Rough Drafts

Microsoft is discovering that, in addition to the annoyance of Justice department anti-trust lawsuits, there’s yet another downside to tightly integrating their browser and mail client into the Windows operating system: Email viruses. A new email-borne virus, nicknamed “Bubbleboy,” has been found —

Egregious opt-out-only marketing from AOL: This message from AOL was forwarded to me by Chris Sandlund. Apparently, you can refuse pop-up advertisements — but you need to keep repeating your refusal if you want it to stick. Chris writes that he’s been an AOL user since 1992, but he’s losing patience

RealNetworks announced this week that it’s really, really sorry about its recent invasions of customers’ privacy — and that it’s working with privacy guarantor TRUSTe to implement a five-point privacy plan. The plan includes a third-party audit, appointing a “privacy officer” to RealNetworks’ staff,

From body parts to boyfriends, it seems there’s nothing you can’t find for sale on a Web auction these days. The latest odd lot is a collection of brightly-colored fiberglass cows, erstwhile decorations on the streets of Chicago, and now up on the auction block at Metromix.com. But you better hurry

AOL is being sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act by nine blind people who charge that the online service, as a public accommodation, is not sufficiently accessible to the blind. The AOL client software, they charge, doesn’t work well with the screen-reader programs used by many blind peop

Maybe you’re thinking that online advertising ISN’T QUITE KAPUT, given recent figures that show a steady increase in online ad revenues this year. According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, Net ad revenues added up to nearly a billion dollars in the second quarter of this year; annual ad revenues

Thanks to the Web, now you can put GOVERNMENT DEBT ON YOUR CREDIT CARD. A new Web site from the U.S. Treasury Department (www.savingsbonds.gov) lets you purchase U.S. savings bonds online, paying for the bonds with your credit card. Cool, huh? But still, something strikes me as odd about putting the

TWENEY REPORT UPDATE: I’ve changed the look and feel of my Web site, www.tweney.com, and among other things I’ve added a Weblog. I’m building this log with Blogger, a cool tool that I found out about through Keith Dawson’s fine Tasty Bits from the Technology Front newsletter. I plan to use this webl

If you’re in New York for Fall Internet World this week, don’t miss my presentation, “The Web in 2004: What Won’t Be,” Friday at 10:00am. Find out the real future of the Net’s biggest myths: online advertising, digital Darwinism, broadband speed, and online customer service. Judging by the amount of

FORWARD-THINKING COMPANY: Perhaps epitomizing the fear and confusion that the Internet engenders in the music industry, Taylor Guitars [1], a manufacturer of high-end acoustic guitars, last week told its dealers that as of May 1 the dealers would no longer be able to advertise or sell the company’s

When a company decides to get into e-commerce, who’s in charge? Usually the IT managers, if you believe a recent survey of — yes, IT managers — by Cambridge Technology Partners’ Cambridge Information Network. According to this survey of 170 CIO’s, in 72% of the cases the IT department is a primary d