An
eBay for Municipal Government - Larry Kosmont, a Southern
California businessman, hopes to present a practical solution to
city agencies: Why not do deals online? Meet the latest Internet
entrepreneur. Kosmont, a 48-year-old CEO with a penchant for
Italian interior design, heads Kosmont & Associates, a $2
million firm with 20 employees, plush quarters in downtown L.A.
and a San Diego satellite office. For his efforts in navigating
government regulations and negotiating $6 billion in transactions
between the public and private sector, he's been named Real Estate
Service Professional of the Year by the Los Angeles Business
Journal and heralded by the press as a bureaucracy-busting private
consultant...
Hillary
and the Lynch Mob -
"1969, A gang of criminals tortures,
mutilates, and murders a black man. The nation demands justice for
the brutal killing. In 1969, Panther leaders in New Haven
suspected Mr. Rackley of disloyalty. He was tied to a chair, and
his comrades tortured him for hours by, among other things,
pouring boiling water on him. Finally, Panther gunman Warren
Kimbro ended Mr. Rackley's suffering with a bullet to the head..."
Senate
bill to target Web cookies -
"U.S. Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.) said Thursday he would
introduce a bill to regulate the use of personal information and
Web cookies on the Internet. At the same time, a privacy
watchdog group filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission
against Internet data collector DoubleClick, saying the company
threatens consumer privacy on the Web..."
PM
webcasts to the nation - Prime Minister Tony Blair is
breaking with British political tradition by planning a regular
broadcast direct to the nation from Downing Street's revamped
website. The first webcast, available on the website this Friday,
is on education and the prime minister details the progress of
reforms since he came to office...
A
French Company That Needs a Break - Agence France-Presse,
one of the world's leading wire services, is trying to move
decisively into the Internet age, but it keeps running into
obstacles. A five-year plan, under discussion since April, was
supposed to give AFP a taste of the online success that has
greeted competitors like the Associated Press and Reuters. But
unlike those privately owned news services, AFP is
quasi-governmental, and is overseen by a board of three government
officials, two AFP staffers and three media company
representatives. The agency is subject to arcane bylaws that
prevent it from raising public capital...
Ex-CIA
Chief's Computer Scandal - "CIA director George Tenet on Thursday refused to comment on
revelations that his predecessor's home computer, which contained
highly classified files, was used to contact pornography sites on
the Internet, possibly by an outsider..."
Eminent
domain name - When Netrepreneur Gary Kremen jumped the
digital gold rush and wangled rights to the domain name "sex.com"
in May 1994, he envisioned online riches. The Stanford Business
School grad started to sketch a business plan for an
adult-oriented Web business, and the millions of hits (and
dollars) that would come with it. Instead, porn impresario Stephen
Michael Cohen presides over a cyber fortune at sex.com, which
boasts more than 10 million paid subscribers, at $25 each, and is
ground zero to a swarm of $1 million banner ads from X-rated
merchants...
McCain's
win nets windfall on Web - Until Tuesday, Sen. John
McCain's presidential campaign had raised $1.5 million in eight
months through its Web site. But after he won big in the New
Hampshire primary, an additional $415,000 poured in literally
overnight. By Thursday morning, the figure had reached $681,000...
Crackdown
on software pirate group -
"One of the suspected leaders of
an international ring of software pirates operating on the
Internet has been arrested and charged with conspiring to violate
the copyrights on thousands of computer programs, federal
officials announced Friday. Robin Rothberg, 32, who was arrested
Thursday in Boston, is suspected of being a "council
member" of a group called "Pirates with Attitude,"
an organization that disseminates bootleg copies of software,
including some not commercially available, said U.S. Attorney
Scott Lasser..."
A
Full Life [REVISITED]
- JOE CLARK is a happy man. Eighteen
months ago, he might not have expected to be. After 21 years as an
industrial engineer at a division of Harvard Industries in
Tennessee, he found himself, when the plant shut down, out of a
job at the age of 62. “I tried retirement,” he recalls. “But
I was just piddling about the house. So I went to a job fair and
left my résumé with several temporary-employment agencies.”
Within six weeks he was on the payroll of Manpower Technical. Now
Manpower is employing him to look at ways to cut packaging costs
for a car-parts firm. “I really look forward to coming to
work.”
Corel's
Cowpland embattled, but upbeat - "A lavish lifestyle and
his wife's infamous body-baring fashions have secured a spot of
honor in the tabloids for Corel Corp. CEO Michael Cowpland. But
the man now facing four charges of insider trading is marked more
by shyness than showiness..."
Hackers Attack Yahoo!
- "Computer vandals using a common type of electronic attack overwhelmed Yahoo!, the most popular site on the
Internet, and rendered the flagship Web directory inaccessible Monday for at least several hours..."
Medical
Net privacy? It's unhealthy - Internet health sites are
collecting and sharing with other companies detailed personal
information about visitors, often without their knowledge and
despite promises to protect privacy, a study released Tuesday
said. A survey conducted for the California HealthCare Foundation
found several lapses from policies pledging to guard personal
information and e-mail addresses at 21 of the most popular medical
Web sites...
DOJ
seeks to Web-enable all crime info -
"But privacy
advocates raise red flags over quiet effort to centralize
thicket of state, local and federal information-gathering
efforts. Through the guidance of a federally sponsored
committee that has been quietly meeting since 1998, the U.S.
Department of Justice is leading a national push to integrate,
standardize and Web-enable all criminal justice information
that is harvested and stored by local, state, tribal and
federal governmental entities..."
PC
rage hits UK -
"As the reliance on computers in the workplace continues to
grow, people in the UK are resorting to violence when their PCs
break down, say researchers. When faced with technical problems,
most people shouted at colleagues, hit the PC or even threw parts
of the computers. The most frustrating hitch was when people lost
their work after their computer crashed or froze..."
Norwegian
teen raided by police in DVD suit - Police raided the
home of Jon Johansen, the Norwegian programmer who
reverse-engineered the DVD Content Scrambling System (CSS) to
allow DVD playback on computers running the Linux operating
system. His DeCSS software breaks the encoding system in DVDs,
and is the subject of several lawsuits in the United States
against people who have posted or linked to the file or source
code...
Office
available, $0 per sq. ft. -
"The growth of free
intranets has been explosive, fueled by the twin trends of
heavy spending on online advertising and a healthy business
environment for small and home-based offices. Companies in the
field are signing up new users at an astounding pace and are
getting ready to take their story to Wall Street..."
Hacker
Mitnick released - "For the first time since
1995, computer criminal Kevin Mitnick is a free man. But will
he hack again? Nearly five years after news of his arrest
blazed across the nation's headlines, hacker Kevin Mitnick
walked out of a medium security prison in Lompoc, Calif.,
early Friday morning - and into an uncertain future..."
S.C.
legislation would make libraries liable for online smut access
- "A Greenville lawmaker has filed a bill to make public
libraries criminally liable if they fail to keep children from
pornography on the Internet. Sen. Mike Fair, R-Greenville, said
Wednesday his bill would remove the legal protection libraries
have under a 1991 state law that prohibits giving minors access to
pornography. Under Fair's bill, parents whose children are exposed
to pornography at the library could file an incident report with a
prosecutor, who would then decide whether to bring an indictment,
he said..."
Cheaters
Beware! Tracking Down Digital Plagiarism - "In just a few
short years, technology has changed the way students go about the
process of learning. A lot of students don't even bother with
encyclopedias anymore; they head straight for the Internet to
gather information. But there's also the dark side of this:
college students using the Internet to cheat. It's called
"digital plagiarism" -- using a computer to cut and
paste somebody else's work into your term paper. It can be very
hard to stop. But now some professors are fighting fire with fire..."
