Donna Ladd

“It’s an investment,” Exley, a Boston computer programmer, says reassuringly. “Thirty-five dollars may be a little inflated for a T-shirt, but nowhere as inflated as the stocks of all these Internet companies. It’s nowhere near as stupid as the hundreds of Internet companies worth billions of dollars right now.” Besides, as his site puts it: “In 20 years time, as we’re clawing our way out of the second Great Depression, these items will be selling on eBay (whose stock price may finally be nearing its 2000 peak) for hundreds — maybe even thousands — of dollars.”

The T-shirts come with a no-crash guarantee. If the stock market slinks its way through 2000 with the sky intact, Exley will send you a replacement shirt, predicting the crash in 2001, instead. But if you lose your shirt in a market tailspin, at least you’ll have commemorative clothing. (“Crash” defined: The Dow or NASDAQ falls 60 percent from its peak and stays below 50 percent of its peak until the end of the year. But 50 percent is peanuts, the site warns; brace for a 90 percent drop.)

Exley says the TheGreatCrash.com is inspired by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s book “The Great Crash,” which chronicles a 1920s bubble based on inflated radio stock. “The parallels are so shocking,” he says, but adds that few Net worshipers will listen. “All my friends roll their eyes when I talk to them about this.”

But hey, if you can’t beat ‘em, enjoin them to help you make a profit. By investing a portion of the T-shirt revenues in the market, Exley figures he can keep the business afloat until the crash — at which point he won’t have to send out any more shirts. Exley says he’s looking toward his own IPO down the road. “I’m seeking angel investors to help me arrange that  This is the only business plan that will profit before, during and after the coming crash — no matter when the crash comes.”

The enterprising Web prankster also is selling products commemorating his online battle with Bush — who filed a copyright suit and a Federal Elections Commission complaint against Exley, and called him a “garbageman” for posting gwbush.com, which now calls itself “The parody site that got W in such a huff!” He’s got bumper stickers, like “GW Bush: Not a Crackhead Anymore!” or a T-shirt quoting Bush’s attack on the site: “There Ought to Be Limits to Freedom.”

As for his new endeavor, Exley sees TheGreatCrash as a great profit-maker. “I missed the boom on the way up; now I’m just trying to make the most of the trip back down,” explains Exley, who plans to add an index of the 100 stupidest Internet stocks to the site. “Maybe I’ll call it the iStupid 100,” he says.

During Wednesday’s debate with Hatewatch founder David Goldman, Ebert said he doesn’t believe violence directly results from either film or Internet images: “Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t have a Web site,” he said. Yet it is ill-advised, he argued, to provide hate-seekers an online roadmap to the sites. “It’s very easy to find it on the Web, but I don’t know that we should make it any easier.”

Goldman countered that “anecdotal evidence” shows that thousands of people, from parents to FBI agents, use sites like Hatewatch as an educational resource. “There is no evidence that linking into a hate site either encourages or exacerbates the situation,” he told Ebert.

The snippety-yet-thoughtful feud between the two men started in October 1999 when Ebert wrote in his “Public Eye” column for Yahoo Internet Life that the media is exaggerating the power of hate sites. “My best guess is that Nazis on the Net are at least a thousand times less popular than porn,” he wrote. “The situation is further clouded because groups opposed to hate sites have a vested interest in exaggerating their popularity.”

Goldman, a Harvard law librarian who founded Hatewatch in 1996, fired back a response to what he called Ebert’s “snide comment,” defending sites like Hatewatch that take the tactic that bigotry should be exposed, not hidden in a closet. “[T]heir threat is not imaginary but very real,” Goldman wrote in a letter to the editor of Yahoo Internet Life. The debate continued in an e-mail exchange, which Goldman provided to Salon.

A concerned Ebert wrote: “Why in God’s name do you list the URLs of all those hate sites, carefully categorized by country, area of hate, etc.? A racist will find no handier all-in-one source.” He advised Goldman that “a little soul-searching is in order. “[T]he most effective thing you could do to combat hate on the Web would be to take down your page. Since a normal person would have no desire to visit any of these sites, who are the URLs being used by?”

Goldman responded that Ebert was “confusing quantity with influence” and emphasized that many bigots, such as Matt Hale of the World Church of the Creator, use their sites to recruit, organize and propagandize. Normal people indeed use sites such as Hatewatch, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center to try to understand where racist evils lurk, Goldman told Ebert. He said, “hundreds, yes hundreds” of concerned citizens use Hatewatch every week to “read in the bigots’ own words what their mindset is, what they believe and perhaps what they wish to accomplish.”

During Wednesday’s debate, Ebert was openly skeptical, saying that it was impossible to determine any Internet user’s true motives. He said his own tour of Hatewatch linked him to anti-Arab sites, skinhead propaganda and Holocaust-denial sites and even streaming video of women being raped. Visitors who don’t have the software, but want to see the video can download the player right on the site, he added. “[Hatewatch] is extremely well designed,” Ebert told the audience. “I hope he is right that it doesn’t promote these sites.”

A preview of StopDrLaura posted on Tuesday quoted Dr. Laura calling gays “products of a biological disorder”; telling the New York Post, “I call homosexual practices deviant”; and musing in a recent issue of Variety, “How many letters have I read on the air from gay men who acknowledge that a huge portion of the male homosexual populace is predatory on young boys?”

The anti-Dr. Laura site, in turn, will ask visitors to “flood Paramount with calls to stop Dr. Laura,” and provide a phone number for chairman Kerry McCluggage.

“Dr. Laura is free to malign any minority she chooses, but Paramount Television is not required to aid and abet in the destruction of our civil rights and the denial of our humanity,” says the site. “In the names of Matthew Shepard, Brandon Teena, PFC Barry Winchell, Allen Schindler, Billy Jack Gaither — in the name of every one of us — please take a stand against hate.”

Also on the site, Emmy-winning executive producer of Paramount TV’s “Frasier” David Lee says: “I think it is outrageous that Paramount chooses to be in business with a woman who is, I think, literally dangerous to the gay community. She may not have a club in her hand, but she encourages an atmosphere where those who do wield weapons feel free to use them.”

John Aravosis, president of the Internet consulting firm Wired Strategies, is the firebrand behind the site. “She’s outrageous. She’s beyond the pale of ‘I’m a Christian, I don’t like gay people,’” says Aravosis, who led the e-mail campaign to expose America Online’s outing of gay sailor Timothy McVeigh (not the Oklahoma City bomber). He has also posted a popular Web site paying homage to Wyoming student Matthew Shepard.

“How do you rein in a woman like Dr. Laura?” he asks. His answer is to use the Internet to expose what he calls her “dangerous” views. As Aravosis sees it, when Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott, Andy Rooney of “60 Minutes,” announcer Jimmy the Greek and writer Jimmy Breslin publicly belittled people of other races they got fired or suspended.

Why not Dr. Laura? he wants to know.

Instead, Paramount TV defends Dr. Laura’s right to free speech and is developing and syndicating an hour-long Dr. Laura TV show starting this fall; stations in 90 percent of the country have signed up for the show. Dr. Laura is already broadcast on more than 400 radio stations, berating 18 million listeners each day for having premarital sex or being imperfect parents.

Dr. Laura’s condemnation of gays goes beyond the issue of free speech, argues Aravosis. “If someone called a Jew a biological error, you think they’d get a TV show? I don’t think so. When you defame African-Americans, it’s racism. You defame gay people, it’s free speech.” Neither Schlessinger nor Paramount returned calls seeking comment.

GLAAD, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, met with Paramount executives in a closed meeting Feb. 14 to discuss the Dr. Laura show. Afterward, the two sides reported a “positive exchange”; yet many gay activists are criticizing GLAAD because it has not demanded that the show be dropped.

Aravosis believes DrLaura.org will do the trick, however. “The show’s going to be canceled. This is going to be living hell for Paramount for the next year at least.” The site will list e-mail addresses and phone and fax numbers for the Paramount offices, giving outraged gays and their supporters an easy way to register their disgust over the Dr. Laura show. “E-mails will keep flying and flying and flying. Everyone online who’s progressive is going to know that Paramount is a bigot,” he said.

David Goldman of HateWatch.org agrees. “HateWatch.org condemns the bigotry that Dr. Laura uses to dehumanize gay men and lesbians. Had similar remarks been made about blacks or Jews, Paramount would never have given her a show,” he says on the site.

Larry Todd, spokesman of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, says the department’s site helps quench the public’s insatiable interest in prisoners on death row. Texas leads the nation in executions — and has given lethal injections to six men already in 2000. “There is a fascination, as morbid as that might be, about executions in Texas … They ask us how tall, how long it took him to die … As soon as we lay down the phone, it rings again,” he says.

Todd’s office is only too eager to comply. For example, the site notes that before his 1984 execution, Ronald O’Brien (convicted of poisoning his son with cyanide-laced Halloween candy) requested a last meal of “T-bone steak (medium to well-done), french fries and catsup, whole kernel corn, sweet peas, lettuce and tomato salad with egg and french dressing, iced tea, sweetener, saltines, Boston cream pie, and rolls.” Scrolling through the painstakingly detailed final moments of executed inmates, it’s hard not to feel as if you are violating the privacy of the dead.

On Jan. 24, Todd’s office added convicted killer Betty Lou Beets to the site’s “Scheduled Executions” list. Beets is set to be executed on Feb. 24, the first woman Texas has injected since Karla Faye Tucker in 1998.

Death-penalty opponent Mary Robinson — who contends that the 62-year-old grandmother was abused, is deaf and mentally unbalanced and had ineffective legal counsel — is mounting an e-mail blitz in an attempt to save Beets’ life. (Beets was convicted of killing her husband, a Dallas firefighter, and the bones of her previous husband were also found at her Gun Barrel City, Texas, home).

On Jan. 29, Robinson e-mailed “From Darkness to Light” — a testimonial in which Beets describes how she was battered and lost control of her life — to anti-death-penalty mailing lists and Bush adversaries, in an attempt to rally opposition for the impending execution. Her effort attracted the attention of Amnesty International, which then issued an Urgent Action Appeal on Beets’ behalf, detailing evidence of mental and physical abuse that it says was not presented at her trials. The alert requests a clemency hearing from Bush, a last-ditch hope since the U.S. Supreme Court last week refused to hear Beets’ appeal. But Amnesty doesn’t sound hopeful. “Texas has consistently violated international human rights standards in its use of the death penalty, including its failure to provide any meaningful clemency review,” the international human rights organization states in its appeal.

Robinson, who runs the online magazine Women SpeakOut From Prison and Death Row, finds the Texas death-penalty site abhorrent. Using the Web to post clemency addresses and the like is fine, but by focusing on sensational trivia, the state avoids having to discuss what it is actually doing, she argues.

“Those little minutiae, the details of what a person ate, what they wore — these are kind of ugly details. It’s like asking, ‘How many hours until rigor mortis sets in? How warm was the body at the funeral parlor?’ … They have to talk about the ritualistic part of what they’re doing. This is human sacrifice.”

Todd readily admits that the site is jarring, but argues that people have a right to know. “We try to answer every possible question,” he says, adding that the site is designed to lead reporters directly to the gruesome details they want and to show taxpayers where their money — $2 billion a year on this agency alone — is going. “Yes, it’s a P.R. tool, but it’s also a public-information tool.”

The kind of information it offers is hardly typical of a government-funded site, however. Want to know many pairs of brothers the Lone Star state has executed? Six, the first pair in 1925, the most recent in 1993. How were people executed before lethal injections? By hanging until 1923; by electrocution until 1964. What’s in a lethal injection? Sodium thiopental to sedate the person, pancuronium bromide to collapse the diaphragm and lungs, potassium chloride to stop the heart. The lethal cocktail costs $86.08 per elimination and takes about seven minutes to work.

Eager for more death-row trivia? Associated Press reporter Mike Graczyk has witnessed 92 Texas executions, condemned prisoner Jay Kelly Pinkerton (May 15, 1986) didn’t eat his last meal in honor of Ramadan. In his final statement (posted as a PDF file), Henry Porter (July 9, 1985) proclaimed his innocence: “They call me a cold-blooded killer when I shot a man that shot me first. The only thing that convicted me was that I am a Mexican and he was a police officer.” And in a final hand-written note before her February 1998 execution, Karla Faye Tucker apologized to the families of her victims.

You can even view JPEGs of the actual “Execution Recordings” in the handwriting of the executioner: On May 4, 1999, Jose Delacruz was strapped to the gurney at 6:01, injected in right hand at 6:05, left hand at 6:09, gave his last statement at 6:14, pronounced dead at 6:23. Scrawled in the space for unusual occurrences: “no sir.”

Though the most intimate details of executed prisoners are revealed in this morbid peepshow fashion, information about the executioners and the prisons remain confidential. “You won’t see any maps in there, or diagrams of prisons. We won’t tell you what kind of weapons we use in the guard towers,” Todd says.

The site isn’t political, in Todd’s view. “We don’t judge the inmates; we’re not pro or con the death penalty. We carry out the orders of the court,” Todd says, adding that news of wrongful convictions have a home there, too. “That information would certainly be communicated on the site,” he says, though there have been none “in recent memory.”

The site may pander to the voyeuristic, but Todd says it is an invaluable service of the state. “Our Web page is the most dynamic and rewarding communications tool that we have had in recent history … We’re not selling anything; we’re telling people about their prison.”

And it’s all free — if you own a Mac and pay the $99 dues to upgrade to Mac OS 9. Of course, you must have a box (PowerPC or better) that will support the power-hungry OS 9. Then, later this year you’re expected to upgrade to the new, Windowish — read: cheesier — OS X. (Code word “Aqua,” in case they ask you at the door.)

What’s next? “You’ve got QuickTime”?

In his bid to pump up market share, Jobs is turning Apple into a playground for newbies. Perhaps this is good for business — on Wednesday Apple reported a $183 million profit for the first quarter of 2000, posting revenues 37 percent higher than the same quarter last year. Or, as Jobs put it in his keynote: Apple sold an iMac every six seconds in the fourth quarter of 1999. The question for the Mac faithful, though, those of us who stuck around through all the red ink, is more pressing. Yes, Apple is succeeding. But what about our chic little club? Does Apple have to dumb itself down into an America Online to keep growing its numbers? And does Jobs really have to take us down the road of proprietary features again?

Macworld columnist David Pogue isn’t worried in the slightest about Apple’s new Internet strategy. “It looks like a win-win to me, because Mac customers get a number of terrific new features at no charge, get to feel proud they’re Mac users, have some additional features to call their own - and Apple gets to build up one hell of a terrific mailing list,” says Pogue, who is also the creator of the Missing Manual book series for O’Reilly Books.

Other long-time Mac users, however, think requiring an OS 9 hand stamp to enter Apple’s Internet universe is going too far.

“I’m concerned about increasing proprietization of the Internet,” says Charles Moore, a Nova Scotia-based columnist for Applelinks. “This already reared its ugly head with Microsoft Web sites that require Internet Explorer for access and others that demand Intel’s Pentium III chip.”

Moore says such “gated communities” in cyberspace could be a disturbing precursor to more slamming doors: “Will the new AOL Time Warner conglomerate, for instance, continue to offer Microsoft’s MSN.com subscribers, or for that matter Apple’s Earthlink subscribers, full and unfettered access to AOL Time Internet content?”

Angela Pratt, a Macintosh technician in Atlanta, loves the idea of Apple’s new online offerings. “It’s about time Apple jumped on the portal bandwagon. It’s all the rage — right up there with e-commerce,” she says. But, she’s incensed over the proprietary-only design: “Something Apple really needs to STOP emphasizing!” she says via e-mail. “It is one of the main reasons I hear when I ask why people choose PC over Mac.”

Nevertheless, like most Mac diehards, Pratt lets the cheating boyfriend back in the bedroom. She loves him, after all. “It sure seems like the same old Apple to me: proprietary attitude, great products, no marketing skills whatsoever — you know, Apple as usual!”

As a Mac technician, she supports more second-generation PowerMacs (circa 1995) than she does G3s and G4s. “It’s just not smart to be exclusionary, particularly when many businesses and home users are not early adopters due to the fact that it is damned expensive to upgrade the OS when all the software must be upgraded as well,” she adds.

Other Apple fans are squarely behind Jobs on this one. Bob Levitus, author of “Mac OS 9 for Dummies,” says the strategy is “very smart” and shows that Apple is “evolving into a company that gets the Internet.” The point, he says, is that Mac users have a place on the Internet just for them — a nice balance to the dozens of Windows-only applications on CompUSA’s shelves.

“I suppose Apple could take some heat for requiring OS 9 when they didn’t absolutely have to. But I don’t think this will kick up a huge fuss,” Levitus says. It helps that the popular Mac fan sites — like MacInTouch, MacFixIt and MacCentral — have all posted instructions for using most of the iTools with earlier versions of the Mac OS.

“Anything Apple can do to make users consider a Mac as their next computer is good,” Levitus adds. “And iTools, not being part of the Windows OS, [can] do just that.”

Barry Fagin, professor of computer science at the U.S. Air Force Academy and a senior fellow in technology policy for the Independence Institute, says the Internet push is perfectly timed; it’s time for Apple to think service. “The world is moving away from software as a product and toward software as a service. This will give Apple a new lease on life.”

Nevertheless, in criticism-weary Cupertino, user grousing seems to be on the increase as Apple’s comeback continues. Some of the iTools features — like iReview, — a Yahoo-esque collection of Apple-reviewed Web sites where users can pipe in with their 2-cents comments — are riling some Mac users.

“There is concern that Apple will finally achieve the perceived long-sought goal of controlling to a large degree the dissemination of Apple and Mac-related news, especially news critical of Apple Computer, to the Mac-using public at large and specifically the growing class of new Mac users,” says Ladd Morse, managing editor of MacSurfer‘s Headline News, an aggregator of links to Mac sites.

Morse points to “spirited discussion” this week on the Mac sites and boards. For instance, Dan Knight complains on LowEndMac.net that “Apple has so far found only 11 computer-related Web sites worth linking to on iReview. Of these 11, only four are Mac-centric, and three of the four are owned by the same publisher.”

But in an interview, Peter Lowe, Apple’s director of Mac OS worldwide product marketing, glossed over that concern. He says that iReview is “a guide to the best of the best of the Internet” — and that Apple will consider reviewing suggested sites, Mac or not. “An important element of iReview is that viewers can suggest sites,” Lowe says.

But Mac Web-masters are concerned that they may lose ad revenue and quality writers as what Morse calls the “bulk of less-inquisitive Mac-news readers” gravitate to the “Apple-anointed” sites. And it’s tough to be rejected at the door: “Perhaps it is that cold flash of insight that many a company has had upon finding out that Apple or Microsoft has just announced a product to be distributed for free that directly competes with their own product, passion and livelihood,” Morse says.

“Or perhaps Apple has simply fallen down on the job and will get to it eventually,” he adds.

Another iTools component that has ruffled a few feathers is the new child-protection service, KidSafe. Apple is presenting it as an alternative to filtering, which is roundly criticized for screening out perfectly safe sites. Instead, the KidSafe function will only allow kids to visit some 50,000 pre-screened sites.

“Jobs is wrong; it’s absolutely filtering,” says Fagin, who also founded Families Against Internet Censorship, a plaintiff in the U.S. Supreme Court case that struck down a federal effort to censor online smut.

He thinks KidSafe is a legitimate market-based response to a social problem, but he won’t use it for his 9- and 11-year-old kids. “I prefer to manage my kids’ Internet access myself through candid discussions of the issues with them … I am simply not comfortable trusting my children’s Internet experience to anyone else, including Steve Jobs and the U.S. Congress,” he says.

KidSafe raises very real social-engineering questions, say filtering critics. “I’m not a big fan of proprietary Web filters, period. What bothers me is the potential for third-party ideologies and political correctnesses to be insinuated into the filtering process. Who decides what makes the cut?” Moore says.

But at least parents can customize KidSafe to their own values, by adding sites to the KidSafe repository. And Apple reassures that an independent team of educators are filtering, er, approving the sites and are set to add 10,000 new sanctioned sites a month.

Still, KidSafe screens out a lot of content. Critics fear that filtering of any sort can treat kids as second-class citizens on the Internet - eliminating from get-go the sites of, say, individual pen pals in Australia, other kids’ artwork, independent movie info or even homework chat rooms that aren’t pre-approved.

And iReview and KidSafe could even work together to limit kids’ knowledge to alternative Mac information. “I’ve got KidSafe right here. When it’s enabled, I can’t visit my own site that discusses Mac hardware upgrading or my personal site on AOL’s home page service. Neither of them is objectionable, in my opinion,” says Todd Stauffer, author of “How to Do Everything With Your iMac.”

Nitpicking aside, Apple watchers are mixed on whether Apple is slowly abandoning the “Think Different” strategy and moving toward a more inclusive, lower-denominator approach. “It’s absolutely an example of thinking different(ly),” Fagin says via e-mail. “Apple’s user base has been smugly obsessed with their computers. They should stop thinking about their computer and start thinking about the Internet.”

But Moore says the cartoonish look of Mac OS X, demonstrated at MacWorld, proves the company won’t be thinking differently much longer. “The rather gaudy new Aqua user interface of OS X may alienate ‘serious’ computer types. … Of course I may well be in a minority who likes the Mac OS more for what it does than how it looks,” he says.

Yeah, personality counts for something, but it’s the new, hip, fashionable Macs that are getting past the bouncer. “Apple products are gorgeous,” Levitus coos. “Can you say that about any of the PC vendors?”

Bottom line: Like beauty, “different” is in the eye of the beholder - a fact Apple is banking on. “The brilliance of the brashness of Think Different is that it’s very easy to apply it to yourself, regardless of Apple’s intentions,” Stauffer says. “It’s an exclusive club and, yet, anyone can think he or she is a member.”