P2P-Zone - View Single Post - The Newspaper Shop -- Monday edition

walktalker · 09-07-01, 08:58 PM

Germany Embraces the Sun
Germany is not necessarily known as the sunniest spot in Europe. But nowhere else do so many people climb on their roofs to install solar panels. Since the introduction of the Renewable Energies Laws (EEG) in April last year, Germany has been experiencing a remarkable boom in solar energy. "When my cab driver gives me a lecture about solar technologies, I know I am back home," raved Rian van Staden, executive director of the International Solar Energy Society (ISES) about Freiburg, the sunniest city in Germany and host to the InterSolar conference July 6-8. The little university town in southwest Germany, about 40 miles away from the French and Swiss borders, is Germany's "Solar Valley."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,45056,00.html

Messenger Killing the Customers?
Microsoft's MSN Messenger was still experiencing a failure Monday, seven days after the company acknowledged a technical glitch that left about a third of its users disconnected or without access to their online personal address books. The lingering shutdown has analysts speculating that Microsoft's reputation and its customer base may be threatened. Microsoft product manager Bob Visse said less than 10 percent of users were still without service Monday, but could not say when the service would be fully restored. This is the second time this year that MSN Messenger has had a major failure.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,45105,00.html

Mr. Tasini, Meet Mr. Greenberg
When Jerry Greenberg agreed to allow the National Geographic to publish his photographs, he didn't think his collection of more than 40 images would be republished in a 30-disc CD-ROM set without his permission or further payment. Greenberg took the Geographic to court. Now, three years after he filed suit and only months after an appeals court victory, his case may be the next battle over e-rights to hit the Supreme Court. The Tasini case could weigh heavily on the Greenberg case. But this time the battle is over images, not just words.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,45011,00.html

Car Renter Fines You for Speeding
A rental car company that uses satellites to track its vehicles and fines customers who speed refuses to halt the practice, the state consumer-protection agency says. As a result, a hearing will be held Aug. 22 on a complaint brought against the company by the Department of Consumer Protection. The agency last week accused Acme Rent-A-Car in New Haven of violating state consumer law. The company uses global positioning system satellites to track customers' speed and automatically fines them for each infraction. The state said it had identified 26 customers who were fined.
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,45099,00.html

Proposed domain rules under the gun
The draft text of the Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement released this week proposes requiring operators of country-code top level domain names in signatory countries to adopt a controversial system for settling trademark disputes over Internet domain names. The FTAA agreement aims to reduce barriers and tariffs in the Western Hemisphere by creating one set of trade rules for the 34 countries in North and South America, except Cuba. The draft agreement is divided into nine areas that are being negotiated such as market access, agriculture, investment services, intellectual property rights and government procurement.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...783118,00.html

Europe signs space deal with China
The European Space Agency (Esa) is to place instruments aboard two Chinese satellites in a project to study "space weather". The agency signed a deal with the Chinese National Space Administration in Paris on Monday, the first time that it has decided to put experiments on board Chinese satellites. "We will integrate the units in Europe and then finally they will be integrated onto the satellites in China," Giuseppe Giampalmo, Esa's head of international cooperation, told BBC News Online. "We think that it may be a world first," he said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci...00/1430369.stm

Atari lives!
It's the summer of 2001 and the video game industry is bigger and hotter than ever. In the feverishly contested hand-held market, Nintendo's GameBoy Advance and Atari's 2600-compatible VCSp are the must-have consoles. But fans are also eagerly awaiting new releases for popular consoles, like Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty for Sony's PlayStation 2 and Elevator Action for the Atari 2600. Wait just a second. Elevator Action for the Atari 2600? In the 21st century? Isn't the Atari 2600 the archaic console that only plays those games with the rinky-dink graphics and sound and simplistic play, like Combat and that godawful version of Pac-Man? The one with the goofy pseudo wood-grain trim on its casing that started the whole video game console market 24 years ago? Yep.
http://salon.com/tech/feature/2001/0...ari/index.html

Why Britain needs more Meccano and less Lego
The failling popularity of Meccano and the rise of Lego has been decried as a "disaster of modern life" that is inextricably linked to "the demise of British engineering" by one of the country's most prestigious scientists. Sir Harry Kroto said last night that playing with Meccano, with its nuts, bolts and perforated metal strips, helped him to win his 1996 Nobel prize for chemistry. A graph plotting Meccano's disappearance from children's toy boxes would, he claimed, match the alleged fall in the quantity and quality of Britain's young engineers and scientists.
http://www.lineone.net/telegraph/200...ws/why_46.html

Napster Blackout Continues
Napster remains out of commission today, more than a week since the embattled company shut down all music-swapping services in order to upgrade its court-mandated file-identification technology. The company now is publicly acknowledging that the latest version of the company's music-sharing client, which supplants all other versions, was encountering problems before it was disabled. Napster halted all file transfers over its network late on the evening of June 1. "There were problems with the database upon which our new file identification technology relies, and those problems were making the technology less effective," says an FAQ published on Napster's Web site. "Because it's important to identify files accurately, we decided to clean up the database before resuming file transfers."
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167740.html

Commerce Dept. Safe Harbor Privacy Site Not So Safe
A government Web site encouraging U.S. companies to take part in an international privacy protection agreement underwent a major overhaul last week, after officials realized the pages gave away sensitive information about participating companies. Web administrators at the U.S. Commerce Department on Thursday scrambled to shut down several Web sites containing information on the agency's Safe Harbor program, an agreement drafted to help U.S. e-commerce companies and other corporations comply with an EU policy that prohibits international data transfers to companies that do not adhere to EU-style data privacy policies.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167738.html

Fasttrack Technology 'New Napster' And More
A Dutch company's peer-to-peer (P2P) technology is on a fast track to become the "new Napster" and will make halting Napster's traffic seem like a walk in the park, Webnoize analysts believe. Fasttrack is not only poised to bring the online content industry to its knees, but seems to be growing into a far tougher legal opponent than Napster, a study by the digital entertainment research firm found. Webnoize analyst Matt Bailey told Newsbytes that Fasttrack is faster, easier to use and better than anything on the P2P market. "Fasttrack is so good, that any commercial P2P network will be hard-pressed to equal it," Bailey said.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167737.html

'Little' Brother Is Watching You At Work
More than one-third of the nation's Internet-connected workers are under "continuous" electronic surveillance by their employers, a new study has found. Some 14 million U.S. employees "have their Internet or e-mail use under continuous surveillance at work," according to the survey, released late last week by the Denver-based Privacy Foundation. The low price of monitoring software, coupled with the increasing ubiquity of Internet communication is driving considerable growth in electronic workplace surveillance, study author Andrew Schulman said today.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167736.html

Bertelsmann Projects New Image, IPO Plans On Web
At the stroke of midnight today here in Germany, an Web site technician flipped a switch and media giant Bertelsmann AG began projecting a new online image – and also removed any doubt that it is preparing for an initial public offering (IPO). The company wants to be recognized as a global media and digital powerhouse. Gone from its Web site is the lime green logo. The company now sports a home page steeped in various shades of grayish purple accented with strategic splashes of orange. White text proclaims: "BERTELSMANN, media worldwide."
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167734.html

People Want A Reason To Buy Broadband
The broadband market would be much larger than its current size if consumers were able to receive it custom-tailored, and if they knew what the possibilities really were via a high-speed Internet connection, according to a new study. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), in research released today, said consumers want to receive high-speed access, via digital subscriber line or cable, without "restrictive options and penalties." "Consumers also expressed a desire for options that do not include built-in penalties for spreading their purchases around - such as purchasing cable modem service from a company without subscribing to their cable television service," the group said in a statement.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167732.html

Civil Liberties Group Plans Effort To Protect Net Parody
Responding to an upswing in legal attacks against Internet parody sites, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is planning to launch a "Chilling Effects Clearinghouse" to help arm online speakers against "unfounded" attacks by corporate lawyers. The clearinghouse, which EFF intends to develop in conjunction with a handful of law schools, will include a "Hall of Shame for lawyers and law enforcers that write these broad, unfounded letters to people," EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn told Newsbytes today. EFF wants to "make law firms think twice about whether they want to participate in bullying," Cohn said.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167701.html

How Annoying Can Online Ads Get?
Online publishers are growing desperate; with investment dollars dried up they need ad revenues. But nobody's finding the right formula that both works and that advertisers are willing to pay for. And there's evidence that some of the promotions they're trying are only angering users. One example: A message-board discussion today on the ****edCompany.com site is hammering away at what by now is a nearly ubiquitous "pop-under" advertising campaign by the X10 digital camera manufacturer. That discussion follows on the heels of a press release issued Thursday by Unicast Chairman and CEO Richard V. Hopple that blasts X10-styled pop-under ads.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167700.html

Software Battle Lines Drawn In Cyberspace
As chief technology officer for the city of Seattle, Marty Chakoian sits at ground zero of the Internet revolution. Chakoian believes the Internet can help Seattle work smarter. He wants to link disparate computer systems into a functioning network so city departments can exchange data more efficiently over the Internet. Departments could then offer Web-based services to deal with suppliers and the public. Eventually, the Web could surpass the telephone and the mail as the favored medium for doing city business.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167722.html

09-07-01, 08:58 PM	#2
walktalker The local newspaper man Join Date: Aug 2000 Location: Montreal Posts: 2,036	Germany Embraces the Sun Germany is not necessarily known as the sunniest spot in Europe. But nowhere else do so many people climb on their roofs to install solar panels. Since the introduction of the Renewable Energies Laws (EEG) in April last year, Germany has been experiencing a remarkable boom in solar energy. "When my cab driver gives me a lecture about solar technologies, I know I am back home," raved Rian van Staden, executive director of the International Solar Energy Society (ISES) about Freiburg, the sunniest city in Germany and host to the InterSolar conference July 6-8. The little university town in southwest Germany, about 40 miles away from the French and Swiss borders, is Germany's "Solar Valley." http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,45056,00.html Messenger Killing the Customers? Microsoft's MSN Messenger was still experiencing a failure Monday, seven days after the company acknowledged a technical glitch that left about a third of its users disconnected or without access to their online personal address books. The lingering shutdown has analysts speculating that Microsoft's reputation and its customer base may be threatened. Microsoft product manager Bob Visse said less than 10 percent of users were still without service Monday, but could not say when the service would be fully restored. This is the second time this year that MSN Messenger has had a major failure. http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,45105,00.html Mr. Tasini, Meet Mr. Greenberg When Jerry Greenberg agreed to allow the National Geographic to publish his photographs, he didn't think his collection of more than 40 images would be republished in a 30-disc CD-ROM set without his permission or further payment. Greenberg took the Geographic to court. Now, three years after he filed suit and only months after an appeals court victory, his case may be the next battle over e-rights to hit the Supreme Court. The Tasini case could weigh heavily on the Greenberg case. But this time the battle is over images, not just words. http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,45011,00.html Car Renter Fines You for Speeding A rental car company that uses satellites to track its vehicles and fines customers who speed refuses to halt the practice, the state consumer-protection agency says. As a result, a hearing will be held Aug. 22 on a complaint brought against the company by the Department of Consumer Protection. The agency last week accused Acme Rent-A-Car in New Haven of violating state consumer law. The company uses global positioning system satellites to track customers' speed and automatically fines them for each infraction. The state said it had identified 26 customers who were fined. http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,45099,00.html Proposed domain rules under the gun The draft text of the Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement released this week proposes requiring operators of country-code top level domain names in signatory countries to adopt a controversial system for settling trademark disputes over Internet domain names. The FTAA agreement aims to reduce barriers and tariffs in the Western Hemisphere by creating one set of trade rules for the 34 countries in North and South America, except Cuba. The draft agreement is divided into nine areas that are being negotiated such as market access, agriculture, investment services, intellectual property rights and government procurement. http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...783118,00.html Europe signs space deal with China The European Space Agency (Esa) is to place instruments aboard two Chinese satellites in a project to study "space weather". The agency signed a deal with the Chinese National Space Administration in Paris on Monday, the first time that it has decided to put experiments on board Chinese satellites. "We will integrate the units in Europe and then finally they will be integrated onto the satellites in China," Giuseppe Giampalmo, Esa's head of international cooperation, told BBC News Online. "We think that it may be a world first," he said. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci...00/1430369.stm Atari lives! It's the summer of 2001 and the video game industry is bigger and hotter than ever. In the feverishly contested hand-held market, Nintendo's GameBoy Advance and Atari's 2600-compatible VCSp are the must-have consoles. But fans are also eagerly awaiting new releases for popular consoles, like Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty for Sony's PlayStation 2 and Elevator Action for the Atari 2600. Wait just a second. Elevator Action for the Atari 2600? In the 21st century? Isn't the Atari 2600 the archaic console that only plays those games with the rinky-dink graphics and sound and simplistic play, like Combat and that godawful version of Pac-Man? The one with the goofy pseudo wood-grain trim on its casing that started the whole video game console market 24 years ago? Yep. http://salon.com/tech/feature/2001/0...ari/index.html Why Britain needs more Meccano and less Lego The failling popularity of Meccano and the rise of Lego has been decried as a "disaster of modern life" that is inextricably linked to "the demise of British engineering" by one of the country's most prestigious scientists. Sir Harry Kroto said last night that playing with Meccano, with its nuts, bolts and perforated metal strips, helped him to win his 1996 Nobel prize for chemistry. A graph plotting Meccano's disappearance from children's toy boxes would, he claimed, match the alleged fall in the quantity and quality of Britain's young engineers and scientists. http://www.lineone.net/telegraph/200...ws/why_46.html Napster Blackout Continues Napster remains out of commission today, more than a week since the embattled company shut down all music-swapping services in order to upgrade its court-mandated file-identification technology. The company now is publicly acknowledging that the latest version of the company's music-sharing client, which supplants all other versions, was encountering problems before it was disabled. Napster halted all file transfers over its network late on the evening of June 1. "There were problems with the database upon which our new file identification technology relies, and those problems were making the technology less effective," says an FAQ published on Napster's Web site. "Because it's important to identify files accurately, we decided to clean up the database before resuming file transfers." http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167740.html Commerce Dept. Safe Harbor Privacy Site Not So Safe A government Web site encouraging U.S. companies to take part in an international privacy protection agreement underwent a major overhaul last week, after officials realized the pages gave away sensitive information about participating companies. Web administrators at the U.S. Commerce Department on Thursday scrambled to shut down several Web sites containing information on the agency's Safe Harbor program, an agreement drafted to help U.S. e-commerce companies and other corporations comply with an EU policy that prohibits international data transfers to companies that do not adhere to EU-style data privacy policies. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167738.html Fasttrack Technology 'New Napster' And More A Dutch company's peer-to-peer (P2P) technology is on a fast track to become the "new Napster" and will make halting Napster's traffic seem like a walk in the park, Webnoize analysts believe. Fasttrack is not only poised to bring the online content industry to its knees, but seems to be growing into a far tougher legal opponent than Napster, a study by the digital entertainment research firm found. Webnoize analyst Matt Bailey told Newsbytes that Fasttrack is faster, easier to use and better than anything on the P2P market. "Fasttrack is so good, that any commercial P2P network will be hard-pressed to equal it," Bailey said. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167737.html 'Little' Brother Is Watching You At Work More than one-third of the nation's Internet-connected workers are under "continuous" electronic surveillance by their employers, a new study has found. Some 14 million U.S. employees "have their Internet or e-mail use under continuous surveillance at work," according to the survey, released late last week by the Denver-based Privacy Foundation. The low price of monitoring software, coupled with the increasing ubiquity of Internet communication is driving considerable growth in electronic workplace surveillance, study author Andrew Schulman said today. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167736.html Bertelsmann Projects New Image, IPO Plans On Web At the stroke of midnight today here in Germany, an Web site technician flipped a switch and media giant Bertelsmann AG began projecting a new online image – and also removed any doubt that it is preparing for an initial public offering (IPO). The company wants to be recognized as a global media and digital powerhouse. Gone from its Web site is the lime green logo. The company now sports a home page steeped in various shades of grayish purple accented with strategic splashes of orange. White text proclaims: "BERTELSMANN, media worldwide." http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167734.html People Want A Reason To Buy Broadband The broadband market would be much larger than its current size if consumers were able to receive it custom-tailored, and if they knew what the possibilities really were via a high-speed Internet connection, according to a new study. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), in research released today, said consumers want to receive high-speed access, via digital subscriber line or cable, without "restrictive options and penalties." "Consumers also expressed a desire for options that do not include built-in penalties for spreading their purchases around - such as purchasing cable modem service from a company without subscribing to their cable television service," the group said in a statement. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167732.html Civil Liberties Group Plans Effort To Protect Net Parody Responding to an upswing in legal attacks against Internet parody sites, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is planning to launch a "Chilling Effects Clearinghouse" to help arm online speakers against "unfounded" attacks by corporate lawyers. The clearinghouse, which EFF intends to develop in conjunction with a handful of law schools, will include a "Hall of Shame for lawyers and law enforcers that write these broad, unfounded letters to people," EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn told Newsbytes today. EFF wants to "make law firms think twice about whether they want to participate in bullying," Cohn said. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167701.html How Annoying Can Online Ads Get? Online publishers are growing desperate; with investment dollars dried up they need ad revenues. But nobody's finding the right formula that both works and that advertisers are willing to pay for. And there's evidence that some of the promotions they're trying are only angering users. One example: A message-board discussion today on the **edCompany.com site is hammering away at what by now is a nearly ubiquitous "pop-under" advertising campaign by the X10 digital camera manufacturer. That discussion follows on the heels of a press release issued Thursday by Unicast Chairman and CEO Richard V. Hopple that blasts X10-styled pop-under ads. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167700.html Software Battle Lines Drawn In Cyberspace** As chief technology officer for the city of Seattle, Marty Chakoian sits at ground zero of the Internet revolution. Chakoian believes the Internet can help Seattle work smarter. He wants to link disparate computer systems into a functioning network so city departments can exchange data more efficiently over the Internet. Departments could then offer Web-based services to deal with suppliers and the public. Eventually, the Web could surpass the telephone and the mail as the favored medium for doing city business. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167722.html __________________ This post was sponsored by Netcoco, who wants cookies, cookies, cookies and, you guessed it, more cookies