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Edupage, 22 November 1998. Edupage, a summary of news about
information technology, is provided three times a week as a service
of EDUCAUSE, an international nonprofit association dedicated to
transforming higher education through information technologies.
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TOP STORIES
Judge Blocks Child Online Protection Act
E-Stamps On The Way
Japan To Microsoft: Unbundle Your Software
Singapore Wants A Leading Role In Internet Commerce
ALSO
Premium ISPs On The Rise
FCC Decides On 5% Fees For Digital Broadcasters
Internet Snafu Leaves Commissioners Red-Faced
Honorary Subscriber: Harlow Shapley
JUDGE BLOCKS CHILD ONLINE PROTECTION ACT
A federal judge Thursday issued a temporary restraining order, delaying the
U.S. Justice Department from enforcing the Child Online Protection Act until
at least Dec. 4. The injunction came in response to a lawsuit filed by the
American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Privacy Information Center
and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as publishers like Time
Warner and the New York Times. The law requires commercial Web sites to
ensure that they are not transmitting material that could be "harmful to
minors." Sites requiring a credit card for access or that use an online
age-verification service would be exempt. The plaintiffs say the law is too
broad and infringes on free speech rights. (TechWeb 29 Nov 98)
E-STAMPS ON THE WAY
E-Stamp Internet Postage has struck deals with America Online, CompuServe
and Digital City to offer online postage stamp service to their members.
E-Stamp offers a technology that allows Internet users to purchase postage
online and print "digital stamps" on envelopes, labels, or directly onto a
document, using a standard printer. The U.S. Postal Service has approved
the E-Stamp system for test markets, and the company plans to roll out its
service nationwide next year. (Investor's Business Daily 20 Nov 98)
JAPAN TO MICROSOFT: UNBUNDLE YOUR SOFTWARE
Japan's Fair Trade Commission has ruled that Microsoft has engaged in unfair
business practices, in violation of that country's anti-monopoly laws, by
bundling word processing and spreadsheet software that was pre-installed in
personal computers. Microsoft does not believe it violated any laws, and
says it has already stopped the practices cited by the FTC. (Associated
Press 20 Nov 98)
SINGAPORE WANTS A LEADING ROLE IN INTERNET COMMERCE
The government of Singapore has a goal of boosting transaction revenues over
the Internet from $150 million this year to $3 billion in 2002, and wants to
help companies in the U.S. and elsewhere establish and manage
Internet-related sales to the region. The plan is showing signs of success,
and Compaq and Hewlett-Packard have already set up centers in Singapore for
the purpose of dealing with electronic commerce. (Associated Press 19 Nov 98)
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PREMIUM ISPs ON THE RISE
A new class of Internet service provider is emerging, variously termed
premium, enterprise-class or, sometimes, super ISP. The new operations
promise speedy, traffic-free Internet connections for companies that depend
on industrial-strength Internet connections for conducting e-commerce or
binding together wide area networks. In addition to avoiding the gridlock
of the "people's" Internet, the premium ISPs offer specialized services,
including hosting Web sites, maintaining dedicated data centers for Web
sites and intranets, and providing an extra degree of security and network
reliability not available from plain-vanilla ISPs. Although the super ISPs
use the same backbone fiber connections as everyone else, they pay premium
rates for special routing arrangements that keep their data on the fastest
links. "It's how the ISP makes use of the available capacity through
sophisticated routing arrangements that really establishes the speed and
reliability of the network," says a senior VP for Concentric Network Corp.,
a premium ISP. (CIO 15 Nov 98)
FCC DECIDES ON 5% FEES FOR DIGITAL BROADCASTERS
The Federal Communications Commission has ruled that digital broadcasters
should pay the government 5% of their gross revenues for new pay-TV services
such as all-movie channels or stock quotations. That percentage, which the
FCC chose on the theory that it represents what the government would
received if spectrum for such services had been auctioned off, pleased
neither the broadcast industry nor consumer advocates. The National
Association of Broadcasters says the figure is too high, and will
effectively discourage broadcasters from offering the kind of programming
and data delivery that cable and others offer. Consumer advocates argue
that the figure is too low, and won't represent fair compensation to the
public for the great value given to broadcasters awarded digital channels.
(USA Today 20 Nov 98)
INTERNET SNAFU LEAVES COMMISSIONERS RED-FACED
Web surfers who clicked on the Boynton Beach (Fla.) Web site this past week
were surprised by a link that to another site advertising how to make money
by having sex with nurses and other risque fare. The link to www.tit.com
had previously connected to city commissioner James Titcomb's Web site for
James Titcomb Creative Inc., which specializes in marketing and advertising.
Several weeks ago, however, that URL was hijacked by a company calling
itself Tekpro Associates in Yonkers, N.Y. A spokeswoman for Network
Solutions, which handles domain name registrations, said that someone posing
as Titcomb had requested the name be transferred, and that Network Solutions
had complied. Titcomb, who called the theft "piracy" and was threatening to
sue whoever is responsible, says he chose his URL because "I'm living in a
society that chooses to make fun of the sexual innuendoes associated with my
last name," and that his site generates about 12,000 visits a month.
(Orlando Sun-Sentinel 20 Nov 98)
HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: HARLOW SHAPLEY
Today's Honorary Subscriber Harlow Shapley (1885 - 1972), one of the
greatest American astronomers of this century. It's a Wide, Wide, Wide
Universe out there. For details, see the end of today's Edupage.
Edupage is written by John Gehl (gehl@educause.edu) and Suzanne Douglas
(douglas@educause.edu). Telephone: 770-590-1017
Technical support for distributing Edupage is provided by Information
Technology Services at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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UPCOMING EDUCAUSE CONFERENCES:
CAUSE98, "The Networked Academy," December 8-11, 1998, Seattle,
Washington. Steve Jobs, Charles Garfield, and Molly Broad are the featured
speakers. See http://www.educause.edu/conference/c98/c98.html
Institutional Opportunities for Advanced Networking, January 7-9, 1999,
Austin Texas. This is a workshop for information technology and policy
professionals in higher education on how best to prepare the broader higher
ed community for the advanced networking technology, lessons, and
opportunities presented by the Internet2 and NGI initiatives.
http://www.educause.edu/netatedu/contents/events/jan99/
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HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: HARLOW SHAPLEY
Today's Honorary Subscriber is Harlow Shapley (1885 - 1972), one of the
great astronomers of this century. Shapley did his undergraduate degree at
the University of Missouri and his doctorate at Princeton, and was at the
Mt. Wilson observatory in California from 1914 to 1921 and at the Harvard
College observatory (as its director) from 1921 to 1952. While still at Mt.
Wilson he was able to determine that the Milky Way galaxy is far larger than
generally believed and centered thousands of light years away in the
direction of Sagittarius. Z. Kopal wrote of Shapley in the journal "Nature":
"Harlow Shapley was an outstanding man of his time -- astronomer,
educator, author, orator, as well as man of affairs. Some of his gifts,
displayed prominently in the course of his life, may gradually fall in
oblivion as those of us who knew him in his prime may no longer be here to
remember; and dust may settle on some of his work, or on many honours
bestowed upon him by his contemporaries. But one title to fame will never
tarnish -- Shapley's discovery of the centre of our Galaxy, and of our
position within it."
Here is a short excerpt from a piece Shapley's "Measuring the Universe":
"The stars in the sky are so hopelessly numerous that we can never
expect to find the distances of even one-thousandth part of them. The best
we can do is to get the distances of special types of stars, or of all the
stars in sample regions, or of objects in peculiar situations in the sky.
Putting together the material which we thus collect, we hope to piece
together slowly and uncertainly a rough picture of the form and dimensions
of the universe. It will be difficult to get the exact boundaries; and
behind the dark cosmic nebulae, through which starlight does not pass, there
will always remain extensive unexplored regions. The dark nebulae that hide
these mysteries of the Milky Way will not dissolve or move out of the way in
our time. The lives of astronomers, or even of civilizations, are far too
short compared with the cosmic processes. We cannot wait to get all the
material about the distribution of stars.
"From the scanty material now on hand, we have in recent years drawn up
the familiar picture of a flattened Galaxy composed of stars, nebulae, and
star clouds. The whole is disc-shaped like a watch. The ordinary surveys,
however, merely permit the exploration of the neighborhood of the Sun. It
is only since the new methods were introduced and developed -- those methods
involving candle power, the spectra of stars, and the Cepheid variables --
that we have been able to explore deeply into the watch-shaped Galaxy. And
then we find that the Sun and the planets are far from the center. It
probably takes light more than fifty thousand years to travel from the
center of the Galaxy to the region out toward one edge, where the Sun and
our naked-eye stars are found."
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EDUCAUSE, an international nonprofit association dedicated to transforming
higher education through information technologies
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