Tuesday, May 16

The SEC fined AOL US$3.5 million for accounting improprieties dating back to 1995 and '96. AOL wrote off $385 million in advertising costs - primarily several landfills worth of AOL diskettes - all at once, allowing it to show a profit for many quarters while dumping its losses into one bad quarter.

Apple demoed Mac OS X at the World Wide Developers Conference, but announced that the new OS won't ship with new Macs until first quarter, 2001.

Jupiter Communications expects commercial email -including spam as well as opt-in email - to increase 40-fold in the next five years.

A new study of web page links looks at the interconnectedness of the web.

Findings of the web page linking study
30%	-	Core pages: highly interconnected, and often linked to
24%	-	Obscure pages with links to the core, but no links from the core
24%	-	Destination pages with links from the core, but no links to the core
22%	-	No links to or from the core

Wireless

Mike Banahan has a fascinating, shot-from-the-hip account of how he WAP-enabled the UK Geographic Search Engine, a place where UK residents can use their cell phones to find the closest pub, curry houses and hotels. PHP enthusiasts should definitely read it for its description of the site's architecture.

The WAP Directory has links to hundreds of WAP-enabled web sites. WAP.COM has even more. WAP WAP WAP. WAP.

Salon interviews Colly Myers, CEO of Symbian, the company that makes the EPOC OS for the Psion and now cell phones.

Andrew Gore of Macworld describes his wireless, AirPort-based home network. (WAP)

Verizon Wireless lost about 16,000 customers' voicemail during an upgrade. Maybe that's why some people say that verizonreallysucks.com.

Computer security and privacy

New threat to your online privacy: the company you work for can file a subpoena to have your anonymous identity revealed in an online forum. The subpoena needs very little justification, and a charge of defamation is probably enough. WAP?

In the wake of the Love Bug worm, next week Microsoft will release a patch to close some security holes in Outlook. The patch will prevent users from opening files containing executable code, and will pop up an alert when a program tries to access Outlook's address book.

IP-based telephony may create new security holes in corporate networks. No, wait. Cell phones. That's it. Cell phone may create new security holes. Oh, and PDAs are about to get hit with a bunch of viruses. WAP!

Mel Beckman of Macworld reviews Doorstop Personal, a firewall for Macintosh.

CERT has issued an advisory that Netscape's SSL authentication procedures contain a flaw that allows DNS spoofing. Netscape versions 4.72, 4.61 and 4.07 are known to be affected, and other versions may be as well. Upgrading to version 4.73 fixes the problem. (Originally posted on 56K.COM on Saturday as a weekend update.)

---

Friday, May 19

AOL's AOL@School program provides free Internet access and kid-safe content to K-12 schools. It's also likely to build brand loyalty in Generation I.

The US House of Representatives has passed a bill pre-empting per-minute Internet access fees. So much for the fabled modem tax. The one exclusion is the bill is a provision that would allow for per-minute fees for voice-related telephony. The exclusion was granted at the behest of the telephone industry, who views IP telephony as a threat. Neil Strother of ZDNet News looks at the growth potential of cable telephony.

The Department of Justice rejected Microsoft's proposal to change its business practices.

Covad Communications won $27.2 million from Pacific Bell in arbitrage. The arbitrators agreed with Covad's claims that Pacific Bell had failed to meet the provisions of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 in providing timely line sharing for DSL service.

Dot-comeuppance

British sportswear retailer boo.com is going out of business. The clothing giant started life in November with US$120 million.

PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that one in four UK net companies will run out of cash in six months, and most will run out of money in 15 months.

Other recent dot-com failures include Nickelodeon's Red Rocket, Craftshop.com and Violet.com.

Wireless

Yahoo! is pushing wireless as a key part of its growth and internationalization plans.

AT&T is going to give away wireless web access to lure new customers to its mobile phone service.

Computer security and privacy

Friendly, smiling, funny backdoor security hole: Clippy and Einstein and the rest of the Microsoft Assistant gang put a pretty face on bad code. Code in Microsoft Office 2000 marked "safe for scripting" allows an attacker to use the Office Assistant to copy files on the computer.

ZDNet explains the recent Netscape Communicator SSL flaw.

A Java security hole that was patched in IE 3 for the Mac has re-surfaced in IE 5.0 for the Mac.

Your mother's maiden name? A commonly-used password reminder that's now available on many genealogy web sites, says a US congressman.

Love Bug

A new polymorphic Love Bug variant has been released. The new version changes the file name that gets sent, addresses itself to every person in Outlook's address book, and deletes all files regardless of extension.

The General Accounting Office found that eight out of 20 federal agencies that it surveyed had email outages of more than a day due to the Love Bug worm.

Previous week