Katie Tarbox made cyberhistory as the first victim of an Internet pedophile to prosecute her attacker successfully. Now she's told her story in Katie.com, freshly published. She describes how her personal insecurities melded with her online life at 13 to entangle her in a secret relationship with an older man calling himself Mark, who impressed her with his polished vocabulary and expression and claimed he was 23. He turned out to be a 41-year-old man, Francis Kufrovich, a California investment funds president with an apparent history of preying on children - but Katie found out the hard way, meeting him at a Texas hotel where her swim team was staying for a contest, then being stunned as he pushed her onto a sofa and groped her. "Mark was supposed to be better than this," she writes in Katie.com. "He was supposed to be patient and kind and generous. He was supposed to care about me." But the book's predominant theme seems to be the emotional trauma she felt when, as she describes it, her own mother screamed at her about... how "this" could ruin a man's life, after she told her parents and law enforcement. Katie is now a senior at a New Hampshire boarding school, while Kufrovich began an 18-month prison sentence in March 1998 after pleading guilty.
CYBERSPACE - Phone.com makes software which gets your cell phone Internet-enabled. Geoworks says it's got a patent on "flexible user interface technology" for "all devices, including mobile phones, which are based on the Wireless Application Protocol specification and placed into the stream of commerce in the United States and Japan" - or, damn near any wireless gizmo hooked to the Web. Geoworks has been soliciting patent licensing fees from competitors, with several including Toshiba agreeing and ponying up, but Phone.com not only hasn't ponied up - they're suing in federal court, challenging the Geoworks claim's validity. "This lawsuit seeks to put an end to Geoworks' repeated and unjustified accusations that virtually the entire wireless Internet industry infringes a Geoworks patent, which was directed to unrelated technology, and its threats to entities unwilling to succumb to its demands to take a costly and unnecessary license," leads the Phone.com complaint. They want a judge to say they don't infringe on Geoworks and that the patent is invalid and unenforceable, according to Wired. Geoworks fired back, accusing Phone.com of "self-interested public grandstanding" in its "unprofessional course of action."
WASHINGTON - Consumer groups - including Consumers Union, the Consumer Federation of America, the Media Access Project, and the Center for Media Education - want to stop America Online's proposed purchase of Time Warner, on grounds it would shrink available public voices, according to a filing they've made with the Federal Trade Commission this week. An unnamed AOL spokeswoman said the merger would bring tremendous consumer benefits, more choice, and helping to speed up the rollout of broadband. But the consumer groups argue the combined firm could make its own standards on basic Internet utilities - "the sticky features that glue the customer to the service provider."
--- Compiled by Humphrey Pennyworth
