Just in time for the start of the high-profile trial of former Enron executives Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling comes EnronEmail.com.

The new Web site features some 514,000 e-mails sent to and from 176 company employees from 2000 to 2002. Originally released by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), EnronEmail.com is set up to allow easy access to all the e-mails, searchable by a number of different search criteria. The trials of Lay and Skilling open on January 30.

There’s also a blog at the site where visitors can post comments, as well as contests to identify the most outrageous e-mails in three categories: I’d fire him (or her); Enron’s funniest jokes; and what were they thinking?

But there’s a more serious purpose behind all this. InBoxer, the Concord, Mass.-based company behind EnronEmail.com says it is using it as a test site and showcase of an e-mail screening system it has in development. The company also worked with M.I.T. and think tank SRI to compile the e-mails in an easily accessible format and delete the irrelevant ones, such as system status notices from Enron’s IT department.

“We discovered in our analysis that 28 percent of the e-mails had nothing to do with business,” Roger Matus, CEO of InBoxer, told internetnews.com. “In investigating Enron, FERC created a Web site with all the e-mails, but it was difficult to use unless you knew what you were looking for. Enron’s considered one of the greatest scandals in history, so we wanted to make all that information more available to the public.”

The EnronEmail.com site includes a dashboard view where you can select e-mails to view by such categories as Privacy Violation, Objectionable Use, Intellectual Property or Marked Confidential.

Enron’s manipulation of the energy market has been widely reported for years and will no doubt gain greater public awareness once the trial of its top execs gets underway. Less well-known is the communication among its employees. The Enron e-mails are an unprecedented two-year snapshot of a company culture and social interaction, at least as reflected by its electronic communications.

After viewing the site, some may ponder how much more damage to the economy Enron might have inflicted if its employees spent less time forwarding hundred-line IM exchanges between “Texas Deadhead” and “Miss Likki Mudd.”

All of it was a dream test bed for InBoxer. Matus said he couldn’t imagine any company letting a third party scrutinize its e-mails on such a scale.

The InBoxer Anti-Risk Appliance is due to ship this quarter. The system consists of a linux PC designed to connect to a company’s network and scan e-mails using InBoxer’s software for such things as inappropriate language, transmission of Social Security numbers and many other criteria that the IT department or other supervisory entity can preset.

Matus said several companies already are testing the product with a number of different objectives. “No one I’m talking to expects there to be no personal use of company e-mail,” he said. “Let’s say a company decides it can live with 28 percent of the messages being for non-business use, like in Enron’s case. Well, they might want to know if more than 60 percent of the e-mails sent by one department aren’t business related.” In one case, Matus said a company has strict rules about a certain department not communicating with another department and is using the system to monitor any deviations from that policy.

If this all sounds like too much Big Brother in the workplace, Matus said it’s nothing new. In a Forrester study released last year, thirty percent of the respondents, corporations with a thousand or more employees, said they have paid staff members monitoring outgoing e-mail.

“The key message I tell people is, do not believe for a moment your e-mail is private and confidential or that, if it serves the company’s interest to publish it, that they won’t do it.”

From management’s point of view, systems like the InBoxer Anti-Risk and others save time and labor costs and are designed to be more effective than manual screening.

On the most benign level, the Anti-Risk Appliance can be set up to automatically notify an employee that an e-mail has crossed a company guideline. But it could also be used by management to filter on specific words and abuses, or on transmission of sensitive or proprietary content.

Matus and his development staff have backgrounds in speech recognition, and the system, while not foolproof, does more than search for offensive language. It also analyzes the structure and format of e-mail content. A single offensive word or term in an e-mail won’t usually trigger a warning, according to Matus, and he said the system understands words like “shitake mushroom” that might otherwise be misconstrued as an obscenity.

Comedian George Carlin had a famous routine about the seven words you can never say on TV. In the case of the Enron e-mails, Matus said, they looked for the seven obscene words and found at least one in 1,200 e-mails. They then broadened the search to look up offensive words as defined by Wikipedia. By that criterion, some 10,725 of the Enron e-mails had offensive words in them. A company can set its own criteria as to what it considers offensive content.

Said Matus: “A church might have very different material than ‘Playboy.’”

The U.S. Supreme Court Monday dealt Research in Motion (RIM) another serious setback in its long-running patent infringement battle with NTP, denying the developer of the widely popular BlackBerry a high-court review of the case.

RIM (Quote, Chart) was seeking a decision of the validity of U.S. patent laws on the Canadian-based company, which maintains its principal servers in Waterloo, Ontario.

“RIM has consistently acknowledged that Supreme Court review is granted in only a small percentage of cases and we were not banking on Supreme Court review,” Mark Guibert, RIM’s VP for corporate marketing, said in an e-mail statement to internetnews.com.

In a press release issued shortly after the decision, the company said, “RIM sought review because it believes the case raises significant national and international issues.”

The Supreme Court did not. The case now goes back to the U.S. District Court in Virginia, where RIM faces a possible shutdown of its U.S. service and a settlement with NTP for as much as $1 billion.

“The Supreme Court’s denial closed the final path for RIM to avoid liability,” NTP said in a statement.

The Virginia court must decide whether to reinstate an injunction against U.S. sales of the BlackBerry. Last November, the same court supported the Virginia-based NTP’s efforts to reject a $450 million proposed settlement with RIM.

U.S. District Judge James R. Spencer said the term sheet entered between RIM and NTP in March 2005 to settle the litigation is not an enforceable agreement.

“Today’s [Supreme Court] order has no bearing on the merits of the outstanding issues in the [Virginia] case,” RIM insisted in its statement.

The November ruling allows NTP to continue moving forward in the case, including the reinstatement of a 2002 injunction that “prohibits RIM from selling, using or importing into the United States infringing BlackBerry hardware and software until the last of the litigated patents expires in 2012.”

NTP said in November any injunction would not affect the usage of BlackBerry products by federal, state or local governments or by first responders. RIM claims if NTP prevails in gaining an injunction, it has software workarounds to keep its popular products in U.S. hands.

Sony has released two new games in the all-ages Ape Escape series, one for each of its game consoles. The PlayStation 2 entry is worth monkeying around with, but the PSP version is awful.

The original Ape Escape was the first PlayStation game to use both the controller’s joysticks. One moved the character, while the other swung his net around to catch escaped apes scattered about the levels. That remains the gameplay of Ape Escape 3, but the gimmick has long since lost its originality. Luckily, a few new elements keeps things fresh.

Now, the monkeys are no longer simply wily and evasive — some of them will become enraged and attack you. To even the odds, you can now transform your character into a variety of forms with stronger attack abilities. In the Ninja form, you can walk across ropes with silent grace and chase down monkeys with super speed.

But most of the time, you’re using the same old primate-gathering methods. You collect a variety of gadgets throughout the game, then decide the best times to deploy them. A radio-controlled car lets you capture monkeys from a distance; a water net helps you capture swimming simians.

The in-game camera is often difficult to manipulate in Ape 3. And the slipshod presentation leaves something to be desired — the graphics look like something from five years ago, hardly what you’d expect from a game developed internally at Sony.

But while Ape 3 transcends its flaws, Ape Escape Academy doesn’t. Rather than a portable version of the console series, Academy is a collection of minigames that each take less than a minute to play.

Whereas similar games like Nintendo’s WarioWare present a volley of amusing contests in rapid succession, Academy features agonizingly long load screens between every game. It’s no exaggeration to say you spend more time waiting for Academy to load than you do actually playing it.

In each game, the controls are awful. Playing video air hockey — which Atari perfected three decades ago with Pong — causes thumb pain because the paddles refuse to go where you want them to.

At least in a game of air hockey, you can figure out what you’re supposed to be doing. This is not always the case with the other challenges. If a game isn’t tied to any real-world activity, the vague and incomplete instruction screens mean you’re in the dark about what you’re trying to achieve until you try — sometimes several times. Try this: What do you do with a stack of monkeys piled up on a cliff? While you’re thinking about it, you’ve lost the game — and have to suffer through several minutes of loading before you can try again. And those are two of the better games.

Academy is best left behind. I can’t think of a less enjoyable game on the PSP.

Digital television services, including TV, Web access and telephone calls, will dominate Europe’s digital economy by the decade’s end with 60 percent of households hooked up, according to a study released on Monday.

More than 100 billion euros ($122 billion) in related investment, including more than 100,000 new jobs, are expected from next-generation television services, said strategy and technology consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton.

“The long-term winners will be the players, who are first to offer the consumer the so-called ‘triple-play’, access to all three services from single source, on favorable terms and conditions,” Booz Allen Hamilton said in a statement.

The study, based on market data and interviews with industry participants, said that digital services will shift away from services focused on broadband — or high-speed Internet — toward comprehensive communication and entertainment services centered on digital TV that also delivers Internet and telephone calls.

“The pressure to consolidate in the European cable TV industry is further increasing,” said Thomas Kunstner, the Booz Allen Hamilton partner responsible for the study, adding that he expected to see mergers that “cut across the traditional boundaries of the industry”.

The study warned, however, that over-regulation of the nascent industry could hinder development and cut total expected spending by about 40 percent.

Nobody said it was easy for EMI, the world’s third-largest record company and the home of British band Coldplay, as the music industry has weathered six straight years of falling sales.

Yet EMI Chairman Eric Nicoli and others in the industry are seeing signs of hope coming from the very source of many of the industry’s woes — the Internet.

Downloaded music sales on online services such as Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes Music Store are surging, and made up 6 percent of industry revenues in 2005. Nicoli said digital revenues are now expected to offset flagging CD sales within a few years.

“We’ve seen a tripling in the last year and we’ve hardly gotten started,” he said this weekend in an interview with Reuters at the music industry’s annual conference in Cannes, where he also delivered the keynote address.

Digital music sales topped the $1 billion mark last year, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, compared with $380 million in 2004.

“We’ve moved on from the days when the main impact of digital technology was to harm our industry by facilitating rampant online and physical theft,” he said. “The day is surely within our sights when digital growth outstrips physical decline and we can all compete for share of a growing pie.”

Digital music is expected to make up 25 percent of EMI’s and the industry’s revenues by 2010.

“Our belief is that the (total) market will be bigger in 2010 than it is today — and potentially much bigger,” Nicoli said.

CHANGES

But even if growth returns, the industry’s rules have changed irrevocably.

Industry analysts expect sales of albums — a format whose popularity is commonly credited to the success of the Beatles 40-odd years ago — to fade now that consumers can buy individual songs online and thus avoid the scenario of a few good songs padded by mediocre filler.

Nicoli, citing the success of Coldplay’s third album, disagrees that the format is on the wane, but he admitted that the “unbundling” of music is here to stay.

“The pessimists will say that’s a problem, but our research suggest that the net effect of unbundling is a positive,” he said.

He acknowledged that in a complex and rapidly changing sector, predictions and projections are an inexact science.

“We thought subscriptions (services such as Napster and Rhapsody that offer unlimited music for a monthly fee) would be huge — it hasn’t been,” he said.

Mobile music, apart from phone ringtunes, has also developed more slowly than many had hoped.

“We’re at year zero — if that — with mobile,” Nicoli said.

Nicoli refused to be drawn on persistent speculation that EMI would eventually merge with its smaller rival Warner Music, a deal that was blocked by European regulators in 2000 when Warner Music was still a part of media conglomerate Time Warner.

Since then, Sony and BMG have merged, leading many analysts to suggest that EMI and Warner would have to follow suit to stay competitive.

Asked if there would still be four major music companies in a year’s time, Nicoli said: “Yes. Or no.”

Internet media company Yahoo said on Sunday it was opening research centers in Spain and Chile, expanding its engineering efforts beyond the United States for the first time.

Yahoo, which has stepped up its research efforts in Web search and other technology areas over the past year, will have six research facilities worldwide, with four existing locations in the United States and centers in Europe and Latin America.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company has hired Ricardo Baeza-Yates, an expert in Web retrieval and data mining, who will lead the two new centers’ work on topics related to Web search and information extraction.

Chilean born Baeza-Yates will be based in Barcelona and report to Prabhakar Raghavan, the global head of research. Baeza-Yates has been affiliated with universities in both Santiago and Barcelona. His Web site is at http://www.dcc.uchile.cl/~rbaeza/.

Baeza-Yates is the latest search industry expert to join Yahoo’s research team. He is the co-author of Modern Information Retrieval, the most used textbook on search (translated into Chinese and Korean), among various books.

Andrei Broder, former vice president of research at pioneering Web search system AltaVista and subsequently a chief technology officer at IBM Research, joined Yahoo as vice president of emerging search technology in November.

The Barcelona office will be run together with the Center for Innovation Barcelona Media, a non-profit institution with local industry and Catalan government support, which has ties to Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) and other local colleges.

The Santiago office will be run in conjunction with the Center for Web Research (CWR), founded by Baeza-Yates and funded by the Millennium Scientific Initiative of Chile’s Planning Ministry. It will be hosted by the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Chile.

Web search rival Google has four U.S. research centers and facilities in Switzerland, India and Japan.

Internet search engine Google has retaken first place in the 2005 global poll of the world’s most influential brands, while the eBay-owned web phone service Skype makes its debut at No. 3.

The annual survey compiled by online branding magazine brandchannel.com often throws up controversial results, such as in 2004, when Arabic TV station Al Jazeera was voted the world’s fifth most influential brand (down to 25th place this year).

But this year, the 2,528 branding professionals and students who voted came up with more conventional and — perhaps unsurprisingly for an online poll — tech-heavy answers when asked “Which brand had the most impact on our lives in 2005?”.

Google Inc, the minimalist search engine which has expanded regionally and moved into new markets areas as its price comparison service Froogle, last topped the poll in 2003, and for 2005 reclaims its top slot from Apple Computer Inc, which came in second this year.

Skype, which offers free calls to other Skype users and charge everyone else, crashes in at third place in the global list, while omnipresent coffee chain Starbucks Corp and Swedish furniture chain Ikea take fourth and fifth place respectively.

The poll does not take account of economic brand value, the dark science of assigning a financial value to brands, which regularly puts Coca-Cola Co’s Coke in first place.

Neither is the survey too fussy about whether the reported brand impact is positive or negative, so the winners need not necessarily take too much credit.

Brandchannel also breaks down the results by region, and in North America the top three — Apple, Google and Starbucks respectively — are strikingly similar to the global outcome, with retailer Target Corp taking fourth place, and cycling legend-cum-human brand Lance Armstrong in fifth.

The top five places in the European list are from homegrown corporations, with Finland’s Nokia topping the poll, followed by Ikea and Skype and then Zara, Spanish Inditex’s ultra-hip fashion chain. Carmaker BMW is fifth on the European grid.

Likewise, the top four in the Asia-Pacific region — Sony Corp, Toyota Motor Corp, Samsung and LG Corp are all, in a sense, local. Fifth-placed HSBC has Asian roots but is headquartered in London.

And in a refreshing change from the high-tech brands that dominate in the rest of the world, Latin America’s top two are party beverages Corona and Bacardi, with mobile phone operator Movistar in third. Sandal maker Havaianas takes fourth place and Mexican building materials group Cemex is fifth.

President Bush made one of his rare public comments on broadband Thursday, promising that the United States will “do better” in increasing broadband penetration rates.

But he didn’t say how.

Taking audience questions after an economic address in the Washington area suburb of Sterling, Va., Bush was asked about legislative efforts to limit municipal efforts to establish Wi-Fi networks and America’s falling rank in worldwide broadband penetration rates.

“It’s interesting . . . because I laid out the opposite vision, which was that broadband ought to be available and accessible all throughout the country by a set period of time,” Bush replied, adding that it appears “Congress is trying to unwind that vision.”

In March 2004, the president set a goal of broadband access for all Americans within three years.

“We ought to have universal, affordable access for broadband technology by the year 2007, and then we ought to make sure as soon as possible thereafter, consumers have got plenty of choices when it comes to purchasing the broadband carrier,” Bush said at the time.

When Bush set the 2007 goal, America ranked 13th in broadband penetration rates. According to the latest numbers from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the U.S. has fallen to 16th.

The ITU analysts attribute America’s falling numbers to a lack of cohesive government policy while others attribute it the vast and diverse U.S. geography.

“You mentioned that other nations are ahead of us. True, we’re catching up — and we’ll do better, by the way,” Bush said Thursday. “Part of the role of government is to create an environment in which people are willing to risk capital. Broadband expansion is part of creating an environment in which it will make it easier for people to be competitive in this part of the world.”

The president called broadband expansion a “brilliant” idea.

“People are able to do so much more from their home, particularly if you’ve got the technology capable of carrying information,” he said. “One of the interesting questions we’re going to have is the last-mile issue, and a lot of that, hopefully, will be changed.”

Frequent fliers willing to be fingerprinted and background-checked may soon get their own airline screening lanes run by private companies in the nation’s airports, homeland security officials say.

The Transportation Security Administration Friday sketched out broad outlines of a nationwide Registered Traveler program that relies on private companies to issue the cards and run additional screening lines, as well as set prices and develop interoperability standards.

Applicants will undergo a government background check and submit 10 fingerprints which will be encoded onto a smart card. When a cardholder enters the security lane, they will have their fingerprints compared to those stored on the card.

While cardholders will have dedicated screening lanes operated by private operators, they will still pass through metal detectors and have their bags x-rayed. However, they will likely not be flagged for pat downs just for booking a ticket at the last minute or flying one-way.

Airline screening procedures post-9/11 have irked business travelers who complain that wait times are long and unpredictable, and that lines are clogged by travelers unfamiliar with screening procedures.

Greeley Koch, president of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, a group that represents business travelers, welcomed the announcement, but expressed concern that multiple operators and airport configurations could confuse travelers.

“Most travelers envision something like ‘Easy Pass’ at the airport. This will be something a little different,” Koch said.

The TSA has tested five versions of Registered Traveler from 2004 to 2005, but the cards were not interoperable and were discontinued.

Verified Identity Pass, a company started by former columnist Steven Brill, already offers a similar card to travelers who frequent Orlando’s airport.

Companies may do additional background checks using commercial databases that include information such as mortgages, marital status and shopping habits. The TSA says companies that do so can offer to get their members through screening even faster, but did not specify how that would work.

Marcia Hofmann, an attorney with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, is waiting to learn further details, but counseled that the program needs to respect travelers’ rights.

“Already the Registered Traveler program is exempt from certain important privacy protections that safeguard the rights of individuals,” Hofmann said. “The full protections ought to be in place whether the data is handled by the government or the vendors.”

EFF attorney Lee Tien questions whether would-be terrorists will game the system and finds the whole initiative distasteful.

“What’s offensive to me is that you have the government selling Registered Traveler on the basis that we will get you through security lines faster, when they created the inconvenience on dubious grounds in the first place,” Tien said.

The TSA hopes to have passengers begin registering in June, though the bidding process has not started.

The Mercury News reported that the Justice Department has subpoenaed search-engine records in its defense of the Child Online Protection Act, or COPA. Google, whose corporate credo famously includes the admonishment “Don’t Be Evil,” is fighting the request for a week’s worth of search engine queries. Other search engines have already complied.

The government isn’t asking for search engine users’ identifying data — at least not yet. But for those worried about what companies or federal investigators might do with such records in the future, here’s a primer on how search logs work, and how to avoid being writ large within them.
Why do search engines save logs of search terms?

In Safari, try the free and versatile PithHelmet plug-in. You can let some cookies in temporarily, decide that some can last longer or prohibit some sites, including third-party advertisers, from setting cookies at all.

While Internet Explorer’s tools are not quite as flexible, you can manage your cookies through the Tools menu by following these instructions.
Have search histories ever been used to prosecute someone?

Robert Petrick was convicted in November 2005 of murdering his wife, in part based on evidence that he had googled the words “neck,” “snap” and “break.” But police obtained his search history from an examination of his computer, not from Google.
Can I see mine?

Usually, no. But if you want to trace your own Google search histories and see trends, and you don’t mind if the company uses the information to personalize search results, you can sign up for Google’s beta search history service.
Could search histories be used in civil cases?

Certainly. Google may well be fighting the government simply on principle — or, as court papers suggest, to keep outsiders from using Google’s proprietary database for free. But a business case can also be made that if users knew the company regularly turned over their records wholesale to the government, they might curtail their use of the site.

A related question is whether Google or any other search engine would fight a subpoena from a divorce attorney, or protest a more focused subpoena from local police who want information on someone they say is making methamphetamines.
What if I want more anonymity than simply deleting my cookie when I’m searching?

If you are doing any search you wouldn’t print on a T-shirt, consider using Tor, The Onion Router. An EFF-sponsored service, Tor helps anonymize your web traffic by bouncing it between volunteer servers. It masks the origins and makes it easier to evade filters, such as those installed by schools or repressive regimes.

The service has its drawbacks. While it can be very useful for a journalist in China, data services can be slower or have greater latency due to the extra stops the data makes, and a general dearth of servers.
Is Tor perfectly anonymous?

No. Computers leak data. Tor, combined with the Privoxy proxy server (which comes bundled with Tor), reduces some of that leakage, but still isn’t foolproof. But when used with Firefox, Tor and Privoxy can provide a mostly-anonymous web browsing experience.
Are there other options?

Anonymizer offers a limited free browsing service and sells software, both of which are supposed to protect your anonymity, but have had serious performance issues. There are other proxy servers on the internet, but you have to judge for yourself whether you trust them, and some websites actively block anonymous browsing.
Search companies use logs and data-mining techniques to tune their engines and deliver focused advertising, as well to create cool features such as Google Zeitgeist. They also use them to help with local searches and return more relevant, personalized search results.
How does a search engine tie a search to a user?

If you have never logged in to search engine’s site, or a partner service like Google’s Gmail offering, the company probably doesn’t know your name. But it connects your searches through a cookie, which has a unique identifying number. Using its cookies, Google will remember all searches from your browser. It might also link searches by a user’s IP address.
How long do cookies last?

It varies. Yahoo sets a cookie that expires in June 2006. A new cookie from Google expires in 2036.
What if you sign in to a service?

If you sign in on Google’s personalized homepage or Yahoo’s homepage, the companies can then correlate your search history with any other information, such as your name, that you give them.
Why should anyone worry about the government requesting search logs or bother to disguise their search history?

Some people simply don’t like the idea of their search history being tied to their personal lives. Others don’t know what the information could be used for, but worry that the search companies could find surprising uses for that data that may invade privacy in the future.

For example, if you use Google’s Gmail and web optimizing software, the company could correlate everyone you’ve e-mailed, all the websites you’ve visited after a search and even all the words you misspell in queries.
What’s the first thing people should do who worry about their search history?

Cookie management helps. Those who want to avoid a permanent record should delete their cookies at least once a week. Other options might be to obliterate certain cookies when a browser is closed and avoid logging in to other services, such as web mail, offered by a search engine.
How do you do that with your browser?

In Firefox, you can go into the privacy preference dialog and open Cookies. From there you can remove your search engine cookies and click the box that says: “Don’t allow sites that set removed cookies to set future cookies.”