DIGITAL DIVIDE
IT Rejuvenating the Reservation (WIRED)
Modernization May Be More Blessing Than Curse in the Brazilian
Outback (WSJ)
INTERNET
E-Commerce: Has the Web's Audience Peaked? (NYT)
Commerce Oks Verisign Dot-Com Deal (NewsBytes)
ACCESS TO INFORMATION
Schools Get Tool to Track Students' Internet Use (NYT)
Civil Liberties Groups Oppose 'Stealth' Web Blocking (NewsBytes)
DIGITAL DIVIDE
IT REJUVENATING THE RESERVATION
Issue: Digital Divide
An organization of 18 American Indian tribes in the San Diego, California
area, the Southern California Tribal Chairmen's Association, was recently
awarded a $5 million grant from Hewlett-Packard to build what they call
a "Digital Village" in Southern California. Technology groups like HP, the
University of California-San Diego, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center
have partnered with the association to help them decide
where to use the money to build a technology infrastructure that meets each
tribe's needs. The opportunity will allow Indians to remain on the
reservation to make a living, find jobs, preserve their culture, educate
their children and build community. Three of the 18 tribes are already
linked to the high-speed wireless Internet connection provided by the
university, and this project will extend the network to the other tribes.
"This is one of the ways for the Indian tribes to maintain their
sovereignty," said Jack Ward, director of the Digital Village.
"They need to be able to compete with any other nation."
[SOURCE: Wired, AUTHOR: Katie Dean]
(http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,43718,00.html)
MODERNIZATION MAY BE MORE BLESSING THAN CURSE IN THE BRAZILIAN OUTBACK
Issue: Digital Divide
In the isolated Amazonian Indian village of Sao Gabriel Da Cachoeira,
Brazil, globalization is encroaching its population of 40,000 with the
installation of a radar tower and the approach of telephone and Internet
service. Villagers hope that they can learn from the mistakes of more
modernized regions suffering from environmental and cultural trauma. A local
phone company is installing pay phones and has donated 10 computers and a
satellite Internet connection to the region's school. Orlando Jose de
Oliveira, president of the nonprofit Rio Negro Indigenous People's
Federation, is excited by the access to information that the Internet will
provide Indians about the outside world, but warns that it could have a
similar paralyzing effect to television access, where Indians stopped
working to watch TV. "If globalization means what's happening with mad cow
and foot-and-mouth disease, we don't want it," says Braz de Oliveira Franca,
the region's first indigenous candidate for mayor. "But Indians have become
dependent on white culture, so we have to define a way of maintaining our
culture in the globalized world."
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Associated Press]
(http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB990387615944586433.htm)
INTERNET
COMMERCE OKS VERISIGN DOT-COM DEAL
Issue: Internet
The Internet gatekeeper VeriSign convinced the Commerce Department on Friday
to approve an agreement that gives the company continued control over the
"dot-com" Internet registry until 2007 - and beyond. In the
agreement, VeriSign will let go of it's control over the "dot-net" and
"dot-org" domains, and has agreed to follow regulations to allow for
competition in the Internet addressing space. Only three significant changes
were made to a draft agreement between ICANN and VeriSign drawn earlier this
year, said a Commerce Department official on Friday. VeriSign will give up
the "dot-net" domain in 2005, 6 months sooner than
agreed in the draft, and if competition doesn't grow in the Internet
addressing industry subject to Commerce Department scrutiny, it could be
forced to open it up to competitive bidding by aspiring registry operators
early as 2003. "I'm perfectly expecting to be absolutely appalled" by the
decision, said Karl Auerbach, one of three ICANN board of directors who
voted against the deal. "I think the Internet community loses badly by it. I
think that VeriSign wins mightily by it."
[SOURCE: Newsbytes.com, AUTHOR: David McGuire]
(http://www.washtech.com/news/regulation/9881-1.html)
E-COMMERCE: HAS THE WEB'S AUDIENCE PEAKED?
Issue: Internet
A recent report by Telecommunications Reports International, a Washington
research firm, said the number of residential Internet customers declined
0.3 percent last quarter, to 68.5 million. It was the first such decline
since the company began tracking online use in 1980, when it monitored users
of the Source and MicroNet, a predecessor of CompuServe. The
report's author, Gary H. Arlen, who is also president of Arlen
Communications, wrote that last quarter's decline was "a statistical
aberration," stemming from the demise of free Internet providers like.
Forrester Research, predicts that the total number of United States
households connected to the Internet wont start to level off until 2004, at
70 million, or about two-thirds of the homes in the nation.
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Bob Tedeschi]
(http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/21/technology/21ECOMMERCE.html)
(requires registration)
ACCESS TO INFORMATION
SCHOOLS GET TOOLS TO TRACK STUDENTS' INTERNET USE
Issue: EdTech
eSniff Solution, a software program that alerts school administrators when
their students access forbidden material Internet, is now available to
schools across the country. A federal law passed in December requires
schools and libraries to install a "technology protection measure" to
protect minors from inappropriate online materials, or risk losing
Internet financial support from the federal e-Rate program. The virtue of
products like eSniff, say its supporters, is that it effectively keeps
students on the straight-and-narrow path without actually preventing them
from going anywhere online. David L. Sobel, general counsel for the
Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, however,
said the eSniff software raised serious privacy concerns. "It sort of
becomes a Hobson's choice - whether we are going to sacrifice free speech,
or privacy, when attempting to regulate what students access in schools," he
said.
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: John Schwartz]
(http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/21/technology/21SNIF.html)
(requires registration)
CIVIL LIBERTIES GROUPS OPPOSE 'STEALTH' WEB BLOCKING
Issue: Web filtering
Civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the
Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, released a statement denouncing the practice of some Internet
service providers of secretly blocking Internet users from viewing certain
Web sites. Peacefire.org, a Web-based organization that opposes mandatory
Internet filtering, led the statement against two large Internet
backbone providers AboveNet and Teleglobe that close certain Web sites from
their customers, including smaller ISPs, that in turn do not notify their
individual customers that their access is restricted. The filtering
was implemented by the backbone ISPs to block spammers identified on the
mail abuse prevention system (MAPS). "If people want to block themselves
voluntarily, that's up to them, but hardly anybody who is
downstream from these blocking ISPs realize that's what's going on," said
Peacefire.org's Web manager Bennett Haselton.
[SOURCE: Newsbytes.com, AUTHOR: David McGuire]
(http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/165895.html)
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