Georgia Tech Lorraine, the European platform of the Georgia Institute of Technology, is being sued in France for having its home page presented only in English and not in French. In France, the law requires that goods and services be offered in French in addition to any other languages in which the offer is made. < http://www.georgiatech-metz.fr/ >

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to rule on the constitutionality of the Communications Decency Act, a new federal law that imposes penalties of up to two years in prison and $250,000 in fines on individuals who use a computer network in a way that would give persons under 18 years of age access to "indecent" material that "depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs." The Clinton Administration is appealing two federal lower-court rulings blocking enforcement of the Communications Decency Act (CDA). Opponents of the CDA say that it is overbroad, unconstitutionally vague, and in conflict with First Amendment rights to

freedom of expression; they argue that the Net is unlike radio and TV (where the Supreme Court has traditionally upheld various content restrictions because of the pervasive nature of broadcast media). The three-judge panel in one of the lower-court cases concluded, "The receipt of information on the Internet requires a series of affirmative steps more deliberate and directed than merely turning a dial" and requires a person to have "some sophistication" in order to have access to it. See < http://www.nytimes.com > for background information.

NTT, the $58-billion-a-year Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corporation, plans to split itself into two regional companies providing local phone service in Japan and one long-distance company that would provide formidable new competition for the international telephone service market. The three companies will remain part of a holding company, which will allow NTT to preserve the company's highly respected research labs.

As the projected costs skyrocket for sophisticated chip fabs capable of cranking out system-chips equipped with more than 100 million transistors, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore points out that chipmaking already is the world's "most expensive real estate speculation." Currently, turning wafers into microprocessors costs $1 billion per acre of silicon. The cost for wafer-fabrication plants capable of manufacturing superchips with 0.07-micron transistors could run as high as $10 billion, he warns. As a result, a decade from now only 9 or 10 of the current chipmakers will be able to afford the new factories, says SGS-Thomson Microelectronics' chief economist. In response, 35 chipmakers, semiconductor systems suppliers and chip users have formed the Virtual Socket Interface Alliance in an effort to develop standards that will enable today's chips to be converted into circuit modules that could be mixed and matched on future system-chips.

Japan's Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture has funded 21 "venture business labs," designed to give Japan's universities a larger role in shaping the nation's economy. Japanese officials have taken a close look at the university-entrepreneurial business partnerships evident in California's Silicon Valley and Massachusetts' Route 128 corridor, and have decided that a closer relationship between academe and industry is essential to Japan's future as an industrial power. "A decisive difference between American and Japanese universities is that U.S. universities are not just research organizations. They also play the social role of raising and supporting new industries and enterprises," says a professor of economics at Tohoku University.

Digital Equipment Company plans to appeal a $5.3 million judgment awarded by a federal judge in Brooklyn to three women whom a jury found had sustained arm, wrist and hand industries caused by use of keyboards sold by the company. In recent years both IBM and Compaq have won similar lawsuits, and this case is the first trial in which a computer manufacturer has lost such a case.

With the Year 2000 problem looming, the latest information technology skill in hot demand is Cobol. Many of the programs that need fixing were written during Cobol's heyday, and programmers who can wend their way through millions of lines of code to identify and correct date fields will have as much work over the next couple of years as they can handle, say industry experts. And, as always, as demand rises, so do prices -- while programmers are getting about $65 an hour today, in a couple of years that could rise to $150, says a VP at Giga Information Systems. But they have to be good: "Finding someone who says he knows Cobol is one thing. Finding someone who is actually good at it is another."

The latest edition of an on-going WWW usage survey conducted at Georgia Tech found that many Web site visitors refuse to provide personal information (or they provide false information) because they fear how that information will be used. The survey is based on more than 14,000 (nonrandom) responses received in October and November 1996. < http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys/ >

Cisco Systems, along with Sun Microsystems, Informix Corp., Netcom Online Communication Services and others, is backing technology developed by Tibco Inc. that is designed to ease data gridlock on the Internet. Tibco's technology moves an e-mail message through the Internet pipeline, and then replicates it at the end of the process for multiple distribution, rather than the current broadcasting system that simultaneously sends thousands of messages to thousands of individuals. The consortium plans to submit a proposal to the Internet Engineering Task Force next year to adopt Tibco's technology as a nonproprietary standard. "We're trying to solve the mass-market dissemination problem," says Cisco's chief technology officer. "If you replicate things 100,000 times or a million times, the Internet dies. It's as simple as that."

Declaring that the Internet is not "a law-free zone," the German government has drafted legislation that would require companies offering transactions via the Internet to store on the minimum of user data necessary to complete the transaction. In addition, the law would require possible objectionable material (specifically, pornography or neo-Nazi propaganda) to be electronically tagged, and in an effort to discourage business fraud, Internet service providers would be able to electronically trace entities doing business online. The government hopes to enact the bill by next

August.

Researchers at Virginia Polytechnic & State University are developing a new way of building faster computers, combining field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips with just-in-time data and instructions via a so-called Wormhole system. The worm -- a string of data detailing a new circuit pattern and associated tasks -- transforms the FPGA chips into special-purpose chips capable of handling specified tasks more quickly than the generic model.

IBM says it will use 20% of its $5 billion research budget this year to develop or improve its Internet products, including the Integrion home banking network, the low-cost Network Computer, and the conversion of its Lotus Notes to a groupware product for use on the Internet.

Countries meeting under the auspices of the World Trade Organization have agreed to eliminate tariffs on computers, software and related goods – a boon for U.S. high-tech companies hoping to peddle their wares overseas. "This could mean $100 million a year at least for IBM," says IBM's public policy director. Microsoft's chief operating officer agrees: "This will be a win-win for every country and every consumer." The agreement was reached after the U.S. agreed to lower tariffs on European cognac, whiskey and other liquors. Officials predict that global trade in information technology products, which is now about $500 million a year, will double to $1 trillion a year by 2000. The pact covers some 500 products, including fax machines,

calculators, CD-ROMs, and automatic-teller machines.

The Clinton administration has proposed establishing a duty-free trade zone for electronic commerce, according to a recently released draft report entitled "A Framework for Global Electronic Commerce." The report recommends developing a Uniform Commercial Code for both domestic and international electronic transactions, and international intellectual property protection agreements. The report also urges governments not to place "undue restrictions on electronic commerce," including "unnecessary regulations, bureaucratic procedures, or new taxes and tariffs on commercial activities that take place via the Internet." The framework encourages

governments to respect the decentralized nature of the Internet, and the fact that the "Internet's unique structure poses significant logistical and technological challenges to current regulatory models."

Andrew Grimshaw at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville has designed a virtual parallel supercomputer with mix-and-match components (including traditional supercomputers, modern parallel computers, workstations, and a variety of types of personal computers) distributed across the Internet. His system, which now includes more than 100 computers from different manufacturers, appears to its users as a single machine that hides the peculiarities of the particular operating systems of the component systems.

A new $55 million supercomputer designed by the U.S. Department of Energy and Intel Corporation can perform one trillion floating point operations (teraflops) per second, and will be used to simulate nuclear weapons tests now banned by international treaty. The system is about three times faster than the current record-holder, a supercomputer made by Hitachi. The new supercomputer uses a "massively parallel computing" design that links 7,264 Pentium-based desktop computers to operate as one machine. IBM and Silicon Graphics are using different technologies in separate projects aimed at developing 3-teraflop machines by early 1999.

In an effort to realize its goal of generating half of its revenues from electronic rather than traditional publishing by 2000, Simon & Schuster has invested $750,000 in a new Corporate Digital Archive system developed by SRA International Inc. The digital archive "will become the centerpiece of how we develop and produce everything as we move forward. It will give us the ability to reuse information over and over again," says the company's chairman. The system enables researchers in the in Higher Education department to access all 40,000 of the publisher's photos when looking for images to illustrate a textbook, for instance. The CDA can then tell

another set of in-house systems to create a print-ready copy in just the right size and image resolution for the use specified (high for traditional print and low for the Web). The CDA then tracks the image's use, adding a "digital watermark" and automatically calculating any royalty payments.

Almost eight out of 10 companies surveyed across North American by Ernst & Young say they have lost valuable information over the past two years to computer viruses, crackers, bitter employees, spies or disasters. Most of those losses -- 63% -- were the result of viruses, while nearly one-third were caused by the malicious acts of insiders. The vast majority of companies refused to say how much money they lost, but E&Y director John Kearns says those losses were significant. Of the 30% that would describe their losses, 14% say they lost between $250,000 and $1-million, while 2% said they lost more than $1-million.

The U.S. Semiconductor Industry Association and the Electronic Industries Association of Japan have concurred on extending the 1991 agreement not to sell "commodity" chips (DRAMS or E-PROMS) at anti-competitive below-cost prices. DRAM stands for Dynamic Random Access Memory, and E-PROM stands for Electronically Programmable Read-Only Memory). The 1991 agreement was forged after U.S. chip manufacturers were severely hurt by chip-dumping practices in the 1980s.

U.S. businesses are reluctant to set up shop on the Internet, although consumers are becoming more willing to try electronic commerce, according to an AT&T survey. Nearly 40% of adults polled said they expect to make purchases on the Internet next year, and 55% say they expect to shop online within the next five years, according to the first-time survey conducted by Odyssey, a San Francisco-based Internet research firm. Of the 2,003 American adults surveyed, 7% said they already have made online purchases, while 20% said they use the Internet for information about products. Of the 503 executives surveyed, 20% expressed concern that "customers aren't ready" for electronic commerce. While 33% predicted the Internet will be a significant marketing tool in five years, only 17% said online sales are "very important" to their businesses today. The study found that 45% of American adults, or 80-million people, have access to commercial online or Internet-based services through home or work, while about 71% have access to personal computers.

The music industry turned up the heat yesterday in its battle to protect copyrights on the Internet, accusing service providers of scare-mongering in an effort to protect their multi-billion interests. Online firms say new treaties to revise copyright laws to include cyberspace expose them to multi-billion dollar liabilities and give broad powers to music and other copyright-based businesses. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry accused online firms of "turning the truth on its head," maintaining they have nothing to fear from the treaties. In Geneva, copyright industries are trying to ensure they get a portion from the distribution of literature, music, software and other commerce on the Internet.

Negotiators in Geneva have approved international copyright accords that boost protection against software piracy worldwide and lay the groundwork for increased commerce over the Internet. Libraries, Web surfers and Internet service providers won a major victory in the final rounds, with the acknowledgment that the temporary copies of copyrighted materials automatically made by computers while browsing the Web are not considered violations of copyright. The treaties protect copyright owners while also encourage content developers to "create wonderful works that enrich all of society, but tempered with that protection a balance affording access to information," says the American Library Association's legal counsel Adam Eisgrau.

Teledesic, the grandiose 840-satellite "Internet in the Sky" system envisioned by Bill Gates and Craig McCaw, says it is on the verge of receiving its long-delayed operating license from the FCC, and hopes to line up its first satellite launches in 1997. "We expect to nail our license any day now," says the company's president. "You'll see a big flurry of activity soon after that." Teledesic has been waiting for FCC approval

since 1994, when the company first announced its plans to offer international corporations data rates of between two million and 1.2 billion bits per second, using a giant fleet of low Earth orbit satellites. Although some industry observers doubt the Teledesic venture will ever get off the ground, McCaw and Gates last week showed their continued support by doubling their investment in the project to 37.6% of the company.

The Internet Society's International Ad Hoc Committee on domain names is proposing that seven new top-level domains (such as .edu, .org, .com) be added to the Internet naming structure. After the introduction of the additional 10 new top-level 3- to 5-letter domains (not yet selected), ten people or organizations could register similar names -- thereby presumably reducing the number of disputes over the us of popular or trademarked names. The committee is recommending that an unlimited number of firms be authorized to register the new addresses, a process that is now being handled exclusively by Network Solutions Inc. in Herndon, Virginia.< http://www.iahc.org >

Workers who spend more time surfing the Net than attending to the bottom line are in for a comeuppance. A new software product called LittleBrother tracks and analyzes Web usage by employees and blocks selected sites. Made by Calif.-based Kansmen Corp., LittleBrother can tell who is playing network games, who uses chat rooms, and who is downloading non-work materials. The software currently available runs on a Windows NT computer linked to an Ethernet network, but early next year the company plans to roll out a Windows 95 version.

As previously reported (Edupage 5 Dec 96), Georgia Tech Lorraine, the European platform of the Georgia Institute of Technology, is being sued in France for having its home page presented only in English and not in French. In France, the law requires that goods and services be offered in French in addition to any other languages in which the offer is made. Marc Bonnaut, the administrator of the French-defense association bringing the suit, says that the use of English and other foreign languages on the Net is not the real issue, and that whether a site "is in English, Chinese or Russian is no problem. The problem is that it is not also in French. We are not against English, we are for the French language. We are in France, after all." Under a 1994 law, such public communications as advertising and restaurant menus must be in French, and if they are also translated it must be into more than one language, to prevent France from becoming a bilingual country. The director of Georgia Tech Lorraine says in protest: "The curriculum is the curriculum of an American university; the students are all Georgia Tech students." M. Bonnaut says: "If there is a German cafe in Paris and only Germans come to it, the cafe still has to have a French-language menu."

The newspaper called China Consumers Daily says that China plans to increase its controls over the Internet, which already include the requirement that all Internet users register with the police. In its war against pornography and "cultural rubbish," Chinese police detained more than 47,000 people and seized 320,000 pornographic products in the first ten months of 1996. Chinese authorities use the term "cultural rubbish" to include anything they consider unhealthy or politically suspect.

The Internet Ad Hoc Committee, formed under the auspices of the Internet Society, has recommended creating seven new generic top-level domains (in addition to the existing .com, .edu, .org and .net domains) as part of its "Draft Specifications for Administration and Management of gTLDs" (generic Top Level Domains). The Ad Hoc Committee will come up with the new domain names following input from the Internet community and other stakeholders. In addition, the committee has recommended the creation of 20 to 30 new domain name registrars, all of whom would compete in the second-level domain business. Organizations could compete for registrar status by plunking down a $20,000 registration fee and hoping for the best in a lottery draw. Losers would have their money refunded. In addition, the committee has recommended that second-level domain name applications be subject to a 60-day publication period before being assigned to an applicant as part of an effort to "promote accountability, discourage extortion and minimize obsolete entries."

The U.S. Air Force's home page on the World Wide Web < http://www.af.mil > was broken into Monday afternoon and replaced with a pornographic image, obscenities, and anti-government tirades. Identifying himself only as a 23-year-old San Diego "business man," the individual who claimed responsibility for the invasion told a reporter by telephone: "This was a complete server takeover. We literally could have dismantled all the electronic information, including e-mail." The man said that he and the individuals who participated with him in the vandalism "didn't do any damage," and claimed that, "We did it simply to show them you've got to upgrade security. The security is simply pathetic on government systems, and it's not stopping anyone. One of the people involved in the actual break-in was only 15. A foreign government could go through that security in a few minutes." He gave himself only 50-50 odds of not being caught, and predicted: "The government is going to treat this very, very seriously. The illegality of this is extreme." The Air Force Office of Special Investigations and the Federal Bureau of Investigations are investigating the break-in.

New findings from Toronto-based Mercer Management Consulting Inc. indicate that it takes 6,000 scientific findings to generate a single successful new venture. Therefore, Mercer suggests that academic research and development efforts take on a more commercial focus: "As institutional budgets shrink and outside grants become scarcer, universities have more incentive to commercialize the results of scientific scholarship... The research conclusively shows that by adopting a business-world strategy toward commercialization of scientific research, not-for-profit research institutions can capture an enormous opportunity to replace diminishing internal budgets."

A report released by the National Counterintelligence Center (NACIC) indicates that the Internet is the fastest growing method used by foreign entities to gather intelligence about U.S. companies. "All requests for information received via the Internet should be viewed with suspicion," says the report, which urges caution in replying to requests coming from foreign countries or foreign governments, particularly with regard to questions about defense-related technology. NACIC works in close coordination with the CIA, but is an autonomous agency reporting the National Security Council.

The U.S. Department of Defense has recommended establishing a new "information-warfare" czar in the Defense Department and an "information-warfare" center within U.S. intelligence agencies. A report released by a task force appointed by the Defense Science Board calls for spending $580 million in R&D over the coming years, mainly in the private sector, to develop new software and hardware to provide security, such as a system for automatically tracing cracker attacks back to their source. The task force also recommends changing the laws so that the Pentagon can legally pursue and repel those who attempt to hack into DoD computer systems, injecting their computers with "a polymorphic virus that wipes out the system, takes it down for weeks." A Defense Department spokesman notes that the Advanced Research Projects Agency is working on an "electronic immune system" that could detect invaders and mobilize against them.

McMaster University sociology professor Dr. Carl Cuneo is the head of a new $4.5-million research project called the Network for the Evaluation of Education and Training Technologies that aims to find out what works and what doesn't in computer courseware. Researchers from the academic community and industry will look at everything from teachers who resist technology in the classroom to the effect that the electronic delivery of courses has on addictive behaviors.

IBM plans to make the content of 2 million U.S. patents (from 1971) available free on the Web site < http://www.ibm.com/patents/ >. Various companies provide patent access for a fee; one company, Questel-Orbit (a division of France Telecom) charges $1,995 a year, and a company executive says: "I still believe that we have the most robust search engine."

Despite a 10% decline in chip revenue in 1996, companies still plan on converting from the current 8-inch to 12-inch silicon wafers, beginning in 1998. "It's too important for them to put off," says the director of the Semiconductor Equipment and Materials Institute's 300-millimeter (12-inch) conversion committee. "It could be the biggest retooling of an industry in history," with costs estimated at $14 billion. The larger wafers will be capable of holding 2.4 times more chips, boosting productivity. As many as 11 chipmakers will begin low-volume and test production next year, and by 2000, about five factories are expected to begin high-volume production.

Researchers at Princeton University have released a paper documenting ways that nefarious crackers could dupe unwitting Web browsers into divulging personal information, such as bank personal identification numbers or credit card numbers. One way to do this is to break into a legitimate Web server and alter the links to other sites, so that when users click to transfer, they're actually transported to the cracker's computer where the virtual hijacker can watch every move they make (such as entering credit card info when prompted). The researchers suggest that Web surfers take the following precautions: disabling JavaScript in their Web browsing software; keeping an eye on the software's location line, to ensure they know where they are; and paying close attention to the addresses they visit.

<http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/pub/spoofing.html >

The reduction of the arms race is causing a computer race, as the U.S. Department of Energy steps up the pace of developing high-performance computers. "In this program, we have to work with the computer industry to compress the length of time between... generations of computers," says the DOE deputy assistant secretary for strategic computing and simulation. The high-powered machines are needed to perform the complex calculations that are used to assess factors such as the impact of aging on weapons and their ability to perform. The DOE says it will need supercomputers capable of performing at least 100 trillion operations per second by the year 2004. To accelerate the process, the agency has established the Academic Strategic Alliances Program to create and fund university "centers of excellence."

China has restored access to many Western media Internet sites, but barriers remain intact for sites that Beijing considers politically sensitive, particularly those containing news and commentaries from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Chinese language sites and those sponsored by Chinese dissident groups are also off-limits. The move to relax restrictions comes several months after access to some 100 sites was blocked last fall. The government has said it plans a more selective approach to Internet censorship in the future.

A new study prepared by Canadian Policy Research Networks concludes the spread of computers in the work place is wiping out job opportunities for unskilled workers. It points out that although computers have created more jobs than they have destroyed, employers have used computer-based technology to eliminate unskilled jobs, and have not given the displaced workers the training they would need to move into the new high-skill jobs. Currently, there is a sharp dichotomy in the employee make-up of computer-oriented vs. non-computer-oriented firms. In low-tech companies, managers and professionals comprise about 15% of all workers, while 36% are unskilled. In high-tech firms, 31% of workers are managers and professionals, and only 10% are unskilled. The biggest winners in the shift in job types are people who know their way around computers: about 15% of the new jobs created went to managers in engineering, architecture, science and information systems, while another 21% went to mathematicians, systems analysts and computer programmers. Overall, managers and professionals accounted for 53% of the new jobs created but only 9% of the jobs eliminated. The biggest losers were in "intermediate" jobs, mainly clerical jobs in corporate purchasing and accounting departments, and in banks and insurance companies. They accounted for 22.9% of the new jobs created by computers, but fully 60% of the job types eliminated.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are using the concept behind how smoke rings are produced to devise a system for keeping computer chips cool. The device is simple: it consists of a box with one flexible wall and a series of holes in the opposite wall; by vibrating the flexible wall at the proper frequency, cooling jets of air puff out of the holes. The boxes are as small as 100 microns in diameter, and because the microjets are highly directional, they can be pointed where needed. In one test, the researchers were able to boost the power of an array of chips by 150%, with no increase in temperature.

Some of the enthusiasm for the network computer concept has been generated by companies hoping to save money by eliminating some of the widely publicized costs associated with maintaining a PC. A Gartner Group study last year estimated that a networked PC costs a business an average of $13,200 a year -- 21% is the cost of the PC and the portion of the network it consumes; 36% is the cost of administering it; and 43% is the cost of "end-user operations" -- employee tinkering, game playing, etc. However, purchasing network computers will not save the entire $13,200 -- the cost of

the network and the server that can support all the needs of network computers will be far higher than those required for PCs, which basically wipes out that savings. The cost of administering the system will indeed be far lower, but there will be an additional cost involved in the introduction of NCs. And the cost of lost employee productivity is perhaps most difficult to measure -- indeed, if the employee is hooked directly to the Internet, instead of playing Solitaire, even more company time might be wasted.

The University of Utah has discontinued using the U.S. mail to send students their grade reports, and will instead distribute grade information exclusively by the World Wide Web or by telephone request. The university will save $10,000 a month. Grades can only be obtained only with a confidential identification number.

A computer scientist at British Columbia has designed a set of software tools called WebCT (for Web Course Tools) that allows instructors to design online courses, create their own Web sites, hold interactive and bulletin-board-type discussions, and administer exams, all on the Internet. Professors simply enter their own material into pre-prepared forms, and the virtual classroom takes shape. WebCT is already being used in more than 70 courses at the University of British Columbia, and the program is available for testing to faculty members outside the university. Once testing is completed, the program's authors plan to charge a fee for its use.

< http://homebrew.cs.ubc.ca/webct/ >

In Finland there are 62 Internet host computers for each 1,000 people, twice the proportion in the U.S. Nearly 30% of Finnish homes have portable computers and about 60% have access to the Internet.

The vision of computers powerful enough to organize and index huge treasure troves of scientific literature using intelligent functions such as "vocabulary switching" -- classifying an article that mentions "Unix" under "operating systems" even if the words "operating systems" do not appear in the article -- is finally coming to fruition, 32 years after it was first outlined in J.C.R. Licklider's "Libraries of the Future" (1965). Large-scale simulations on the HP Convex Exemplar supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications have resulted in generating concept spaces for 10 million journal abstracts across 1,000 subject areas covering all engineering and science disciplines -- the largest vocabulary switching computation ever achieved in information science. Future developments will require automatic indexing with scaleable semantics to coordinate searches among the one billion repositories likely in the next century.

Kenneth E. Dowlin has been forced to resign his position after serving almost 10 years as head of the San Francisco Public Library, where he was a creative proponent of the use of information technology in the modern library. Critics charged that he favored technology over books. Peter Lyman, the University Librarian at the University of California at Berkeley, says in support of Mr. Dowlin: "It's so sad to be debating books versus computers, when the issues facing San Francisco are of literacy, of immigrant populations. The public library needs to be a place that helps children learn the basic skills of literacy, that helps immigrants become citizens. Ken was trying to create a sense of political community through technology, and the new library is in many ways successful on those grounds."

Microsoft is gaining ground in its war with Netscape over browser software penetration. In the business market, which numbers 30- to 34-million users, Netscape's share has dipped to 70%, down from 87% early last year, according to Zona Research Inc. And its share of the business server software is falling, too -- 75% last September, down from almost 100% the previous year. Netscape's strategy to reverse its fortunes is pinned on its new suite of Communicator software, which allows corporate workers to collaborate on documents and scheduling over company intranets.

Marsh & McLennan Inc. is offering businesses a hedge against Year 2000 problems. The New York insurance broker will sell up to $200 million worth of insurance against business losses caused by the policyholder's own computer system, or by another company's neglect to become Year 2000-compliant, or by data supplied by another company's computers. Before the policy is issued, however, Marsh & McLennan will enlist experts to make sure that the policy-buyer is taking all possible steps to avoid Year 2000 problems.

The Internet Engineering Task Force is moving forward on its plan to develop a standard way to present White Pages directory information, including e-mail addresses, URLs and phone numbers, on the Internet. The White Pages are designed to standardize the way such information appears in Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directories; the LDAP itself specifies only how information should be requested and updated. A final version of LDAP 3 should be available in the next few months.

Stanford University professor Robert Laughlin, who's worked on bomb-related physics at Lawrence Livermore Lab since 1981, has his doubts about the ability of supercomputers to accurately predict how nuclear weapons will react to aging and storage conditions: "Computer programs can only simulate the stuff you know. Suppose you left a personal computer out in the rain for a year. Is there a program that can tell you whether it will still run? Of course not -- it all depends on what happened to it. Changes happen over time that you are not sure how to measure. Some matter, some don't. The problem is the things you didn't think to put in the simulation." Indeed, past attempts to simulate very complex situations have not always been successful, and the software codes to predict whether bombs will explode or fizzle "are full of adjustable parameters that have been fit to (underground test) data. If the new codes don't match the old ones that correctly predicted experiment results," (and Laughlin bets they won't) "the designers will simply throw them out."

An editor at The Journal of the American Medical Association and an adjunct professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco have recommended an electronic peer-review system that would allow researchers to have ready access to all comments related to a particular paper through a consolidated database. Editors could review readers' comments, request responses from authors, and update the database on a quarterly basis. Journals could make publishing a work conditional upon such participation, and people who submit comments would be required to disclose any conflicts of interest or affiliations that might affect their response.

On the heels of their admission that they sold supercomputers to a Russian nuclear weapons lab without the required export license, Silicon Graphics has now acknowledged that it sold two similar computers to China's Academy of Sciences, which also is involved in nuclear weapons and missiles research. The company says the China deals were conducted "in full compliance with U.S. export regulations," but records show it was sold in June 1996 without an export license. The Clinton administration began its policy of requiring licenses for the export of supercomputers to foreign entities involved in nuclear weapons research in January 1996. The computer sold to the Chinese is twice as powerful as the one recently sold to the Russians and will be used as a "backbone" for "hundreds of institutes" in the Chinese academy.

Renowned management consultant and author Peter Drucker says: "Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won't survive. It's as large a change as when we first got the printed book. Do you realize that the cost of higher education has risen as fast as the cost of health care? ... Such totally uncontrollable expenditures, without any visible improvement in either the content or the quality of education, means that the system is rapidly becoming untenable. Higher education is in deep crisis... Already we are beginning to deliver more lectures and classes off campus via satellite or two-way video at a fraction of the cost. The college won't survive as a residential institution. "

The demand in Japan for Bandai's virtual chicken toy (tamagotchi or "cute little egg") is so strong that the toy can trade on the black market there for up to 25 times its suggested retail price of about $16. The plastic egg has a small liquid crystal display on which a chick "hatches." The owner or "parent" can press buttons to feed, clean and play with the chick – which if bored, underfed or over-fed, will emit a piercing noise, change into an old man and die. However, if properly cared for, the chick ruffles its feathers, hops about, and lives happily for about a week and a half. Bandai is increasing production of the toy by a factor of five, and is planning to introduce it soon into the European and American markets.

A group of six small Internet service providers and three independent businesses, calling themselves Enhanced Domain Name Service (eDNS), is challenging the current domain name infrastructure administered by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. eDNS has proposed that it maintain the Internet's root servers, including the current domains and the ones it will create, leaving registration authorities in charge of administering the root system and allowing an unlimited number of registrars to create an unlimited number of top-level domains. eDNS's founder says his plan "ensures lower registration costs and better service through competition," but some observers have noted that running the same address on different root servers could cause chaos in e-mail delivery and Web access. "I'm in favor of free markets, but this is not a place you can have competition," says one independent consultant. "You have to respect the bounds of that technology." eDNS is already operating five root servers, but only about one-half percent of the Internet currently recognizes eDNS's root servers.

Universities are heeding the call from companies for more qualified techies capable of designing and managing a corporate Web site, and are now beginning to formalize such training with degree programs geared toward producing "Webmasters." Rather than stressing computer science skills, the programs tend to lean toward either library science (with a special emphasis on technology) or graphic media design. Included in the degree programs are courses in such disciplines as organizational psychology, library science, graphic design, and business. For example, Indiana University offers a master's degree in information science, building on the library science program for which it has long been known, and John Brown University is about to offer a bachelor-of-science degree in digital media. Other programs can be found outside the U.S. in Australia and Canada.

Canada is conducting a pilot project that should reduce the time required for highly-skilled foreigners in six specific high-tech categories to enter that country. The experiment will end the process under which companies must prove there are no qualified Canadians available to fill key jobs.

More than 40 countries are expected to sign a $500 billion agreement that would remove tariffs on information technology products by the year 2000. The pact covers computers, telecommunications products, semiconductors, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, software, and scientific instruments. The United States, the European Union and Japan are opposed to proposals from Malaysia, Thailand and India and other Asian countries to maintain tariffs on some products until 2005 or 2007.

PGP Media Inc. in New York City has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Herndon, Va.-based Network Solutions Inc., the company that (under contract to the National Science Foundation) assigns Internet domain names, charging that Network Solutions has conspired with other groups to prevent free and open competition in the market for Internet addresses. PGP wants Network Solutions to add references to the domain names PGP assigns, "so that PGP may compete with Network Solutions in the domain name registration market.''

The European Monetary Union's changeover to a single currency -- the euro --will have a ripple effect through most industries around the world today, but adapting computer software to the new system ranks high on the list of major headaches, rivaling even the Year 2000 problem for complexity and ubiquity. Companies will have to perform a line-by-line inventory of all software code to determine where it's currency-sensitive and change the fields to accommodate the euro. To make matters worse, some countries, such as Italy and Spain, don't use decimals in prices and their computer systems therefore aren't equipped to handle them. And some countries, such as France, quote securities in decimals, but others, such as Britain, use fractions.

Ira Fuchs, vice president for computing and information technology at Princeton University, says there's a chance that by the time Internet 2 is built, researchers already will be clamoring for Internet 3. He cites what he calls Fuchs's Law, which states that the time to acquisition is longer than the time to obsolescence. "What that means is that the technology is advancing so rapidly that by the time the computer you originally asked for is finally delivered, you don't want that computer any more. That same problem is going to have an effect on Internet 2. We have to worry, Will we have enough time to test, and to think, before everybody is beating down the door to get on this thing?" Educom VP Mike Roberts is a little more optimistic: "I don't think we've worn out the field of dreams... But I think clearly the most important applications are the ones that can't be predicted. There are going to be marvelous things that come out of this,but nobody knows what they're going to be."

Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, who wants the PC to take its place in the living room as part of an all-digital home entertainment system admits that the PC must become easier to use and promises: "I think people are going to be pretty stunned. They saw how quickly we adapted the PC to Internet standards. The next target is simplicity."

Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold says the development of Mosaic and similar Web-oriented products were social and commercial breakthroughs (and "fine work"), but not technological breakthroughs. "If you'd said up front, 'My research program is that I'm going to allow bitmaps to get transferred over this simple protocol,' people would have said, 'That isn't research.' It isn't!" And so what, exactly, has happened? "It turned out that a low-tech social phenomenon called the Internet has suddenly arisen and surprised people. But it's like asking people in plastics research why the hula hoop was successful."

PROTONIC CHIPS NEVER FORGET

Researchers at the University of New Mexico and Sandia National Laboratories are investigating the use of protonic memory for making cheap forget-me-not computer chips. In 1995, they noticed during experiments on silicon wafers that protons deep within the wafers were responding to electrical signals on the surface. "Nobody had seen these moving protons before," says one scientist. Further research showed the protons can be precisely controlled with standard microcircuits -- and are thus able to store data. Protonic chips won't need the fancy processing used in "flash" and other so-called nonvolatile memory chips, and can operate at very low power levels, thus prolonging battery life in laptops. Protonic chips currently are being tested at Texas Instruments.

NSI SAYS FCC SHOULD ASSUME INTERNET REGISTRATION FUNCTIONS

Network Solutions Inc., which currently registers all top-level domain names under contract to the National Science Foundation, has suggested that the Federal Communications Commission temporarily assume that function until an international legal authority can be created to manage the system. The transition period would allow for public comment on the plan in order to incorporate any new processes or structures deemed necessary. The plan is in contrast to an earlier proposal announced by the Internet International Ad Hoc Commission to create seven new shard generic top-level domains to be administered by 28 new registrars. NSI's president says the IAHC plan risks Internet instability, creates "too much bureaucracy," and will contribute to increased domain name legal disputes