The Newspaper Shop -- Wednesday edition

[walktalker]

Graphics conference plays up interaction
Hay Young, a researcher at the Center for Media Arts at City University of Hong Kong, believes computing should be a full contact sport. Body-Brush, an application being developed by Young and his colleagues, lets people compose 3D paintings or perform electronic music through movement. Raise a hand and musical pitch increases; spread one's arms and volume surges. In drawing mode, streaks and lines appear on a wall-mounted screen to represent a person's running pattern. The speed, gait and acceleration of the walker affect the tone and look of the images. "We've talked to psychologists who want to use it for art therapy," Young said. The object tracking part of the technology could also be used for security purposes.
http://news.com.com/2100-1046_3-5057...g=fd_lede2_hed

Panel defends flaw disclosure guidelines
A group formed to set rules for disclosing information about security flaws on Wednesday defended its latest revision and called for researchers to adopt its guidelines. The Organization for Internet Safety (OIS) held a panel discussion at the Black Hat Briefings security conference here to field questions regarding its latest attempt to create a standard way for security researchers to report flaws to software vendors. Currently, researchers handle flaw information in widely different ways. Some immediately publish the information on the Internet, while others work with software makers to fix the issues. The group hopes that researchers will give software companies at least 30 days to come up with a patch for a problem before going public with a flaw. Scott Culp, security program manager for Microsoft and an OIS member, stressed that more time does not mean the companies won't take security seriously.
http://news.com.com/2100-1002_3-5057914.html?tag=fd_top

IBM exec: 'Forces' at work against Linux
An IBM executive has claimed that a "set of forces" is attempting to derail Linux, and hinted that Microsoft and SCO Group are among those responsible. Al Zollar, a general manager of sales for IBM eServer iSeries, told delegates attending the company's Asia Pacific Strategic Planning Conference in Queensland, Australia, on Tuesday that a "set of forces" was attempting to stymie adoption of the open-source operating system. "They're mostly located in Redmond, although they have recruited a few allies," said Zollar. Microsoft has its headquarters in Redmond, Wash. Zollar then indicated that SCO was part of the alliance. The company, based in Lindon, Utah, has made intellectual property claims to certain code contained in some versions of Linux and is maneuvering to gather license fees from commercial applications of the operating system.
http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-5057840.html?tag=fd_top

MPEG standard addresses rights
The Moving Pictures Experts Group has completed an effort on two digital rights management technologies intended to increase the MPEG standard's appeal to the recording industry and Hollywood. MPEG announced the completion of parts 5 and 6 of MPEG-21, a member of the MPEG family of multimedia standards that defines how audio and video files can play in a wide range of digital environments. The digital rights management (DRM) capabilities are crucial to MPEG-21, as they are to other emerging multimedia standards, so that publishers in the recording and movie industries will adopt the standard without fear of losing control of copyrighted works. Part 5 of the standard, the Rights Expression Language (REL), lets multimedia publishers designate rights and permissions for how consumers can use their content. The REL expression "play," for instance, would let the consumer use the material in a "read only" mode, while other expressions could allow more flexibility in playback and reproduction.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5057852.html?tag=fd_top

Will Web users ever pay for content?
Some entrepreneurs get crowned in the record books as spectacular successes. Others find themselves lumped into the losers list of spectacular flameouts. Louis Borders is that rare businessman whose name appears on both sides of the ledger. Borders is a co-founder of Borders Group, the $3.4 billion company that today is the nation's second-largest bookseller. He also happens to be the man behind Webvan, the billion-dollar online grocer that famously failed in 2001 and became synonymous with both the magnificent dreams and the hubris of the dot-com era. Now this self-professed serial entrepreneur is taking another stab at building a brand from scratch. On Monday, Borders launched a subscription-based digital newsstand called KeepMedia. But he also faces the challenge of convincing Web surfers to pay to access archived online content. Despite the Web's transformation into a major publishing platform, relatively few Web users have warmed to the idea that they also should pay for content.
http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-5057174.html

Inventions' wonderful world on display at Microsoft fair
Microsoft might be on the verge of its best office invention yet: a self-charging robot slave that goes to meetings in your place. Imagine the hooky-playing possibilities that Robie the Robot could create. You can control the robot from a personal computer, using its two-way audio and video technology to participate by proxy. You also could send Robie out to the water cooler to talk shop with co-workers' Robies. Robie isn't even close to being sold at stores, but it was one of dozens of inventions on display yesterday at a research fair Microsoft hosted for hundreds of university faculty visiting the company this week.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...science30.html

Napster 2.0: Music to investors' ears?
When I went online Monday morning and read that Roxio had finally announced a launch date (holiday season 2003) for its Napster 2.0 legitimate music-download service, I promptly clicked over to an investment site to see how the company's stock price was moving on the news. What I saw nearly caused me to spew coffee all over my monitor. For a time on Monday, the stock soared and briefly established a new 52-week high. It closed slightly down on the day, but by press time on Tuesday, it had again begun to head north on higher-than-normal trading levels. Clearly, investors are jazzed about Roxio's potential to emulate Apple and its success with launching the iTunes music service.
http://money.cnn.com/2003/07/30/tech...lweg/index.htm

The leaky net
In everyday life, with a few simple precautions, you can keep your personal details private. By using cash, taking public transport, using a pre-paid mobile and avoiding the internet most of your movements will go unseen. You will not fade away entirely, but the time and trouble it will take someone to find out what you have been doing will make you a lot less visible. But on the net, almost no matter what you do, you leave behind scraps of information about what you have been doing. Information about the computer you are using, the sites you visit, where files were downloaded to and information you type into forms will be noted. If you take no precautions in the offline world, you may leave the same scraps but they are harder to piece together, search through and compare. On the net, by contrast, it is relatively straightforward.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3092839.stm

Why iTunes Has Bands on the Run
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe established bands such as Metallica should fear Apple's iTunes Music Store. Longtime Metallica fan Marc McCoy, a graphic designer in Pittsburgh, wrote me that he would have bought just two songs off the band's new St. Anger release rather than the whole CD if he could have. Writes McCoy gleefully, referring to the coming PC version of the music store: "When iTunes for Windows rears its head, we'll see who's in control." McCoy isn't alone. In the deluge of e-mail I've received about my last column few had any sympathy for bands such as Metallica and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who refuse to release their music to iTunes. They fear buyers will buy individual songs, breaking up the artistic fabric of their albums. These bands aren't without their supporters. About a third of my mail called my critique wrong-headed, a disservice to the bands and popular music. "Album rock is still alive and strong," writes David Schrimsher, a commercial lender in Huntsville, Ala. "Isolate the songs, and the message is lost."
http://businessweek.com/technology/c...8330_tc056.htm

Barnes & Noble to buy Bertelsmann's stake
Barnes & Noble, the top U.S. books retailer, said Tuesday it has agreed to pay $164 million to buy a stake that German media firm Bertelsmann AG has decided to sell in its online subsidiary.
Barnes & Noble, whose foray into the Internet has faced increasing competition from top online bookseller Amazon.com, said it expects the transaction to cut its profit estimates for the rest of 2003 by 11 cents a share. The transaction, which is expected to close in 45 days, calls for Barnes & Noble to pay $2.80 for each Bertelsmann share. This is a 37 percent premium over Barnes&Noble.com's closing price of $2.04 on Tuesday on Nasdaq. According to Bertelsmann's 2002 annual report, the German media conglomerate owned a 36.8 percent stake in the online arm of New York-based Barnes & Noble. Barnes & Noble, with more than 870 stores, launched Barnes&Noble.com in May 1997 after operating a Web site on the America Online Web site for a few months. Late in 1998 Bertelsmann paid $200 million to partner with Barnes&Noble.com and continued to jointly invest in the online venture.
http://news.com.com/2100-1019_3-5057559.html?tag=cd_mh

Labels win round in piracy crackdown
Sydney University can't hide behind claims that file-swapping data sought by record labels was deleted from its system, an Australian federal judge has ruled. The decision is a setback to alleged copyright infringers that hope to delay or deflect threatened lawsuits from the recording industry, which has filed a wave of subpoenas against universities and Internet service providers in recent weeks. Some U.S. schools, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University, have sought to challenge the subpoenas on procedural grounds. While those actions could delay investigators, it is unlikely to derail them. The order by Justice Brian Tamberlin for now removes one of the most potent shields for accused students. In the United States, for example, rules about data retention by Internet service providers are still in flux, leading some legal experts to suggest that destroying file-swapping data offers a legitimate out for ISPs that are hit with subpoenas.
http://news.com.com/2100-1029_3-5057849.html?tag=cd_mh

Pentagon nixes futures market on terror
The Pentagon office that proposed spying electronically on Americans to monitor potential terrorists has quickly abandoned an idea in which anonymous speculators would have bet on forecasting terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups in an online futures market. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said Tuesday that the program would be dropped. And he asserted that he first learned of the Pentagon-sanctioned futures market through news accounts after two Democratic senators disclosed the concept on Monday. "I share your shock at this kind of program," Wolfowitz told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "We'll find out about it, but it is being terminated." Sen. John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he had conferred with the program's director at the Pentagon, "and we mutually agreed that this thing should be stopped."
http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-5057574.html?tag=cd_mh

FTC warns about file trading, spyware
The Federal Trade Commission issued a brief consumer warning Wednesday about potential privacy concerns surrounding file-swapping software and spyware. In the latest of a series of consumer privacy alerts, the agency stopped short of warning consumers not to use free file-trading software, but it said computer users should take care to understand and prevent a range of potentially unpleasant consequences for doing so. "Make sure that you consider the trade-offs," the agency wrote. "File sharing can have a number of risks." The alert cited the possibility that consumers might download viruses, share private or copyrighted files that could land them in legal trouble, or accidentally download mislabeled pornography. The warning intensifies the drumbeat of concern over file-sharing software, as courts, legislators and copyright holders put more pressure on peer-to-peer networks and individual file-traders.
http://news.com.com/2100-1029_3-5057814.html?tag=cd_mh

Putting Sunburns to Good Use
Surgeons in Israel have performed the first surgery on a live animal using not scalpels or a laser, but sunlight. The technique, which was performed on rat livers, could have advantages over laser surgery for two reasons: It's cheaper, and it won't damage the surgeon's eyes. The only hitch -- and it's a big one -- is that the technique requires constant sun. So Seattle and London are definitely out. "Even though the deployment of solar radiation for surgery must be restricted to clear-sky periods in sun-belt climates, its appeal lies in its potentially low cost compared with conventional laser fibre-optic treatments," wrote Jeffrey Gordon, Daniel Feuermann and their colleagues at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheva. The article appeared in Nature. While a laser unit costs more than $100,000, the solar concentrator that Gordon and Feuermann built costs about $1,000.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,59828,00.html

Solar Sail Plying Turbulent Seas
At first glance, it looks like an illustration from a particularly creepy kid's book, a scene depicting an accident in which a gigantic fairy somehow lost one of its wings. But the developers of the 47-foot silvery object that's now suspended 10 stories above the crowds in New York's Rockefeller Center hope their project doesn't turn out to be the stuff of fantasy. That "wing" is actually a replica of one of the eight blades from the Cosmos 1 solar sail spacecraft, scheduled to launch in September. The solar sail exhibit is part of Rockefeller Center's new Centennial of Flight show, which traces technological advances made in aviation during the last century. If all goes well, Cosmos will prove that solar sails are the future of space flight, a viable technology that can allow humans to glide gracefully through space relying primarily on naturally produced propulsion instead of jet engines and fuel.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,59817,00.html

Federal Data Searches on Hit List
Broadening his legislative assault on the Terrorism Information Awareness program, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) introduced a bill Tuesday that would require the Pentagon, the CIA and the Treasury and Homeland Security departments to report to Congress about their use of commercial databases to track down terrorists, fugitives and deadbeat dads. The Citizens' Protection in Federal Databases Act, which was drafted in conjunction with a bipartisan coalition of privacy groups, would cut off funding for agencies' use of commercial databases unless they file a report in 60 days about the extent to which they use these databases or the databases of other federal agencies. "We cannot stand by and allow the government to shine a spotlight onto the personal records of law-abiding citizens who have a constitutionally protected right to privacy," said Wyden in a written statement. "It is Congress' duty to find out on behalf of all Americans what federal agencies are hoping to do with their personal information."
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59824,00.html

I Think, Therefore I Communicate
Moving chess pieces by thought alone might have been in the realm of science fiction once. Not anymore. For Jessica Bayliss, a researcher who has been working on brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, at the University of Rochester, it's simply the next challenge on her list. For the past 15 years, researchers have been trying to develop BCIs to tap into the brain waves of individuals who are unable to communicate with the outside world. The goal of all BCI research is to create a direct link between computers and the electrical signals in the brain of these so-called "locked in" individuals so they can operate devices like wheelchairs or use simple word processing programs to express their wishes.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,59737,00.html

How IT Fixed London's Traffic Woes
N 1903, 10 years before Henry Ford began mass-producing automobiles, traffic traveled through central London at a sedate 12 mph, with horses providing most of the motive power. One hundred years of progress later, the average speed had slowed — yes, that's right, slowed — to just 9 mph. As in other major cities, traffic congestion has negated a century of determined innovation of the internal combustion engine. Figures showed that London's drivers spent around half their time in queues, incurring 2.3 minutes of delay for every kilometer they traveled. But on Feb. 17, 2003, London began to fight back. The British capital launched an anticongestion scheme, based on tolls, that is attracting attention from all over the world. Unlike American-style tolls, though, there's no sitting in queues waiting to pay. Or transponders. Instead, 688 cameras at 203 sites scattered across the 8-square-mile anticongestion area photograph the license plates of the 250,000 cars that traverse it each day.
http://www.cio.com/archive/071503/london.html

Brain scans 'reveal baby thoughts'
A burst of brain activity recorded by scientists could offer clues to a baby's level of understanding of the world around it. The researchers involved, from Birkbeck College, and University College London, believe their finding could begin to settle a controversial argument on baby brain development. When an object is shown to six-month-old babies, then hidden, they often behave as if it is no longer present. It appears to be "out of sight, out of mind", as far as their level of understanding is concerned. But scientists still suspect the baby, to some extent, does understand the object is still around, just hidden, even if it shows no physical signs of awareness. The London team wired up their babies to a harmless "hair-net" of sensors which measured electrical activity in the brain.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3107797.stm

Prisons go for open source
The Department of Corrections will go live in two weeks with an open-source content management system to provide an intranet for its 4500 staff. Open-source software is free to licence and is developed by a global "community" of programmers in their spare time. IT manager Derek Lyons said the intranet system, using the free OpenCMS software, would replace a mixture of static web pages and ordinary database access. Its purpose was to improve access to internal information, such as manuals, and there might be an opportunity to add other functions such as forums. The development has been under way for two months and has involved the conversion of web pages to data in an Oracle database, which will feed OpenCMS pages.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydispl...on=information

Cyborg Liberation Front
Yeats's wish, expressed in his poem "Sailing to Byzantium," was a governing principle for those attending the World Transhumanist Association conference at Yale University in late June. International academics and activists, they met to lay the groundwork for a society that would admit as citizens and companions intelligent robots, cyborgs made from a free mixing of human and machine parts, and fully organic, genetically engineered people who aren't necessarily human at all. A good many of these 160 thinkers aspire to immortality and omniscience through uploading human consciousness into ever evolving machines. The three-day gathering was hosted by an entity no less reputable than the Yale Interdisciplinary Bioethics Project's Working Research Group on Technology and Ethics; the World Transhumanist Association chairman and co-founder is Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom. Dismiss it as a Star Trek convention by another name, and you could miss out on the culmination of the Western experiment in rights and reason.
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0331/baard.php

'Safe' alternative to depleted uranium revealed
Controversial anti-tank shells tipped with depleted uranium may be phased out if an alternative material proves its worth. The US Army is expected to award a contract this week for the manufacture of prototype ammunition incorporating a "liquid metal" alloy. The new rounds could be in service within two years. Campaigners have complained for years about the potential health effects of DU - it has been linked to everything from Gulf War syndrome to birth defects. But the health connection is disputed and the military defends its use of DU. All the same, the US Army's Tank-automotive and Armaments Command is looking for alternatives in case political pressures force it to abandon DU.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994004

US ad campaigns show how stealing films hurts the 'little guys'
Following the example of the music business the movie industry is targeting individual peer-to-peer pirates with an advertising campaign currently running in cinemas and on television across the US. The ads, which can be viewed at RespectCopyrights.org, are designed to show the pirates how their activities affect the 'little guys' in the movie business, hoping to shift attention away from the million dollar grossing studios and stars. Rich Taylor of the Motion Picture Association of America (Miaa), which is running the campaign, told US news site The Pittsburgh Channel: "I think [the public] doesn't get that [movie piracy] is not a victimless crime. They think the only people impacted are those on the red carpet who have plenty of money". The Miaa has long targeted more traditional pirates, selling bootlegged videos of blockbusters, but now it is realising the treat posed by peer-to-peer movie swappers.
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/index.cfm...view&news=3446

IBM Takes Linux To A New Level
IBM announced today that it will build what it says will be the most powerful supercomputer ever to run on the Linux operating system. The new computer, which will be capable of more than 11 trillion calculations per second, will be used by Japan's biggest public research organization to support research in biology and nanotechnology. Big Blue's new box should outpace a cluster of Linux machines built by Linux Networx, a privately-held Utah firm, for the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. Clark Roundy, vice president of international operations at Linux Networx, emphasizes that since the IBM system has yet to be built, any contrast between the two will have to wait. "It remains to be seen how these will compare," says Roundy. Although a single supercomputing deal might be of negligible financial importance to the Armonk, N.Y.-based information technology services giant, today's announcement gives IBM bragging rights in Linux, nanotech and life sciences. All of these are considered to be important growth areas.
http://www.forbes.com/2003/07/30/cx_mh_ld_0730ibm.html

New government agency created to quickly respond to citizen's queries
The U.S. General Services Administration has launched what it calls the "first comprehensive customer service department for citizens" in the U.S. government, with a goal of responding to questions by Web, e-mail, or phone within two business days. USA Services, the new GSA program launched Wednesday, will allow federal agencies to redirect questions sent to the wrong federal agency to USA Services staff, who will then answer the questions. USA Services can also function as a customer service center for federal agencies, with the new program responding to frequently asked questions for each participating agency, instead of agency staff taking time away from other duties to answer questions from U.S. residents.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,111829,00.asp

EFF gives swappers 'heads up' on subpoenas
Internet file swappers worried about being sued by the Recording Industry Association of America Inc. (RIAA) can now find out whether the industry association has their number -- their IP (Internet Protocol) number, that is. A new Web-based tool provided by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) gives file swappers the ability to check their home IP address or file sharing service user name against a list of addresses and names disclosed in hundreds of subpoena filed by the RIAA to ISPs (Internet service providers). The tool was unveiled on Friday and consists of a Web page with a field into which visitors can type a user name from file sharing services such as Kazaa and Grokster, or the IP address of a system used to swap files. That page is linked to a database containing file swapper information culled from RIAA subpoenas, according to Fred von Lohmann, senior intellectual property attorney at the EFF. The RIAA did not respond to requests for comment.
http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2003/07/30/eff/

New battle lines drawn in file- swapping war
As the recording industry prepares hundreds of copyright lawsuits against online music swappers, the makers of file-sharing software are fortifying their programs to try to mask users' identities. Some of the upgrades reroute Internet connections through so-called proxy servers that scrub away cybertracks. Others incorporate firewalls or encryption to thwart the sleuth firms that the recording industry employs. "Everyone is concerned about their privacy," said Michael Weiss, chief executive of StreamCast Networks. The upgrade to his Morpheus file-sharing software has been downloaded more than 300,000 times since its release last week. Music industry officials insist file-swappers can't hide.
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansas...ss/6376835.htm

Tales from the dark side of space
There is more than one way to see the universe, and some of them were featured this month in Sydney, where the world's astronomers gathered for the triennial meeting of the International Astronomical Union. Once restricted to looking at the pearly lights of stars, astronomers have increasingly sought to look for what they cannot see in the darkness between the stars. Some have used a chunk of Antarctica as their telescope to map the rain of high-energy particles from the cosmos. Others have used galaxies themselves as lenses to limn invisible clouds of dark matter that envelop the cosmos.
http://www.iht.com/articles/104653.html

More news later on