Cyberscope

Power Plays Six customizable action buttons reproduce the keyboard aspect of first-person and action-adventure games like Unreal: Tournament and Tomb Raider

Ready, Aim, Fire There are two triggers (one on each grip), so lefties won’t feel left out

Take It for a Spin Microsoft’s most radical innovation is the pivoting pod. By tilting the right-hand grip up or down, you raise or lower your character’s POV; by rotating it left or right, you make your character turn.

Run and Gun Just push the Dual Strike joystick’s thumbpad in the direction you want to go: forward and backward, or to sidestep left and right. You’ll get the hang of it in no time at all.

COMPUTERSiMac Take Two

Apple computer’s interim CEO Steve Jobs unveiled new iMacs last week, just in time for holiday buying. The difference between these egg-shaped consumer PCs and their popular predecessors? They’re a bit smaller and translucent enough to see the innards. Better sound. Faster chips. DVDs in two of the three configurations (priced at $999, $1,299 and $1,499 for a very cool-looking silver model). And new software, including a video program to make your own “Blair Witch” knockoff. While these iMacs have no noisy internal fans, they’ll surely please Apple’s very noisy fans–but only if the think-different company makes its delivery promises.

ONLINETurning 5.0

America online had a message for its 18 million users last week: You’ve Got an Upgrade. AOL 5.0 offers a more efficient search engine, a more useful home page and–watch this trend–support for devices like the PalmPilot. It addresses the logjam in screen names by allowing monikers of 16 characters. There are also new features like a scheduler for appointments (which, with the help of things like Moviefone, can add new ones) and a way to get your photos online. The goal is to make AOL so “sticky” that you’ll never leave.

KIDSAn Organizer for Obsessive Pokefans

Parents, stow the toy chest. Today’s dot-matrix-crazed kids may prefer to organize their piles of Pokemon paraphernalia with a battery-operated gadget. Shaped like a palm-held computer, Tiger Electronics’ new Pokedex organizer (retail, $24.99) sports a keypad and screen. Both let kids catalog, research and display every character of the ubiquitous cartoon, Nintendo game and trading cards. But beware: its annoying tones may drive you to hide in the toy chest.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-25” author: “Phillip Mickel”

Until now, all of the portable digital music players have come from smaller manufacturers like Diamond and Creative Labs. Next week RCA debuts its Lyra ($199; www.lyrazone.com). The Lyra supports both MP3 and RealNetworks G2 formats, and can be easily upgraded through software to support other formats as well.

A jog shuttle lets you control the volume and the graphic-equalizer settings

Optimize settings for pop, rock, jazz, bass boost or flat

AC adapter jack

A variety of playback modes gives you more control of your music

Weight: 3.3 oz. Size: 4.5" x 2" x 7/8" Storage: 16 MB to 64 MB

The LCD shows the name of the song, artist and album

Music is stored on CompactFlash cards; expect a 300-MB version by 2000

GAMESEpic Proportions

Easily the most anticipated game of the year, Final Fantasy VIII (SquareSoft) for the Sony PlayStation is a four-CD action and adventure epic with a dash of romance. You are Squall Leonhart, a soldier who battles an evil sorceress bent on, what else, world domination. As you make your way around the game’s vast, intricately detailed 3-D world, you must master arcane and mystical powers. Novices may be overwhelmed at times, but the tutorials help smooth the way. For PlayStation owners, this one’s a must.

HEALTHBirds and Bees

Dr. Drew Pinsky brings “Loveline,” his popular sex-and-relationships radio show for young adults, to the Web this week at www.drdrew.com. It will feature a vibrant community of people, and unlike other health Web sites, says Pinsky, “it’s going to be a very hip place.”

SITE SPECIFICDecorate Your Home From the Comfort of …Home

There comes a time in every person’s life when he or she must buy a couch. Or a bed. Or an antique mahogany grandfather clock. Whatever your design needs and budget, there a Web site out there to help make that dream come home–or a cramped apartment–happen.

www.goodhome.com Who It’s For: Well-heeled homeowners with impeccable taste and some kind of design background

What It’s Like: A very posh Ethan Allen, or your own suit-clad decorator

What It’s Got: Expensive furniture, choose-you-own fabrics, an in-house design team

www.living.com Who It’s For: Ordinary people who want nice things but don’t do swatches

What It’s Like: Populist, accessible and easy to use. Decorating for dummies.

What It’s Got: Sharp graphical layout, online decorating magazine, budget and space planner

www.furniturefind.com Who It’s For: All those folks who just want a couch–none of this matching business

What It’s Like: Wal-Mart meets Costco online. Point, click and buy.

What It’s Got: Links to manufacturers, big discounts, online showroom, free delivery

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-13” author: “Theresa Parker”

Build or tear down buildings

Check the status of your civilization

Monitor a map of the game world

THE WEBPlan Your Party With the Click of a Mouse

It used to be that party planning was a big pain: invitations, decorations, favors… so much work for a few hours of fun! Today, though, you can use the Internet to find just the right John Travolta outfit for little Johnny’s disco Halloween party. Buy whole theme packages or just one rubber bug–the choice is yours.

iParty.com Who It’s For: The online party source. Party goods, decorations, a magazine, even safety tips. You’re all set.

What It’s Like: The really huge party store in the middle of the mall

What It’s Got: Costumes (Queen Amidala is big this year), personalized balloons, even a motorized disco ball

birthdayexpress.com Who It’s For: Parents who want to customize birthday and other parties for their little ones

What It’s Like: A personal shopper who helps you pick just the right Barney cups

What It’s Got: A veritable trove of themes, from ‘Blue’s Clues’ to fire trucks to Winnie-the-Pooh

birthdayinabox.com Who It’s For: Those same parents who want an interactive educational twist to their parties

What It’s Like: What your child’s kindergarten teacher might recommend

What It’s Got: Lets you choose a theme (mermaids, pirates) that comes with stickers and prepacked goody bags

SCIENCEWhale Watching

WHEN TWO JUVENILE pilot whales washed up on Cape Cod, Mass., last summer, scientists were not sanguine about their chances of making it back to sea; fewer than one in four survives strandings. But, this week, the now healthy whales were released from Connecticut’s Mystic Aquarium into the Atlantic. Marine biologists tagged the pair with radio transmitters that will beam their movements via satellite back to Mystic for study and to the Web (mysticaquarium.org) for the public’s enjoyment. The satellite tags drop off after only two months, so check them out before they’re gone forever.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-04” author: “Amelia Norman”

AUCTIONSGavel to Gavel Coverage

With the proliferation of online auction sites, millions of people are discovering the joys of e-buying and selling. A new site, Auctionwatch.com, is helping to make the whole process easier. Here you can chat with buyers and sellers, get in touch with appraisers or vent about getting ripped off. It will even track hits across different auction sites, so you can see if your Beanie Babies sell better on eBay or uBid. About the only thing it doesn’t do is sell your stuff for you.

SITE SPECIFICSo Many Phones, So Many Plans

Resigned to join the mobile universe, but wary of fading signals and spiraling costs? More than 83 million Americans will spend some $36 billion on mobile phones and wireless gadgets next year. These three new compare-and-save sites can help you decide on a plan.

Point.com How It Works: Aims to be all telecommunications to all people, even small to midsize businesses

Cell Selection: Boasts more than 3,000 plans, 200 phones and 1,000 extras–all easy to search

Best Feature: Lets folks in top 50 metro areas compare all available phones and plans

Cellmania.com How It Works: Offers a sense of community by asking visitors to ‘rant and rate’ on phone of choice

Cell Selection: Divides plans into ‘quick picks’ for students, emergency use and road warriors

Best Feature: Free Mobile Mail, which lets you send e-mail, voice mail and messages to one site

Decide.com How It Works: Informs customers of new services and money-saving plans, when available

Cell Selection: Doesn’t stop at mobile. Site will soon offer land-line calling-plan comparisons, too.

Best Feature: Plays audio files of call-sound quality in specific metro and urban markets

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-26” author: “Betty Dade”

SPORTSAs Real as It Gets

If you’re looking for the most realistic, eye-popping and flat-out fun football game around, look no further than NFL 2K ($49.99, www.sega.com) for the newly launched Sega Dreamcast gaming console. The game has the best 3-D graphics we’ve ever seen in a sports title and is engaging for novices and seasoned veterans alike. The slick interface lets you call offensive and defensive plays with ease, while the intuitive player controls make it easy to guide your guys around the field. Lifelike animations make every bone-jarring tackle and fancy move look real–you can even see players’ breath during cold-weather games. Extra points for this one.

AUDIOKick Out the Jams

Tired of listening to MP3 files on your PC through those tinny speakers? Now your PC can sound as good as your stereo, thanks to Yamaha’s @PET ($499; www.yamaha.com), which bypasses your sound card and delivers the audio through a high-quality amplifier. It connects to your PC via USB, and you plug your speakers into the @PET. And for all those NPR or Howard Stern fans, it even has a built-in AM/FM tuner. It’s been music to our ears.

SUPPORTA Little Less Swearing

Every computer user has had the “oh, $%*&!” moment when something breaks, flashes or freezes on your machine and you haven’t a clue what to do. A new Web site, MyHelpdesk.com, offers free access to support lines, user groups and message boards dealing with the most popular computer products. A good thing for the tech-frustrated everywhere.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-19” author: “Richard Kahle”

HOT PROPERTYTouring the Plains of Africa the Easy Way

Cheaper and cleaner than a real safari, nature: virtual Serengeti ($29.95; 203-797-3530) lets children explore 360-degree views of the “endless plains,” their people and animals. This CD-ROM really provides kids a mouseclick that roars.

Not as dangerous as in real life, but if you get lost, turn to the compass

Visit native dwellings

‘Nature’s’ George Page is your guide

Spotting animals triggers video footage

The field guide provides the background to elephants, naked mole rats and more

Hop on the plane and take off to ever more remote locales

The video recorder stores movies of the various animals you’ve found

THE WEBVirtually Dieting

Sure, computers help you pay bills, write to friends and work from home. But the founders of eDiets.com swear they can help you shed pounds too. This powerful site (which boasts you’ll lose two pounds per week) creates a profile that considers food allergies–and whether you’d rather cook from scratch or nuke your dinner. For about $70, members get personalized meal plans, shopping lists and support on a Web page they can access from the road, work or home. Its biggest potential gold mine: men who are too embarrassed to waddle into Weight Watchers.

SERVICESBack to You

Forget cardboard boxes filled with missing gloves–the lost and found has gone high tech at www.ReturnMe.com. The service provides members with personalized ID tags (12 for $9.95) that include a personal code and ReturnMe.com’s e-mail address and toll-free number. Members pay a handling fee and FedEx charges for returned items.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-30” author: “Lydia Campbell”

www.pets.com Uses its ‘puppet spokes-dog thing’ to chat with pooches in parking lots and sing the site’s praises wherever pets play

www.cnet.com Urges you to rely on it, not the usual experts, for tech advice. This doc agrees to ‘investigate’ with an ominous latex glove.

www.ecampus.com Pokes fun at the mental capacity of college kids by telling you it sells books bored students ‘so desperately need’

GADGETSEasy E-Mail

Attention, technophobes: you now have no excuse for shunning e-mail. VTech’s PostBox ($99.99; 888-468-8324) lets up to five users write, send and check e-mail without using a desktop computer. Turn it on, type a message and plug the unit into a phone jack; the internal modem finds a local host, even if you leave home turf. A pocket-size counterpart, the Express ($79.99), supports one user and runs on batteries. A bit of comparison shopping for snail-mailers: at less than $100, both products cost less than a PC, but more than a book of stamps.

SITE SPECIFICThe Net Can Help When It’s Time to Tie the Knot

In weddings, as in pairs figure skating, men are often relegated to supporting roles. Women plan 85 percent of all events, by one estimate, which may explain why the legions of wedding-planning Web sites are unapologetically aimed at the bride-to-be. Try these on for size:

The Knot The Skinny: Other ‘wed’ sites aspire to be The Knot. Massive yet easy.

Best Reason to Go There: One-stop shopping. Research options. Look at 6,000 gowns. Register for gifts. Chat with other brides. Later this month: book your honeymoon travel.

Good Tip: ‘Try not to have unrealistic expectations for your bra’

WeddingChannel The Skinny: Smart shoppers know to seek a second opinion. Get it here.

Best Reason to Go There: The official online partner of Bride’s magazine and the registry partner of Federated Department Stores (Macy’s, The Bon Marche, Stern’s)

Good Tip: Don’t wear frost eye shadow; it will make you look tired

iVillage Wedding Center The Skinny: If this site were a cake, it would be home-baked and lopsided

Best Reason to Go There: Other brides are a great resource. Nicely managed boards and bride ‘buddy’ lists can save you from agonizing over decisions in lonely isolation.

Good Tip: Save money by avoiding a Y2K wedding. Rates are sky high.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-22” author: “Sylvia Carter”

Michael E. Ryan WEBTaste of Home for Those Who Roam Ever try to find beef jerky in Burundi? How about peanut butter in Brazil or muffin tins in Malawi? Cravinghome.com offers an extensive catalog of American comfort foods and drugstore items, giving expats a place to turn when friends and family don’t come through with that care package. It’ll handle special orders, too, and deal with the complexities of international shipping. Finally, a way to get enough deodorant for all your friends in France.

SITE SPECIFIC Building a Bridge to the 21st Century–Slowly Al Gore and George W aren’t the only ones crusading to make government more user-friendly. A growing number of e-government portals, such as GovConnect.com, aim to make your dealings with the IRS, DMV, DOT and other migraine-inducing abbreviations as painless as possible. All-Uncle-Sam-all-the-time is still a ways off, but these two come the closest:

What’s There: You can pay taxes, bills and parking tickets for a fee. Type in your ZIP and get the lowdown on local services and community events.

Pros: Direct link to 30 county and city agencies expedites payments. Se habla espanol.

Cons: Payment options limited beyond those 30 agencies

What’s There: Make payments. Check government auctions and job listings. Ask a ‘how do I’ question and get a reply within 24 hours.

Cons: Sluggish payment process

EVENTS Light Your Fire Burning Man (burningman.com), a weeklong counterculture event in the Nevada desert that began as a San Francisco beach party 14 years ago, is going high tech this year. If you’re among the expected throng of 30,000 artists, nudists and other free spirits, you can log on to a new high-speed wireless intranet for maps, news and messages. Bring your network-ready laptop, or just visit one of 15 kiosks. Party on… line!

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-16” author: “Anthony Garcia”

Other less ambitious 3-D apps are already available: Ububu Universe (ububu.com) lets you create theme planets–the equivalent of a folder on your desktop–and load them with pop-up icons for your bookmarks or favorite programs. And Win3D (clock wise3d.com) brings you into a personalized virtual office complete with scrolling news tickers, a game room and file cabinets for Word documents. All three can be downloaded, free. But bosses beware: with browsing this easy, getting any work done just got a lot tougher.

GADGETS Eat on the Run A handheld gadget from Intel–the Vivonic fitness planner–brings new meaning to the phrase eat and run. It’s a pedometer and nutrition-and-exercise planner rolled into one (available at vivonic.com for $229). The device converts miles walked or run into calories burned, which can be handily cross-referenced against Vivonic’s database of thousands of food items. Manage your fitness journal on your PC desktop, and then input your workout into the portable unit. Instead of just thinking about how long you’d have to walk in order to burn off that 510-calorie Big Mac you just ate, you can actually do it. It’s only about two hours.

LAUGHS And Now, a Big Hand for Bighands Do guys 5 feet 8, 5 feet 9 have value? Do steaks know where they come from? The answers can be found at Timmy Big Hands (timmybighands.com), a humor magazine created by the folks who brought us “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett and a cadre of others create essays, poetry, animations, mock reviews and comic strips pieced together from Corel Draw clip art. “It’s not a bad site,” enthuses Corbett.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-23” author: “Stacia Arriaga”

Slip into form-fitting ‘scan wear.’ Then it’s 12 seconds of standing very, very still while a machine records 200,000 data points on your body. Use your model the next time you shop at landsend.com.

Appearing in 14 cities. If you miss the truck, expect to see the scanning system pop up in malls over the next year.

FUN More Pokemon For Game Boys If you thought Pokemon had peaked, brace yourself. Pokemon Gold and Silver ($30; 800-255-3700), the two latest installments of the hugely popular game for Nintendo’s handheld Game Boy, have hit U.S. shores. The two titles combined have already presold more than 600,000 units (only a thin slice of the 100 million Game Boy game units out there). Newly redesigned color graphics bring the Pokemon world to life onthe tiny screen.

COOL STUFF All Together Now Remember “internet appliances”? After a flurry of hype, the manufacturers went to work, and machines are finally trickling out into the marketplace. Latest entry: the $499 Ergo Audrey, launched last week by networking giant 3Com. Overall, an impressive effort: the device looks good, installs in a snap and works with your existing ISP account. Available online at 3com.com/ergo.

This Beetle Has Juice The King of Freakdom, director Tim Burton, now brings his talent for drawing figures you wouldn’t want to snuggle up with to the Web. His animated show “Stainboy” recently premiered at shockwave.com. For those who revel in Burton’s pencil puppetry, “Stainboy” won’t disappoint. A mute, bug-eyed fighter of social evils, the M&M-size character is sent on missions to right the wrongs caused by miscreants. No one bares his dark side as splendidly as Burton, and the world just keeps watching.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-28” author: “Ann Mcgowan”

Old-Style Film With a Digital Touch

Kodak estimates that 40 percent of cameras are sold during the holiday season. That’s why the company is rushing to get 30,000 units of its new Advantix Preview camera ($299) into stores by mid-November. The main advantage of this model is the LCD screen that lets you preview your pics–then select your style of printing.

HOW WIDE? Push a button here to choose from panorama, regular 4x6 proportions or a slightly wider print mode called ‘group’

FIRST LOOK: Press here for a color preview of the shot you just took. Or skip it and save your batteries.

YES, PLEASE: Once everything is perfect, give your masterpiece the nod

REPRINTS: Love the photo? Order a dozen. Hate it? Order none.

FRONTSIDE: The flip-up flash is far from the lens to reduce red-eye

SHOW ME: Digital-camera-style preview pane gives a nice option for people who’d rather stick with real film for now

FILM

Free Movies for The Little Screen

The next time it pains you to spend 10 bucks on a flick, we recommend alwaysi.com. The site features more than 1,000 independent films, many of which have premiered in film festivals, but were not picked up by a distributor. Selections are as varied as a video store, and alwaysi.com tries to find big-screen deals for the more popular films. The site accepts 75 percent of all submissions, so quality ranges greatly–but there are some real gems. This is a no-brainer for any intrepid indie filmmaker, and not bad for a rainy night when cozying up to your screen for free seems like a grand idea.

Just in Time for Halloween

“Girls like games that are smart, detailed and nonviolent,” says Megan Gaiser, president of HerInteractive. The company conducted research to see what would keep girls gripped on the edge of their chairs while interfacing and created two award-winning games based on gal sleuth Nancy Drew. The newest addition, Message in a Haunted House ($29.99), drops the virtual detective into a scintillating intrigue replete with eerie music and eyebrow-raising suspects. Once you set foot in the house, we dare you to put down your magnifying glass.

POLITICS

Campaign 1952

Who can forget Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 TV campaign commercial showing a little girl picking daisies juxtaposed with a nuclear explosion? Or Willie Horton? In case you need a refresher, the American Museum of the Moving Image has mounted an Internet exhibit (ammi.org) of presidential campaign commercials dating back to 1952, the year Dwight Eisenhower appeared in a series of 20-second spot ads on TV. Streaming video lets you view all the commercials in their entirety. Morning in America, anyone?

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-29” author: “Gustavo Medina”

FUN A Hip Feline Makes Her Debut She’s furry, she’s green and she’s from the planet Katatonia. She’s Katbot, and this week she makes her debut on the World Wide Web. By day, she frequents a Long Island, N.Y., high school and lives with her host family, the LeBores. By night, she hits the punk club scene and hangs out with her musician boyfriend. Katbot’s site, katbot.com, is home to her e-mails, journals, videos, games and–most important–her quirky take on planet Earth. But don’t expect any fluffy stuff from this feline. Angela Martini, Katbot’s 28-year-old creator, says Katbot takes after her and one of her cats: “She’s got an attitude.” Definitely not just another furry face.

Take Me to Your Loss Leader The Web’s great for browsing. But how can you tell if that $100 pair of python-print shoes will really fit? That’s where Saleshound.com comes in. The site indexes sales at bricks-and-mortar stores near you. You punch in your ZIP code and search for sales by item, department or even by store. You can also sign up for an e-mail service that alerts you to bargains you like. So far, Saleshound posts about 28,000 sales a week from more than 165,000 retailers nationwide, and the creators plan to cast its net even wider. So whether you’re into linens or lawn mowers, Saleshound will gratify your inner cheapskate.

ACCESSORIES Clear Speaking We were impressed by the noise-canceling properties of Plantronics’ new M135 headset for mobile phones ($49.95; plantronics.com). The headset transmits a much clearer voice quality, and the earpiece keeps possibly harmful radiation away from your head. However, the over-the-ear configuration can be tricky. An e-mail plea for help yielded these tips from the company: “Place earhook over ear. Adjust back of hook for a snug fit. Position microphone near the mouth.” And, finally, “It helps to put the headset on in front of a mirror.” Uh, thanks.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-05” author: “Ben Couper”

Thanks to MP3 compression, the Nomad Jukebox can store 150 CDs, about 100 hours of music.

How do you navigate this much music? The playlist feature lets you organize your songs.

Rechargeable batteries are included to power the Nomad Jukebox for up to four hours.

MACHINES Stop, Guard! Ah, the wondrous internet. You can use it to send flowers, check your bank balance and–maybe soon–run a search-and-destroy mission. Pitikhate Sooraksa of King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology in Bangkok has designed a robot equipped with a video camera and a gun. Remote viewers use the camera to track a target. They can then fire the gun via an Internet connection. Right now, Roboguard’s packing an air gun, but Sooraksa says the robot could easily carry something more threatening. Roboguard also boasts infrared sensors so it can operate by itself in automatic mode. Just in case that Internet connection gets flaky.

BOOKS Travel Lighter Instead of toting an unnecessarily chunky travel guide, why not write your own? With .com, you don’t pen the work but click it into place. Guides are hand-tailored using selected entries from books like Frommer’s, Lonely Planet and Insight Guide. If you want the dish on Sartre in Paris, but won’t be shopping, booktailor.com allows you to create a guide whose every page might be useful. You enter a title, dedication and byline, and it binds, wraps and ships your chef- d’oeuvre. Books are priced by number of pages, and range from $15 to $50. While your work won’t be sold in bookstores, you can, of course, order more.

Sydney 2000: Disqualified Olympic fever is running high, but don’t let enthusiasm overcome good judgment. Case in point: Sydney 2000 ($39.99; 415-547-1200), a disappointing new videogame based on this year’s Games. Available for the three major consoles, Game Boy Color and Windows PCs, the game allows you to participate virtually in 12 events, from the 100-meter sprint to more obscure ones like skeet-shooting. To compete, you mash the buttons of your game controller as fast as humanly possible while also trying to follow confusing on-screen prompts that dictate the timing of this finger-numbing exercise. After a few events your arm will grow tired and your patience will wear thin. If you truly love the Olympics, take your $40 and donate it to the U.S. team’s training fund.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-29” author: “Edmund Vanblaricum”

GameBreaker does not offer the play-as-a-receiver option, but is otherwise the same game set at the college level. More than 100 Division 1-A teams are included along with 64 “classic” collegiate teams (though no teams from before 1978 are on the list). The graphics in both games are not top notch, but they are realistic enough and move along at a crisp, life-like pace. Big-play celebrations, college bands and a host of other small touches help add to the realism.

BEAUTY Now Everyone Can Try to Be Like Kathie Lee For those who have dreamed of life as a blonde, but didn’t reach for the peroxide–or who want to try a new lipstick without shelling out the bucks–virtual makeovers let you take some risks with a few easy clicks. From the zany to the plain, there’s no reason not to try.

SOUND It’s All in the Mind, Man With five-speaker Surround Sound available for the den, who needs to go to the movie theater? (1) People who don’t have the space (or the cash) for a full-fledged entertainment center and (2) those with families who don’t always want to share the magnificence of bombs bursting in air. Luckily, Dolby Laboratories has come up with Dolby Headphone, a sound-processing system that simulates five-channel sound through any pair of ordinary headphones. The new technology will start appearing in DVD players, videogame consoles and high-end TVs later this year. CYBERSCOPE took a test drive–and though we have no idea how it works, it does.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-07” author: “Donald Grissom”

The goggles ($699) are more powerful, but do have a certain ‘Silence of the Lambs’ look–CYBERSCOPE does not recommend wearing them in public. The NOCX3 monocular ($299), with infrared illuminator, is the best seller.

LAUGHS Four Minutes Of Free Fun God is a crotchety old geezer and the Devil is a sultry, mouthy woman. These portrayals of Western civilization’s two ubiquitous figures appear in Mondo Media’s animated Web cartoon, “The God & Devil Show.” Each episode of the weekly chat show features a “guest” (past appearances include caricatures of Jane Goodall, Chris Rock and Bill Gates) who fumbles through a stint with G & D, before going to H or H.

With snarky remarks about sex and scatology, “The God & Devil Show” walks the line of vulgar without being outright offensive. These four-minute shows are a great break from a long sit in front of the screen. And no fights over the clicker.

ACCESSORIES Patchy Protection Calgon carbon says its WaveZorb adhesive patch can block “up to 99 percent” of microwaves, like those from cell phones. But the phones need to receive and emit the radiation to work; block too many and you’re left with a very safe, very useless fashion accessory.

So WaveZorb covers only the earpiece, as if your cell were shooting a single beam of possibly harmful rays up the ear canal and into your brain. It’s not. The whole side of your head is exposed to radiation from the phone, says microwave physicist Mike Hayden, and it comes from the antenna, not the earpiece. With many phones, says Hayden, “you’d be putting the patch nowhere near the thing that’s radiating.” Calgon rep Ben Ward admits the patch is imperfect, calling it “a step in the right direction.” Looks like they might not be stepping far enough.

Oh, What a Tangled Web… Spider-Man is back in action, thanks to a great new game for the Sony Play-Station ($40; Activision; 310-255-2000). The game is an action-adventure in which you control the wall-crawler as he tries to clear his name after being framed, then rescue his wife, Mary Jane, from the evil Venom. Oh, and while you’re at it, you’ll have to punch, kick and weave webs around just about every supervillain Spidey has ever met in a series of one-on-one showdowns.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-22” author: “Leandro Valliere”

PHOTOGRAPHY Is That a Pixel In Your Pocket? How many pixels does it take to persuade a pro to go digital? Olympus figures 4 million will do the trick. In addition to the new Camedia E-10 camera’s 4.1 megapixels, it has shutter-release lag time of under 100 milliseconds. Priced at $1,999, the E-10 is clearly not aimed at the lower end of the digital market, where prices have plunged in recent years. The E-10 has both wide and telephoto lenses and higher resolution than most amateurs would ever need. You can get the snappiest results with Olympus’s P-200 portable photo printer, a compact box that prints three- by four-inch color photos using SmartMedia and CompactFlash cards. Photos will print in any room, not just dark ones.

Fly Me to the Moon, With E-Mail Guess what? We’re just plane addicted to our e-mail. To meet the demands of manic messagers, AT&T will soon launch ePlane, an on-board service that brings you selected Internet access and e-mail while cruising the North American skies. With a modem-equipped laptop and free ePlane software, you’ll have a home-style 56kbps connection speed. You can look for hotels and restaurants at your destination, and check the weather. And for those of you who stayed offline at 35,000 feet because of the whopping costs of on-board phones, you’ll be pleased to know that ePlane will charge a flat fee that’s priced closer to a glass of wine than a bottle of Chivas. So when the steward is rolling the headset cart down the aisle, you can choose: movies or messages.

GADGETS E-Concierge Stumped for what to do tonight? Consult your modo, a new $99 gizmo from Scout Electromedia (available at modo.net for Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York) that receives updated events and entertainment information–wirelessly and for no added monthly charge. This lifestyle gadget harnesses the pager infrastructure to broadcast its daily feed of news, restaurant listings and events information for museum exhibits, sports and nightclub acts. “It’s not meant to be a Yellow Pages listing,” says a spokesman, who notes that there’s no way to type a search request into the device. It has only four buttons; the triangular one on the front is dedicated to one-touch access to ads and coupons.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-20” author: “Anthony Gardner”

Cooking: Beep Beep! Your Penne Is Ready! No, it’s not one of those James Bond gadgets disguised as a common utensil. It’s Brookstone’s Pasta Smart ($25), a sleek kitchen gadget with a built-in timer that calculates the cooking time (either al dente or regular) of 11 types of pasta. Our first reaction: save your AAA batteries for something useful. But put to a cyber test, the thingamajig timed a quarter pound of linguine to al dente perfection (eight minutes, 20 seconds). A half-pound of elegant bowtie pasta took 12 minutes for easy-to-chew regular. The buttons are simple to program–just try not to press them by accident, or your meal may be interrupted by an unwelcome beep from the kitchen. Safer E-Mail OK, so you’ve heard that e-mail attachments can be the kiss of death, ushering fatal viruses onto unsuspecting hard drives across the land. How to avoid them? A new Yahoo Mail feature lets you view e-mail attachments without downloading them. Even if you don’t have the right software for, say, a Microsoft Word document, you can open it through your mail account and read it online without its coming near your precious PC. The new feature not only saves time downloading files and opening software, it can also save your computer from some nasty bugs.

Games: One Universe Is Not Enough Japanese game developer SquareSoft keeps turning out great videogames. In addition to the company’s ultrapopular Final Fantasy series, gamers can now enjoy Chrono Cross, a role-playing adventure in which you play a young hero named Serge who wakes up in an alternate universe–one in which he apparently died many years earlier. With only a strange young woman named Kid as a companion, Serge must discover why he has been pulled into this world and how he can eventually make it back to his own. Along the way he and Kid will meet many potential friends and even more enemies. All the while a mysterious catlike villain lurks behind the scenes, seemingly familiar with Serge and the reasons behind his predicament. The game’s graphics and musical score are some of the best we’ve experienced on the PlayStation to date. But it’s the compelling story and addictive action that pull the whole thing together.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-16” author: “Bernadette Jacobs”

CONSOLES Mini-PlayStation Sony’s PlayStation 2 debuts in the United States on Oct. 26, but the original PlayStation game console is still hot. A redesigned version–called the PS one–has been outselling its generational competition since it launched in Japan in early July. The sleek new PS one is only a third the size of the original but has the same capabilities. Driven by blockbuster games like SquareSoft’s Final Fantasy IX and Chrono Cross, 5,970 PS ones sold in Japan the week ending July 23. This trailed the PS2 by 54,000 units, but beat the Nintendo 64 (5,387 units) and the Sega Dreamcast (4,518). Not bad for a five-year-old product sporting a new look.

GAMES Another Virtual Pet That’s All Wet Tamagotchi, 1997’s virtual-pet craze, never really lit our candle. But then we heard about Seaman, a new game for Sega Dreamcast that’s become Japan’s top-selling Dreamcast game ever. Narrated by Leonard Nimoy and featuring a microphone that plugs into your controller, Seaman lets you raise your own fishlike creature in a virtual aquarium. You have to feed it, talk to it and play with it or it will die–or worse, turn into a jerk who makes fun of you. After a few days of TLC, our Seaman said he loved us. Thanks, but we’ll pass on this craze, too.

Harry Does Interactive Last week, as the first wave of Harry Potter merchandise was landing in stores (sample items: Hogwarts knapsacks and Hagrid picture frames), Warner Bros. announced it had selected a company to take the teenage mage into videogames. The winner: America’s largest game publisher, Electronic Arts, whose hits range from Sim City and Ultima Online to Madden Football and Tiger Woods Golf. Just as Warner Bros. held a bake-off among some of Hollywood’s top filmmakers before selecting Chris Columbus to direct the movie, the studio pored over pitches from companies like Sony, Infogrames and Microsoft before selecting EA from its sorting hat. The possibilities range from multiplayer titles like Everquest to portable games like Pokemon. Quidditch, anyone?

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-16” author: “Debra Mallett”

OBSESSIONSGet Your Kicks From BLiX Got a minute to kill? It’ll quickly turn into an hour if you try BLiX, a funky puzzle game in the tradition of Pong and Tetris. The point of this Web-based exercise (found at shockwave.com) is to manipulate little blips into a “cup,” a task that becomes increasingly complicated on upper levels as “space junk” appears that can seriously screw up the trajectory of your blips. A cool techno soundtrack alerts fellow workers to your new addiction. COMDEXHandhelds in the Spotlight Las Vegas returned to its Wild West roots at last week’s Comdex when top executives from Palm, Microsoft and their hardware partners faced off over the future of handheld computing. The Microsoft camp said that its feature-laden Pocket PC devices were BMWs compared with Palm’s modest PDAs. The Palm folks likened handheld computing to a camping trip, saying that when you’re hauling your own gear, you carry only what you need. Tortured metaphors aside, Palm is winning the operating-system gunfight: according to the market-research firm NPD Intelect, Palm’s September market share was 71 percent, compared with just 7.3 percent for all Pocket PC devices. NETSCAPEThe Browser Wars Go On After more than two years in the making, Netscape’s new browser software was released last week. It was worth the wait. Netscape 6, built from scratch, adds several impressive new features. The e-mail reader is able to serve as an in box for more than one e-mail address. The My Sidebar feature packs news, stock quotes, search and your buddy list into a task bar next to your main Web-surfing window. Our favorite new feature: the cookie manager makes it easy to see which Web sites have set bits of code into your browser. Available for free download at netscape.com.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-17” author: “Coletta Carver”

CD-ROM Don’t Come Over Even diehard fans will be disappointed by Christina Aguilera: Follow Your Dreams, a new CD-ROM from Simon & Schuster Interactive that appears to have been produced with minimal participation of the pop-music diva. For starters, there’s the entirely lame “Discover Me” scrapbook: lots of photographs of Christina but scant information. Even worse is the “Dream Finder” section, pitched as the place where girls can “get inside their own heads and hearts to figure out what is important to them and how to achieve their goals.” Sounds like something we all could use, but sadly it’s just three dumbed-down games that are devoid of fun or insight. If you like Christina Aguilera, save your $20 for her next album.

Have Mead, Will Travel Journey back to the land of Vikings and Norse mythology in Rune ($40; Gathering of Developers, 877-463-4263), one of the year’s most unusual action-adventure games. Available for both PC and Mac, Rune is a third-person game in which players assume the mantle of Ragnar, a young Viking warrior who must fight his way out of the underworld on his way to thwart the evil Conrack and his master, the mischievous god Loki. Players must not only be adept with sword, ax and hammer, but also be quick-thinking and agile. The game’s intense hand-to-hand combat sequences can be a bit bloody, but Rune does offer a “no gore” option. Gore or no gore, Rune is a splendid diversion.

UPGRADES AOL Anywhere If the internet felt slow last week it was probably due to heavy downloading, as both America Online and MSN released new upgrades. AOL 6.0 handles e-mail better and integrates wizards for using your AOL account over the phone or through your PDA. The new souped-up MSN interface now looks more like AOL–even if the service’s meager 3.5 million-member subscriber base looks nothing like it.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-11” author: “Robert Gronlund”

Over the Moon When researchers Barry Spletzer and Gary Fischer set out to create the world’s first hopping robot, they used grasshoppers as their guides. The insect’s random jumping pattern inspired the Sandia National Laboratories team to build the Hopper. (What else?) Using a thimbleful of propane fuel, the piston-driven robot rights itself after each hop like a Weeble. It also does what no other mobile robot can: clear objects much larger than itself. It’s able to leap up to 20 feet high in a single bound and travel roughly five miles, which should come in handy on space missions, in minefields and during police surveillance. The secret, it seems, is the Hopper’s simplicity. “It goes boing, and it waits awhile,” a spokesman said. “Then it goes boing again.” THE WEBTry Before You Buy. Or Just Try. Free lunches may be hard to come by, but free samples.com is more than willing to send free snacks, among other goodies, right to your door. In exchange for some demographic info–don’t worry, you don’t have to divulge your income or phone number–this fledgling e-marketing venture will ship up to four freebies in a box that feels a bit like a gift. Never mind that the site’s selection at any one time is small, and each shipment requires that you choose at least three items, only one of which you may really want–a few free snacks can make one fine lunch.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-31” author: “Dino Turner”

TRAVEL TIPS Bathroom Break Ever found yourself in an unfamiliar city when nature calls–and you can’t find a restroom that isn’t reserved “for patrons only”? Relief is on the way. The folks at YadaYada.com, an integrated wireless ISP and wireless Web portal, have teamed up with wireless portal Rovenet and besttoilets.com to offer Bathroom Finder on your modem-enabled handheld. It not only lists free rest stops by nabe in 12 major cities, but it reviews each for size, comfort and cleanliness. Ahhh.

Shopping Is Hard Enough For $39.95 you, too, can own a Qoder, a sweet little scanner that’s a pleasure to play with but not very useful. Qode.com is betting that shoppers are willing to swipe the bar codes of interesting products they’re not quite ready to buy. Once home, pop the Qoder into a PC-linked docking station, and it goes online to find product info and the best deals locally and on the Web. The company claims Qoder makes shopping fun again. That’s true if your idea of fun is getting a near hernia from flipping over a heavy Barbie Dream House to scan its bar code. We’ll pass, thanks.

TIME WASTER Rate Thy Net Neighbors How attractive are you? Find out at AmIHotOrNot.com. Submit your picture, anonymously and free of charge, to be scrutinized on a scale of 1 to 10 by the vast Internet audience. Or you can simply rate other people. Enter the Web site and you will see an anonymous Web user–often more than just a modest face view, though the site does its best to weed out nudity and porn. Click in your score and you’ll see “what others thought” and get to rate another person. And on and on. The Web site has attracted an ardent fan base since it went up on Oct. 9: some 163,000 people have submitted photos, and the site gets 10 million page views a day, even though it wasn’t conceived as a business. The site now breaks even with the revenue from banner ads. Dot-com refugee and co-creator James Hong, 27, says the economics aren’t quite in place yet: “It’s not bad. It’s not great. We’re doing OK.” He and his partner, Jim Young, a grad student, programmed the site in two days after they came up with the idea “over beers.” Is it hot? We give it a 10.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-13” author: “Carol Rivera”

We feel bad. it’s hard to be cheerful about our roundup of the best PlayStation 2 games when so many of you are in pain, unable to find a PS2 in time for the holidays. With condolences, our top picks: SSX ($40; Electronic Arts, 800-245-4525) Take to the slopes in eight different settings–each more outrageous than the last–as you try to snowboard down the mountain faster and with more aerial stunts than your opponents. Intense vertical drops, 90-degree turns and massive jumps are only some of the way-out obstacles you’ll encounter. Fast-paced and addictive. Madden NFL 2001 ($40; EA, 800-245-4525) NFL 2K1 for the Sega Dreamcast may have the edge in terms of overall gameplay, but it can’t touch Madden NFL 2001 for the PS2 in some key areas: gorgeous, intricate 3-D graphics and amusing color commentary from the game’s namesake. Tekken Tag Tournament ($50; Namco-Hometek, 408-922-0712) Frenetic button-mashing madness is typical of fighting games that feature arena-style one-on-one matchups. But TTT lets you tag a partner into the ring whenever you start to falter. Great graphics, and 34 characters in all, some of whom become available only as you uncover secrets or attain specific in-game goals. Summoner ($50; THQ, 818-591-1310) Despite a stupefyingly verbose backstory, this sprawling role-playing game sucks you in for 40 or more hours’ worth of controlling the likes of Joseph (an ill-starred farmer with a strange power) and his bizarre party of compatriots, including wild and dangerous beasts he “summons” with his mystical skills. Easy to learn, impossible to quit. TimeSplitters ($50; Eidos, 800-656-5426) A B-movie-style first-person shooter that skimps on the eye candy to deliver white-knuckle action at a rock-solid 60 frames per second, even in the four-player split-screen mode. This game comes from some of the guys who worked on Rare’s classic Nintendo 64 hit Goldeneye, and they’ve thoughtfully included a level builder so you can create your own maps for death-matching. Smuggler’s Run ($50; Rockstar Games, rockstargames.com) Indulge your inner outlaw with this off-road racer, in which rival smugglers compete to deliver contraband while avoiding the long arm of the law. Dead or Alive 2 ($50; Tecmo, 800-338-0336) Don’t let the bouncing bikini babes fool you; this is the king and queen of PS2 fighting games. Its elegant system of attacks, blocks and reversals makes you feel like you’re the one kicking butt and taking names–especially when you take down a human opponent. Ready 2 Rumble: Round 2 ($50; Midway, 903-874-5092) Has the “vast right-wing conspiracy” hit videogames? Among the celebrities in this arcade boxing title are our own First Couple, Bill and Hillary Clinton, who trade physical and verbal jabs atop a Manhattan skyline. An unimpeachable hit.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-12” author: “Samuel Smith”

GAMES Monkey Around The fourth installment of a popular and long-running series, Escape From Monkey Island ($40; LucasArts Entertainment Co., 888-532-4263) is a fun and often hilarious 3-D adventure game for Windows PCs. As in the previous titles, our hero is would-be pirate Guybrush Threepwood, self-proclaimed scourge of the tri-island area. Returning from his honeymoon with Gov. Elaine Marley, Guybrush finds that an Australian real-estate developer is snapping up valuable island property and a frenzied treasure hunt is on for the dreaded voodoo artifact called The Ultimate Insult. To set things right, you guide Guybrush through the wacky 3-D landscape, chatting up the locals and solving a variety of challenging puzzles. You’ll also have to master the tricky art of Monkey Kombat and Insult Arm Wrestling. Devoted fans of the series will pick up on a ton of inside jokes, but even newcomers should find plenty to chuckle about. In this adventure, getting lost is almost as fun as getting to the end.

CELEBS Michael Jackson’s Pious Posting “The sabbath was the day I was able to step away from my unique life and glimpse the everyday,” writes Michael Jackson about his experience as a Jehovah’s Witness in a short yet revealing essay posted this week on Beliefnet.com, a multifaith religious Web site. Read about how Jackson upheld the practice of proselytizing in the suburbs of southern California, as recently as 1991: “I would don my disguise of fat suit, wig, beard and glasses… visiting shopping plazas and homes.” You expected white gloves and a red jacket? RELAUNCHESBert and Ernie 2.0 Sesamestreet.com is one of the most recognizable Web addresses for kids, so its designers recently revamped the site to make it easier for the youngest Net surfers to find their way around. The old clunky pull-down menus have been replaced with whizzier graphics, and the site has added animation and sound to take advantage of new technologies that have emerged since its original launch in 1998.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-21” author: “Eleanor Meyers”

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-21” author: “Shelley Weeks”

The 1.8-inch LCD screen is a nice touch, but the images are hard to see in low light Users can easily toggle between digital video, pictures and MP3 playback on the mc3 Video is recorded in the QuickTime format, so Mac and Windows users can share files The built-in speaker doesn’t provide the greatest sound, but earphones are included GAMESGet a Kick Start It may look like just another shoot-’em-up, but you’ll need more than a fast gun to beat Oni ($40; Take 2 Interactive, 212-334-6633). This intense game for PC, Mac and PlayStation 2 mixes traditional third-person action with martial-arts combat and a Japanese anime style. As Konoko, the star agent of the Technology Crimes Task Force, your mission is to take down a ruthless crime syndicate without harming innocent civilians. To succeed, you must master hand-to-hand combat moves, including punches, kicks, throws and vicious combinations. The game can be tough at first, mostly because of the sheer complexity of the moves, but it’s a blast all the same. Michael E. Ryan WEBStar Gazers It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it. The Hubble Telescope has labored away in outer space for nearly 11 years, keeping a watchful eye on the universe. Hubble snaps sharper pictures than any other telescope, including stunning shots of 14,000 targets like quasars, dying stars and colliding galaxies. Check it all out at New Views of the Universe (hstexhibit.stsci.edu), a companion Web site for a traveling Hubble exhibit. The site catalogs some of Hubble’s more fascinating discoveries–you can watch a photo of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashing into Jupiter with the force of millions of nuclear bombs. Or you can just peruse pretty pictures of planets. Want more? Go to the official Web site (hubble.stsci.edu) to browse through the entire Hubble photo gallery. Re-Creating History Jon Haddock uses computer graphics to portray famous moments (like the seizure of Elian Gonzalez) that have a PC-game-like look he thinks kids can relate to. Check some out at whitelead.com/jrh/screenshots.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-09” author: “Lisa Verdugo”

Kobe and Shaq may not always get along in the real world, but in NBA Live 2001 ($50; Electronic Arts) these two superstars play together better than ever. This PlayStation 2 hoops game features some of the most fluid animation we’ve seen on the new Sony console, as well as tight court action, surprisingly accurate play-by-play commentary and a killer hip-hop soundtrack. Take charge of your favorite NBA team, or pick your favorite players to go one-on-one in a street court.

SOFTWARE: Zip It, Just Zip It!

How many versions of TurboTax do you have cluttering up your hard drive? It’s great software, except for the fact that each year requires a new version of the program to accommodate changes in the tax codes. To help solve this cyber-age problem, Quicken has teamed up with Iomega, maker of the popular Zip drive, to offer TurboTax on Zip disks–in addition to the CD-ROM and floppy-disk versions we have used for years. Now, instead of having to copy the 40MB program onto your PC, you keep it entirely on the Zip disk. Your computer runs the program from the Zip and stores all your tax data there too. Come April 16, pop the disk out of the drive and into the filing cabinet. It also comes with a spare 100MB disk, just for kicks. A good deal at only $29.95.

VALENTINES: Getting to the Heart of Things

One benefit of waiting until Valentine’s Day to express your love for that special someone is you get a full rack of commercial products to help. The cyberfriendly can go to CDNOW.com and custom-mix a romantic personal CD ($19.99 for 12 tracks), or purchase heart-shaped sweets at Godiva.com. But eCRUSH.com may be the most useful site of all: the unique service lets you find out if someone you like is also interested in you–but without the pain of rejection if the feeling isn’t mutual. You log on and submit a list of people on whom you have a “crush” along with their e-mail addresses. The site notifies the crushees that “someone” is interested in dating them. They then log in and submit their own list of people they like. If the computer spots a match, the identity of both parties is revealed. This way, love doesn’t have to stink.

TUNES: Not-Smoky Joe’s

Tired of your city’s club scene? Hear something new on the Digital Club Network (dcn.com). The site broadcasts live shows from 65 spots around the country–everywhere from McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica to Chicago’s Double Door to Maxwell’s in Hoboken. Check out archives of past Webcasts, or read profiles of emerging bands and favorite venues. Best of all: there’s no cover.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-26” author: “Ina Howard”

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-01” author: “Marilyn Munroe”

For starters, making e-signatures commonplace is a big job. Organizations from telecoms to private companies to the post office have gotten into the act. They’ve signed on to become “trusted third parties,” to whom people will come when they want to get their own, unique signature (which will likely be held in smart cards that plug into PCs). It will be their job to verify the identities of people who apply for e-signatures and assume the liability for fraud.

It’s not a foregone conclusion that European consumers will accept e-signatures. For one thing, governments don’t actively regulate the third-party firms, which means consumers will have to use their own judgment about whether to put their signatures online. Personal privacy is another issue: an e-signature is potentially traceable to its owner. And then there’s security. Industry experts say that the signatures are nearly impossible to hack because they are made up of 50-digit numbers, but privacy advocates claim hackers will still be able to wreak havoc by blocking access to lists of revoked or fraudulent signatures. Egads! What would John Hancock make of it all?

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-20” author: “David Pratt”

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-19” author: “Loretta Christian”

Last November the United States and the EU hammered out a set of privacy standards that American firms would have to meet if they want to transfer data on EU citizens out of Europe. These so-called safe-harbor rules stipulate, for instance, that each company notify individuals of what it plans to do with the personal data it collects. But as of last week, only 61 American companies had signed on. The list includes big names like Microsoft, HP and the Direct Marketing Association, but many heavy hitters (such as AOL Time Warner and IBM) are notably absent. On July 1 the EU is expected to begin enforcing the rules; companies that don’t meet EU privacy standards could have their data flow cut off.

Why haven’t more companies signed on? “It takes a lot of time and money–sometimes millions of dollars–to make sure that you are compliant with the law,” says Gary Clayton, CEO of the Dallas-based consultancy the Privacy Council. Microsoft spent seven months getting its own privacy standards in line.

As U.S. companies struggle to sort out privacy compliance, legal experts say that the possibility of litigation looms large. “I think we’ll begin to see some high-profile privacy cases this fall,” says David Aaron, an adviser at Dorsey & Whitney. (Aaron helped negotiate safe harbor as a U.S. Commerce Department official in the late 1990s.) What’s more, Aaron says that data abusers have more to fear from each other than from the EU: “It will be the competition that turns you in.” Prepare for more corporate fear and loathing as the privacy battles heat up.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-13” author: “Della Mccarthy”

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-13” author: “Raymond Ephriam”

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-19” author: “Janet Hamilton”

So what’s this pioneering Web bank’s next move? Last March it announced plans to build 10 small branch offices in Rio and So Paulo. Why? A recent survey showed that even the keenest Internet junkies want to see a real live person when conducting loan negotiations and other complex transactions. “We realized it was very important for a virtual bank to show clients ‘Here we are, here is your money’,” president Luiz Carlos Urquiza told the financial daily Gazeta Mercantil. Even a dot-com has to satisfy the psychology of its target customers.

Mac Margolis

GADGETS A New Tool for Couch Potatoes You are beyond lazy. If this description fits, then you may be the target audience for Casio’s new Wrist Remote Watch ($129.95; casio.com), which puts an end to the tough task of hunting around for a misplaced remote control. Now you just strap it to your wrist. The device (it’s so crazy we love it) is a universal remote, able to control 20 different pieces of electronic equipment at a range of up to 16 feet. Casio also makes a watch with an integrated digital camera, one that can measure your blood pressure and another that can locate your precise whereabouts by receiving transmissions from Global Positioning System satellites. Wrist-top computing, anyone?

THE WEB More Room for Internet Names www.symbolics.com was the first dot-com to go live, on March 15, 1985. Today there are about 30 million registered Web addresses that end in .com, .org or .net. To relieve the crushing demand, seven new top-level domains are on the way: .biz, .info, .museum, .aero, .coop, .name and .pro. Last week registration for .biz addresses, which are for commercial use only, opened to the public, after an earlier sign-up phase for trademark holders; the domain goes live on Oct. 1. On July 25 .info opens for registration, and the company running the domain plans to activate the new URLs in mid-September. Go to neulevel.biz and afilias.info to apply. Check out www.icann .org for general information.

SURF REPORT For People Still Addicted to Noise Michael Goldberg, a longtime Rolling Stone magazine staffer, started Addicted to Noise, one of the Web’s first music sites, in 1994. After several redesigns and buyouts, Goldberg bailed out–but managed to successfully navigate the dot-bomb crisis and become independently wealthy. His new endeavor, called Neumu (neumu.net), is an artsy oasis of music reviews, gallery exhibits and culture commentary. It’s also ad-free. Feels like 1994 all over again.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-15” author: “John Wixon”

A Really Hot Dog

When Sony introduced its AIBO robotic dog two years ago, people scratched their heads–and bought it anyway, for a whopping $2,500. Tiger Electronics, the toymaker responsible for Furby, has created a cheaper knockoff called i-Cybie ($199.99; tigertoys.com). Unlike other electronic pets, i-Cybie doesn’t just bark or wiggle on command. It has 16 independent motors that allow the pooch to walk and perform tricks like push-ups and headstands. It’s AIBO for the rest of us.

SPACE

Pass the Salt

Space fanatics need no longer dream about life aboard the International Space Station. The Space Store (thespacestore.com), an online souvenir shop for NASA lovers, recently started selling the foil pouches of food eaten daily by American astronauts aboard the ISS and Space Shuttle. The selections, $9.95 each, are ideal for challenging environments. According to the store’s press material, the beef stew “is thick… and doesn’t float away.” The meat loaf is “easy to cut.” And, the peach yogurt is shelf stable for five years. Yum!

GAMES

Mars Attacks

Red faction for the PlayStation 2 ($50; THQ, thq.com) pits you against a coldhearted corporation bent on strip-mining Mars at the expense of countless workers’ lives–including yours. As you inadvertently become embroiled in an armed uprising by the miners, you must fight your way through the mining facility and into the relative safety of the mysterious, rebellious Red Faction. But there is much more to the situation than meets the eye. We’ll leave the rest to you.

SOFTWARE The Open Sourcers Strike Again Microsoft’s most recently touted jihad is a companywide initiative it calls Microsoft.Net–or, .Net for short. The idea is to tightly integrate the Windows desktop with the transport capabilities of the Internet to give consumers powerful, new applications like Excel spreadsheets that can automatically update themselves using stock quotes from the Web, for example. This week a Boston-based company called Ximian struck a blow for the implicitly anti-Microsoft open-source movement. It announced its Mono project that would use Microsoft specifications to create open-source versions of .Net software products, effectively liberating Microsoft’s big plans from Windows. “For consumers, it’s an alternative to living in a Windows-based world,” says Ximian’s VP of marketing Jon Perr. Of course, Perr’s optimism assumes that Linux (and its penguin mascot), along with other open-source operating systems, will grab hold of consumers’ imaginations and, eventually, their PCs. For now, it’s still Bill.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-02-01” author: “Perry Carmichael”

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-20” author: “Willie Ryan”

Companies would most like to check such biological signatures against computer databases. Currently, however, this isn’t possible on a large scale. An airline, for instance, wouldn’t be able to screen all its passengers by taking account of their biometrics because the resulting information-processing load would choke even the biggest computers. Rather than using a database, a better solution might be to put data into a smart card and issue it to the customer as a form of identification. You might not even need to take it out of your wallet; the card could send, via radio link, your biometric description to a nearby device, which would compare it to what the camera behind the counter was picking up. Even when advances make it possible to use big databases, smart cards, which smack less of Big Brother, may be preferable. THE WEB

Divine Online

pujas,TERRORISM

Fighting the Bugs

You Are What You Surf

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-12” author: “Elise Santos”

At the center of it all are the infamous boo.com founders, Ernst Malmsten and Kajsa Leander. They are coming out with a book, for which their agent is busy selling film rights. Set for release on Nov. 1, “boo hoo: a dot.com story from Concept to Catastrophe” will tell the tale of the “revolutionary, glamorous, and staggeringly ambitious” online retailer. But will it tell how the photogenic founders of the failed site (valued at $390 million before it was even up and running) managed to blow through $100 million within a year? On the off chance it doesn’t, journalist Gunnar Lindstedt looks at boo.com in his book, coming out Oct. 23 in Swedish (the juicy details should warrant a translation). Lindstedt’s main source was Patrik Hedelin, the little-known third founder of boo.com who was later pushed out. Malmsten and Leander, Lindstedt says, spent the money on flashy hotels, PR agents, champagne parties and the Concorde. He also paints Leander as a high-tech Lady Macbeth, pulling the strings on Malmsten, her former lover. “She left him, and that was a problem,” says Lindstedt. “Ernst was still in love with her, and she could manipulate him.”

None of boo.com’s founders come off well in “dot.bomb: The Rise & Fall of Dot.Com Britain,” published last week. In it, BBC correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones gives the broad story of companies like boo, lastminute.com, First Tuesday and QXL. He also tells how the dot-com roller coaster increased the number of individual shareholders in Britain but failed to change the old establishment business culture.

Rana Foroohar PHONES Trash TalkingChattering to friends is one of the mobile phone’s killer apps, but frivolity has reached new heights with the disposable cell phone. You buy it with a prepaid number of minutes, and when you’re done you toss it in the trash. The phones are just a folded piece of paper with electronic circuitry printed on the surface; others are plastic. They made a sensation with their debut last summer in Italy, the chat capital of the world. Since the phones don’t require a contract, callers don’t leave a trace–a key selling point (and a security concern). Who wants them? “Mostly people having affairs and stalkers,” says Italian radio.

Barbie Nadeau HOT PROPERTY Here’s the CDJWith the advent of the CD, vinyl records are a thing of the past. That’s a major problem for DJs, who over the last two decades have turned mixing and “scratching” into an art form. Several companies have devices that allow music from CDs to be mixed as it would be on a turntable, without much success. Pioneer hopes to change that with the CDJ-1000. The device records songs from a CD to its memory buffer, allowing users to cue up, stop, backspin and scratch songs just as they would on a turntable. The CDJ-1000 is good enough to make people like Jazzy Jeff curious. Purists may still prefer vinyl, but now today’s DJs have a better chance of finding that perfect beat. More Digital-Imaging OptionsInk-jet printers, it turns out, aren’t a great way to make paper copies of digital photos. Two new devices may have a better answer. Over the summer Canon introduced its CP-10 digital-photo printer ($299). It allows Canon digital-camera owners to make sharp two-by-three-inch color pictures, going directly from the camera to the palmsize printer. In October Sony is bringing out a similar product, its DPP-MP1 printer ($280), which churns out crisp photos the size of business cards. It can read Sony’s proprietary Memory Stick media cards or print photos from non-Sony cameras that have been fed through a PC first. For bulk prints, these devices aren’t practical, considering that Sony’s paper-and-cartridge refill pack costs $20 for 24 sheets. On the other hand, instant gratification never looked so good.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-02” author: “Rose Cranford”

For picking a destination, we like the travel channel at About.com (home.about.com/travel). The site uses destination experts, or “guides,” to help moderate the dozens of forums and discussion boards. The big commercial travel Web sites, expedia.com and travelocity.com, are still the best places for comparing fares and buying tickets.

There are also a number of smaller, quirky Web destinations that provide unique services. Check out webflyer.com for deals using your frequent-flier miles. Drivers can use freetrip.com to map their road itineraries and calculate the average price of gas for each leg. And, before you board, airsafe.com can help you overcome your fear of flying.

PLAYSTATION 2 A Good Score Soccer videogames typically get crushed under the cleats of Electronic Arts’ FIFA series, but the new ESPN MLS ExtraTime ($50; Konami of America, www.konami.com) finally puts up a decent struggle. While the FIFA games focus on international soccer and include American Major League Soccer teams almost as an afterthought, ExtraTime does the opposite. The game accurately re-creates MLS uniforms and stadium venues, and renders the soccer action with the requisite high-quality 3-D graphics, sound effects and audio commentary. Players control any of the 12 MLS teams and can play single games, entire seasons or tournaments. ExtraTime may not match the polish of FIFA 2001, but it gives it a good run for the goal. PHOTOGRAPHYLooking Back at An Epidemic Ten years ago magazine editor David Friend had an idea: a photographic retrospective of the AIDS epidemic. He put together some initial pages for Life magazine, where he was director of photography at the time, but it never ran. The project was shelved but not forgotten. This week, “20 Years: AIDS & Photography” goes up at digital journalist.org, to mark the AIDS anniversary. Friend, who produced the online exhibit on his own, says, “The Internet is a perfect medium for getting something that’s visual up fast.” The retrospective includes famous images like the controversial 1990 Benetton ad which used a picture of AIDS victim David Kirby on his deathbed. In an interview at the site, photographer Herb Ritts says, “I just hope there’s no 40-year reunion.” Sony’s New Play Is $499 too much to pay for a handheld electronic organizer? Of course it is. But Sony’s new Clie PEG-N710C does give you some snazzy features for the high price. It’s the first Palm-powered PDA to play MP3 tunes; the new Sony effectively bridges the gap between Palm devices and the more multi- media-capable Windows CE handhelds, like Compaq’s iPaq H3650. We like Clie’s functions and sharp color screen, but don’t like the fact that you’ll have to shell out even more money to augment the 8MB memory stick to take full advantage of the device’s capabilities.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-20” author: “Marcus Sayre”

IT investment is crucial to remaining competitive in nearly every industry. Some industry watchers believe that a broad range of European businesses, from banks to media firms, now have an opportunity to grab market share. “Europeans didn’t invest so much in technology all at once, and they can now afford to keep spending,” says IDC chief research officer John Gantz. “That will give them a real competitive advantage going forward.” It may also help Europeans close the one-year lead that many American rivals still have in e-business. Most big European companies already have software in place to help them manage their internal business processes. An IDC survey (commissioned by Microsoft and released in May) shows that these firms will continue to look for IT that improves their own efficiency. But they’ll also invest in technology that helps them retain customers and suppliers, and increase their level of online transactions.

IDC says that banks, telecommunication firms and business-services companies (including consulting, law and accounting firms) will shell out the biggest bucks for new technology. Who will benefit most from all the spending? Not surprisingly, the largest software and services companies on either continent, such as SAP and IBM Global Services. In the aftermath of the dot-com debacle,bigger always seems to be better.

Rana Foroohar GAMES Rioting Gear If the world trade organization riots in Seattle, Washington, gave you an itch to throw a brick through a corporate store window, consider the latest offering from Rockstar Games: State of Emergency for PlayStation 2. The gamer’s objective is to “smash up everything and everyone in order to destabilize the ATO [American Trade Organization],” according to the firm’s Web site. The game will likely be released early next year but, in response to some early negative local press reports, the creators have issued a statement denying similarities to the 1999 WTO riots in Seattle. ATO? WTO? The average gamer probably won’t care. Based on the success of Rockstar’s previous efforts, such as the Grand Theft Auto series, fans will more likely be interested in how many ways they can destroy their virtual landscape. What parents think–now that’s another story. THE STOCK MARKETSin-Free Investing Investing in the stock market is tricky for anyone, but especially for Muslims. Not only must they fret the market’s every move; they must also adhere to the strict principles of shariah, or Islamic law–specifically, the prohibition against earning interest. That means no bonds, futures or hedge funds. And they can buy stock only in companies that engage in religiously sanctioned activities–in other words, no beer giants or tobacco companies. A new online brokerage service, TradeIslamiq, aims to help Muslims stay true to their beliefs without sacrificing their financial returns. The firm’s Web site (islamiqstocks.com) includes 8,000 U.S. stocks that have been screened for shariah compliance and also offers a “portfolio-purification service” for existing investments.

Muslims already have $150 billion invested in the capital markets. Hasnita Dato Hashim, TradeIslamiq’s CEO, expects that figure to rise 20 percent a year. A growing share of her clientele are wealthy Mideastern women who want to take control of their own investments–and avoid committing a sin.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-31” author: “Louis Parker”

Most of Office XP’s improvements lie in its usability. Data-recovery enhancements make it possible to rescue that document you didn’t have time to save before your computer crashed. Smart Tag icons that appear over words and numbers present a menu of options (allowing you to, say, correct Word’s automatic spellcheck). he new Task Pane, a display panel loaded with commands, makes many jobs easier: in Word it allows you to create programs more easily, and in PowerPoint, the presentation program, it helps in formatting slides by gathering them all in one place. Outlook, the e-mail program, is finally catching, up, too: it automatically completes e-mail addresses you begin to type and deletes the irritating line breaks that inexplicably turn up in many e-mails. And speaking of annoyances, Microsoft has finally killed the much-despised Office Assistant, that smart-alecky paper clip that gives advice without being asked.

But amid the pros hides one big con: cost. Upgrading from the old version of Office costs $235, and first-time buyers have to shell out $480. (Well, no one ever said moving out of an old office into a new one would be free.) And then there are the hidden charges. For example, the Smart Tags sometimes link users to Internet databases that charge a fee. Although you pay only if you choose to take advantage of the particular service, eventually Microsoft plans to begin charging automatically for all links to Internet databases through a service called Hailstorm. Perhaps Microsoft has realized it can’t make much money merely running banner ads for its products and services on its own Web sites. Or maybe it’s just trying to use its existing software customers to sell a wider range of Web-based services, as many antimonopolists have alleged.

Should you let yourself be wowed by the voice-recognition software included in Office XP, even though it means succumbing to the costs hidden beneath the treasures? Or should you stick to the old system and save a bundle in the long run? Ultimately, the decision will rest with each consumer.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-08” author: “Michael Park”

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-24” author: “Garrett Hernandez”

Little iLink, by contrast, is knee-deep in profits. The reason: in these harder times, customers can afford to be choosier about where they park their business. Rather than settling for faceless anonymity, they’re opting for better and more individualized services, paying top dollar for those that iLink provides: specialized software engineers who tailor general-use programs to a company’s specific needs, and faster and more dependable Internet links. Other small outfits also seem to be getting it right: Sky Datamann in Hong Kong, for one, and Pihana in Singapore. It all goes to show, says Tam, “if you’re going to leave your baby, you’d better find the right sitter.”

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-10” author: “Elmer Trinklein”

BOOKS Well Written Writing about life online is difficult, which is why “The Well,” a new book by veteran technology reporter Katie Hafner (who once wrote for NEWSWEEK), is a revelation. The book chronicles the life of an early experiment in online communities known as The Well. It still exists, though it doesn’t exert the same magnetism it did in the late ’80s, when it was a playground for many of the San Francisco Bay Area’s prominent countercultural figures, including Stewart Brand, its founder and the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog. Hafner smartly organizes the narrative around The Well’s resident crank, a Silicon Valley futurist named Tom Mandel, who would die of cancer in 1995. He shared his decline with his online compatriots. By the end, The Well had become more than an outlet for Mandel’s scabrous rantings. It was a surrogate family. “The Well” tells the tale. Nikon’s Fistful of Megapixels Small is beautiful. That’s the pitch for a new camera from Nikon that joins the ranks of pocket-friendly digital cameras. Aiming to compete with Canon’s supersmall IXUS line, the Nikon Coolpix 775 claims to be the lightest point-and-shoot digital in its class, which we take to mean 2.1-megapixel cameras with a 3x optical zoom. The Coolpix 775 weighs 6.5 ounces, compared with Canon’s Digital IXUS 300 at a suddenly hefty-seeming 9.7 ounces.

But the small price may be the bigger draw. When this camera hits the street in July, it will retail for $449.95, a nice price for a second-generation 2-megapixel camera that includes a rechargeable lithium ion battery and charger. The good news for digital-camera shoppers: it’s just one of several good buys expected later this year. Stay tuned. WEB MEMESAs the Net Spreads When it seems your workday won’t end, there’s nothing like a viral Net gag landing in your in box to help pass the time. Earlier this year a hilarious animation accompanied by a dance track built around the phrase “All your base are belong to us” –taken from a mistranslation in the Sega Genesis game Zero Wing–spread through the Internet like the Black Plague (planettribes .com/allyourbase). So what’s the next Net-sation? We think it’s Xiaoxiao–stick figures in “Matrix”-style fight scenes–at games.sohu.com/fightgame/ fight3.htm.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-26” author: “Pasquale Lopez”

Richard Wolpert left the Disney boardroom for Checkout.com, a music and novelty retail Web site, only to see his stock options head south. Geraldine Laybourne left her presidency at Disney-ABC Cable Networks to become CEO of Oxygen.com, a media company that targets women. Now the firm is trimming its online business. David Wertheimer worked wonders at Paramount’s online division. After he arrived at Wirebreak.com, however, the erstwhile provider of interactive entertainment content laid off more than 15 percent of its staff. Michael Ovitz, the onetime Disney president, poured his own cash into Checkout.com, Scour and other dot-coms, and lost a bundle. Unlike these others, at least Semel has one thing going for him: he made his move after the dot-com bubble burst.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-15” author: “Charles Garafano”

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-19” author: “Margaret Council”

Surf Report Whether you’re a couch potato or a road blazer, you can catch a bit of action from this week’s summer-surfing list:

www.jumptheshark.com: Calling all armchair TV critics. Vote off the weakest links on the tube. Let’s see who gets immunity: “Survivor” or “Millionaire.”

getmusic.com: Not your ordinary sound-snatching site. Boasts of interviews with celebs: Lenny Kravitz, Carly Simon, David Gray and Dido.

gaspricewatch.com: Planning a road trip? First check here to see where gas prices are cheapest (and most expensive) in the U.S. and Canada. You, too, can be a voluneer price spotter.

dilbert.com: Cartoon creator Scott Adams dabbles in e-publishing. Catch a free preview of his mysterious but inexpensive e-book, “God’s Debris” ($4.95).

www.freetranslation.com: Want to take a trip to, say, Norway? This site will help you talk like the locals.

SOUND

Add a Snooze Alarm to Your PC Bose has long been known for getting big sound out of small packages, including clock radios. Its new Wave/PC connects directly to your computer, so you can wake up to the vibes of your favorite CDs, MP3 files and Web-Radio stations. It also has a lot of clever tie-ins to your PC: for instance, it can download a list of your local stations from the Net and adjusts your computer’s sound card to match the radio’s speakers. The Wave/PC ($449) is a particularly smart accessory for a laptop: it turns its tinny output to almost home-stereo quality. Go ahead, crank up the volume. Your neighbors will distort before the speakers do.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-09” author: “Gregory Baptiste”

Internet-mania won’t end when the British election is over. Many European governments are spending millions of euros to put all their transactions on the Web. The United Kingdom hired Microsoft to build an uber-portal that will connect hundreds of government institutions, local and national, to one another by 2005. E-voting trials are underway in Switzerland, Belgium and Germany. Italian and Dutch taxpayers already file online.

But the Euro governments may be overreaching. The complexity of forging seamless data links between myriad local and national departments is enormous–many of the world’s top corporations haven’t yet managed it. And there are antitrust issues. The U.S. Internal Revenue Service raised concerns when it began offering online tax filing in competition with private firms Intuit and Quicken. “In Italy, there’s an entire industry devoted to tax preparation,” says Andrea DiMaio, an analyst at Gartner. “Right now, only a few thousand people file online via government sites, but what happens when that goes to millions?”

DiMaio believes governments may end up farming out many Web services to third parties. The biggest rewards may come to governments that use the Web to increase internal efficiency. Watch for a new acronym: G-to-G.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-25” author: “Kathy Aigner”

Do you suffer from PDA envy whenever you see someone tap addresses into a personal digital assistant and wish you could afford the $200-and-up price tag? New Jersey-based Royal Consumer Business Products has created an affordable alternative: the PDO. These personal digital organizers can’t connect to the Internet or beam files like Palms and their clones, but at $30 and less, they do have many useful features: phone book, scheduler, memo pad, qwerty keyboard, touch screen, stylus and more. The Excelsior ($30), which has 384KB of memory, can even link with Microsoft Outlook on your PC. No downloading any books onto these gadgets, but then again, reading the entire Kama Sutra on an LCD display can’t be good for the eyes anyway.

In Arcanum (Windows, $50; Sierra Studios, sierra.com), you’ll find nearly limitless adventures within a world racked by turmoil. The game world (Arcanum) faces a tumultuous industrial revolution in which machines and firearms threaten to displace good old-fashioned swords and magical spells. Players can opt to master mechanical skills, magical abilities or neither as they engage in quests and make their way through an intricate story line. The graphics are nothing to shout about, but the deep story, the open-ended gameplay and the richly detailed world all shine.

Adjectives used to describe cyberpets–first dogs, then cats, birds and chameleons–include “cool,” “futuristic” and “interesting” but rarely “adorable.” Leave it to the Japanese to come up with a robotic dog that really hammers the cute button. Sony Electronics announced last week two new additions to its pioneering robotic dog family: its AIBO LM series in two flavors, Latte (the white one) and Macaron (gray). Their faces look eerily similar to that of Japan’s other cute export, Hello Kitty, and their robotic dog tricks will twang your heartstrings. At $850 (orders taken at www.aibo.com; dogs ship starting Oct. 1), these puppies aren’t exactly aimed at the mass market. Hello Kitty key chain, anyone?

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-15” author: “Santiago Calhoun”

Planning to answer your e-mail while on holiday in New York? That may not be easy. The Internet may have been invented in the United States, but America is one of the least likely places where a traveler might find an Internet cafe. “Every major city in the world has more cybercafes than New York,” says Joie Kelly, who runs CyberCafeGuide.com. The numbers seem to bear her out: according to various directories, London has more than 30, Paris 19, Istanbul 17, but New York has only eight. Other U.S. cities fare just as poorly: Los Angeles has about 11, Chicago has four. “Here it’s quite hard work to find a cafe. I was surprised,” says Michael Robson, a sportswriter from York, England, who was visibly relieved to be checking his e-mail at Cyber Cafe near New York’s Times Square.

Why the lack of places to plug in? Americans enjoy one of the highest rates of Internet access from work and home in the world, and they’ve never really taken to cafes. About 80 percent of Cyber Cafe’s clients, for instance, are tourists from overseas. Greek tycoon Stelios Haji-Ioannou also thinks high prices drive away locals. Last November he opened a branch of his Internet-cafe chain easyEverything in Times Square. With 800 terminals, it’s the largest Net cafe in the world. While the typical American cafe charges $8 to $12 an hour, easyEverything charges $1 to $4. Marketing manager Stephanie Engelsen says half the cafe’s customers are locals. “We get policemen, firemen, nurses who don’t work at desks with computers, actors between auditions.” easyEverything is now planning to open new locations in Harlem, and possibly SoHo. Unless there’s some cultural shift afoot, however, New York will continue to lag behind metropolises from Mexico City to Moscow.

Anna Kuchment

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-10” author: “Harriet Lewis”

A Case for Typing

When it comes to making it easy to input text, PDAs are all thumbs. Some less-than-perfect past solutions include qwerty keyboards that unfold to semi-full size, ones that snap onto the bottom of your handheld and the much maligned software approach that requires mastery of the stylus. Enter Fellowes’s $80 PDA Keyboard and Case: a twofer design that embeds a keyboard and many function buttons into the lid of a hard case for your Palm III, Palm V or Handspring Visor. Not a bad idea except that the case is so big it turns your now pocketable PDA into a briefcase hog. We’re hoping voice-to-text makes strides this year.

More Digital-Imaging Options

Ink-jet printers, it turns out, aren’t a great way to make paper copies of digital photos. Two new devices may have a better answer. Over the summer, Canon introduced its CP-10 digital-photo printer ($299). It allows Canon digital-camera owners to make sharp 2-inch by 3-inch color pictures directly from the camera to the palmsize printer. In October, Sony is bringing out a similar product, its DPP-MP1 printer ($280), which churns out crisp photos the size of business cards. It can read Sony’s proprietary Memory Stick media cards or print photos from non-Sony cameras that have been fed through a PC first. For bulk prints, these devices aren’t practical, considering that Sony’s paper-and-cartridge refill pack costs $20 for 24 sheets. On the other hand, instant gratification never looked so good.

Surf Report

Netscape recently launched a new version of its Web browser. Upgrade to 6.1 at netscape.com and then try out these links:

spamcon.org: Newly formed antispam foundation offers tips and news bulletins about the scourge of the inbox.

negotiationskills.com: Look under “Ask Steve’s Advice” for some good ideas on many different negotiating scenarios.

site59.com: Travel site specializing in last-minute weekend-getaway packages.

karaoke.getmusic.com: If you have a microphone you can record a karaoke track here, post it and expose the world to your unrecognized talent.

inmamaskitchen.com: An almost-too-quaint homage to Mom’s cooking. There are recipes amid the stories.

panicware.com: Download a free program called Pop-Up Stopper to combat annoying pop-up and pop-under ads.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-14” author: “Jeremy Lemaster”

Dear cubicle dweller: Scott Adams feels your pain. Self-acclaimed as “one of the world’s leading authorities on what’s wrong with cubicles,” the “Dilbert” cartoonist teamed with high-tech design firm IDEO to create a working prototype of a perfect cubicle, unveiled this week in San Francisco. “We actually think this is a pretty good design,” Adams says. Dilbert would agree.

LIGHTING: The orange band simulates the effect of sunlight moving from east to west, and then fading as the day ends

SCREEN: Doubles as your PC monitor and a ‘virtual window.’ Can also be hooked to a camera that lets you spy on your boss.

CHAIR: Unfolding the wall-mounted seat triggers your phone to ring. Convenient way to get rid of a chatty co-worker.

FLOORING: The panels can sport surfaces from shag to Persian to AstroTurf to pavement (for those preparing for layoffs)

BEVERAGES: A cup holder senses the presence of your drink and keeps it cold or warm no matter how long it sits there

STORAGE: Each wall module is an empty cube which can be customized or simply used as a place to hide your junk

FLOWERS: The daisies perk up when you enter and wilt when you leave. Thank God something knows you’re alive.

AQUARIUM: Rather than give you a promotion (as if), your boss might instead reward you with a live-fish module

GAME BOY; Souped-Up Mario

Mario Kart: Super Circuit ($35; Nintendo of America, nintendo.com) is a superb remake of the Super NES classic Mario Kart, and a must-have title for Game Boy Advance owners. Vibrant graphics, intense go-kart racing action and a familiar cast of characters (including Nintendo celebrities like Mario, Luigi, Yoshi and Donkey Kong) all come together in this lighthearted title. Perhaps most impressive of all, you can hook up with a friend to play the game head to head on two linked Game Boy Advances with just one copy. The game is very easy to pick up and it features multiple difficulty levels and a host of hidden bonuses that will extend the fun.

Trading Cards a la Wall Street

The IPO market might have slowed, but with eTopps you can snap up “individual player offerings.” This fall the venerable Topps trading-card company will offer online limited-edition cards of 70 baseball players and 150 footballers, from $3.50 to $9.50 apiece. The card goes into your virtual “portfolio,” while the physical card stays in the Topps vault. You can sell it–and buy more–on a special eBay marketplace where owners can auction their cards. The fun comes from tracking your portfolio’s value. A Super Bowl win or home-run crown can skyrocket a player’s value; a career-ending injury will make the card look like a dot-com.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-04” author: “Opal Cooper”

SURF REPORT

It’s August, which to us means stay cool by staying indoors. A few distractions:

invisibleweb.com: A search engine that points you to more than 10,000 databases and archives when you’re looking for deep, deep information.

slipups.com: This site chronicles, in text blurbs, more than 9,000 bloopers from TV, movies and live events. Amusing, but the site really needs to get streaming video.

wetip.com: Got a crime tip? Report it anonymously here, the online outpost of a well-established information network.

eparks.org: If you’re curious about fly-fishing in Yellowstone or want to find out if your congressperson is ecofriendly, you’ll discover it here at the official site of the National Parks Conservation Association.

replacements.com: Cracked a dessert plate in your favorite Noritake china service? This site may help you replace it.

Progress; Get Me Rewrite!

As if our jobs weren’t already in jeopardy, computer scientists are now showing that machines can be journalists. Charles Callaway and James Lester at North Carolina State University originally built the software, called Author, to help children learn to read by creating new fairy tales. All it needs are a few details about the plot and characters, and Author’s massive database of grammar, word choice and sentence construction turns them into masterful prose. The scientists say that with a few tweaks of the program (facts substituted for plot), Author could make reporters obsolete. Come on: does anyone think a computer could have done a better job covering Monica?

This Robot Is for the Birds

Fish farmers in Louisiana can rest a little easier now that scarecrows are getting a high-tech upgrade. TV-size robot boats are on patrol, keeping away pesky egrets, cormorants and other flying bandits. Louisiana State University professor Randy Price and his student Lance Black designed the scarecrowbot after a flock of migrating pelicans flew off with $16,000 worth of the school’s catfish in their bills. The scarecrowbot’s color sensors can detect intruders from up to 30 feet away; then the floating bird deterrent uses artificial intelligence, solar power, paddle wheels and water guns to chase down the bird or squirt it with water–no harm is intended. (Farmers typically use poison, guns or loud cannons to ward off the fish thieves.) The boat seems to be working. If it stops doing the job, Price and Black might try throwing on alligator costumes.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-28” author: “Fred Johnson”

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-25” author: “Arnold Boden”

In the laptop industry, thin and light are usually synonymous with expensive. No more. Sony’s newest portable, the slim (one inch thick) and trim (three pounds) VAIO SR33, costs just $999 after a $100 mail-in rebate. It comes with a 600 MHz Celeron processor, 128 megabytes of RAM and a 10-gigabyte hard drive. One thing to keep in mind: the SR33 is “legacy free,” euphemistic code for no serial or parallel ports, only modern connectors like USB and Fire-Wire. But since most of today’s peripherals and accessories–digital cameras, inkjet printers, flatbed scanners, digital video camcorders–use those connectors, it shouldn’t be a problem. At $999, there’s no need to let suits with expense accounts have all the fun. Are You This or Are You That? If not hot… then what? Last year’s “Am I Hot or Not?” craze spawned Webwide existential brooding–and dozens of imitators from amiredneckornot.com to AOL’s Rate-a-Buddy feature. No wonder hotornot.com cofounder James Hong is seeking a trademark and patents. “It’s almost comical that we have to take the business of ‘rating people’ so seriously when the point of the Web site is vastly more lighthearted,” he says. At amigodornot.net, put yourself in the pantheon with Bill Gates and Elvis. Skewer celebs at amiannoyingornot.com, where Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton leads, for now. Or steer clear of “BMWs, tanned skin, [and] Britney Spears” at amigothornot.com. Of course, the ‘Scope would be a 10 at amicyberornot.com. GAMESReally Mad Max

It’s gritty, violent and absolutely overflowing with sappy, tough-guy detective-novel dialogue. It’s Max Payne ($40; Gathering of Developers, godgames.com), a great new 3-D action game for Windows. You play the title character, an undercover New York City cop whose wife and child have been murdered and whose cover has been blown. In order to take revenge on an underworld kingpin, Max hunts down bad guys in amazingly photorealistic city settings. The cinematic styling of the game is undeniably slick, with a “Matrix”-like “bullet time” feature (which slows down everything so you can dodge bullets). Be warned, however: this game, rated M, is not for kids.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-20” author: “Mary Unger”

GAME WARS

X Marks the Spot

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-18” author: “Lawrence Gaines”

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-11” author: “Harold Hicks”

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-09” author: “Diana Henderson”

GAMES Thunder Ball Powered by the same 3-D graphics programming behind most of today’s hottest PC games, Adventure Pinball: Forgotten Island ($30; Electronic Arts, 877-324-2637) puts a new spin on an old game. The concept and the controls are the same as in regular pinball. Your ball caroms through a fully animated landscape that has cavemen, dinosaurs and volcanoes, instead of on a narrow table with bumpers and flashing lights. To help you take in the scenery–and avoid motion sickness–the game’s camera follows the ball at all times. Even so, you may find the quick pace a bit disorienting at first. Hang in there. After a few warm-up sessions you’ll be playing like a wizard. SURF REPORTWhat If the Sears Tower Were Made of Pennies? More! more! more! that’s the cry of a Web surfer in need of somewhere new to go. We know it all too well. This week’s cure for the Internet blues:

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-09” author: “Dorothy Washington”

Tekno Kitty Price: $39.99 Manufacturer: Manley Tricks: Purrs when petted, meows, wiggles tail, falls asleep, can count to four Accessories: Fish and interactive place mat Creepy tag line: “She has a mind of her own.”

Shelby Price: $24.99 Manufacturer: Tiger Tricks: Tells knock-knock jokes, burps, talks to Furby Accessories: English-Shelbish dictionary Creepy tag line: “The more you play with me, the more I do.”

Chirpy-Chi Price: $24.99 Manufacturer: Tiger Tricks: Flaps wings, bobs up and down, imitates other animals, sings 40 songs Accessories: Corncob Creepy tag line: “Feed me my special corn toy when I’m hungry!”

Muy Loco Price: $29.99 Manufacturer: Trendmasters Tricks: Dances, flicks tongue, says “I like my salsa, baby, hot hot hot!” and other phrases Accessories: Fly Creepy tag line: “Mi es muy loco!” GAMESHigh and Outside High heat baseball 2002 ($40; 3DO, 800-336-3506, Windows) is a bitter disappointment. There’s a great game in there somewhere, but it’s crippled by bugs. Pitchers stand hip-deep in the mound, pop-up fly balls vanish into thin air. In fact, High Heat 2002 rarely provides a single session of virtual baseball that isn’t tainted. Until the bugs are fixed, you’ll probably want to back out of the batter’s box. GENEALOGYPulling Up Your Family Roots Starting this week, visitors to Ellis Island can search for their ancestors using a new computer archive of immigrants who passed through the port of New York from 1892 to 1924. The database is the result of a massive volunteer effort by the Mormons: it took some 5 million hours of converting ship ledgers on film to digital files. It’s also online at Ellis Islandrecords.org.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-28” author: “Norman Thompson”

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-08” author: “Kenneth Cleary”

COMPUTERS Finally, It’s the Mac’s Turn for a Flashy New Interface After an epic run-up, Apple Computer has finally released a finished version of operating system OS X (X, as in the Roman numeral for 10), depending on what you mean by “finished.” Support for important tasks like CD burning or DVD watching is forthcoming, and crucial applications like Microsoft Office have yet to be ported. But OS X does have impressive stability, and its flashy interface has benefited from user feedback during the beta test run (at last you can put the machine to sleep from within an application). Apple-oids will rush to plunk down $130 for this next evolution of the Mac. SURFINGSome of Our Favorite Sites Every week, CYBERSCOPE reviews Web sites that are interesting, funny, occasionally controversial and, above all, useful. But many Web sites don’t get written up simply for lack of space. Here are some of this week’s favorites, in no particular order.

• netflix.com Mail-order DVD rentals. Flat monthly rate of $19.95, and you can keep movies, up to three at a time, as long as you want.

• randomaccessmemory.org A searchable archive of memories, submitted by Web users and organized by date, name and subject. Lovely design, quirky content.

• virtuallythere.com Personalized travel portal that consolidates your itineraries and lets you view them using wireless devices.

• quickbrowse.com A free tool designed to make surfing easier by collecting your frequently visited sites and stringing them together into one long, scroll-able Web page.

• iping.com Need a wake-up call? Go to this free site, input your phone number, schedule the call and consider it done.

• google.com Yeah, we know Google’s not new. But the popular search engine last week added a phonebook feature. Type first name, last name and state (e.g., John Doe, OH) in the regular keyword-search field. It’s so good it’s scary.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-19” author: “Lillian Choquette”

All thumbs: Buttons for changing the display of your ‘computer’ located within easy reach

Beam it: A sensor on the front fork uses radio signals to transmit speed and distance

Revolutionary: A magnet is attached to a spoke to mark each turn of the wheel and its velocity

Calculating: Not exactly cutting-edge tech but it gets the job done GAMESCooperate–Or Get Lost in Space Log on to a session of Tribes 2 ($50; Sierra, 877-446-0184), and prepare yourself to enter a full-fledged Internet war. A sequel to a hugely popular online game, Tribes 2 is team-based action in which players must work in concert to defeat opposing teams in a variety of armed sci-fi battles (most being variants of the basic capture-the-flag idea). Players can modify their equipment to tackle different tasks, such as a light-armored reconnaissance mission or a heavy weapons assault. And although most of the action takes place on foot, players can also pilot several different kinds of vehicles on and over the vast, rolling outdoor environments complete with rain, fog or even the odd meteor shower. FASHIONWhat a Concept! Palm and Sanyo Shokai, a Japanese coat maker (no relation to the electronics company), have teamed to make rainwear that gives you an inside pocket designed just for your electronic organizer. Call it “Palm-enabled.”

Gentlemen, Choose Your Partners After six years of foot-dragging, the five major record labels are embracing their digital future. Last week each label announced deals with online companies RealNetworks, RioPort and Yahoo. Here’s what each label’s dance card looks like. (Graphic omitted)

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-02” author: “Eunice Orozco”

Plenty of veterans agree. Benchmark, the legendary Silicon Valey firm, is seeding new ventures with $750 million in the next two years, and this month it lured former Irish telecom executive Barry Maloney as partner. Draper Fisher Jurvetson, another Route 101 heavyweight, recently sent partner John Fisher to London with $700 million to invest in new European tech firms. The smarter home-grown VCs are still writing checks, too. U.K.-based Amadeus Capital, founded by Austrian serial entrepreneur Hermann Hauser, is pouring money from a 235 million [pound sterling] fund into local tech hubs like Cambridge, South Hampton and Bristol.

The smart money isn’t on dot-coms that deliver tofu to your door, or even on the once trendy business-to-business exchanges or e-consultancies. The new things are those that make real companies run faster and better–software that integrates business processes, wireless services and optical networks. Those who didn’t blow all their money on the Internet bubble are now picking up cutting-edge technology on the cheap. “The balance of power has shifted back to the investor,” says Amadeus’s Anne Glover. European investors and entrepreneurs may be fewer than a while ago, but they have gotten smarter. Even though VCs may have to invest more money into younger firms and wait longer for the IPO, the less frenetic pace is allowing more time for due diligence, something all too rare in the bubble market of 1999 and early 2000. The correction has also weeded out a number of consultants and bankers who built companies on a lark and has left a cadre of experienced entrepreneurs. As more firms stumble and get up again, Europeans may finally begin to realize that failure, like market dips, can be a great opportunity.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-19” author: “Valorie Lory”

REPAIRS Beyond Kicking Are you handy with a screwdriver? Repairclinic.com lets you order parts and repair manuals online so you can fix your own dishwasher and other major appliances, including old models no longer sold and some machines from other countries. The site also offers vital advice on coddling your appliances. And if you don’t have a part number, just a malfunctioning thingamajig, the site’s Part- Detective asks a series of questions (“Is the part 100% plastic? Is [it] 100% the same color?”) to help identify the mystery part, then produces nicely detailed photos of likely candidates. Let ’er rip!

Michael E. Ryan and Jennifer Tanaka

SITE SPECIFIC Fun and Games on the Web–And the Price Is Right Though you can’t wear out your computer’s copy of Minesweeper, it’s still possible to get sick of it. So why not go online for some fresh digital entertainment? Gaming sites that specialize in free, low-bandwidth fun (crosswords, brain-teasers, simulated slots and roulette) have legions of fans who spend hours a month clicking away–alone and in Web-connected groups.

pogo.com WHAT’S THERE? Forty-two ‘casual family- oriented’ games from classic board games to virtual Keno

WHO’S PLAYING? Seventeen million members, 55 percent of whom are female. Most users play from home.

COOL EXTRAS Integrated chat and a token-based system of ’no risk’ gambling for prizes

boxerjam.com WHAT’S THERE? All original games. Rounds of playing interspersed with 15-second TV-like commercials.

WHO’S PLAYING? Lots of women, and lots of parents. Site activity peaks between 9 p.m. and midnight.

COOL EXTRAS Multiplayer chat and e-mail notification if you win a prize in one of many drawings

zapspot.com WHAT’S THERE? Small games (about 500KB) that you can play online or download to your PC

WHO’S PLAYING? Women in their 30s form a sizable part of the audience, many of them with kids

COOL EXTRAS Sign up for a free e-mail service that will send you a new game once a month

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-31” author: “Mario Herron”

Sega’s console may be on its way out, but the company is still pumping out innovative content. Phantasy Star Online ($39.99; 800-872-7342), a sci-fi role-playing game, is a one-of-a-kind title that allows players from all over the world to team up for missions and quests. (The game connects to the Net via the Dreamcast’s built-in 56K modem but not, oddly enough, through the recently released Broadband Adapter.) Players act as bounty hunters on a distant planet, where mysterious and dangerous creatures await. You can play the game offline, but the real thrill lies in taking your custom character to cyberspace for tougher quests. The optional Dreamcast keyboard ($24.99) is a big help with this game, as chatting is difficult without it. Either way, Phantasy will keep players hooked for weeks on end. Michael E. Ryan

GADGETS: Microsoft’s Latest Trick: A Phone With a PC Built In

While Microsoft’s Windows CE operating system lags far behind Palm in the handheld computing arena, mobile phones are still virgin territory. Last week, Microsoft unveiled its smartphone platform, code-named Stinger, at a wireless conference in Cannes, France. Stinger merges the capabilities of a Pocket PC into a mobile phone with a color screen and features like Web browsing, e-mail, audiovisual playback and personal information management. To pack all of that functionality into a compact 3.8-ounce package required some serious engineering ingenuity, says Phil Holden, director of Micro-soft’s mobility group. “We’ve reduced the in-tegrated circuits and CPU to 80 percent of the size of a typical Windows CE-based PDA,” says Holden. And he promises that these phones will be easier to use than the still-awkward Pocket PC. “The goal is to have users up and running in five minutes.” Now if only they could do something about junk e-mail…

STORAGE: Pocket Full Of Memory

let’s be honest: do we really need another removable storage format? After all, we’ve already got SmartMedia, CompactFlash, Memory Stick, Secure Digital, PocketZip, Microdrive and recordable CD-ROMs, just to name a few. But Southern California-based Agate Technologies has come up with a nifty idea: a hard drive that’s so small you can slip it onto your key chain. Even better, it plugs right into any USB port. The Q drive, as Agate has dubbed it, comes in 16-, 32- and 64MB sizes and a variety of colors; it’s available through the company’s Web site, agatetech.com.

PDAS: Beamie Baby

Without wireless Net connectivity, your Palm is an island. But for frequent travelers, help is coming from a new start-up called adAlive. It’s attaching cereal-box-size devices to billboards to provide Internet access for infrared- enabled PDAs. Just point to an adAlive-equipped billboard for e-mail, city guides, AvantGo and Vindigo updates and additional information or coupons from the advertiser. Right now, it’s available just in billboards at the American Airlines terminal at JFK, but expect other airports and hotels to add adAlive soon.

title: “Cyberscope” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-17” author: “Anna Lewis”

TRAFFIC Trouble Ahead, Trouble Behind Trafficstation.com offers free traffic reports on 30 U.S. and Canadian cities on its Web site–but, more important, drivers can access this information en route via Web-enabled mobile phones, pagers and PDAs. The free service warns of congestion, construction zones and accident areas. For $5.95 a month, users can get more advanced features, such as setting up personalized routes and the option to call TrafficStation using any phone to hear real-time traffic info. Pay users can also arrange for the service to call, e-mail or page them with relevant information whenever slowdowns are detected. To keep up to the minute, this handy service uses a number of sources: the Department of Transportation, highway cameras, volunteer “spotters” and aircraft services.

Take On the Evil Federation Slowly but surely, the number of must-have PlayStation 2 games continues to grow. The latest game to make our wish list is Star Wars: Starfighter ($49.95; LucasArts Entertainment Co., 888-532-4263), an intense and beautifully crafted space-combat adventure. This story-driven game challenges players to fly a variety of spacecraft in battles against the evil Trade Federation. During the game’s 14 missions, players will assume the role of three different characters: a military pilot, a mercenary and a pirate. The missions are hair-raising and challenging, but don’t forget to take in the spectacular view.

TIME WASTER If You Were Wondering… Settle your sexual-identity issues once and for all. The gender test at thespark.com/gendertest asks you 50 offbeat (and occasionally racy) questions like “Would you rather fall to your death or drown?” and “In a certain light, nuclear war would be exciting: true or false.” Then it compares your responses to those of other people and guesses your gender. Its creators claim a better-than-80 percent success rate–though the answer it gave a NEWSWEEK reporter was at odds with his birth certificate.