Tuesday, February 29

Today is leap year. The rule for leap year is that it occurs every four years, but not in years divisible by 100 (such as 1900), unless they are also divisible by 400 (such as 2000). Programs that aren't Y2K compliant will think the year is 1900 and that today is March 1. The Japanese weather service has had several problems because of leap year and Y2K, while Hong Kong reports no problems. Overall, Reuters reports few problems.

Lycos is launching a free ISP service to compete with AltaVista and Yahoo. As with AltaVista, 1stUp will provide the backend services, with Lycos providing the marketing.

Cable modems and DSL

Consumer groups continue to protest the AOL-Time Warner merger and AT&T-MediaOne mergers, noting that AOL and AT&T both claimed open cable access was necessary for competition, but then changed their position once they announced plans to merge with major cable companies.

Update: AOL and Time Warner will unveil plans today to provide open access to their cable networks.

Cable modem company Road Runner had a server outage that has interrupted email delivery in Kansas and Ohio. The problem began on Saturday and was resolved Monday afternoon.

Cable modem company ExciteAtHome is considering expanding into DSL service in areas where cable modems either aren't available or belong to another cable company.

Jim Thompson at ISP Planet is dubious about free DSL.

Wireless

PC Magazine has reviews of eight web-enabled mobile phones.

In separate deals, AOL and Microsoft are planning wireless deals with cell and pager companies to provide wireless email and Internet access.

EarthLink customers will soon be able to access their EarthLink email and personal start pages through web-enabled Sprint PCS phones. The service may be available as soon as second quarter of this year.

Palm's upcoming IPO could lead to a market capitalization greater than its parent company, 3Com. 3Com's stock is benefiting, with its best share price ever. Palm's latest alliance is with Sun.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman William Kennard has proposed a wireless spectrum exchange for companies buying and selling unused licenses for wireless transmission.

Mobile commerce - or m-commerce - will require a secure means of financial transactions, and smart cards may be a better choice than credit cards.

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Friday, March 3

DSP maker Texas Instruments expects a fivefold increase in orders for cable modem chips this quarter.

Computers.com reviews the Palm IIIc. In its IPO yesterday, Palm shares climbed from the issue price of $38 a share to an intraday high of $165 before closing at $95. Shares of parent company 3Com fell 22 per cent.

News.com reports on allegations brought by its content partners that AOL negotiates unfairly. The article also details the astonishing amounts of money companies bring to the table in order to partner with AOL, with Travelocity paying $200 million over five years to provide reservation services on AOL.com, CompuServe , Digital City and Netscape.

Computer security and privacy

FBI agents on Thursday seized the computer of Coolio, a 17-year old New Hampshire boy believed to be the perpetrator of the massive distributed denial of service attack on Yahoo! last month. He has admitted to investigators that he was responsible for the attack a few weeks later on rsa.com. His grandiose plans went beyond the world's most popular web site. According to online acquaintances, Coolio wanted to bring down the Internet using zombie computers.

Sendmail.net explains why your email isn't private once discovery begins in a lawsuit. Wired has an even better article on email that comes back to haunt you.

Convicted hacker Kevin Mitnick testified before Congress on Thursday about the potential for computer intrusion in federal agencies.

Microsoft is under fire for implementing a proprietary extension to the open Kerberos authentication standard.

Under pressure from privacy advocates, the FCC and the Michigan attorney general's office, DoubleClick has promised that "until there is agreement between government and industry on privacy standards, we will not link personally identifiable information to anonymous user activity across Web sites." By correlating cookie information with registration information across its huge network of sites, DoubleClick had planned to unmask anonymous surfing and track user surfing and buying patterns.

Wired looks at the generation gap between young and old hackers.

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