Bitbucket Nr.1 (last Millennium)
Domain Name Fcuk Up
The Register reports on a reverse domain-name hijacking attempt derailed for comical reasons. The multinational clothing chain French Connection had tried to wrest the fcuk.com domain from Tony Sutton, who registered it in April 1997 and now uses it for First Consultants UK. FC's claim? That Sutton had sullied the goodwill stemming from its UKP3M UK ad campaign for its trademark "FCUK". The judge didn't buy it: "How can you talk about goodwill in connection with such a tasteless and obnoxious campaign?" He chucked FC's request for an immediate injunction and ordered a full trial, where, according to defense attorney Nick Lockett, "If he deems that the use of the Fcuk campaign is against public policy, then he may revoke the trademark."
Semantic Forests
For all the growing noise about the NSA's Echelon system, there's very little well-informed speculation about its practicality. An excellent exception was the recent short discussion about "Semantic Forests" on the Cryptography mailing list. "Semantic Forests" refers to a patent application filed by the NSA with the US Patent and Trademark Office, which was approved on 10 August; the patent describes techniques (very efficient ones, it seems) for "automatically generating a topic description for text and sorting text by topic"--text, it is thought, generated by the speech-recoghition software applied to telephonic traffic. The Cypherpunks thread meandered around various aspects of whether or how the NSA would be able to mass-transcribe all the voice traffic it is said to have access to.
The End of Konr@d
True, Konr@d, the cybermagazine launched by the German publishing giant Gruner + Jahr in August 1997, never really wanted to be the German Wired. So, in this regard, it shouldn't really matter that negotiations had failed between Rossetto & Co and Gruner + Jahr a year before the launch of Konr@d. Now Spiegel-Online mourns the end of Konr@d in what David Hudson calls "a fine and respectful obituary." It's good that Spiegel-Online wrote it, so we didn't have to--Telepolis never really was thrilled by the "constant identity crisis this magazine was dealing with for two long years" (Hudson again). We did like that headline of their first cybersex story, "Click me harder"; but all the followup stories on that same subject didn't arouse us, and nor did the sensationalist reporting on "Cyberwar." No matter, now. But we definitely disagree with the view of Konr@d editor in chief David Pfeiffer that "the time is over for intelligent magazines about the Internet."
Cause and E-fect?
A supremely imbecilic California court ruling against the Euro bad-boy art-gang Etoy has attracted a wave of bad press -- and the stock price of their legal antagonist, toy e-tailer Etoys.com, took a dive. A debate has broken out about whether the negative media coverage played a role in driving it down. Keith Dawson, the staid publisher of the TBTF newsletter, found a compelling case to think that it could have done so; Wired News's Declan McCullagh scoffed at the idea and offered up his own analysis of why the stock has been plummeting. But it was the mercurial Dave Mandl -- cypherpunk emeritus, radio theorist and practitioner extraordinaire, and Autonomedia editor -- who said it best in a message to the Nettime list: "I'd put the eToys drop in the same category as levitation of the Pentagon: Publicly, to support the cause, I'd swear I saw the building rise. Why not? The whole thing was about psyching people out anyway. But if 'one of us' asked me in private, did I really, truly see the building levitate?, I'd let him in on the secret.... Freaking out/scaring the hell out of eToys is what this is all about, after all. But among friends, if someone were to ask me, honestly, I'd say: Not a snowball's chance in hell...." And futurologist-turning-presentologist Bruce Sterling summoned up a suave image to describe these "friends" in message 00114 (about a hurricane-spawned vampire-bat epidemic in Nicaragua) to his Viridian list: "European net.artists rally their infowar vampire bats to combat tawdry, shameful domain-poaching by corporate Yankee commercial interests."
Bitbucket - Data In Hopeless Turmoil
Bitbucket Nr.1 (last Millennium)
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