Credit card giant American Express has quietly begun a pilot project offering its cardholders free dial-up Internet access (www.amexol.net). This is great news for the economy-minded because it comes just as free Internet offers from outfits like Excite.com and AltaVista.com have ended.
There still is no free lunch, of course, since you have to pay at least the annual fee to hold that American Express card. You also get e-mail, as well as access to Internet newsgroups. (Keep reading for the dark side of that one.)
PORN PATROL
SPIES WILL BE GUYS
We learned at the trial in New York of terrorists accused of bombing U.S. embassies in Africa that operatives employed by renegade Saudi Arabian oil billionaire Osama bin Laden frequently communicate by way of secret attachments embedded in obscene photographs posted on pornographic Internet newsgroups.
As a result, somewhere in the bowels of the United States’ supersecret National Security Agency, American intelligence agents are downloading the latest smut files posted on the thousands of newsgroups that make up the Usenet. Terrorists hide things like maps and schedules in smut files that get posted everywhere from alt.binaries.pictures.sex to Napster.
TO XP
OR NOT TO XP
The high-powered marketing geniuses at Microsoft Corp. finally have decided on the name for the long-awaited new operating system that will integrate both consumer-oriented Windows ME and business-strength Windows 2000 in a single package. A drum roll please: Would you believe Windows XP (for experience)?
Likewise, the follow-on for Microsoft Office 2000 will be, you guessed it, Office XP.
You have just got to wonder why naming a product so it sounds like only the experienced can use it seems to make sense for the Raptors of Redmond, Wash. On the other hand, the enormously successful Windows 95 seemed like a dumb name when it was sold for the first time just four months before the calendar turnover to 1996. That’s why the folks who dream this stuff up are so Xpensive.
WEB’S PATRON SAINT
YOU’VE GOT GRACE
From the Vatican press corps comes word that Pope John Paul II will name St. Isidore of Spain, a 7th Century writer of encyclopedias, the patron saint of the Internet and computer programmers.
The pope apparently has been Internet-savvy for years. The Vatican put up its first Web site (www.vatican.va) in 1996 and has used it heavily since to post papal decrees and thousands of church documents. With more than 1 billion Catholics worldwide, traffic got so heavy that the Vatican had to establish three servers, named for archangels: Raphael, Michael and Gabriel. And yes, they have firewalls. Pax vobiscum.
