Coop: Fear and loathing in ... Chile?

Word has it that there's a move afoot to make automatic e-mail forwarding a reality. That is, you drop one ISP for another and change e-mail addresses, but messages would still get delivered for about 90 days. There may be some word about the effort soon, but insiders are loath to offer firmer predictions.

The same folks who swear Howard Hunt and Bill Gates were together on the grassy knoll in Dallas in 1963 have been clogging up my mail box with e-mails raving about the threat ICANN poses to our precious bodily fluids. The loonies were especially active in the last week, and my assumption was that someone in the group had scored an extra dose of pain relievers. But what set their gums flapping was the disclosure that the nonprofit group, which is charged with figuring out how to privatize Internet domain name registration, was hurting financially. Sadly for them, MCI WorldCom and Cisco came to the rescue with a $650,000 loan. I can't wait to check my mailbox next week when ICANN holds its next board meeting in Santiago, Chile.

After Red Hat's smashing IPO success, wannabe open-source moguls can pick up some handy tips at the O'Reilly Open Source conference. Among the luminaries: Sun Microsystems all-purpose guru Bill Joy and Mac evangelist-turned-venture capitalist Guy (Let the good times roll) Kawasaki.

Aspen, Colo., is a great place to visit if for no other reason than you'll in the same state as Hunter S. Thompson. But if you're in the neighborhood, it will be fun to drop in on the Aspen Summit. The theme this year is cyberspace and the American Dream. I got a look at the impressive speaker roster, and rest assured, the palaver will be in no short supply. Whether you'll learn anything, of course, is another question.

The week that was:
John McCain's got guts. The Arizona senator's already butted heads with his party's majority weasel over campaign finance reform (or the lack thereof), and now he's calling for an end for all caps on the number of immigrants with high-tech skills. Outside of Silicon Valley, that's not a popular position to take. But it's the right one.

Compaq was so eager to announce its eight-way, e-commerce-oriented servers that it jumped the gun on Intel's orchestration of the official rollout. More interesting is the knee-jerk tendency in some press quarters to stick the idiotic adjective "troubled" in front of Compaq's name. Folks, it's a passing tempest. By this time next year, the same boo-birds will be singing hosannas to Michael Capellas. BTW, Compaq's new CEO made the right call this week by killing off NT development on Alpha. That platform's future is better linked up with Linux, Tru64 Unix and OpenVMS.

Just finished Ken Auletta's wonderful write-up in the New Yorker of his various lunches and dinners with sundry Microsoft moguls -- including His Highness in Redmond -- during the course of the company's antitrust trial. For all his wealth and power, Bill Gates still sulks and carries on when he doesn't get his way. That's a character flaw that DOJ legal beagle David Boies has exploited for all it's worth -- and in this case, it could be worth a fortune.

Libertarians are more than mildly upset about the DOJ's new proposal governing authorization for disabling encryption programs on personal computers. They're right to register concern, but the explosive rhetoric is overkill. This isn't carte blanche for Big Brother to spy on you and me. Law enforcement agencies would still need a green light from the courts.

In ruling that AOL couldn't trademark such phrases as "You have mail," the courts struck a blow for sanity in an increasingly uncivilized world. Now if they can do something about idiotic lawsuits, such as the one filed against eMachines by Apple Computer. Steve Jobs is wasting his time calling foul. eMachines CEO Steve Dukker has set the PC industry on its ear with his devastatingly brilliant marketing approach to selling computers.

Forget the hyperbole -- Ray Lane says it would have an impact on industry "that we haven't seen in as much as 100 years" -- but HP's new electronic commerce initiative (called e-speak) is getting a strong thumbs-up from developers and analysts. Still early to offer flat predictions, but unlike some of its rivals (Compaq, Dell and Gateway), HP has a clearly articulated vision of how it wants to insinuate itself into the e-commerce plans of its customers.

In the news:
Furor rising over PC wiretap plan
High-tech brain drain
AOL can't trademark 'You have mail'
Apple sues eMachines over eOne
HP's e-speak initiative