29 July 2002

Voice Reconition in Cars DUBLIN, Ireland -- While Irish legislators are trying to remove anything like hands-free telephone kits from cars, voice recognition systems are continuing to arrive in cars. Some of these systems are smart enough to show you the way when you're lost.

Open Secrets Inside New Media OPEN SECRETS.org -- You can find an amazing amount of information about US campaign contributions at OpenSecrets.org. For example, PACs in the Communications/Electronics sector have contributed $8.8 million to Federal candidates so far in the 2001-2002 election cycle. They contributed $14.7 million in the 1999-2000 election cycle. PACs in the entertainment industry (TV-movies-music) have given $1.85 million to Federal candidates so far this cycle. They contributed $3.36 million in the 1999-2000 election cycle. A lot of this miney is spent to wine and dine officeholders and remind them of where the largess comes from and what their clients want to see happen on the floor of the House and the Senate. No wonder why Web radio was killed and that tight constraints are being placed on digital content.

The case against stealth PDF links A link on a web page most often brings up a page written in HTML, but it may bring up one of several other kinds of file instead.  Very often, particularly on legal sites, the link is to a PDF file, perhaps a judicial opinion or another official government document, and the browser's Acrobat plug-in will then have to go through the time-consuming process of starting either Acrobat or the Acrobat Reader before the document will display.  On my relatively quick system, connected via cable modem, it takes about 20-25 seconds for Acrobat to load and display the chosen file.  For those with slower processor speed or those who have no better than a dialup connection, the time it takes the system to load the document is often extremely long, particularly if the PDF file is very large.  What's worse, after the PDF-within-the-browser is closed, the user has to go through the same process again if another unmarked PDF link is followed. When I am wandering from link to link, I simply do not want to bother with that process in the majority of cases.  Very often, if I wish to peruse it, I will choose to download the PDF file to disk so that I can look at it later.  In order to have that flexibility of choice, we believe that links to PDF files should be clearly marked as such (as we have done on this site) so that the user can choose whether and how to view it.  We call an unmarked link to a PDF file a "stealth PDF link".  We encourage all web authors to clearly mark PDF links, and to forever foreswear the use of stealth PDF links.  If you agree, send a polite reminder of this preference to webmasters of sites displaying the offending links. [The LitiGator]

Deep Linking Takes Another Hit WIRED -- A ruling by Munich's Upper Court determined that using a search engine to find stories on a newspaper's Web site violates European Union law. The decision is the latest ruling in a two-year court battle between German newspaper Mainpost and German search service NewsClub. Mainpost claims that searching through and linking directly to Mainpost content flouts the EU "Database Directive," which grants copyright protection to database creators for selecting and arranging the information in a database even when they do not hold the copyright on the information.The law also protects against unfair extraction of items in a database, specifically downloading or hyperlinking. NewsClub faces more legal hearings, but without any expectation that the Upper Court decision will be reversed.