Moreover, advertising-subsidized free content Web site has died together with Web advertising. Geocities - a community of free hosted, ad-supported, Web sites purchased by Yahoo! - is now selectively shutting down Web sites (when they exceed a certain level of traffic) to convince their owners to revert to a monthly hosting fee model. With Lycos in trouble in Europe, Tripod may well follow suit shortly. Earlier this year, Microsoft has shut down ListBot (a host of discussion lists). Suite101 has stopped paying its editors (content authors) effective January 15th. About.com fired hundreds of category editors. With ugly demise of Themestream, WebSeed is only content aggregator which tries to buck trend by relying (partly) on advertising revenue.

Paradoxically, e-publishing's main hope may lie with its ostensible adversary: library. Unbelievably, e-publishers actually tried to limit access of library patrons to e-books (i.e., lending of e-books to multiple patrons). But, libraries are not only repositories of knowledge and community centres. They are also dominant promoters of new knowledge technologies. They are already largest buyers of e-books. Together with schools and other educational institutions, libraries can serve as decisive socialization agents and introduce generations of pupils, students, and readers to possibilities and riches of e-publishing. Government use of e-books (e.g., by military) may have same beneficial effect.

As standards converge (Adobe's Portable Document Format and Microsoft's MS Reader LIT format are likely to be winners), as hardware improves and becomes ubiquitous (within multi-purpose devices or as standalone higher quality units), as content becomes more attractive (already many new titles are published in both print and electronic formats), as more versatile information taxonomies (like Digital Object Identifier) are introduced, as Internet becomes more gender-neutral, polyglot, and cosmopolitan - e-publishing is likely to recover and flourish.

This renaissance will probably be aided by gradual decline of print magazines and by a strengthening movement for free open source scholarly publishing. The publishing of periodical content and academic research (including, gradually, peer reviewed research) may be already shifting to Web. Non-fiction and textbooks will follow. Alternative models of pricing are already in evidence (author pays to publish, author pays to obtain peer review, publisher pays to publish, buy a physical product and gain access to enhanced online content, and so on). Web site rating agencies will help to discriminate between credible and in-credible. Publishing is moving - albeit kicking and screaming - online.

On other hand, UPnP is a special kind of plug-and-play. This looks for printers and other devices added on network (wired and wireless). It's actually a pretty cool idea. Now, when someone adds a printer to network you must configure it on each and every workstation. With UPnP configuration is totally automatic.

However, UPnP is very, very new and there is almost no real support for it with any devices. So UPnP is more or less not used, and it is certainly not needed by home computer users. By shipping Windows XP with product Microsoft was solving classic "which came first, chicken or egg" problem. They had to send out support for these devices in order to convince vendors to start providing them.

But Microsoft made one big mistake - when you install Windows XP, this unused service is turned on! What that means is everyone who has ever installed Windows XP is running this service.

And service has a bug - a huge bug, kind of bug that if it hit your windshield would smash car and cause it to explode in flames, killing all of passengers and driver.

The problem is very bad, and Microsoft has released a patch to fix it. But story gets even more interesting.

The National Infrastructure Protection Center released an advisory stating that everyone who is not using this service should disable it. This is an incredible statement from this agency. What they are implying is UPnP service problem directly puts United States computer infrastructure at risk (that's what this agency protects)! That's a big thing for them to be saying.

What are they afraid of? That hackers and perhaps hostile governments can use bug to their advantage. You see, special programs called Zombies can be installed on Windows XP machines with this problem, and Zombies can be used to launch distributed denial of service attacks on computers throughout world.

In fact, I'll bet you heard about denial of service attack performed by Code Red worm recently against Whitehouse (the attack failed, if you remember). That's exactly what this agency is afraid of and what they are trying to prevent.

So next time you are thinking about giving all of your credit card data to a site which uses Microsoft Passport, think about this article. Do you want to trust all of your confidential data to a company which cannot keep it secure? Just think about it, read some more, and make rational decision.

For more information, check out following articles.

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS01-059 http://www.microsoft.com echnet reeview/default.asp?url= echnet/security/bulletin/MS01-059.asp

eEye Digital Security http://www.eeye.com/html/Research/Advisories/AD20011220.html

NIPC ADVISORY 01-030.2 Universal Plug and Play Vulnerabilities http://www.nipc.gov/warnings/advisories/2001/01-030-2.htm