Cafe Owners or Porn Police?
Those wishing to ban Internet pornography are waging an improbable battle, but it's not for lack of effort. If a special committee set up by the Mumbai High Court gets its way, proprietors of cybercafes will be forced to police their premises in the name of protecting minors from "unsuitable Internet material" and cyberstalkers. The six-member committee wants the High Court to issue a binding "direction" that would make all cafes in the state of Maharashtra (of which Mumbai is the capital) responsible for requiring customers to show photo-identity cards, recording their personal details, maintaining logs of all the sites the users have visited, and restricting minors to machines that do not have cubicles.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,50615,00.html
Bush's Energy Plan: Let's Drill
Calling fuel cells and hybrid cars "the wave of the future," but not the solution to dependence on foreign oil, President Bush Monday urged drilling in a pristine Alaskan wildlife refuge. With three gleaming U.S.-made energy-saving experimental vehicles -- none of which is available yet to consumers -- parked behind him at the White House diplomatic entrance, Bush focused on his commitment to conservation rather than his controversial plan to open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration. He pressed the Senate to pass a comprehensive energy plan embracing increased production as well as conservation, saying it would create jobs and help wean America from foreign oil.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,50662,00.html
Mexico Wants an E-Revolution
The goals of Mexico's e-gov revolution are lofty, promising everything from free e-mail accounts for every Mexican to the restoration of faith in government. Launched last year to great fanfare, e-México envisions wiring the entire country to the Internet, then offering educational, health and government services online. President Vicente Fox has slathered praise on the $4 billion initiative, saying it will push Mexico into the ranks of the developed world.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,50622,00.html
DNA Unveils Ghost Town Secrets
Archaeologists searching under floorboards in this 19th century mining town are using DNA testing in a way it's never been used before to learn secrets about the Old West. Some of the tests might tell a story of the frontier rarely seen in westerns or on the old Bonanza television series that helped make Virginia City famous. The DNA used for the tests was found in traces of morphine residue on a 125-year-old glass hypodermic syringe found beneath one small home.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,50647,00.html
Robo-Therapist Helps Ailing Limbs
One of the newest robots to debut on the medical market is designed to aid physical therapists who work with stroke patients. InMotion2 is a 30-inch-tall robo-therapist that its inventors believe can help patients regain the use of limbs incapacitated by a stroke. They think it can ultimately be a less-expensive proposition than physical therapy, too. But the robot is not likely to put its human counterpart out of a job. The robot still relies on a human to assess the patient, work out an exercise pattern, monitor progress and program the machine.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,50254,00.html
Bright Idea for Electric Scooters
Road works, traffic jams, red faces and honking horns: Driving around in Berlin's urban, concrete jungle is no love parade. It's no wonder an increasing number of Berliners are trying to sneak by long traffic lines on motorcycles and scooters. But motorcycles and scooters don't come without problems of their own, primarily more unwanted noise and emissions in an already-polluted metropolis. SolarMove, a startup from Berlin, believes that electrical scooters make sense. E-scooters move silently like prowling cats.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,50584,00.html
Jack Valenti: Movies Get Framed
The movie industry is under siege from a small community of professors who argue (1) that broadband access to the Internet will never gain consumer acceptance without movies legitimately being made available on the Net and (2) that producers deliberately are holding back the exhibition of movies on the Net because of -- in the words of Lawrence Lessig -- "the threat the Net presents to their relatively comfortable way of doing business." Add to this (3) the accusation that copyright owners are stifling innovation in the digital world.... Yadda yadda yadda...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2002Feb24.html
Grateful Dead lyricist lambasts DMCA
Grateful Dead lyricist and Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow has denounced the Digital Millenium Copyright Act as likely to turn the Internet into an information desert. Speaking at the RSA Security Conference 2002, in a session entitled "Copyright or Copy Wrong: Digital Millennium Copyright Act Examined," Barlow used the example of the Dead's approach to copyright to illustrate how the free flow of content did not necessarily choke off content availability. Or indeed lead to anarchy, communism, the end of the world and very poor record companies (although he might agree that last one could be a good thing).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/24186.html
Blind Gain New Site for Literature
An online service launched last week is expected to provide the largest electronic library for the blind and visually impaired on the Internet. Bookshare.org features more than 8,000 books -- from New York Times bestsellers to the classics -- that individuals can download and print in Braille or listen to using software that reads text aloud.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...s%2Dtechnology
Persuasive, Pervasive Computing
In 2000, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched an ambitious project to transform the way the world uses computers. The old model: a box, a monitor and keyboard. The new: computers as pervasive and invisible as the air we breathe. They called it Project Oxygen. Now, nearly two years out, the first technologies are rolling out of the labs. Project leaders -- Laboratory for Computer Science chief Victor Zue, associate director Anant Agarwal and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory director Rodney Brooks — insist that Project Oxygen is about an idea, not products.
http://www.techreview.com/articles/brown022502.asp
Media Win Access To Video Depositions In Microsoft Case
News media organizations will have access to edited videotapes and transcripts of interviews given by up to five high-profile executives in the Microsoft antitrust trial, a federal judge ruled on Sunday. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled that news media may review edited video tapes and transcripts from depositions of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and James Allchin, senior vice president of Microsoft's Platforms Group.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/174749.html
MP3 Files Not Always Safe With Top Media Players
A quirk in media players from Microsoft and RealNetworks could enable attackers to hijack Web browsers and run scripts on the computers of some MP3 music fans. The trick has apparently been discovered by pornography sites and spammers, which have been seeding some music file trading services with bogus MP3 music files. One such MP3 file, ostensibly containing the music of the Los Angeles-based rock group Lifehouse, launched a pornographic video and generated a "massive" amount of pop-up ads when played back on the Windows Media Player from Microsoft, according to one newsgroup report.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/174747.html
RIAA Blames Digital Music Pirates For Bad Year 
The recording industry has singled out Internet piracy as a major, contributing factor in its poor music sales during 2001, when U.S. shipments from record companies slipped by over 10 percent. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said it is lost for a "simple explanation" as to why record shipments to retailers crashed last year. The industry group on Sunday further revealed the dollar value of all music shipments fell from $14.3 billion in 2000 to $13.7 billion in 2001.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/174732.html
Microsoft Patches IE But Leaves PopUp Attack For Later
Microsoft on Thursday issued another set of patches to correct two "critical" security flaws in its Internet Explorer (IE) browser. But the company has yet to wall off a month-old attack that can launch programs on the computers of IE 6 users. The patches, posted at the Microsoft site Thursday evening, include a fix for an IE6 bug published last December in the browser's XMLHTTP ActiveX control, as well as for a previously unpublished flaw in the handling of VBScript by all supported versions of IE.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/174723.html
Music-For-Money Hits Sour Note With Online Fans
Even if popular tunes were not widely available for free on rogue music-swapping services, few music fans would pay for the kind of subscription services now being offered by major record companies, a new report says. Researchers at Ipsos-Reid said their own surveys show that fewer than 8 percent - or about 4 million - of those Americans who had downloaded or streamed music online had ever paid for that form of entertainment.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/174753.html
Aspirin might combat common viruses
Already hailed as a wonder drug, the humble aspirin might also combat viruses that attack fetuses and patients with damaged immunity. Aspirin was originally developed to numb pain. But it also helps prevent heart attacks and strokes by inhibiting blood clot formation, and even shrinks polyps that otherwise develop into colon cancer. Now, Thomas Shenk and his team at Princeton University in New Jersey, US, have shown that close relatives of aspirin can block common viruses. "For a 100-year-old drug, aspirin never stops springing surprises," says Nick Henderson of the charity European Aspirin Foundation. "Every year, aspirin re-invents itself."
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991971
Cutting edge P2P, crypto comes to your PC
The wonderful CodeCon conference that took place in San Francisco last weekend is now available as an audio stream. And in keeping with the true hackish nature of the event, the audio stream is a cross-platform DIY project in its own right. CodeCon gathered together much of the most interesting bleeding-edge R&D work on distributed networks and crypto, and we'll give you a few pointers on where to move your WinAmp dial below. Probably what made this grassroots conference so enthralling was the absence of people who talk about stuff, and an abundance of people who do stuff.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/24183.html
More news later on