Angela Gunn

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E-Business Browsing

Summer, the season of featherweight literature, lends itself admirably to books on the lives of the superrich, as long as they’re not too deep — the books, not the lives. And yet we geeks have so much serious reading to do! Which makes Money From Thin Air, Seattle Times reporter......
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Thirteen Ways of Looking @ a Dot-Com

  I Among twenty venture capitalists, The only moving thing Was the CEO of the dot-com.   II I was of three minds, Like an office complex In which there are three dot-coms.   III The dot-com whirled in the Internet World reception. It was a small part of the......
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FBI to E-Mailers: Bite You

RealNetworks is approximately the luckiest group of bastards on the planet when it comes to privacy scandals. Last time the company found itself in a privacy-related peccadillo, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson handed down his Microsoft findings of fact and knocked that story right out of the limelight. This month, just......
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Netizen's Uprising

There was something extremely heartening about seeing all the kids lining up for Harry Potter. After hearing for so long how Pokémon and ADHD were destroying the ability and desire of the under-12 set to appreciate the mental exercise of a good book, we finally heard from the children, who......
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Wireless for a Week

Perhaps you’ve heard of DotComGuy, the Dallas man who shut himself in his house and says he won‘t leave for a year. Instead, he’s living life strictly via the Net. He‘s shopping, he’s chatting, he‘s entertaining virtual guests, he’s shopping, he‘s paying the bills, he’s . . . shopping. DotComGuy......
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Space-Age Whiz Kids

Now that we‘re all taking a little rest from throwing money at each other by the fistful, is there the slightest chance we can settle in and get some work done? One of the nice things about being a tech journalist is that I have a great excuse for not......
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Space-Age Whiz Kids

Now that we‘re all taking a little rest from throwing money at each other by the fistful, is there the slightest chance we can settle in and get some work done? One of the nice things about being a tech journalist is that I have a great excuse for not......
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Wares Wars

My name is Bill. I run a company that creates software. You probably use some of my software, but you might not like me. You may dislike me so much you use my software to write flaming anti-Bill screeds, or to put up an anti-Bill Web site, or to create......
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No-Tell Mattel

This is a story about how to get a child’s attention, or a journalist‘s, or that of anyone else with a good bullshit detector. Blocking software (or censorware, as it is known in some circles) is software designed to prevent access to sites offering certain kinds of content. Most blocking......
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Patently Absurd

Illustration by Melinda Beck Which is the worst: the evil you know, the evil you don’t know, or the evil that’s been around so long no one pays attention to it anymore? Two weeks ago, Tim O’Reilly issued a rallying cry in the battle over chilling Net-patents by attacking Amazon......