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A L S O__T O D A Y 21st Challenge No. 16: Misdirected love notes. By CharlieVaron and Jim Rosenau Answer the mystery e-mail -- win a prize - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K The Microsoft antitrust trial: Discuss events as they unfold in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Strange Webfellows? By Andrew Leonard What the AOL purchase of Netscape really means (11/24/98) Thought-activated computing By Sam Witt and Sean Durkin The brain/computer interface becomes real -- as a boon for the paralyzed (11/23/98) The copyright boomerang By Peter Wayner A new copyright law bans tools that "circumvent" copy protections -- is cutting and pasting illegal? (11/20/98) Court puts new Net censorship rules on hold -- for now By Janelle Brown First ruling in "CDA II" case goes the way of law's opponents (11/20/98) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg Windows on the wane? Open source and information appliances squeeze the PC from both sides (11/19/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST FEATURES ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - 21st Log "Nerds 2.0.1": PBS's all-too-brief history of the Internet - - - - - - - - - - S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.

T h e__N e t_.never f o r g e t s - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - EVERYTHING YOU'VE EVER POSTED ONLINE COULD COME BACK TO HAUNT YOU SOMEDAY. BY J.D. LASICA | Our past now follows us as never before. For centuries, refugees sailed the Atlantic to start new lives; Easterners pulled up stakes and moved west. Today, reinvention and second chances come less easily: You may leave town, but your electronic shadow stays behind. We often view the Internet as a communications medium or an information-retrieval tool, but it's also a powerful archiving technology that takes snapshots of our digital lives -- and can store those fleeting images forever. Not only are official documents and consumer profiles accumulating, but the very essence of our daily online existence -- our political opinions, prejudices, religious beliefs, sexual tastes and personal quirks -- are all becoming part of an immense, organic media soup that is congealing into a permanent public record. What is different about the digital archiving phenomenon is that our beliefs, habits and indiscretions are being preserved for anyone to see -- friends, relatives, rivals, lovers, neighbors, bosses, landlords, even obsessed stalkers. Take all those homespun Web pages out there. People assume that their home pages disappear once they pull the plug. Not necessarily: While your browser may report a "404: File Not Found" when you call up an offline Web page, those pages live on in other electronic nooks and crannies. Since 1996, the Internet Archive, a kind of digital warehouse, has been trolling the Web and hoarding everything it comes across -- text, images, sound clips. Every two months, it scoops up the entire Web and stores the results on its virtual shelves. It has preserved my expired site, and it may well have yours. Bulletin board messages live on far after the threads peter out. The messages we send to the Internet's 33,000 newsgroups often fall off the edge of Usenet after a week or so, but the postings live on in databases like Deja News and the Internet Archive. Mailing lists, where people toss off casual correspondences as if writing to a close-knit group of friends, are often archived for all the world to see. Marie Coady, a freelance writer in Woburn, Mass., was appalled to discover that her messages to online-news, a small, cozy listserv of 1,350 news professionals, had been posted on the Web and summarily stored by dozens of search engines -- and made available to tens of millions of readers. "When I typed my name into a search engine and found everything I've ever written online, I felt violated and helpless," she says. "It was like coming home and finding someone had gone through my personal belongings. I consider it an invasion of privacy to have words typed in response to a query chiseled in stone. In light of our litigious society, it could be dangerous to post any message at all." Although the moderator posts occasional notices that mention the list's public archiving policy, not all listserv hosts do so, and few users bother to read the fine print. "The odd thing is, we perceive the Net as a conversation and not as public record, and it turns out to be public record to a larger extent than people are aware of," says Bruce Schneier, a cryptography consultant and co-editor of the 1997 book "The Electronic Privacy Papers." "You can easily imagine in 20 years a candidate being asked about a conversation he had in a chat room while he was in college. We're becoming a world where everything is recorded." N E X T_P A G E .|.Whether we know it or not, we're all "speaking on the record"