News from 1999

Executive summary In January 1999, I was contacted by Netscape regarding a report that I coauthored that was critical of the implementation of their "Smart Browsing" service. Netscape incorrectly claimed that the report is "incorrect or misleading" and that it "misrepresents" the Smart Browsing service. The same claim was made to Anonymizer Inc, who mirror the article on their web site. I disagreed strongly with Netscape's claims. Later that month, I became aware that Netscape's "Smart Browsing" service claimed that the report I coauthored was "related" to The Unabomber Manifesto. I made my displeasure clear to Netscape, at which point, my email went unanswered. There are numerous issues at hand here: the dangers of having a technology provider having editorial control over material being presented and the business of reputation and character assassination. I do not know to whom else Netscape has claimed that the report is incorrect, but there is reason to believe that it includes journalists who might otherwise be inclined to write about the service's problems. In any event, the service still has rather severe privacy invasion problems and a FAQ that does not tell the whole story. Now anyone reading an article critical of the service can use the service to be told that this work is somehow related to the manifesto of an anti-technology murderer. And the media doesn't seem interested in covering the problems. Something is clearly amiss.

rcpp-mode is a major editing mode for Emacs for programming in RESOLVE/C++. In essence, we have inherited c++-mode from the "CC Mode" package and added RESOLVE-isms.