On the Net and off, personal data is a currency, an entity that can be bought, sold, bartered and, yes, stolen. Ideally, this information connects companies with potential clients and consumers with products and services. Ads with the precision of surgical airstrikes are swell for ...
A few months ago while shopping for an iMac DV, I faced a dilemma. It wasn't the matter of sticking with Apple, but about whether I should buy it locally. Aside from issues of availability, price and OS language, there was the DVD bugaboo. The ...
When the deliciously innovative iMacs were unveiled last year there was a collective gasp: What?! No floppy drive? How do I transfer files? But the concern was unwarranted. Forward-looking Apple knew the Internet (and intranets) could take care of everything. In a networked society, there's ...
Stop me if you've heard this one: A mustachioed fun-loving Turkish guy throws up a personal Web page that, in simple, bad English, depicts him as a regular Renaissance stud muffin, who loves to travel, plays numerous instruments, is single, and -- the kicker ...
They say this might be the year that online Christmas sales in the U.S. actually live up to past promises of e-commerce's ascendancy. Hurrahs could be heard when it was reported that online transactions over Thanksgiving were up 10-fold (and groans could be heard ...
The Internet could be blamed for empowering armies of blowhards, chatterboxes and gas bags. While you probably have no shortage of these around you in the real world, you are just as likely to bump into them online, boasting, preaching, whining, ranting, blathering on ...
Let's look at the headlines from Net music news. Maestro, hit the rewind: Responding to pressure from the Recording Industry Association of America, Carnegie Mellon University busted 71 students for collecting and distributing MP3 files, the standard du jour for music pirates on the Internet. ...
"The Blair Witch Project," which will finally appear at a theater near you this month, is one of the scariest movies of the '90s. I'm not talking about the actual movie, which I saw at a recent preview. It does produce plenty of goose ...
"Susunu Denpa Shonen," which airs every Sunday night on NTV, has become a bona fide phenomenon partly by tweaking noses and partly by joining hands -- call it cynicism cut with altruism While the long-running show has produced a number of different mini-booms, its ...
I have written and read e-mail during my commute, beamed my virtual meishi to new acquaintances, played cards in taxis, and once in a shameless display of computing on my feet I consulted a database of Tokyo restaurants, which I had downloaded from www.bento.com, ...
