New York Times :: To Whom May I Direct Your Free Call?
By Nicholas Thompson
...Mr. Zennstrom and Mr. Friis have reunited with the same team of Estonian programmers who wrote the code for Kazaa and have created a way to allow people to make high-quality phone calls over the Internet without having to pay a penny.
On Aug. 29, their new company, called Skype, released a preliminary version of the program. Already, more than a million people have downloaded it, the company's Web site says.
It is "a real opportunity to do something that is disruptive in a very positive way," Mr. Zennstrom said. "We have a big ambition with Skype: it is to make it the global telephone company."...
For the most part, Mr. Zennstrom is taking the same position with Skype that he adopted with Kazaa. He says that the company is just providing software; that users can do with it what they want; and that there are too many potential legal issues internationally to worry about them all.
"We don't know if Skype will be banned in Bhutan," Mr. Zennstrom said. "The only thing that we know for sure is that we are providing something very competitive that is very good for the consumers using it. If a country were to ban it, that would be very bad for consumers there."
Skype also faces a potential standoff with the F.B.I. Because traffic over Skype is strongly encrypted and distributed over wide-ranging sources, it could hamper authorities' ability to wiretap.
Paul Bresson, an F.B.I. spokesman, said, "It is legal; it is a concern; and it is something that we are looking into."
Mentioned in this article: Skype, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Cisco, The Pew Research Center, Legg Mason, MCI, Yankee Group, Vonage, and AT&T.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette :: Why hurt feelings really do hurt
By Michael Woods, Post-Gazette National Bureau
...The old Scottish nursery rhyme was wrong. Sticks and stones can break your bones, and names can hurt you, too.
Researchers yesterday revealed the biology behind what every victim of a put-down, cheap shot or social snub knows all too well: social rejection hurts. They showed that hurt feelings affect exactly the same region of the brain as a broken bone or other physical injury.
"This study should make people more aware of the impact of negative words and gestures toward others," said chief researcher Dr. Naomi Eisenberger, a psychologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. The study will appear in today's edition of the journal Science, which is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. ...
"Emotional pain is an undesired psychological state of affairs," said Pankseep, who was not involved in the research. "And the less there is of that in social networks, the more harmoniously people will interact."...
K-Collector