The Newspaper Shop -- Monday edition

[walktalker]

SCO puts disputed code in the spotlight
SCO Group's legal battles against Linux took center stage at the company's partner and customer conference, as executives displayed the lines of disputed code and vowed to continue the fight. The Lindon, Utah-based company has rattled Linux users by suing IBM, claiming that the company inserted unauthorized code from SCO's Unix into Linux. SCO has also sent letters to corporations with Linux systems, warning them that they may be violating copyright laws by using the increasingly popular operating system. During the first two hours of a morning keynote session at SCO Forum here Monday, CEO Darl McBride outlined the company's legal strategy and tried to convince SCO partners and customers that it is fighting the good fight.
http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-5065...g=fd_lede1_hed

AOL 9.0 gets personal with subscribers
America Online is aiming to cinch ties to subscribers with technology that gets to know you. The company's latest Web access technology, which it introduced to broadband subscribers in recent weeks, incorporates software that shapes Web pages to personal tastes -- a first for AOL. By collecting data from questionnaires and with users' permission, AOL 9.0 can deliver personalized listings on TV shows, movies, music and shopping queries. It also can learn what consumers like over time based on their ratings and recommendations on entertainment they prefer. In the future, AOL could use the technology to alter search results and news to personal tastes, according to Steven Johnson, president of ChoiceStream, a developer of software that helps power AOL's service.
http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5065373.html?tag=fd_top

Labels: We're after big swappers
The recording industry's wave of subpoenas that target individual computer users has drawn the critical attention of at least one influential lawmaker on Capitol Hill. Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., who chairs the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, sent a letter to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on Thursday that criticized its recent spate of subpoenas and asked for detailed information on how the process is working. Coleman said the RIAA may be going too far. "The industry has legitimate concerns about copyright infringement," Coleman said in a statement. "Yet, the industry seems to have adopted a 'shotgun' approach that could potentially cause injury and harm to innocent people who may have simply been victims of circumstance, or possessing a lack of knowledge of the rules related to digital sharing of files."
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5058594.html?tag=nl

PC makers put on their game face
Game on. That's the message computer makers, which are increasingly looking to hard-core gamers to make up for a lackluster PC market, are sending. Gateway is the latest to try to take advantage of the trend. The company plans to release this week customized versions of its midrange and high-end desktops, which it aims specifically at gamers. "We are definitely seeing gaming growing," said Rick Schwartz, Gateway's senior product manager for digital solutions. Schwartz added that the expected debut of action game "Half-Life 2" at the end of September could spark existing game players to upgrade their machines. Hewlett-Packard said last week that it, too, will offer a PC aimed specifically at gamers. In doing so, HP and Gateway are targeting niche players such as Alienware that have focused on that segment of the market. Dell also has entered this market with its Dimension XPS.
http://news.com.com/2100-1043_3-5065320.html?tag=fd_top

The hidden dangers of documents
Your Microsoft Word document can give readers more information about you than you might think. Even Alastair Campbell has fallen foul of the snippets of invisible data few of us realise our documents contain. Uually with Microsoft Word, what you see is what you get. If you make a change to a document, then that is what you see when it gets printed out. But in fact, in many cases it is what you cannot see at first glance that proves more interesting. Analysis of hidden information in the so-called Iraq "dodgy dossier" showed, among other things, the names of the four civil servants who worked on it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3154479.stm

Girls on the motherboard
Kourtney Mclean bent over the guts of the dismantled computer, scrutinizing the wires, the motherboard and other parts at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto. "It seems difficult," said Mclean, 12, who dreams of becoming a chef, photographer or therapist. "You have to study computers all the way through so it won't melt or blow up or light on fire." The eighth-grader's assessment of the technology is perhaps an indication why, according to the National Science Foundation, the percentage of female students in engineering, computer science and related fields in the United States has fallen from 36 percent to 20 percent in the last two decades. In the Bay Area, Stanford University and UC Berkeley report a slight drop in computer science majors in the last academic year, due in part to poor tech job prospects. But both majors remain popular.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg....DTL&type=tech

Broadband Britain - a third world country?
While take-up of broadband in Britain is making slow but steady progress, some Asia Pacific countries are storming ahead on ADSL adoption. Research out today from the Office of National Statistics shows that while the number of UK broadband subscribers has risen by 170 per cent over the previous year and around six per cent over the last month, the amount of users accessing the web via broadband still makes up just 16.8 per cent of total subscriptions. It's a sharp contrast to the picture in some Asian countries, where internet access via broadband has become the norm – it's currently running at around 69 per cent in South Korea, according to figures from Ovum.
http://www.silicon.com/news/500016-500001/1/5638.html

Open Source: Closing, Closing...
It might look like the battle of David and Goliath, but in the case of the SCO Group vs. IBM, not too many people are rooting for David. The SCO Group, which has filed a $3 billion suit against Big Blue, alleges that Unix code – which it claims rights to – was wrongly used in some of IBM’s Linux code. IBM has filed a countersuit, saying that SCO is simply trying to make money from laying claim to code that is freely available under the General Public License. Linux distributor Red Hat has also joined the fray, asking that SCO be stopped from making claims of intellectual property misuse in Linux code. Most Linux developers have weighed in on IBM’s side, expressing annoyance at what they perceive as SCO’s attempt to undermine the very nature of open source software development. The case is making headlines, but the larger issue in question is whether Linux – which has become the poster child for open source software development -- can truly remain open while simultaneously gaining acceptance in the corporate marketplace.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/a...7&homepage=yes

China blocks foreign software
A new policy from China's governing body states that all government ministries must buy only locally produced software at the next upgrade cycle. The State Council's move, aimed at breaking the dominance of Microsoft on desktop computers, will eliminate Microsoft's Windows operating system and Office productivity suite from hundreds of thousands of Chinese government computers over the next few years. Gao Zhigang, an official with the Procurement Center of the State Council, told reporters that the new policy will be in place by year's end. At a special congress held to encourage ministries to upgrade to WPS Office 2003, a China-made office productivity suite, Gao said the government will purchase only hardware preinstalled with domestic operating systems and applications. Those seeking exceptions will need to submit a special request.
http://news.com.com/2100-1012_3-5064978.html?tag=cd_mh

Project searches for open-source niche
An emerging Web search project is out to keep Google, Yahoo and MSN honest -- and improve the process of finding useful, noncommercial information on the Net. Called Nutch, the project is developing open-source software for locating documents online. But unlike major search providers, it won't cloak its formulas for matching relevant results to visitors' queries. Rather, it will provide an open window into its calculations with links to explanations on how it determined each result, according to lead architect Doug Cutting. "All of the existing search engines have secret methods for deciding which documents are the best documents," said Cutting, whose resume includes research and development stints at Excite, Grand Central and the Palo Alto Research Center.
http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5064913.html

Stones: Get yer ya-ya's out online
The Rolling Stones, one of the last marquee holdouts against online music distribution, have finally agreed to sell their music online, according to record label EMI Music. The venerable rock band's appearance online is both a signal of the increasingly rapid mainstreaming of digital music and a welcome relief to online music companies, which have endured the absence of the Rolling Stones and a few other major bands, such as the Beatles, as a significant missed beat in their appeal to consumers. The band's music -- including the albums "Sticky Fingers," "Exile on Main Street" and "Some Girls" -- debuted Monday exclusively on RealNetworks' Rhapsody subscription service, as part of a new promotion that will also see the Rhapsody service distributed and promoted heavily in Best Buy retail stores around the United States. Analysts said the extensive offline promotion was itself a critical sign of the digital medium's maturation.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5064855.html?tag=cd_mh

Aggregators Attack Info Overload
Maniacally wired netizens who read a hundred blogs a day and just as many news sources are turning to a new breed of software, called newsreaders or aggregators, to help them manage information overload. Many now say that their news aggregator is as indispensable as their e-mail client. Aggregators, such as NewsGator and AmphetaDesk, allow users to subscribe to feeds from sources as diverse as the BBC, Sci-Fi Today, Slashdot and thousands of bloggers across the world. The services work by checking an Internet address at a regular interval, usually once an hour, to see if new content has been added. The feeds are written according to one of a few competing shared specifications, which are collectively referred to as RSS, which stands, depending on who you talk to, for really simple syndication or rich site summary.
http://www.wired.com/news/infostruct...,60053,00.html

Who's Holding the Aces Now?
Rob McGarvey is, in the lingo of the blackjack world, an advantage player. A card counter. To maximize his take, he keeps track of the cards as they're dealt, and tailors his bets based on the cards his system predicts will hit the felt next. Card counting, of course, is nothing new. Math professor Ed Thorp scorched Vegas with his groundbreaking 1962 book, Beat the Dealer, that detailed winning card-counting strategies. It's been a pitched battle ever since, with counters and casinos each developing new systems to stay one step ahead of the other. But to hear some tell it, the casinos' latest offensive may be its strongest yet against McGarvey and his peers. That's because of a new optical pattern recognition technology called MindPlay MP21, which is designed to automatically track and analyze the play and betting patterns of every gambler at a blackjack table in real time.
http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,60049,00.html

Software Spots Devilish Details
The most sophisticated medical diagnostic scans do little good if changes indicating the early onset of a disease are too subtle to be seen by the human eye. Concentrated squinting may seem like an antiquated medical technique, but modern medical imaging often requires doctors to visually compare side-by-side images to try to spot changes. Computers can help, but even the beefiest machines struggle when searching medical images for faint changes. They arduously examine each pixel in a set of diagnostic images and often spot only extraneous changes, like a slight difference in the focus or angle of the device used to capture the images. But scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory have developed a way to enable computers to spot those subtle life-or-death warning signs.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,60045,00.html

Wingman: get ready to fly at 186 mph
Want to soar like an eagle? Then go with a parasail or a hang glider. But for those who dream of screaming through the air like a superhero, there's the Skyray - a solid, triangular, carbon-fiber contraption that lets skydivers shoot above the clouds at 186 mph for two exhilarating minutes. That's quadruple the air time of the usual free fall and almost twice the speed of the world's fastest bird, the spine-tailed swift. Nearly ready for mass production, the 9-pound Skyray is the brainchild of Munich-based inventor Alban Geissler, who has designed earthbound objects from hot rods to hot-water pumps. His innovation: delta wings, like those on an F-102 fighter jet. Instead of sticking out perpendicular to the body, the Skyray's wings are angled back, eliminating the need for a stabilizing tail and making any kind of spin - the fatal flaw of many a wing suit - impossible. When the high-speed joyride is over, the jumper pulls a rip cord and parachutes in for landing - wings still attached.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/wing.html

Texas Wind Blows With Green Power
Texas, a state famous for its love affair with fossil fuels, has quietly begun a courtship with wind power that could push it to the nation's forefront in clean energy. Prodded by state laws that require utilities to purchase green credits, tax breaks and easy access to vast open plains with steady, strong winds, Texas has become the second-largest wind producer in the country, after California. More than 900 megawatts of wind power generation have been built in Texas in the past three years, bringing the total to 1,094 megawatts, or enough to power about 500,000 homes in the energy-thirsty Lone Star state. "At this point, we think 10,000-plus megawatts in the next five to eight years is doable," said Russel E. Smith, executive director of the trade group Texas Renewable Industries Association.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,60070,00.html

We're all geeks now
As he eyes the latest motherboards at PCs for Everyone, a Cambridge computer shop, Matt Burstein is the very picture of a technology geek. With his bushy beard, shorts, and sandals, he might have stepped right off the nearby campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Only Burstein actually stepped out of a workshop in Somerville where he restores antique furniture. He's not an engineer or software developer; indeed, he has had no formal training in computers. But he knows them so well that for a time the 46-year-old Burstein considered closing down his antiques business and going into computer repair. It all began in 1994, when Burstein's wife purchased a $4,000 PC to help with her work in graduate school. "I sat down at that thing and started playing around with it," Burstein recalled. "Within two weeks I had crashed it and lost everything. . . . It was my responsibility to get it back up and running." And because he had to, he did.
http://boston.com/business/technolog..._all_geeks_now

First game-playing DNA computer revealed
The first game-playing DNA computer has been revealed - an enzyme-powered tic-tac-toe machine that cannot be beaten. The human player makes his or her moves by dropping DNA into 3 by 3 square of wells that make up the board. The device then uses a complex mixture of DNA enzymes to determine where it should place its nought or cross, and signals its move with a green glow. The device, dubbed MAYA, was developed by Milan Stojanovic, at Columbia University in New York, and Darko Stefanovic, at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Kobi Benenson, who works on other DNA approaches at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, says the work demonstrates the most complex use of molecules as logic gates to date, and "represents a significant advance in DNA computing."
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994063

Fake drugs force makers to play spy games
Drug companies are turning to spy novel gizmos — invisible inks, tiny radio-frequency antennas and the like — to help stop counterfeiters from faking or adulterating prescription drugs. Counterfeits represent a fraction of the $192 billion U.S. drug market. But investigators in recent months have seized a variety of fakes. They include Lipitor pills that contained only small amounts of the ingredient needed to lower cholesterol and vials of an expensive cancer drug filled with only bacteria-laden salt water. "Pharmaceuticals are clearly an industry that needs a security program," says Craig Stamm, chief financial officer for Isotag, which makes a variety of anti-counterfeit products. "If you have a knockoff Gucci bag, it's not ethical, but you're not going to die from it."
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/20...akedrugs_x.htm

Texting blamed for summer movie flops
In Hollywood, 2003 is rapidly becoming known as the year of the failed blockbuster, and the industry now thinks it knows why. No, the executives are not blaming such bombs as The Hulk, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle or Gigli on poor quality, lack of originality, or general failure to entertain. There's absolutely nothing new about that. The problem, they say, is teenagers who instant message their friends with their verdict on new films - sometimes while they are still in the cinema watching - and so scuppering carefully crafted marketing campaigns designed to lure audiences out to a big movie on its opening weekend. "In the old days, there used to be a term, 'buying your gross,' " Rick Sands, chief operating officer at Miramax, told the Los Angeles Times. "You could buy your gross for the weekend and overcome bad word of mouth, because it took time to filter out into the general audience."
http://news.independent.co.uk/digita...p?story=434778

Smallpox immunity may last a lifetime
Vaccination may induce life-long immunity to smallpox, suggest the results of the first detailed tests of their kind. This means that any terrorist release of smallpox might not spread as catastrophically fast as feared, and fewer people might die. A smallpox was declared eradicated in the wild in 1980, after a worldwide vaccination campaign. But the disease stopped circulating earlier in the west, and routine vaccination ceased in the 1970s. That means most westerners born since then have not been vaccinated, making smallpox - which is highly contagious and kills a third of its victims - potentially a horrific biological weapon. But how horrific depends on whether people who were vaccinated have retained their immunity. It has been assumed that few would.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994064

Interview with the CEO of StreamCast Networks
StreamCast has gone through more changes and faced more challenges than most other p2p clients combined. The changes of network and source code from OpenNap to FastTrack to Gnutella are well documented. In addition to this, StreamCast has undergone several changes in leadership, specifically its CEO. Michael Weiss led the company through its phenomenal success with both OpenNap and FastTrack. He recently returned to the company and with a legal victory under his belt he is seeking to regain the old success of Morpheus. Can a company that self-admittedly lost contact with much of this community attempt a resurgence? Slyck gets answers from Micahel Weiss, the CEO of StreamCast on lawsuits, FastTrack, P2P, the RIAA, the attempted resurgence of Morpheus and more ...
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=220

Film industry targets pirates
The British film industry is to join forces with the government in a new task force to fight UK film pirates, it has been announced. The sale of bootleg videos and DVDs is a growing problem, up 80% in the last year, according to the Federation Against Copyright Theft. That means piracy has cost the UK film industry £400m in the last 12 months, the research said. It was a "direct attack" on the jobs of 50,000 people in the industry, said UK Film Council director Nigel Green, who will chair the Anti-Piracy Taskforce. Illegal copies of blockbusters like Tomb Raider 2, Terminator 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean have appeared on sale before their cinema releases.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain...lm/3158227.stm

GNU Questions: RMS on SCO, Distributions, DRM
In September of 1983, a computer programmer working in the Massachusetts Institute for Technology AI Lab announced a plan that was the antithesis of the proprietary software concept that had come to dominate the industry. The plan detailed the creation of a UNIX replacement that would be entirely free, not as in the cost of the product, but as in freedom. That announcement would eventually catapult its author, Richard M. Stallman, into someone known and respected around the world and, perhaps more amazingly, a person that companies such as Apple and Netscape would alter their plans because of. Stallman is not your average advocate of a particular cause. Nearly two decades after the announcement of his GNU System, he has stayed firm on his positions and has founded and guided the Free Software Foundation into an organization capable of promoting and managing the GNU System, a set of components that form more of what is often mistakenly known simply as "Linux" than the Linux kernel itself does.
http://www.ofb.biz/modules.php?name=...rticle&sid=260

Record sales for 'cheap' albums
A record number of albums were sold in the UK in the last year because they are now cheaper than ever, industry figures have revealed. More than 228 million albums were sold in the 12 months from June 2002 - up 3% on the previous year - according to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI). And they were on sale for an average of £9.79 each, which is a new low, the BPI said. But despite the healthiest album sales recorded, music industry profits are down. The BPI said the total UK music market for the first six months of 2003 was down 7% in sales values, compared with last year.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain...ic/3158767.stm

RIAA: Blame Canada
A desperate American recording industry is waging a fierce fight against digital copyright infringement seemingly oblivious to the fact that, for practical purposes, it lost the digital music sharing fight over five years ago. In Canada. "On March 19, 1998, Part VIII of the (Canadian) Copyright Act dealing with private copying came into force. Until that time, copying any sound recording for almost any purpose infringed copyright, although, in practice, the prohibition was largely unenforceable. The amendment to the Act legalized copying of sound recordings of musical works onto audio recording media for the private use of the person who makes the copy (referred to as "private copying"). In addition, the amendment made provision for the imposition of a levy on blank audio recording media to compensate authors, performers and makers who own copyright in eligible sound recordings being copied for private use."
http://www.techcentralstation.com/10...D=1051-081803C

Open-Source Community Approaches SCO
Members of the open-source community have approached The SCO Group with a proposal that they hope will allow them to look at the alleged offending Unix code in the Linux kernel either without or under a less restrictive non-disclosure agreement. SCO has said that no one can see its Unix code without signing an NDA agreement that will protect its intellectual property rights. But many in the open-source community say the NDA is unreasonable and far too restrictive in its current form. "The current NDA is completely unreasonable and will prejudice the ability of any of us to do our job going forward if we sign it. We feel that SCO needs to be reasonable about granting access to the offending code.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1224877,00.asp

More news later on

[RDixon]

"You have to study computers all the way through so it won't melt or blow up or light on fire."

ROTFL

[MRON]

Originally posted by RDixon
"You have to study computers all the way through so it won't melt or blow up or light on fire."

ROTFL

LOL....i read that three times trying to understand it!!!

never seen that happen in my life...yet

cool news, thanks WT!

[multi]

"In addition, the amendment made provision for the imposition of a levy on blank audio recording media to compensate authors, performers and makers who own copyright in eligible sound recordings being copied for private use."

that bit worries me..
dont know why..
how will they be able to tell whos stuff is getting copied?