November-December 2003 Archived Blogs

		w December 25, 2003
		Do You Really Need That Warranty Card? By IAN AUSTEN BETH GIVENS admits she is guilty of avoiding at least one small housekeeping matter. "I'm a pretty lousy consumer," she said. "I don't fill out those warranty cards." But it is less out of laziness than principle. As director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Francisco, Ms. Givens is among the privacy advocates who say that consumers should not register the products they buy or receive. "Warranty cards are among the most deceptive practices of marketers today," she said. Product registrations, Ms. Givens and other critics argue, are now little more than a means of building marketing databases with detailed information about individuals. In return, these critics say, consumers get little or no additional warranty protection. Read More

		w December 21, 2003
		Lost? Hiding? Your Cellphone Is Keeping Tabs By AMY HARMON On the train returning to Armonk, N.Y., from a recent shopping trip in Manhattan with her friends, Britney Lutz, 15, had the odd sensation that her father was watching her. He very well could have been. Ms. Lutz's father, Kerry, recently equipped his daughters with cellular phones that let him see where they are on a computer map at any given moment. Earlier that day, he had tracked Britney as she arrived in Grand Central Terminal. Later, calling up the map on his own cellphone screen, he noticed she was in SoHo. Mr. Lutz did not happen to be checking when Britney developed pangs of guilt for taking a train home later than she was supposed to, but the system worked just as he had hoped: she volunteered the information that evening. "Before, they might not have told me the truth, but now I know they're going to," said Mr. Lutz, 46, a lawyer who has been particularly protective of Britney and her sister, Chelsea, 17, since his wife died several years ago. "They know I care. And they know I'm watching." Read More

		w December 18, 2003
		Musicians Protesting Monopoly in Media By JENNIFER 8. LEE WASHINGTON, Dec. 17 -- Musicians rocked for peace in the 1960's. They rocked for Africa in the 1980's. Now they're rocking for stricter corporate media regulation. And all they are saying is, Give radio station ownership caps a chance. In front of an audience of 1,100 on a recent rainy Monday night at the cavernous 930 Club here, Tom Morello, former guitarist of Rage Against the Machine, took the stage with musicians like Billy Bragg, Steve Earle, Lester Chambers and Boots Riley. Here the raging was mainly against the star of media consolidation, Clear Channel Communications, which since 1996 has grown from fewer than 40 radio stations to more than 1,200 nationwide. "What's happening is that Clear Channel is a great hulking Frankenstein monster gobbling things up," Mr. Bragg told the crowd, a mix of young and not-so-young, many of them urban professionals, briefcases and children in hand. But the real favorites of the night were two balding, middle-aged Federal Communications Commission members, who joined the musicians and the M.C., Janeane Garofalo, for the last performance of a three-week, 13-city tour called Tell Us the Truth, aimed at educating the nation on the perils of media consolidation. Read More

		w December 15, 2003
		Support Franklin Furnace When Franklin Furnace's 25th anniversary approached a few years ago, our Board of Directors set about devising a fitting celebration. We decided to perpetuate the spirit of risk for which Franklin Furnace is known by presenting a cash award to an artist whose work fell outside the present confines of artistic practice. We dubbed our new award the "McMartha," an ironic reference to the renowned MacArthur Foundation "genius" grants. In 2000, we selected the first McMartha recipient, artist/architect Kyong Park, for his visionary "Adamah" project in Detroit, which critiqued the capitalist system while proposing a new social order. Yoko Ono was to present the award on November 7, 2001, but September 11, 2001 intervened. Feeling that the spirit of risk needed support like never before, we still gave the cash award of $25,000 to Mr. Park for his idealistic, albeit impossible, idea. You can help sustain the spirit of artistic risk-taking by joining a risk-loving organization. Show the world the spirit of risk in your heart by joining Franklin Furnace. Our programs are described in brief below, and in detail on our regularly-updated website, www.franklinfurnace.org. So lay yourself open, stick your neck out, sleep on the edge of the volcano, whip out your checkbook, hazard a few bucks, and take a leap with Franklin Furnace today! Descriptions of our Membership perques follow below - please visit our homepage and click on "Become a Member." We look forward to hearing from you often in the new season. Very truly yours, Martha Wilson Founding Director Go to FF website

		w December 15, 2003
		Using a Bicycle to Uplink on a Downtown Platform By DAVID F. GALLAGHER As a saxophone's melancholy music bounced off the tile walls of the subway station at Union Square in Manhattan last Thursday afternoon, Yury Gitman was hunched over a laptop computer, trying a different kind of performance. A thin stream of wireless Internet bandwidth was trickling down the stairs to the downtown platform of the N,R,Q and W lines, two levels below the street, and Mr. Gitman was trying to get the tenuous link to send what he said would be the first e-mail message from this deep in the New York City subway system. Mr. Gitman, an artist who is teaching a class at the Parsons School of Design in collaboration with Eyebeam, a media arts organization, intended the stunt to be a demonstration of his Magicbikes - ordinary bicycles rigged with networking gear that transforms them into wireless Internet access points, using the wireless fidelity, or Wi-Fi, technology now built into many laptops. Read More

		w December 8, 2003
		Nations Chafe at U.S. Influence Over Internet By JENNIFER L. SCHENKER PARIS, Dec. 7 - Paul Twomey, the president of the Internet's semi-official governing body, Icann, learned Friday night what it feels like to be an outsider. Mr. Twomey, who had flown 20 hours from Vietnam to Geneva to observe a preparatory meeting for this week's United Nations' conference on Internet issues, ended up being escorted from the meeting room by guards. The officials running the meeting had suddenly decided to exclude outside observers. Mr. Twomey's ejection may underscore the resentment of many members of the international community over the way the Internet is run and over United States ownership of many important Internet resources. Although Mr. Twomey is Australian, Icann - the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - is a powerful nonprofit group established by the United States government in 1998 to oversee various technical coordination issues for the global network. Read More

		w November 3, 2003
		File Sharing Pits Copyright Against Free Speech By JOHN SCHWARTZ Forbidden files are circulating on the Internet and threats of lawsuits are in the air. Music trading? No, it is the growing controversy over one company's electronic voting systems, and the issues being raised, some legal scholars say, are as fundamental as the sanctity of elections and the right to free speech. Diebold Election Systems, which makes voting machines, is waging legal war against grass-roots advocates, including dozens of college students, who are posting on the Internet copies of the company's internal communications about its electronic voting machines. The students say that, by trying to spread the word about problems with the company's software, they are performing a valuable form of electronic civil disobedience, one that has broad implications for American society. They also contend that they are protected by fair use exceptions in copyright law. Read More