The Stanford University law professor and cyberadvocate redefines the parameters of the Internet. A Q&A with Larry Lessig on his vision for a future of competition that will realize the Net’s full potential as a catalyst for creativity and innovation.

How do you tell the difference between the companies that are going to survive the shakeout among telecommunications service providers and those that will go belly-up?

Every CEO running a phone company has studied the problem. When some number of customers stops buying, a company's remaining customers often come looking for discounts. It's exactly this double whammy of falling demand and falling prices that has hit telecommunications providers. ...

Few people in the United States understand the scientific process and many believe in mysterious psychic powers and may be quick to accept phony science reports, according to a national survey.

Prabhakar Raghavan, CTO at Verity, Inc., on building a secure foundation for information retrieval.

On the Web: a few tens of TBytes. In enterprises: many orders of magnitude more than that. The technical challenges inside companies are very different from those for the Web. The primary factor is what we call "fine-grained security." In summary, fine-grained security is the ability to interlace search with security at the document and individual levels. A huge technical challenge! Another challenge is the diverse types of documents.

I'll describe some of the framework for the solution ... Security is every bit as important as searching. This aspect of secure search is the foundation from which we build up deeper functionality ...

Bernard J. Ebbers, who built WorldCom Inc. into a global telecommunications giant but then saw its fortunes and stock price crumble amid fierce industry competition and questions about the company's finances, has resigned as chief executive and president.

There are people who believe Silicon Valley is a misnomer. ... Iron Ferrite Valley would be a more appropriate name, although the case has been harder to make since IBM decided to sell its business in magnetic disk data storage to Hitachi.

A half-century ago, IBM began research that would lead to the first disk drive.

Almaden Research Center has long been considered one of IBM's crown jewels ... Now, part of it will become a joint venture to be 70% owned by Hitachi.

So there was some quiet grumbling ... as many technologists wondered whether the computer maker was not mortgaging its future.

Does IBM actually have a grand strategy in data storage [or is it about improving the short-term bottom line]?

It may take a peculiar kind of company to stay alive in [the rapidly consolidating storage industry.]

The technology is changing even faster. Execution of each new generation of technology has to be flawless or else market share can collapse overnight.

For decades, critics have been predicting the imminent obsolescence of hard-disk drives. IBM may have finally decided that the writing is indeed on the wall.

Communication technologies contain embedded values that affect our society's fundamental values, such as privacy, freedom of speech, and the protection of intellectual property.

Researchers have shown the design of technologies is not autonomous but shaped by conflicting social groups.

Consequently, communication technologies contain different values when designed by different social groups.

Institutions where communication technologies are designed and developed are an important source of the values of communication technologies. We focus on political, economic, social, and legal influences, institutional reactions to these influences, and decision-making issues in the review process.

In this incisive, insightful work Mark Buchanan presents the fundamental principles of the emerging field of "small worlds" theory -- the idea that a hidden pattern is the key to how networks interact and exchange information, whether that network is the information highway or the firing of neurons in the brain. Mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, and social scientists are working to decipher this complex organizational system, for it may yield a blueprint of dynamic interactions within our physical as well as social worlds. Highlighting groundbreaking research behind network theory, Buchanan documents mounting support for the small-worlds idea and demonstrates its multiple applications to diverse problems.

An exciting introduction to the hidden geometry that weaves our lives so inextricably together.

A few short weeks ago, CDs were gathering dust in the nation's record stores, where sales of new albums were down 10% from a year ago. Then along came Ashanti. In its first week of release, her self-titled debut album sold 502,000 copies. After three weeks, Ashanti's album has sold 940,000 copies and is still No. 1 on the charts.