Cyber privacy activists are howling at word out of Washington that the U.S. Postal Service is flirting with establishing e-mail accounts on government-owned server computers for every citizen with a snail-mail address. Each of us would get a 10-digit encrypted numeric code.
The government would use the e-mail accounts to send things like tax forms, census questionnaires and such, but insiders briefed on the plan were told that the feds are considering letting advertisers attach their messages for a fee.
THE KING FISHER
WORLD WIDE WEALTH
Nanosecond novelist Stephen King says he’s getting richer still, now that he has offloaded some of his output from ink-on-paper publishers to his own www.stephenking.com Web site, where a novel-in-progress called “The Plant” is on sale. The cost is $1 per chapter for the early chapters and $2.50 for the later ones, as the story builds and the suspense grows.
King boasts that 152,132 folks downloaded his $1-a-pop Episode 1, which is hardly chump change. At that rate he will rake in 1,673,452 downloads by the time installment 11 is posted in 20 months.
Can you trust the King of Suspense not to up the ante for that tantalizing last chapter?
THROWAWAY COMPUTERS?
PALM THEM OFF
They’re still not as cheap as a disposable Bic razor, but the bright, candy-colored cases and $149 price tags on the Palm m 100, making their debut Monday, conjure a future when computers become as common as cauliflower on the crudites tray.
These curvaceous mass-market handhelds boast 2 megabytes of memory and the full-blown Palm software for tracking appointments, keeping huge address lists and all the other stuff that first made Palms a status symbol for corner office big shots.
Best new feature? Push the scroll button and the time and date pop up on the screen, which is visible through a small window in the flip-top case cover.
Worst feature? It comes with a clunky, Windows 95-style serial connector for attaching to PCs rather than the far more convenient USB ports.
R.I.PRINCETON.COM
A VERY BIG BIT PLAYER
There hardly would be any tech about which to buzz if not for Princeton’s John W. Tukey, who logged off last week at age 85. It was professor Tukey, a statistician, who coined the word “software” to describe the computer code he created to crunch numbers. It appeared in American Mathematical Monthly in a 1958 article.
Tukey also gave us “bit,” for the zeros and ones (binary digits) used by computers to do their stuff. His passing reminds that, in the end, life bytes all us bit players.
