One of the purposes of this section was to highlight the technological changes which are having a significant impact on society and those which have significant impact on IT managers in running their businesses. As other venues cover daily events and news better and as we are better serving our customers through direct service provision, we are reducing the commitment to keep this section up.

June 2000: ATT WINS ON APPEAL IN PORTLAND. They do not have to provide access to other ISPs to their cable customers.

First Half of 2000: MICROSOFT BREAKUP ORDERED.

NAPSTER SUED BY METALLICA and presented with 350,000 names of people who were violating Metallica's copyrights. The recording industry continues to press their case against Napster.

The I LOVE YOU VIRUS wreaks havoc with email systems worldwide. It was seemingly started by Philippine computer students trying to steal passwords to get free computer time. Flaws and security holes in Microsoft products allowed the virus to spread through MS Outlook users.

12/15/99 WINDOWS 2000 GOES GOLD - RELEASE DATE OF 2/17

12/08/99 CELL PHONE ENCRYPTION BROKEN The A5/1 part of the GSM standards has been broken according to an abstract in a research paper. GSM are the standards which most cell phone companies use, though the A5/1 "protocol" is used only in European countries.

12/04/99 ATT RELENTS AND OFFERS OPEN-ACCESS TO THEIR CABLE so now Seattle will get high speed access. In earlier news, below, it was mentioned how ATT spent billions to gain access to homes by buying cable tv companies throughout the nation and did not want to give up their monopoly of that wire into the homes. Today, however, they have announced an open-access policy so that other ISPs can offer internet service over ATT's cable lines. Specifically, ATT indicated in a letter to the FCC chairman that they had setup a new policy and had signed an agreement with Mindspring.

12/01/99 Y2K SPENDING is expected to total $311 billion, with $97 billion spent in 1999 and $30 billion to be spent in 2000; the balance was spent in 1995-98. This according to a report from IDC.

12/01/99 RECORD SET FOR DOMAIN NAME PURCHASE A Houston Entrepreneur last summer obtained business.com for $150,000 from a British firm. All his friends assured him he had lost his mind. A startup company called ecompanies.com with some powerful players at the helm, bought business.com from him this week for $7.5 million. This tops the $2-3 million Compaq paid to get the altavista.com name from the South American name holder. Of the generic names, drugs.com went for $823,456 last year.

11/23/99 PACBELL HAS MERGED their home and small business internet division with Prodigy. This includes their DSL division. In 3-6 months, PacBell will be marketing such internet services under the Prodigy name. Yeesh. Hope PacBell subscribers fare better than the Prodigy users of late, who in some cases have had email problems for the last 4-6 months.

11/22/99 Today's news had CLASS ACTION LAWSUITS being prepared against Microsoft in the 18 states which allow indirect customers to recover for damages, including treble damages. This because the anti-trust case mentions some pricing strategy for Windows 98 Upgrade, when Microsoft faced choosing prices between $49 and $89 and chose $89. Thus, plaintiffs would say, users have been "harmed" by paying higher prices than they would have in a competitive environment.

11/21/99 Just noticed an ad in today's glossy newspapers ads for a "free" PC. Sign up for 3 years of internet service. You've seen ads similar to this. Yet this one involves a Packard Bell computer, a brand which already announced is going out of business. We wonder if the warranty (or product support) will equal the internet service period.

11/20/99 plagiarism.com is making news allowing professors to submit student's essays and use pattern recognition to detect plagiarism. Site is in use already by many classes, and next quarter all of UC Berkeley's classes will use it. The site developer decided that with dozens of sites available to students for pre-written essays, something had to be done to help the other side. The developer's hot button got hit when he heard of one site soliciting students called Evil House of Cheat.

11/19/99 The baby bells, including PacBell, have been ordered to open up their copper to all other ISPs, via the DSL technology. In a separate action, the Calif. PUC ordered PacBell to lower tariffs for these ISP's DSL from $148 to less than $13. Wow. Advocates applaud the opening up of the "last mile" and the advent of universal fast high-speed connections.

On the other hand, review the ATT cable situation. With their recent acquisitions, ATT has become one of the largest providers of cable (tv) service in the US. As they acquired cable firms, some localities imposed certain restrictions. A notable area is Seattle (home basically of Microsoft), which does not now have high-speed cable internet service. When ATT acquired the cable company in that locale, the locals required that ATT make their cable broadband access available to any other ISP. ATT is fighting this requirement in court, and for now is not going to offer Seattle the high-speed internet service if it requires letting other ISPs in. ATT argues, they have paid billions to gain access to these customer's home, why should they be forced to give their natural advantage over. They also point out that there are competing technologies for high speed access, and so the handling of cable internet by themselves only as the cable franchisee isn’t harmful.

11/18/99 PacBell DSL has an outage that effected all of Southern California. In the morning, the web connectivity was spotty and the outbound email server not always available or forwarding. Then around 11:30am the whole thing went dead. All of Socal.

Windows 2000 has a ship date! February 17, 2000. The Enterprise edition would come in August and Exchange 2000 in May.

Toshiba settled a class-action lawsuit for $1 billion where the defendants had no experience of the claimed product flaw, nor could Toshiba duplicate the supposed error (involving floppy drives on their laptop). This settlement has emboldened the plaintiff's attorneys to sue a whole slew of other companies, including HP and E-machines for some quick easy money.