I apologize for my paranoia last week. Alec Saunders , a Microsoft product manager, says that the Registration Wizard is just an electronic form with which you can easily register any of your Microsoft software. Nothing surreptitious happens, and nothing is reported that you don't choose to report. [Steve Schack , comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy, 5/28/95.] (Rats! Another good story ruined by the facts. The original "virus/piracy" report was said to be from Information Week (5/22/95, p. 88).)

Netscape (Mountain View) will license Sun's Java programming language -- foundation classes, development tools, compiler, and runtime interpreter -- for its WWW browser, Netscape Navigator. Platform-independent applets built with Java are transported through the network using Netscape's Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) open protocol. Java is now available for Windows NT and Windows 95 as well as Solaris. [HPCwire, 5/23/95.] (Netscape has 75% of the browser market, and Java could clinch that lead.)

Sun Microsystems' new Hot Java program can be downloaded from . Critics are warning that the animation "applets" it transmits could be used to spread viruses. [Information Week, 5/29/95, p. 32; also IBD, 5/23/95, A8. EDUPAGE.] (A Mac OS version is planned.)

Phantom is another interpreted language for distributed processing, with similar goals to Java. Applications might include distributed conferencing systems, multi-player games, and collaborative work tools. The language core is based on an extended subset of Modula-3 and the distributed lexical scoping semantics of Obliq, implemented in ANSI C and with a binding to the Tk GUI toolkit. It offers static structural-equivalence typing, objects, modules and interfaces, lightweight threads, exceptions, garbage collection, higher-order functions and lambda expressions, a keyword binding mechanism, dynamically sized lists and slice indexing notation, and type-safe implicit declarations. For details and availability, see or its US mirror . Antony Courtney . [Jim Fleming , comp.object, 5/19/95.]

Chuck Morefield recommends "KidSim: Programming Agents Without a Programming Language" by Smith, Cypher, and Spohrer, CACM, 7/94, pp. 54-67. The article, from Apple's Advanced Technology Group, can be found on . It proposes that agent-based programming can be as easy as kid's programs for text and graphic editing. [, 5/29/95.]

SIU Carbondale has announced new US mirrors of: Shinjuku Guide, a real-time gesture-based interface; the VRXplorer authoring system for 360-degree views in MS Windows; and MultiMedia WWW PC, about how to distribute interactive applications on the Internet. , , and . [Paolo Tosolini , net-hap, 5/1/95.]