January, 2000      Diablo Blue      Page 9

Be sure to read this article on the PCWorld.com web site:

which details a ruling in a Utah federal court where the judge issued a temporary restraining order against a web site that had published email messages that listed URLs that provide access to copyrighted material that the copyright holder (the Mormon Church) did not want unauthorized users to be able to access. However, these web pages apparently don't have login IDs and passwords to control who can access them, the church simply didn't publish the URLs.
This ruling is potentially so broad that it could impact all web sites that link to other sites. All those other sites would have to do is claim that the link is to copyrighted material to meet the conditions of the ruling in this case. And almost all pages on the web include a copyright notice!
Take a look at the article through the above link. BTW, this link could be construed as being in violation of PCWorld.com's copyright of the article!

Didn't your mother always tell you that looks aren't everything? It's true -- especially when it comes to Web sites. When you're looking at a "dotcom," you probably don't care what kind of server it's running on (as long as it's running). If you're curious, George, then perhaps you need to use the form at NETCRAFT.COM. Enter a URL and it'll come back with the Web server's operating system. For giggles and grins, take a look at what kind of servers hotmail.com uses. Now, should you want to know if a server supports SSL, you can use another NETCRAFT.COM form. And yes, all of this research is free.

Are you or your members becoming more Web-centric in your computer use? Our site, Traffick -- The Guide to Portals, may be of interest.
The consumer web portals (Yahoo, AOL, Go, Lycos, Excite, etc.) make up a huge part of many people's web experience worldwide. We are a new site that reviews various portal features (such as web-based e-mail, navigational aids, calendars, content, etc.). In general, we do our best to help you make sense of the portal phenomenon. We hope you find us to be a useful resource, and encourage you to tell members and colleagues about our site.
We also have a newsletter for those who are interested in regular updates about web portals and interesting new trends. Sign up at traffick-subscribe@topica.com, or just visit our site and sign up there.

[By the way, Traffick is a great multi-search engine. It returns results is a very readable form, and often gives results where other search engines either return lots of irrelevant links or no links at all. I recommend that you give it a tryout -- I think you'll be pleased. Ed]