

Sure, once you download and install this software there are neat things you can do with it, like listen to NPR's "Talk of the Nation" or, if you must, the O.J. At any time, people from all over the world can check in on his neon tetras and angelfish (the URL is The development of RealAudio - a Web browser "helper application" that allows sound to be transmitted over the Net in real time - has really pushed the envelope of stupid Internet tricks.
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This is a video camera that a fellow at Netscape has trained on his very nice tank full of tropical fish. There's no end to the people who are doing dumb things on the Net just because they can. A hotel news roundup on Airbnb, SF's Golden Gate Hotel and Line Hotel.Horoscope for Thursday, 10/27/22 by Christopher Renstrom.UC Davis event hosted by conservative student group canceled after 100-person brawl breaks out.Super Star Restaurant in San Francisco is feeding an entire neighborhood.


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People who want to wreak havoc on AOL can spend 10 free hours doing it, and then just find another diskette and start over.ĪOL wants to have its cake and eat it, too. But it's also a very easy system to abuse. One the one hand, it's a brilliant and effective marketing strategy: Millions of people have played with their 10 free hours, liked what they've seen on AOL, and stuck around after the meter started running. AOL is the second-largest consumer of diskettes in the world after Microsoft, and those diskettes are all going out to spread the AOL gospel. Imagine a place with three times the population of San Francisco where nobody is accountable to anybody.Īnd if you own a computer, or if you've been thinking about buying one, then you probably know about the third big problem: the diskettes offering 10 free hours on AOL. Combine this huge population with the problem of fluid identity, and it's not surprising that AOL is having trouble. But what AOL's president Steve Case calls "the AOL community" comprises 3.5 million people. So when people find out that UncleJim is online cruising for teenagers, or that HotGirl4U is actually a boy, those identities vanish, and the people behind them re-emerge under different names.ĭisposable identity might not cause much mischief in a small community. But allowing users to change names lets anyone throw away his or her identity if it starts developing a bad reputation. The screen names are ostensibly meant to give parents a way to let their kids use their AOL accounts. AOL lets any customer have up to five "screen names." Users can change these at any time. There have been actual arrests, too, which is inconvenient for people who like to use the online-porn issue to push for more laws: It sure looks as if we have all the laws we need to arrest people who distribute child pornography and abduct children.īut what this story has thrown into sharp focus is this: America Online, the nation's most popular online service, can be awfully unsavory. Compared to earlier scares, this story hasn't been getting huge play - even though, for once, there seem to be actual criminals and an actual victim, a 10-year-old boy who's been missing since 1993.
