Andrew Motion, poet laureate of the United Kingdom, and record producer Richard Carrington are creating an online archive of recordings of English-speaking poets. The Poetry Archive will include recordings of poets including Tennyson, Yeats, Kipling, Betjeman, and Sassoon and will also feature recordings of living poets reading their own work, including Margaret Atwood, Seamus Heaney, […]

City officials from New Orleans have announced plans to deploy a wireless network covering the entire city by the end of 2006. The network will provide improved communication for city services, including fire and police departments, and–the city hopes–will draw residents and businesses back to the city following this year’s disastrous hurricane season. When complete, […]

Motivated by a number of factors, growing numbers of college hopefuls are turning to the Web to submit applications, though concerns about the medium persist. For colleges and universities, online applications generally mean easier processing with fewer mistakes. Many institutions waive application fees–which can run as high as $75–for students who apply online. As a […]

The Free Software Foundation has announced plans to revise the General Public License (GPL), which covers many open source applications including the Linux operating system. The license has not been revised since 1991, long before Linux and other open source applications had been implemented widely. Now, according to Eben Moglen, the foundation’s general counsel, “The […]

The BellSouth Foundation announced it will spend $20 million over five years to improve online education and technology access in nine states in the southern United States. The BellSouth Foundation is the charitable arm of BellSouth, which serves the southern region. The foundation is specifically charged with improving education and, according to Mary Boehm, president […]

The World Association of Domain Name Developers has filed a lawsuit in a California court against the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and VeriSign over a deal recently reached between the two organizations. After resolving a dispute over VeriSign’s Site Finder service, which directed users who mistyped URLs to VeriSign’s Web site, […]

The Federal Court of Australia in Sydney has ordered the operators of the Kazaa file-sharing service to install a keyword filter to screen out copyrighted material by December 5. The filter will keep users from trading files containing keywords from a list of 3,000 chosen by record companies. The order follows a September ruling that […]

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a patent-infringement lawsuit involving eBay and a patent holding company that eBay lost in 2003.
MercExchange holds a patent over sales and purchasing methods used in online auctions. The appeal deals with whether the U.S. District Court that handled the case should have issued a permanent injunction against eBay. The […]

Amsterdam-based UnifiedRoot S&M BV has created an Internet addressing system that eliminates top-level domains such as .com and .edu, allowing organizations and individuals to register Internet addresses ending with the name of their businesses or other words. The new system can combine top-level domains with second-level domains for what the company calls more intuitive addresses […]

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has agreed to consider single-letter addresses such as a.com in response to company requests. (Six companies with single-letter names were allowed to keep their names when the existing system was established.) In deciding whether to accept single-letter names, ICANN will also have to determine how to […]