The Newspaper Shop -- Monday edition

[walktalker]

SCO takes aim at Linux users
SCO Group, a company that says Linux infringes on its Unix intellectual property, announced on Monday that it has been granted key Unix copyrights and will start a program to let companies that run Linux avoid litigation by paying licensing fees. The company, which is at the heart of a controversial lawsuit over Linux code, said it plans to offer licenses that will support run-time, binary use of Linux to all companies that use Linux kernel versions 2.4 and later. "We have a solution that gets you clean, gets you square with the use of Linux without having to go to the courtroom," SCO Chief Executive Darl McBride said in a conference call Monday.
http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-5047...g=fd_lede1_hed

Analyst: Crime pays for identity thieves
The number of consumers who have fallen prey to identity thieves is severely underreported, market researcher Gartner said in a survey released Monday. The research firm estimates that 3.4 percent of U.S. consumers -- about 7 million adults -- have been victims of identity theft of some form in the past year. Moreover, arrests in identity theft cases are extremely rare, catching the perpetrator in only one out of every 700 cases, said Avivah Litan, vice president of financial service for Gartner. "The odds are really stacked against the consumers," she said. "Unfortunately, they are the only ones with a vested interest in fixing the problem." The release of the survey comes as state and federal governments are trying to stem the problem of identity theft.
http://news.com.com/2100-1009_3-5050295.html?tag=fd_top

Teen charged with AOL scam
U.S. regulators have charged a 17-year-old boy with using "spam" e-mails and a fake AOL Web page to trick people out of their credit card information and to steal thousands of dollars. Federal Trade Commission representatives said on Monday that they had agreed to settle their case against the teenager, who was not identified because of his age, after he agreed to pay back $3,500 he had stolen, and to submit to a lifetime ban on sending spam. It's the first enforcement action the FTC has taken against such an Internet scam that used unwanted e-mail to lure people to look-alike Web sites, where they are deceived into forking over personal financial data. "We're only beginning to discover the extent of these e-mails. They're only beginning to proliferate right now," FTC commissioner Mozelle Thompson told a news conference.
http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-5050716.html?tag=fd_top

Playing Tag with Shoppers' Anonymity
In Biblical times, it was David vs. Goliath. Today, it's Katherine vs. Wal-Mart. Katherine Albrecht is a Harvard doctoral candidate and founder of a self-styled consumer group called Customers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion & Numbering (CASPIAN for short). She's on a crusade against the giant retailer and other corporations that want to use a new technology called RFID, or radio frequency ID tags. These are tiny computer chips attached to merchandise that beam out unique identification information, such as serial numbers, to scanners as far as 10 feet away. Wal-Mart announced in January that it would test a so-called smart shelf at its Brockton (Mass.) store that would use RFID tags to track the sale of Gillette razor blades and automatically update inventory. Albrecht has been throwing stones at Wal-Mart ever since. On June 6, she claims to have seen the smart shelf in use -- and she took several photos for proof, using a disposable camera purchased on the premises.
http://businessweek.com/technology/c...8408_tc073.htm

Google beefs up news searches
Google on Monday unveiled refinements to technology for searching daily news, its latest effort to become the Web's go-to hub for headlines. Google's new service, called Advanced News Search, allows visitors to scour headlines by date, location, exact phrases or publication. People can use it retrieve articles from more than 4,500 news outlets publishing on the Web. Advanced News Search adds to the company's ever-expanding set of Web navigation tools and improves on its specialty index, Google News, which was introduced last fall. For example, Google released a new browser toolbar last month that lets people block pop-up ads and easily update their blogs as they surf the Web. For its part, Google News has proved immensely popular, with roughly 2.5 million unique visitors in June, according to Nielsen-NetRatings.
http://news.com.com/2100-1024_3-5051022.html?tag=cd_mh

Amazon plan allows text searches of many books
Executives at Amazon.com are negotiating with several of the largest book publishers about an ambitious and expensive plan to assemble a searchable online archive with the texts of tens of thousands of books of nonfiction, according to several publishing executives involved. Amazon plans to limit how much of any given book a user can read, and it is telling publishers that the plan will help sell more books while better serving its own online customers. Together with little-publicized additions to Amazon's Web site, like listings of restaurants and movie showings, the plan appears to be part of a strategy to compete with online search services like Google and Yahoo for consumers' time and attention. Providing a searchable online database of the contents of books could make Amazon a more authoritative source of information, drawing additional traffic to its online retail store.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5049506.html?tag=cd_mh

Backyard Paparazzi to the Stars
Earlier this year, Stefan Seip snapped an astonishing picture of the sun that was chosen by NASA as the Astronomy Picture of the Day on July 7. Remarkably, given the quality of the picture, Seip isn't a professional astronomer. He's a 39-year-old IT sales consultant who lives in Stuttgart, Germany. Seip took the picture from his balcony during breakfast with his girlfriend, using a 4-inch refractor telescope, a special filter and an inexpensive digital camera. "I had the luck to capture one of those rare moments when you can actually see such large prominences at the edge of the sun," said Seip. Seip's picture -- and the dozens of others at his well-organized website -- illustrates the remarkable effect of consumer digital cameras on amateur astrophotography. Inexpensive digital cameras, consumer camcorders and even webcams are helping amateurs take pictures of the cosmos that only professional astronomers could have achieved a few years ago.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,59682,00.html

Second Life Intrudes on First One
Wagner James Au is an embedded journalist. But his beat isn't Iraq or Afghanistan. In fact, it's not even in what most people would call "the real world." Instead, Au is reporting from inside a new online three-dimensional virtual world called Second Life and filing his dispatches on the game's community site. Second Life is an experiment in which open-ended social interaction collides head-on with surreal engineering. It's a lush, multitextured and lavishly detailed online world where alien spaceships abduct unsuspecting bystanders, travelers summon flying taxis and strangers band together to create residential communities reminiscent of the wild West or the medieval Orient. None of this was ever prescribed in any manual.
http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,59675,00.html

Patriot Act Complaints Reviewed
Justice Department investigators found that 34 claims were credible of more than 1,000 civil rights and civil liberties complaints stemming from anti-terrorism efforts, including allegations of intimidation and false arrest. According to a report Monday, Glenn A. Fine, the Justice Department's inspector general, looked into allegations made between Dec. 16, 2002, and June 15 under oversight provisions of the USA Patriot Act. Many complaints were from Muslims or people of Arab descent who claimed they were beaten or verbally abused while being detained. Among these are a claim by a Muslim inmate that he was ordered to "remove his shirt so that the officer could use it to shine his shoes" and a complaint from an Egyptian national that he was improperly arrested by the FBI after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59709,00.html

Play Your Tunes Away From Home
The funny thing about covering the music beat for Wired News is that I rarely listen to music while I work. That's why it was such a treat to poke around Muse.Net. The service plugs people in to their digital music collection through any Internet connection. So for the past few days, I've been quietly humming "Possibly Maybe" by Bjork and bobbing my head to "Begin the Beguine" while typing. Yes, there was even a little chair dancing to Michael Jackson. "Your media should move with you," said Ian Rogers, president and CTO of Mediacode, the parent company of Muse.Net. "Muse.Net provides the ability to play back from anywhere, to anywhere. That might be as simple as having one machine at home where you store all your music that you want to access at work." Sure, listening to music at work is not unique.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,59646,00.html

Latest Cancer Fighter: Pepperoni
Italian scientists say gorging on pizza could help reduce the risk of certain types of cancer. In a twist on the accepted medical wisdom that food you enjoy tends to be bad for you, researchers at a Milan pharmacology center found that eating one or more pizzas a week dramatically reduced the incidence of some types of cancer. A study of 8,000 Italians found that regular pizza-eaters were 59 percent less likely to contract cancer of the esophagus, while the risk of developing cancer of the colon fell by 26 percent. Of course, the odds of dying of a heart attack probably shoot way up, too.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,59704,00.html

US Navy dumps Microsoft, makes network the weapon
The United States Navy is quietly and aggressively touting its horn on adapting a Network-Centric philosophy, one that will win them brownie points with Donald Rumsfeld and the current wave of "transformational" thinking flowing through the Pentagon. To rework the old cliche, the network is the weapon, more specifically the glue that binds together sensors and weapons, allowing warfighters to view the battlefield more precisely and apply the force necessary to achieve desired "effects." The new way of fighting is built around Internet standards, including web pages, routers, Ethernet, instant messaging, and chat rooms. Casualties appear to be both expensive customized systems and Microsoft software.
http://inquirerinside.com/?article=10581

No glass ceiling to Linux, says Torvalds
Fears that Linux will hit a glass ceiling are unfounded, according to its creator Linus Torvalds, who predicts the open source operating system will march from strength to strength. Speaking during a panel debate last week at Computer Associates' CA World in Las Vegas, Torvalds was asked whether he thought application support for Linux would reach a plateau. "I used to think so, but we passed that point so long ago that I don't think there's a glass ceiling. The point of open source is having people come together and improve the product," he told the audience. Other panel members, which included executives from Red Hat, SuSE and Oracle, agreed.
http://www.vnunet.com/News/1142477

Digging for Googleholes
The arrival of Google five years ago served as a kind of upgrade for the entire Web. Searching for information went from a sluggish, unreliable process to something you could do with genuine confidence. If it was online somewhere, Google and its ingenious PageRank system would find what you were looking for — and more often than not, the information would arrive in Google's top 10 results. But the oracle — recently described as "a little bit like God" in the New York Times — is not perfect. Certain types of requests foil the Google search system or produce results that frustrate more than satisfy. These are systemic problems, not isolated ones; you can reproduce them again and again. The algorithms that Google's search engine relies on have been brilliantly optimized for most types of information requests, but sometimes that optimization backfires. That's when you find yourself in a Googlehole.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2085668/

Sensors guard privacy
In a world where sensor networking and location tracking technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated and prevalent, preserving privacy is an increasingly difficult challenge. Researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder have addressed the problem with a way to set up networks of tiny sensors that allows users to gain useful traffic statistics but preserves privacy by cloaking location information for any given individual. "We realized that privacy policies tend to get incredibly complex because they need to define in detail under which circumstances who should get access to what information," said Marco Gruteser, a researcher at the University of Colorado.
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2003/0...cy_071603.html

Mickey aims to sink the pirates
Partnerships come in all shapes and sizes. Some are good: cheese and pickle, Posh and Becks, Tony Hart and Morph. Some are less good: John and Yoko, Bush and Blair, Sara Cox and my radio. Some are just ridiculous: David Gest and Liza Minnelli. This month a partnership was announced that would seem to fit into all three categories. A group of American scientists who are developing a system that could make the internet up to 6,000 times faster have been talking to Microsoft and Disney about developing possible applications for it. Normally my heart would soar at the idea of giant entertainment and technology companies taking an interest in the evolution of the internet but when I heard the news I couldn't help wondering what on earth Disney and Microsoft were playing at. Just think how many more movies, music tracks and copies of Microsoft Office you will be able to download if your web connection suddenly gets 6,000 times faster. About 5,999. And yet Bill and Mickey are keen to get on board?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/new...002126,00.html

Is MIT a Security Risk?
Thousands of male international students and scholars who were born in any of 26 predominantly Muslim countries (see “Special-Registration Countries,” bottom) are reliving Zuberi’s experience nationwide. The mandate for these students to register is part of a new effort by the government to ferret out possible terrorists. (Three of the terrorists involved in the September 11 attacks had entered the country on student visas.) And since January 2003, U.S. educational institutions have been required to enter all foreign nationals into the new tracking system. Sanctioned by the USA Patriot Act passed in 2001 and under a strict deadline from Congress, the tracking system was implemented before it was fully developed and tested. As a result, it crashes frequently, loses data, is painfully slow, and has been publicly labeled a disaster by at least one Washington lawmaker.
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/atwood0703.asp

Cyber sex lures love cheats
Most spouses who got involved with the opposite sex over the internet did not think they were doing anything wrong, said the report by a University of Florida researcher. But partners felt betrayed by the virtual infidelity, even though in most cases no physical contact had taken place. "The internet will soon become the most common form of infidelity, if it isn't already," said Beatriz Mileham, from the University of Florida, who carried out the new study. "Never before has the dating world been so handy for married men and women looking for a fling. "With cyber sex, there is no longer any need for secret trips to obscure motels. An online liaison may even take place in the same room with one's spouse."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3083173.stm

BluFilter may a provide a solution for artists and Filesharers
Exciting news over at Music Industry News may provide a much needed solution for the online music community. A BETA release of BluFilter: Authorize software will allow artists to list thier material in a web based BluFilter database and set prices. Then P2P network facilitators such as Kazaa, Morpheus etc. can plug in the BluFilter ActiveX component into thier applications for free. Here is how it will work. When a user or file sharer completes the download of a song, the BluFilter component extracts a digital signature of that file and cross references it with the content database to check for copyright validity. If the file is copyrighted, the user can opt to purchase it for the preset price otherwise the file is deleted. While the majority of the transaction revenue goes directly to the artist or record company, a percentage will also go to the file-sharing network.
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/article.../07192003d.php

Music industry goes after ordinary young listeners
In the eyes of the music recording industry, 22-year-old Ted Gibbs is a criminal. A graduate student at Loyola University, Gibbs goes online four or five times a week and downloads music over so-called peer-to-peer networks, where copyrighted music is available free of charge from other users. Many students he knows do the same, he said. But last month, the Recording Industry Association of America announced it would try to find digital music swappers and sue them for copyright infringement. Last week, in response to a federal subpoena filed by the RIAA, Loyola confirmed it had turned over the names of two students allegedly engaged in the practice.
http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/...s-music20.html

More interesting news later on

[MRON]

WT !

tanks for the news, man


<flips a cookie for Netcoco>

[multi]

Googlehole No. 1: All Shopping, All the Time. If you're searching for something that can be sold online, Google's top results skew very heavily toward stores, and away from general information. Search for "flowers," and more than 90 percent of the top results are online florists. If you're doing research on tulips, or want to learn gardening tips, or basically want to know anything about flowers that doesn't involve purchasing them online, you have to wade through a sea of florists to find what you're looking for.

The same goes for searching for specific products: Type in the make and model of a new DVD player, and you'll get dozens of online electronic stores in the top results, all of them eager to sell you the item. But you have to burrow through the results to find an impartial product review that doesn't appear in an online catalog.

I suspect this emphasis is due to the convention of linking to an online store when mentioning a product, whether it's a book, CD, or outdoor grill. In addition, a number of sites—such as DealTime—track the latest prices and availability of thousands of items at online stores, which creates even more product links in Google's database. Because PageRank assumes that pages that attract a lot of links are more relevant than pages without links, these most-linked-to product pages bubble up to the top.

Google is replicating one of the problems experienced by some of the big portals—sites like Lycos and Infoseek—during the boom years. They sold so much real estate on their pages to online stores and other advertisers that their results became less reliable, which gave Google its opening in the first place. Now the same thing is happening again, only it's happening organically, without Google manipulating the integrity of its search engine.

Googlehole No. 2: Skewed Synonyms. Search for "apple" on Google, and you have to troll through a couple pages of results before you get anything not directly related to Apple Computer—and it's a page promoting a public TV show called Newton's Apple. After that it's all Mac-related links until Fiona Apple's home page. You have to sift through 50 results before you reach a link that deals with apples that grow on trees: the home page for the Washington State Apple Growers Association. To a certain extent, this probably reflects the interest of people searching as well as those linking, but is the world really that much more interested in Apple Computer than in old-fashioned apples?

At this stage in the Web's development, people who create a lot of links—most notably the blogging community—tend to be more technologically inclined than the general population, and thus more likely to link to Apple Computer than something like the Washington State Apple Growers Association. (This process is sometimes known as "googlewashing," where one group of prolific linkers can alter the online associations with a given word or phrase.) But there's another factor here, which is that categories that don't have central, well-known sites devoted to them will fare poorly when they share a keyword with other categories. Maybe there are thousands of pages that deal with apples, but only one Apple Computer or Fiona Apple home page. People interested in growing or eating apples will distribute those links more widely across those thousands of pages, while Mac or Fiona fans will consolidate around fewer pages, driving them higher in Google's rankings.

Googlehole No. 3: Book Learning. Google is beginning to have a subtle, but noticeable effect on research. More and more scholarly publications are putting up their issues in PDF format, which Google indexes as though they were traditional Web pages. But almost no one is publishing entire books online in PDF form. So, when you're doing research online, Google is implicitly pushing you toward information stored in articles and away from information stored in books. Assuming this practice continues, and assuming that Google continues to grow in influence, we may find ourselves in a world where, if you want to get an idea into circulation, you're better off publishing a PDF file on the Web than landing a book deal.

There's a parallel development in Google's treatment of Web sites that restrict access to their archives. The New York Times may be an authority in the world of opinion, but its closed archives mean that its articles rarely rank highly in Google results, if they appear at all. Search for "Augusta National," Howell Raines' pet obsession from this year, and not a single page from the Times site appears in the top 50 results. Uber-blogger Dave Winer bet the CEO of the New York Times Digital last year that in 2007 bloggers will rank higher than the Times in Google searches. As Winer now puts it: "If you want to be in Google, you gotta be on the Web."

You can't really hold Google responsible for these blind spots. Each of them is just a reflection of the way the Web has been organized by the millions who have contributed to its structure. But the existence of Googleholes suggests an important caveat to the Google-as-oracle rhetoric: Google may be the closest thing going to a vision of the "group mind," but that mind is shaped by the interests and habits of the people who create hypertext links. A group mind decides that Apple Computer is more relevant than the apples that you eat, but that group doesn't speak for everybody.

We're wrong to think of Google as a pure reference source. It's closer to a collectively authored op-ed page—filled with bias, polemics, and a skewed sense of proportion—than an encyclopedia. It's still the connected world's most dazzling place to visit, a perfect condensation of the Web's wider anarchy. Just don't call it an oracle.

good article..