S E P T 1 9 9 7 A R C H I V E S Exit of a spammer; demise of "The Site" Two departures this week: Spam abatement Although newspapers and magazines have gone gaga for years now hyping the Net and the companies that are trying to profit from it, news that's really important to Internet users still sometimes fails to make headlines. But if you craned your neck and cupped your ears last week, you could almost hear the cheers welling from node to node across the Net as the word spread that Cyber Promotions had been booted offline by its Internet service provider. The news wasn't in your newspaper, but you could find it at Web news sites like News.com. Cyber Promotions, of course, is the most infamous purveyor of junk e-mail -- i.e. spam -- around. Its owner, Sanford Wallace, has proudly adopted his critics' nickname for him ("Spamford"). His Web site, currently out of commission, was always full of witty aphorisms along the lines of "Son of Spam says: Sending an e-mail advertisement isn't first-degree murder!" Well, of course not. But promoting mass mailings of e-mail junk is an extreme nuisance -- and an abuse of both common courtesy and the Net's communal resources. Until recently, Wallace received his Net connection from a company called AGIS that, for its friendliness to junk e-mailers, had earned the label "the premier provider of spam" from Wired News. But apparently Wallace's shenanigans -- which most recently included ripping off art from a Salon article on bulk e-mail and putting it on his home page without permission or credit -- finally drove even AGIS to cut him loose for what the company called "an outstanding security issue." Wallace has lost his Net connection before, and no doubt he'll be back before long -- like it recently said on his home page, "If you burn down our house, we will build a new castle." In the meantime, though, have you noticed any decrease in the volume of useless offers for get-rich-quick schemes clogging your in box? Isn't it great? Site unseen It's official, sort of: "The Site," the joint venture between MSNBC and Ziff Davis, is off the airwaves -- but not offline. "The Site" encompassed TV and Web components from its start, over a year ago, in an ambitious and sometimes innovative attempt to achieve the holy grail of interactive TV -- using existing technology rather than somebody's pipe dream of a set-top box. By TV standards, "The Site" was smart and techno-savvy, though it sometimes erred on the side of blandness in its quest to reach a mass audience. Apparently, that quest failed. MSNBC took the TV show off the air two weeks ago to shift to all-Di, all-the-time coverage -- and though there are talks underway that may bring "The Site" back to finish its current contract through January, the show apparently will not be renewed beyond that point. A notice on "The Site's" site says: "The television show is currently off the air during negotiations, but we're still publishing fresh news and stories on the Web site each day." But how long will MSNBC and Ziff keep "The Site" site going if they've already decided to can the TV part of this Siamese twin? Ziff, now a division of Softbank, has already announced its own plans to build a 24-hour technology news cable channel called ZDTV. So presumably the commercial logic of a Ziff-MSNBC joint effort had evaporated, anyway. But as these companies continue, like CNET before them, to pour their cash into TV coverage of computers, the picture still remains fuzzy. Do people actually want to receive news about digital technology from their old analog TV sets? And will technology advertisers support the delivery of such news -- without utterly corrupting it? Stay tuned. Sept. 25, 1997 -- Scott Rosenberg New York Times newshounds still barking up the wrong tree when a respected newspaper makes a dumb mistake once, you excuse it as carelessness. Twice, and it's a sign of either institutional bias or mad obsession. Back in June, the New York Times ran a lengthy front-page piece headlined "On Frontier of Cyberspace, Data is Money, and a Threat." The story offered a well-researched investigation of incidents of personal harassment that, alas, had nothing to do with cyberspace. This past Monday, astonishingly, the Times pulled an almost identical stunt. The front-page headline read "On Line, High-Tech Sleuths Find Private Facts." The "special report" was labeled "ELECTRONIC EYES: What the Computer Knows." The illustration showed Web pages for three companies that dig up personal information -- social security numbers, credit card purchases, real estate records and the like -- for a fee. I looked at the display for the piece and thought, aha -- the Times realized it goofed in June and sent the same reporter, Nina Bernstein, back to make good on the promise of finding data warfare on the "frontier of cyberspace." No such luck. Once more, the Times has taken a valuable investigation of information abuse and draped it with misleading, overhyped rhetoric about the evils of the online medium. Monday's article begins with a report on some dubious behavior by Texaco: Besieged by suits after a 1992 refinery fire, the company's lawyers hired a private investigator to dig up personal information on the plaintiffs. Did the investigator cruise the Web or haunt AOL chat rooms hoping to overhear incriminating evidence? Of course not. He did what private eyes have been doing for ages: He used expensive commercial databases, electronic surveillance equipment and the most basic old-fashioned scams. The lengthy article meanders along to raise all sorts of valid issues about the way corporations "launder" gray-market information through layers of contractors, or how "cash-strapped governments are selling digitized public records" -- making them easily available through the commercial databases used by private investigators and, uh, journalists at places like the New York Times. But it never makes good on its high-tech angle -- its diagnosis of "the rise of a new kind of information combat, waged with vast computer arsenals of personal data." It talks only briefly about Web sites that offer information for sale -- but these sites mostly serve as online storefronts for information brokers whose businesses and techniques long predate the Internet. If anything, the "information combat" Bernstein recounts is the oldest kind of all -- what's known in the hacker underground as "human engineering." To obtain most kinds of private information today, you don't need to know anything about computers; you just need to have the chutzpah to call up telephone companies and banks, pretend to be someone else and ask for a copy of your last bill. Or know how to plant a wiretap. The "High-Tech Sleuths" article offers plenty of cause for outrage, but not about technology. It's a piece about an out-of-control legal system that allows big companies to harass the people who sue them -- and about a shady private-investigation industry for whom computers serve simply to accelerate time-tested methods of snooping. The story probably should have been headlined "Corporate Sleuths Lie to Gather Private Information." So why did the Times feel it had to hang the "high-tech" label over the investigation? Did that somehow make it sexy, in a "cyber" sort of way? Shouldn't the U.S. "paper of record" be above such nonsense? Oddly, its business section, for the most part, has been. In the past few months, it's the Times' front-page editors who seem most clueless. It's as if, 50 years ago, they'd investigated county courthouses for real-estate fraud -- and headlined the resulting article to highlight the threat of typewriters. Sept. 18, 1997 -- Scott Rosenberg The New Yorker can't keep up with Apple For a long time, the New Yorker left its coverage of the technology business in the hands of Ken "I never met a corporate executive I couldn't canonize" Auletta. So it was with some relief that we noticed John Heilemann's byline on this week's "Letter From Silicon Valley." Heilemann, who has often provided intelligent coverage of digital-age news from Washington for Wired, is unlikely to write the kind of adulatory puff piece that has been Auletta's specialty. And indeed this "Letter," devoted to Steve Jobs and the Apple-Microsoft deal he engineered last month, is a solid piece of work, neither idolizing nor smearing its subject. It gives Jobs credit for enormous corporate savvy in engineering a "reverse takeover of Apple" straight out of the hands of former CEO Gil Amelio (whom, Heilemann reports, Jobs was referring to as "bozo" and "moron" behind his back). But it suggests that what Jobs has achieved so far in turning Apple around has been a triumph of perception over reality, and points out -- as few commentators in the mainstream press did -- that the much-ballyhooed $150 million deal with Microsoft will probably wind up benefiting Microsoft a lot more than Apple. Heilemann talked to Amelio and former CEO John Sculley, along with other former Apple insiders like Jean-Louis Gassée and Heidi Roizen. He did his homework and got the story right -- up to a point. The trouble is, by the time Heilemann's piece appeared, the saga of Apple and Jobs had entered a whole new phase. Apple concluded a murky, complex feud with the most successful producer of Mac clones, Power Computing, by buying the company's Macintosh business for $100 million -- effectively squashing the Mac clone market. Power Computing had become popular with hard-core Mac devotees: The feisty company's over-the-top Mac advocacy appealed to them, but more importantly, Power was beating Apple to the punch, shipping faster, more powerful Mac computers before the lumbering Apple could. The cloners' competition with Apple not only kept Apple on its toes, it also served as a guarantee to Mac users that their operating-system platform might have a life above and beyond the vicissitudes of Apple Computer, Inc. Apple says the cloners were stealing its profits, and that it was subsidizing each clone computer purchased. Observers like the newsletter TidBits pointed out the fallacies in such logic: "The company insists that licensing was unprofitable, which is clearly the case, but rather than face the competitive market head on, they're ending the game so they can declare themselves the winners ... Apple is only subsidizing Mac OS licensees in that clone sales earn less for the company than Apple hardware sales, but there is no guarantee that the inability to purchase a Mac OS clone will return a customer to Apple: There are reasons why those customers left in the first place." Apple's Jobs-inspired about-face on cloning seems to have accomplished what no amount of decade-long boardroom infighting ever managed: It has alienated the affections of Mac loyalists. As news of the Power Computing buyout broke last week, Mac-addict sites across the Web wrote about their sense of betrayal. Today, for the first time, loving the Mac seems to mean distrusting and disliking the company that invented it. Far more than the Microsoft deal, the Power Computing purchase is the story that will shape the fate of the Mac -- and perhaps of Apple. Maybe Steve Jobs will extricate Apple from this wreckage and produce some great new products that will save it. More likely, we'll look back and see the cloning crackdown as the point of no return in the Mac's downward spiral. And if Mac users defect, who does Jobs think will buy Apple's next-generation Rhapsody system? Whatever happens, the New Yorker's readers have been left in the dark. Heilemann's piece doesn't discuss the critical decisions on licensing the Mac operating system to other companies; it doesn't mention "clones" once. Plainly, it's hard for a weekly magazine to keep up with the new-deal-an-hour technology business (although the New Yorker's stop-on-a-dime coverage of Princess Diana proved that the magazine can move plenty fast when it wants to). But it's also true that personality-driven magazine journalism often focuses so intensely on the ups and downs of individual leaders like Jobs that it misses the big story. If the New Yorker really wants to keep up with Silicon Valley, it may have to drop that pokey "Letter From ..." format and start using e-mail. Sept. 11, 1997 -- Scott Rosenberg Look, ma, no seams! Remember the hype-saturated roll-out of Windows 95? Batten down your mouse -- Microsoft is ramping up for the release of Windows 98 this coming winter. Last time, the theme song was the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up." This time, the phrase that will be drummed into our skulls -- from ads to press releases to fawning media coverage -- is a little more leaden: Can you hum "seamless integration"? Beta-test versions of Windows 98, the operating system formerly known as Memphis, are now being reviewed in the trade magazines, and it turns out there aren't a huge number of sexy innovations on tap. By far the biggest carrot Microsoft is dangling before buyers is the notion of "seamless integration of the Web into the operating system." This means that you'll be able to use the familiar interface of your Web browser -- er, Microsoft's Web browser, Internet Explorer 4.0 -- not only to visit your favorite sites but to poke around the contents of your own hard disk. Meanwhile, Internet-delivered content will be spilling out all over your desktop thanks to the new "push technology" components of the Microsoft browser. Now, anything "seamless" is supposed to be good stuff in the world of software marketing. And you can expect the wonders of "seamless integration" to be touted as a small miracle in coming months. The Sept. 9 issue of PC Magazine, for instance, heralds the arrival of "your personal Internet" thanks to "the browser's integration into the Windows desktop," and notes that "Windows now looks more like the Internet, and vice versa." Still, the "We're geeky and we love it!" Ziff-Davis flagship didn't go nearly as gaga over this feature as the mainstream media are likely to as Windows 98 hits the shelves. So here are some questions that nobody seems to be asking -- and that you ought to keep in mind as the latest Microsoft juggernaut lumbers forth from Redmond: Why would you want to integrate the Web with your desktop -- seamlessly or otherwise? Until now most of us have quite fully enjoyed Web sites that remained respectfully inside the browser window. It's even reasonably useful to know that what's inside the browser is usually "stuff from the Web" and what's on your desktop is usually "stuff from my computer." What do users gain by the blurring of these lines? Or could it be that the value isn't to users at all, but to the Net marketing industry, which chafes at the limitations of the "old" Web -- where the user is in control -- and aches to make the Web more of a broadcast-style medium? If you thought flashing ads on Web sites were annoying, wait till the Web and your operating system are "seamlessly integrated" and watch the pulsating promotional crud spill out over your desktop. "Seamless integration" has value for Microsoft itself, that's for sure: That's not just any browser that is turning into the operating system's primary interface -- it's Bill's. The user who believes that "seamless integration" will change his life is a user who trashes his old copy of Netscape and adopts Internet Explorer as his primary Web tool. So "seamless integration" solves some problems for marketers and for Microsoft. Does it offer any benefits to us? Well, Microsoft is going to argue that since most users are now familiar with the way a Web browser works, the browser will be an easier interface for novices to use in finding stuff on their own computers. And that might be true. But if it is true, it's an admission of awful truth for Microsoft: It's saying, "After all these years and versions of Windows we still haven't figured out how to make personal computing easy enough for an intelligent person to learn easily." And of course it turns out that to make real use of "seamless integration" -- if you want to create "Web views" of your own files and annotate them with useful notes -- you have to create them as Web pages with an HTML editor. So rather than making navigating your own hard disk as easy as navigating the Web, it sounds like Microsoft will be expecting Windows 98 users to become personal Web developers before they can take full advantage of the system's features. So much for "seamless." Sept. 4, 1997 -- Scott Rosenberg ARCHIVES: FEBRUARY | MARCH | APRIL | MAY | JUNE | JULY | AUGUST