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The year is still young, but computer hackers are already hard at work, crashing our hard drives and clogging the net with worms and viruses. The latest outbreak, "Mydoom," has already penetrated some half million computers worldwide. For an article in this week's New York Times Magazine, Clive Thompson traveled through Europe in search of the masterminds behind the worst computer viruses. He tells Brooke what he found.
While there are basic things computer users can do to avoid virtual virus infection, stopping the viruses at their sources is proving to be a much more daunting prospect. As law enforcement agencies struggle to combat hackers worldwide, President Bush is calling on Congress to ratify the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime. But others are criticizing the measure as an affront to civil liberties. Bob talks to the ACLU's Barry Steinhardt about the treaty.
Last month, a small community of webloggers decided they were fed up with the coverage that their favorite Democratic candidate was getting in the mainstream press. They decided to take matters into their own hands, and one by one began to "adopt" reporters whose work they would critique on their own websites. Is this new corps of citizen media critics an inevitable outgrowth of the Internet Age? Or is there something about Campaign '04 that invited an army of reporter watchdogs? Perhaps, suggests Brooke, it's a combination of both.
With just a couple of days left before the Iowa caucuses, the airwaves in the all-important 29th state are awash with campaign ads both for and against the Democratic candidates. But how is a poor undecided Iowan to weed out the substantive wheat from the false and misleading chaff? Enter factcheck.org, a new website sponsored by the Annenberg Public Policy Center. Veteran journalist Brooks Jackson is the project's director, and joins Bob to discuss it.
When it comes to the murky legal waters of freedom and privacy issues, the Internet was a virtual Pandora's Box in 2003. As email ushered all manner of spam and worse into our homes, some feared that wide-ranging invasions of privacy were just around the corner. But according to Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig, the proposed cures may be worse than the disease, resulting in even less freedom and privacy. Professor Lessig shares his New Year's premonitions with Bob.
It's been a big year for all of us at OTM. We've watched soul-searching over integrity in newspaper journalism, battles over deregulation in broadcast, war reporters on tanks in the desert, and new challenges to freedom of information and the First Amendment. But who is THE media figure of 2003? Presidential candidate Howard Dean? Mega media mogul Rupert Murdoch? Arnold Schwarzenegger? "The Week" magazine and iwantmedia.com have teamed up to determine who will bring home the honors. Bob mulls it over with Patrick Phillips, founder of iwantmedia.com.
Back in the era of Beverly Hills 90210 an obsessive viewer named Daniel Drennan kept up a minute-by-minute account of the show on his website. He also hosted a chat room where other 90210 fans could get together and gossip about Brandon, Donna and the rest of the gang. That’s where Sarah Bunting and Tara Ariano first met and their shared interest led to the creation of their own site; Television Without Pity. The site now “recaps” 37 shows, each one updated weekly by a “recapper” assigned to that beat. Brooke speaks with founder, Sarah Bunting.
This fall, a groundbreaking technology was quietly unveiled on the Internet. Visitors to Amazon.com can now search the entire contents of 120 thousand books, and view the pages with the corresponding text. Eventually, the online retail behemoth plans to extend its "Search-Inside-the-Book" feature to millions of its books. Wired Magazine contributing editor Gary Wolf talks to Bob about the enormous implications for publishing and research.
