Internet Users

IN THE Internet's brief but astounding life, users have come up with only three "killer apps," or breakthrough applications: e-mail, search engines and accessing pornography. The Internet is lousy with porn, the largest online industry, with annual revenues approaching $13 billion. Two in five Internet users visited a porn site in April, according to one media survey. Would the other three in five - uninterested in or disturbed by porn - be better off if there was a virtual red-light district?

WASHINGTON - About 10 percent of Americans have viewed online images of the Iraq war that mainstream media have deemed too gory to display, the Pew Internet and American Life Project reported recently. "People wanted to see the unadorned truth," said Lee Rainie, director of the project. "Folks who think the mainstream press doesn't cover all of it ... use the Internet to supplement. Other folks are morbidly curious." The Pew telephone study was conducted from mid-May to mid-June, after some of the most tumultuous times of the war, including the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, the gruesome killings of four American contractors near Fallujah and the beheading of U.S. citizen Nicholas Berg.

In a vivid demonstration of the growing power of the Internet and its effect on the media, a new study shows that about 50 million Americans go online to read the news on a typical day, primarily from the Web sites of traditional media outlets. Much of that growth is fueled by a rise in broadband connections in homes over the past four years, according to the report, issued yesterday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. It said the Internet is the primary news source for people who adopted broadband connections at home and are heavy users of the Internet.

REMEMBER NOT that long ago when it was morning on the Internet, there was a vast new world of possibilities, and Microsoft Corp. captured all that by asking in its ads, "Where do you want to go today?" Today, Microsoft is working closely with Chinese government censors to make sure Chinese bloggers don't take their readers' minds where Beijing doesn't want them to go - by blocking postings with certain dangerous words, such as "human rights," "freedom" and "democracy." The restrictions apply to postings on Microsoft's blog-hosting service in China, MSN Spaces, which has already attracted 5 million Chinese, or about one-twentieth of the Internet users in the world's largest nation - a potentially lucrative toehold for the world's largest software firm.

For most of us, the World Wide Web is worldwide in name only. The vast majority of Web sites we visit are in the United States. Occasionally, we might happen onto a site in Canada or England, or perhaps an English-language newspaper in some other country. So it might come as a surprise to learn that non-English-speaking parts of the Internet are soaring in popularity. The dot-com boom may be only a memory here, but it's just getting started internationally. Yet as recent business deals show, this phenomenon is well known to big Web businesses.

WASHINGTON - A major university will conduct an independent review of the FBI's "Carnivore" Internet-snooping device and then issue a public report on its findings, Justice Department officials said yesterday. "The university review team will have total access to any information they need to conduct their review," Attorney General Janet Reno said at her weekly news briefing. "I would hope we could do [the review] quickly." Justice Department officials said they plan to ask a still-unselected university to study Carnivore to relieve fears of privacy groups and lawmakers.

What do Janet Jackson, Hurricane Katrina and the Xbox 360 have in common? In 2005, they were among the top news searches on Google, says the company's year-end zeitgeist report. (Ms. Jackson, by the way, was No. 1, doubtless because of her "wardrobe malfunction.") If officers at the world's top search engine wanted to reveal more than that from the company's vast storehouse of retained data, they could go so far as to detail the content of almost half of all Internet searches - down to specific Web sites visited by particular computers.

ARE YOU Internet-savvy when it comes to real estate? Have you clicked your way through dozens of home listings on realty agents' Web sites, gone on virtual tours of properties before visiting them, checked out neighborhood educational quality, environmental problems, crime rates, household income levels, property taxes and other community profile data online? Have you shopped for mortgage money on the Internet? Of course, you say. Doesn't everybody use the Web to help gather information to make real estate decisions?

It's time to put hackers in their place. Over a period of seven months, they have erased, altered and stolen unclassified computer records from the Pentagon. In April, they pilfered an on-line copy of the National Security Agency's employee manual. If the North Koreans stole a government employee manual, we wouldn't worry. But because these break-ins were electronic, news organizations made a big deal and missed the larger point.Computer security is threatened, not by two-bit hackers, but by a lack of security on the Internet and other networks.

Six months ago, Carroll County school officials debated whether to take their once avant-garde Web site off the Internet.Instead, they decided to redesign the site, and last week they unveiled what some believe will become a model for school systems throughout the nation.What sets the Carroll site apart is that it helps users find information quickly and easily -- information that could benefit every Internet user.The Homework Helper section, for example, provides links to home pages on the World Wide Web.Each link contains a description written by Carroll teachers, telling Internet users what they will find at each site.