CAN LINKING MAKE YOU LIABLE? - If your Web site links to a site that links to a third site and the third site contains illegal reproductions of copyrighted material, can you be sued for damages? So far, the answer is no, because Los Angeles Federal District Court Judge Manuel A. Real dismissed one of the defendants from a case brought by Hollywood glamour photographer Gary Bernstein, charging that such linking is illegal. After the judge's ruling, Bernstein withdrew his lawsuit, but legal experts say the issue will come up for court review another day. Law professor Mark Lemley says that "the consequences of holding an end user liable for copyright infringement would be disturbing for the Net... It might deter surfing. It might also give some unscrupulous groups the power to suppress speech or critics." (New York Times 25 Sep 98)

NSF STILL BATTLING OVER INTERNET FUND - The National Science Foundation is confronting a new challenge from Congress over plans to spend the $60 million collected by Network Solutions Inc. as part of the registration fee paid for Internet domain name addresses. The latest obstacle came when the Senate Finance Committee announced it is considering repealing part of a 1998 law that had cleared the way for the NSF to spend the money, which up until then had been locked up in a court proceeding. "This would put a wrench in the plans we have to help universities connect to high-speed networks," says the deputy director of NSF's office of legislative and public affairs. "There seems to be a problem brewing." The money has been earmarked for the Clinton administration's Next Generation Internet initiative. (Chronicle of Higher Education 25 Sep 98)

THE INTELLIGENT ESSAY ASSESSOR - A psychology professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder is spearheading the creation of an Intelligent Essay Assessor, a computerized tool to assist professors in grading students' written essays. Thomas Landauer says that to use the program, a professor must first teach it to recognize both good and bad essay writing by feeding it examples of both, which have been manually graded. The program can also be trained using a "gold standard" - materials written by experts on the same subject as the essay to be graded. Earlier digital essay graders work by analyzing essays mechanically - looking at sentence structures and counting commas, periods and word lengths. Landauer's program can actually "understand" the student's writing using artificial intelligence technology called "latent semantic analysis," comparing the patterns of word usage in the essays with the usage patterns it has learned from the samples. The Intelligent Essay Assessor is *not* meant to be used to grade essays in English-composition or creative-writing assignments, where a student is being graded more on writing skill than subject knowledge. (Chronicle of Higher Education 4 Sep 98)

FEDS REVISE Y2K ESTIMATE - The federal government's Year 2000 Conversion Panel now says it will cost the government at least $5.4 billion to reprogram its computers for solving the Year 2000 problem caused by old programs that used two-digit year codes leaving a computer not knowing what century it's in. This new estimate is about $400 million higher than the last one. (New York Times 6 Sep 98)

EDUCAUSE OFFERS Y2K SITE - EDUCAUSE is offering campus administrators access to more than two dozen institutional Y2K sites via a Web page that also offers links to the U.S. Department of Education and other related sites, see: http://www.educause.edu/issues/y2k.html . (Chronicle of Higher Education 4 Sep 98)

INVISIBLE WORLDS TO MAP THE INTERNET - Internet software developers Carl Malamud and Marshall Rose have founded Invisible Worlds, Inc. with the goal of creating a way to navigate the Internet using maps that portray the relationships between computers and information as three-dimensional space. "We think you should be able to take your mouse or joystick and drive around the Internet," says Malamud. "One of the reasons the Web seems so chaotic is there is no way to see it visually." The navigational tools, which will be available some time next year, will be known as the Blocks protocol. Initially, users will view the interactive maps using their Web browsers, but Malamud hopes to someday offer map-viewing software with more powerful visualization features. Malamud traces his inspiration to the work of such writers as Thomas Pynchon, whose "Mason & Dixon" novel celebrates the role that the cartographer can play in defining uncharted territory. (New York Times 23 Sep 98)