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Live Nude Video-Teleconferencing
Fear and Loathing in Lexis-Nexis This summer, word started getting around that Lexis-Nexis was re-selling access to a sophisticated database of personal information, called P- Trak. A spark of concern turned into a bonfire of bad P.R. all around. The grass-roots movement against the P-Trak database was significant, and spoke well for the responsibility of Netizens. However, some facts (about SSN and mother's maiden name) got overzealously distorted, and the story started to balloon out of control. Netizens came out looking jerky, P-Trak looked maligned, but the matter that's at the heart of it all is that collecting and connecting publicly-available data creates new risks for privacy.
The Sincerest Form of Flattery... ...is outright plagiarism. In March, Hotwired publicly accused c|net of stealing the wording of their help pages. Says Flux's Ned Brainard, "Note the order of questions. Note the wording of questions. Heck, note the text itself, starting with the very first question. Apparently the staff at c|net has found that the ëSave as Source' command on their browsers is the perfect tool to express flattery in the time-honored form of scrupulous imitation."
These AOL Bills Are Killing Me: AOL was blamed for a lot of things in the Internet community, but murder? Apparently so. Investigators in Caliorina, Mo., said that this fall a 12-year-old boy apparently shot himself and his mother a day after they quarreled over the seventh grader's excessive AOL bills.
The Web is Not FDA-Approved Move over, Mr. President. Now the U.S. Food and Drug Administration wants to censor the Net. On October 16-17, the agency held a conference to decide how to respond to the "problem" of discussions of drug use in America Online chat rooms and pharmaceutical companies that link to sites that offend the Feds' sensibilities.
Patently Offensive From what rock did these guys crawl out from under? They claim to own a patent (#4,528,643) that represents much of today's electronic commerce over the Web. So far, e-Data has sent out 25,000 amnesty packets to companies they say are violating their patent. If you're selling goods over the Net, you too may be slapped with an e-Data lawsuit. Following e-Data's lead, IU has patented a system that represents the way in which magazines are sold on newsstands. We hope to make a killing.
Suck Sells Out When the sucksters sold their site to Hotwired in late '95, we quietly waited for the site to become a mouthpiece of the man. When version 2.0 debuted in early May, complete with frames and Java-enhanced, browser-crashing ads, we knew the end was near. When, Wired, Rolling Stone and Time, ran pictures of suck co-creator Carl Steadman in the same month, we thought this is it. Well, were still waiting.
Anonymous? Yeah, Right... Paranoid security freaks have long hypothesized that the Feds don't really need to bother with search warrants and code-cracking; the surest way to read secret e-mail would be to infiltrate the anonymous- remailing community and trick users into routing e-mail through government machines. In April, this urban legend took on respectability when, for the first time, it was discussed by security professionals at a Harvard symposium. Be safe, kids; encryption is to e-mail what condoms are to sex.
The $500 Box Oracle's Larry Ellison spent much of '96 hyping the $500 network computer, a dumb-downed box with a fast processor, Internet connection and little else. This stripped down PC sounds like the Yugo of the computer hardware world. Will it sell or is it a lemon? Do we care?
The Unamailer A hacker, operating under the nom de plume Angry Johnny, briefly became public enemy number after he flooded the e-mail boxes of a select list of journalists and public figures with thousands of messages by signing them up to hundreds of automated mailing lists.
The Net as Plot Device 
With Hollywood realizing that the Internet by itself does not make a
good movie (The Net, Virtuosity, Johnny
Mnemonic, etc.) or TV show (Dweebs) in '95, the Net
became a plot device in '96. The Net played a prominent role in
everything from the Friends season finale to the summer blockbuster
Mission Impossible and the ultimate measure of mainstream
acceptance--a made-for-TV movie, NBC's Deadly Web.
The Seven Deadly Newsgroups 
Bowing like girly-men under pressure applied by German censors,
CompuServe removed over 200 Usenet newsgroups from their service
earlier this year, including a number of forums involving discussion
about homosexuality. CompuServe flip flopped once again their after
receiving negative media publicity and tons of complaints from the
service's users. They brought back all but seven newsgroups:
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen, alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.young,
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.teen.male, alt.sex.bestiality,
alt.sex.pedophilia.pictures, alt.sex.pedophilia.girls and
alt.binaries.pictures.erotic.senior-citizens. Senior citizens get no
respect.
Silly Law Suits Where's there's money, there's potential law suits to file, and this year the Internet became the arena of choice for enterprising lawyers looking to further bog down the justice system. Our vote for the silliest: Texas baker Miss King's Kitchens, maker of the "Original Texas YA-HOO! Cake," sued Yahoo! over their shared moniker. It seems the bakery first became alerted to the problem when several customers complained that their delicious baked goods yielded no results for even the simplest of searches. Anxiously awaiting the results of the trial are the makers of Lysol Disinfectant and Spiderman, the original Webcrawler.
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Are you as tired as we are of people sending you the good luck totem, the Neiman Marcus cookie recipe and other assorted witticisms and homilies via e-mail? Please stop, please.
Pranks and Spanks Hotwired staffers get bored. Hotwired staffers get frisky. Hotwired staffers make fake banner ad for local bar. On April Fool's Day, ironically, glitches ensue. Fake ad is accidentally put up on site. Angry e-mails fly around. Heads roll. You'd think Hotwired would be a relaxed, liberal place to work, with patient and reasonable managers. You'd be wrong. In contrast, Sun Microsystems took down their entire site and replaced it with a parody of themselves for the same April Fool's Day.
IBM's Olympic Intranet  Problems with IBM's much hyped Olympic information system were well documented in the press, yet this item bears repeating. Journalists looking for a transcript of interviews with Olympic shooters got the following message: "Today's events were won by a bunch of funny talking shooters that no one in the press conference could understand. Nobody cared, we are gone."
Too Much Caffeine Coffee replaced manifest destiny (Explorer, Navigator, Magellan) as this year's hot metaphor. To wit, Sun Microsystem's Java, HotJava and Java Beans Borland International's Latte, Symantec's CafÈ, Applix's Espresso, Natural Intelligence's Roaster, IBM's Arabica and Argus Systems Group's Decaf. With the hype surrounding Marimba's Castanet, were already hedging our bets that musical instruments will be the next year's big metaphor.
SPAM Disk Epidemic REDO ME Nearly 95 percent of all Americans suffered from the SPAM disk epidemic in 1996. Hundreds of millions of disks (enough to circumscribe the world over) were bundled with everything from magazines to boxes of condoms and prompted users to create pages dedicated to finding alternate uses for all of the wasted plastic.
Mitnick Mania Three books on notorious computer outlaw Kevin Mitnick (The Cyberthief and the Samurai, The Fugitive Game and Takedown) are published concurrently. Nobody reads any of them.
Snooping Feds Afraid of being seen as soft on terrorism, the U.S. Congress caved in to increasingly shrill demands from the FBI on September 30. That's when they passed an elephantine six-agency spending bill that included an unlimited slushfund that the Feds will use to expand their wiretap abilities.
Warez Pirates Busted--ISPs Dragged Into the Fray The Software Publishers' Association officially began its crackdown of software piracy in June, when they filed suit against a Seattle man who had allegedly been trading warez. This came as a shock to netizens, who had been used to the SPA busting big companies but leaving the little guy alone. The fight for what's right got ugly in October, though, when the SPA started charging ISPs as accessories to piracy and demanding that they monitor and censor user content.
But Just Wait 'Til the Cable Modems Get Here 
We've all heard this excuse for the Net's current lameness. Just
remember: You can't drive a Porsche quickly through the drive-up lane
at Wendy's, and you can't do your Net stuff fast when there's server lag.
What's more, a lack of bandwidth doesn't excuse bad writing.
We Hardly Knew Ya Interchange network, the original MSN, eworld
Net Netiquette Users who respond to Usenet postings with the message, "Me too," or any variation thereof, will be punished. The "Me too," list sees to that-- the Web page has been posting a blacklist of sorts that links to the e- mail addresses of users with poor "Me too" netiquette. For new users, the Net maintains more manner rules than a royal tea.
The Good Times Virus 
The Good Times Virus is a hoax. We repeat the Good Times Virus is a
hoax. It's beyond us why this won't go away, but then again people still
believe Walt Disney is frozen. Maybe its time to flood the Web with
public service ads starring J.J. "Dyn-o-mite" Walker.
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