continue the war to rebalance copyright law.

At Museums, Computers Get Creative
by Katie Hafner, New York Times
Interactive exhibits have been a mainstay in museums for more than three decades, seen as a way of improving learning by increasing vistor involvement. But until recently, computers were seldom used creatively.

Mozilla Previews E-Mail Program
by Paul Festa, CNET News.com
Weeks after the successful launch of its Firefox browser, Mozilla released an e-mail application in another salvo on Microsoft's home turf.

Trust Your Employees, Says Microsoft
by Lucy Sherriff, The Register
British managers need to learn to trust their staff if the UK is to realise the full potential benefits of mobile and flexible working.

Firefox Is The Success Story In Tech Right Now
by Scott Granneman, Unofficial Microsoft Weblog