That was then: Marie Antoinette telling the not-so-rich, "Let 'em eat cake." This is now: the U.S. government's bid to cut poverty and homelessness saying, in effect, "Let 'em eat bytes": the government has a new online resource for the homeless. What it has: links to several Labor Department programs aimed at helping the homeless. What it doesn't have: bright ideas on how the homeless – who are not exactly known for vast computer ownership – are supposed to get there in the first place. "Given the inconsistencies across the nation in homeless people's access to public Internet terminals," said TechnologyReview.com, "it's reasonable to wonder whether this latest example of e-government will be accompanied by new efforts to close the (very real) digital divide."
There's going to be a very real divide between John Romano and the outside world for more than three years – a divide known as federal prison. The millionaire is going up the river for running a cyberscam that targeted foreigners hoping for lottery wins to get immigrant visas. Sentenced July 23, Romano pleaded guilty previously to mail fraud and reached a $2.2 million settlement on civil charges from the Federal Trade Commission against his Global Web Solutions. "This case," said FTC chairman Timothy Muris, "is a red light for fraudulent green-card operators. We want potential immigrants to know that the federal government is here to protect their rights."
Microsoft wants you to know that its online magazine Slate is up for sale. The company is said to be in "early discussions" with several media companies over prospective sale of the eight-year-old Internet magazine. Microsoft has been approached before about selling Slate, but published reports indicate this is the first time they've taken such inquiries seriously. Longtime Slate editor Michael Kinsley left the e-zine in April to become the editorial/opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times. Microsoft's preference is said to be a deal keeping Slate distributed through MSN, but the company is said not to object if it goes elsewhere online or in print.
Google's challenge of Froogles has been spurned. Their right to use Froogle for its online shopping service is now under question, following a July 23 Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers arbitration panel holding that turned down Google's challenge to Froogles.com. "The dissimilar letters in the domain name are sufficiently different to make it distinguishable from Google's mark," the panel held, saying Froogles.com makes "an entirely new word and conveys an entirely singular meaning from the mark."
Ten have been marked on charges of selling or conspiring to sell Ecstasy-like drugs on the Web, sales said to have caused 16 overdoses, two of which were fatal. Investigators said the drugs were sold as research chemicals but the buyers' names – acidtrip420, ecstasylight, ravergirlny, psychedelic-stoner – suggested other intentions.
There should be no doubt about Blinkx's intentions with their new search tool – one that composes "on the fly" lists of Web pages and local hard-drive documents relevant to what you see on screen at the moment. It's available as a free download and, once you install it, it indexes documents on your hard drive – including e-mail, attachments, and Microsoft Word, Excel, and Power Point files. It also points you to five online destinations: Websites in general, news sources, multimedia files, Weblogs, and products. At screen's top, you get six small icons for those destinations, Blinkx says, which they call channels. "By eliminating the mechanics of search, such as keywords or sorting through dozens of unqualified results," the company says, "we drive users more quickly to their goal: finding something, even if they didn't know it was there."
Or, as company co-founder Kathy Rittweiger puts it:
"Blinkx is reading whatever I'm reading and then it's going off and looking for related content in these different channels and bringing that back to me before I even ask for it. You have a unified view of recommendations coming from various sources all at once."
