|
|
When America Online first acquired Time Warner, it required Time Warner divisions and the 82,000 employees therein to dump their old email systems and start using AOL. The move was supposed to look like a gesture of company unity. But it caused many problems and solved none. The main problem is that AOL is designed for consumers, not businesses. Thus, it didn’t work very well at the corporate level, crashing often and restricting what senders could do, such as making it difficult for them to send out attachments and mass emails. According to the Wall Street Journal, AOL performed particularly poorly in AOL Time Warner Magazine divisions, where important emails, large attachments and page proofs were slow to go through or even lost. AOL Time Warner has given into employee complaints and now will allow them to use whatever email system they please.
Log on to see the Mona Lisa and the Louvre
Liberté, égalité, internet: The Louvre is taking an egalitarian step in cyberspace. The Parisian museum is in the process of posting images of all works in its collection online, including a good many that have never been viewed by the general public. This way, many great artworks that ordinary people might not be able to travel to see will become accessible. Ultimately, some 35,000 exhibits will be available online, including the Mona Lisa. As an added bonus, 130,000 drawings will be viewable on the web site; usually, those drawings can only be seen by appointment because of their fragility. As part of the site upgrade, site visitors will be able to create a customized Louvre page and receive email updates about exhibits and presentations and the like. The project will be completed next year.
Google restores anti-Scientology web site
The Church of Scientology is right up there with some of the world’s great religions when it comes to inspiring conspiracy theories involving the media. The latest media organization to tangle with Scientology is Google, which recently erased an anti-Scientology web page from its search engine database, then promptly restored it after taking flak for doing so. The reasoning behind the deletion was that the page in question, Xenu.net, breached copyrights held by the church, thus violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Or so the church and its lawyers say. Xenu.net’s title, "Operation Clambake: The Fight Against Scientology on the Net," sums up its mission. The site does include some quotations from L. Ron Hubbard’s writings, but in general they are marked as such. What the church objects to is that its copyrighted secrets are being made public without its getting paid royalties. The pages were restored to Google’s listings after complaints from the site’s founder and free-speech advocates, who says that this is an issue of free speech rather than of intellectual property. Xenu.net now proudly advertises that it was "censored by Google."
Poetry Society loses site to Viagra shill
The Poetry Society in Britain may have been around the last 100 years, but that didn't matter much to a web e-tailer that quickly snapped up the site when the Society failed to renew their domain on time. Lapsed-domain snatcher Ultimate Search Inc. took over www.poetrysoc.com just before last Thursday's World Poetry Day and promptly began hocking everything from poker to Viagra. Poetry Society officials were unsure of what exactly went wrong. "The Society paid money last year to renew the domain name, but something went wrong somewhere down the line and the domain name lapsed," says Poetry Society lawyer Jane Mutimear, according to Reuters. The Society has since moved to www.poetrysociety.org.uk.
Internet worm masquerading as Clinton cartoon
A new computer worm is taking advantage of the those who continue to mock former President Bill Clinton. The worm, which is named MyLife.b, is cloaked in the guise of a screensaver that features a cartoon in which Clinton plays the saxophone. The virus is dangerous because if recipients open it, it can erase files and slow down network connections. If an infected computer is rebooted between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., the worm will attempt to erase all the files on the user’s C, D, E and F drives. As it is a typical computer worm, MyLife.b propagates by mailing it to all email addresses in a recipient’s Microsoft Outlook address book. The MyLife virus has popped up in at least 29 countries, with the U.S., Australia and United Kingdom hit the hardest.
March 25, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
Send to a
Friend| Printer-Friendly Version
Cover Page | Contact
Us
