The Newspaper Shop -- Thursday edition

[walktalker]

Big Blue files counterclaims against SCO
IBM on Thursday filed counterclaims against the SCO Group in the continuing legal battle over the Linux operating system. In a 45-page document that it filed late Wednesday, IBM argues that because SCO distributed a version of Linux under the open-source General Public License (GPL), it can't claim that Linux software is proprietary. IBM also argues that SCO software violates four IBM patents and that the company interfered with IBM's business by saying it had terminated IBM's right to ship a Unix product, AIX. IBM is seeking unspecified monetary damages and an injunction to stop SCO from shipping its software. The counterclaims came as part of Big Blue's answer to SCO's amended suit and were filed in the same federal district court in Utah.
http://news.com.com/2100-1016-5060965.html?tag=nl

Merrill Lynch boots outside ISPs
Merrill Lynch on Friday will ban access to outside e-mail services from popular sites such as America Online, Yahoo and MSN, in response to regulatory requirements and to protect its network from viruses, according to a company memo. The policy shift will affect the 48,000 Merrill Lynch employees worldwide who use the company's Internet network. A Merrill Lynch representative said the policy is an extension of existing bans in departments such as the trading desk. Other investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs, have similar companywide policies. The policy will also affect access to outside message boards, chat rooms and forums, and any access to accounts from Internet service providers. The memo also included Juno, EarthLink and Comcast in its list of banned ISPs.
http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5061310.html?tag=fd_top

Newspapers: Help wanted in Net ad battle
Traditional newspapers are taking the gloves off in a high-stakes brawl with Web-based competitors over the control of help-wanted classified advertising. The fight escalated this week, when CareerBuilder.com announced exclusive deals with America Online and MSN that will lock rival Monster.com out of two of the most highly trafficked sites on the Web. Whether CareerBuilder's deals will bear fruit remains to be seen. But the message sent by the joint venture of newspaper conglomerates Gannett, Tribune Company and Knight Ridder was clear: The newspaper industry will go to extraordinary lengths to prevent Web rivals Monster.com and Yahoo's HotJobs.com from chipping away at its coveted help-wanted business.
http://news.com.com/2100-1024_3-5061148.html?tag=fd_top

Study: It's a small world, to a degree
It really is a small world. The idea that there are only six degrees of separation -- only a handful of people between you and anyone else in the world -- holds true on the Internet, researchers said Thursday. An experiment in which Internet users were asked to find any one of 18 strangers by using their online connections, showed that it took, on average, only five to seven steps by using friends and acquaintances. The results, published this week in the journal Science, illustrate how social networks operate and how they have become truly global, the team at Columbia University said. "The Internet is just a tool for doing this. It is all about social networks,'' said Duncan Watts, who led the study. The findings can shed light on epidemics, cultural fads, stock markets and organizations that are surviving change, Watts said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1029_3-5061224.html?tag=fd_top

Mad as hell and not going to take it
After weeks of Linux-baiting, the folks at SCO Group finally managed to light Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik's famously short fuse. On Monday, Red Hat slapped SCO with a seven-count lawsuit that Szulik said was designed to head off a "campaign of innuendo and rumor." SCO earlier this year filed a billion-dollar suit against IBM for alleged copying of its proprietary Unix intellectual property into Linux. The case has ramifications beyond these two companies. If SCO can make its claims stick in court, customers may be on the hook for damages. Indeed, the company has sent letters to about 1,500 Linux customers, warning that they may be infringing on SCO's intellectual property.
http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-5060916.html?tag=fd_top

Chipmakers sharpen 65-nanometer focus
Chartered Semiconductor, IBM and Infineon Technologies said Wednesday that they had agreed to a joint deal to advance development of the next frontier of computer-chip manufacturing technology. Chartered and IBM, two of the world's four biggest contract makers of custom computer chips, together with Infineon, a major maker of memory chips, said in a joint statement that they were working to speed development of 65-nanometer chips. One hundred nanometers is roughly 1/1000th the width of a human hair. The push to build computer chips at increasingly tiny geometries drives down the cost while multiplying the performance and complexity of semiconductor devices. The venture could enable chips to be built with circuit wires that are just 65 nanometers apart. The tiniest chips now being commercially built are 90 nanometers in width. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
http://news.com.com/2100-1006_3-5060969.html?tag=fd_top

Digital CD decks challenge vinyl
The success of a digital system that allows CDs to be scratched and mixed in the same way as 12-inch records could mean the death end of DJs using vinyl, a top DJ and record producer has said. The system, called the CDJ-1000 and produced by technology company Pioneer, has been designed to replicate as much as possible a traditional vinyl deck, but taking advantage of modern digital technology. The decks, which have already won a number of awards, have been given great approval by Erick Morillo, boss of Subliminal records and one of the most influential DJs in the world. "I'm letting technology take over," Mr Morillo told BBC World Service's The Music Biz programme. "With the introduction of the CDJ-1000 I feel like there's a whole new way of DJing these days."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3128653.stm

Camera Van Brakes for Close-Ups
When Shaun Irving goes on vacation he doesn't have to worry about forgetting his camera -- he'll be driving it. Irving has built what he believes to be the world's largest traveling camera on gas-powered wheels. It's certainly the only camera that gets 15 miles per gallon. He constructed the machine, dubbed Peanut, out of an old mail-delivery truck he bought on eBay and surplus military parts, including a lens that came straight from a submarine periscope. The camera truck takes photos that are 4 feet tall and 8 feet wide -- more than 3,000 times larger than the typical negative. It's essentially one step above a pinhole camera, the standard prop used in introductory photography classes. Irving composes his images by driving closer to or farther away from his subjects and stands inside the camera to make the images.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,59929,00.html

Horse Clone's Sister is Mom, Too
Italian scientists said Wednesday that they had created the world's first cloned horse from an adult cell taken from the horse that gave birth to her. Prometea, a healthy female, weighed in at 80 pounds when she was born during a natural delivery May 28 in Italy after a normal, full-term pregnancy. Although sheep, mice, cats, cattle, goats and pigs already have been cloned, Prometea is the first animal carried and born by the mother from which it was cloned. "This is the first horse that has been cloned from an adult cell. She has been carrying herself, so the newborn is the twin of the mother that carried the pregnancy," said Dr. Cesare Galli, of the Laboratory of Reproductive Technology, a nonprofit research organization in Cremona, Italy.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,59924,00.html

Phone tracker keeps tabs on mobile users
A new mobile service will let UK users pinpoint another person's physical location at all times, based on the individual's mobile phone signal. The mapAmobile service from Carphone Warehouse is being marketed with the slogan "for your peace of mind" and positions itself as a way to keep an eye on loved ones. However, some may be slightly concerned at reading that the Web site also refers to "knowing where your loved ones or colleagues are at any time." Carphone Warehouse is hoping the UK public will find the service cool, not creepy, and says mapAmobile is well suited to parents, for example, who want to keep in touch with children. The company says the service should be able to find people accurately to within 50 metres, covering the major UK mobile networks of O2, Vodafone, Orange and T-Mobile.
http://www.electricnews.net/news.html?code=9370858

Software piracy battlefield
The war for control of intellectual property is being waged on many fronts using an array of strategies that will have a dramatic effect on consumers and business over the next few years. Music-swap sites, such as Morpheus and the Australian-owned KaZaA, are Weapons of Mass Destruction aimed at the music industry, but the conflict does not begin and end on that battlefield. The local IT industry threw itself into the fray late last week. Pre-eminent lobby group, the Australian Information Industries Association (AIIA), has baulked at a proposal before government to put a levy on all blank media and any technology that can copy and distribute audio and video files. Meanwhile, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has taken a swing at the Federal Court for its decision to outlaw a modification chip (mod-chip) designed to defeat Sony's fear of copyright theft.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...E15309,00.html

Linux Robot: Could Be A Hero, Could Be A Toaster
The Linux operating system has a growing following among business-software users, but could Linux one day play a key role in the search and rescue of disaster victims? At LinuxWorld in San Francisco this week, scientists from SRI International's Artificial Intelligence Center demonstrated Linux-based robots that can search for objects and people in environments unsafe for rescue workers, such as the site of a chemical spill or an earthquake-damaged building. The research project is sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Linux was chosen for the robots, called Centibots, because they require a small, reliable operating system that has drivers for a variety of devices, can be automatically installed, and have a journaling file system, says Regis Vincent, a scientist with the nonprofit research institute.
http://www.informationweek.com/story...cleID=13000333

Piracy warning over digitised fine art
A scheme to digitise famous paintings that was unveiled last week by the National Gallery in London, UK, may be placing the collection at risk of digital piracy. Now music and movie makers are warning the world of fine arts to act quickly if it wants to prevent the same kind of high-tech piracy that is crippling their industries. The National Gallery has been working with computer giant Hewlett-Packard for eight years on a scheme to digitise all of its 2300 paintings. The images have been captured with a digital camera that steps backwards and forwards over the painting, a technique that improves the resolution of the image to 100 megapixels, 20 times that of the best consumer cameras. Wen someone places an order, a six-colour printer in the gallery's shop will print out a high-quality copy in just five minutes.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994030

Making the web pay
The internet is coming close to answering the question creative people have been asking for years. Can an individual with a talent for writing, drawing, photography or music use the internet, not to create millions, but to make enough to live comfortably and do what they want to do professionally? What's more, the answer may well turn out to be a hesitant yes. Six years on from the start of the popular web explosion, people are adjusting to paying for content on the internet. The Wall Street Journal, for example, announced last month that its subscriber base had brought in $80m (£50m) last year. Revenues for the online wing of the New York Times have grown more than 20% in this past quarter to $21.6m (£15m): operating profit increased to a record $4.3m (£2.7m). The Guardian started to charge for some services this month. It goes on.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/sto...013313,00.html

Legal battle rages over free code
Supporters of the Linux operating system are rallying to defend it against claims of copyright infringement and demands that they pay at least $700 to use it. Linux is open source software, meaning the code is freely available to all and often developed by large and disparate communities. The dispute could lead to changes in the development process, some observers say. Utah-based software business SCO, which sells versions of the operating system UNIX, claims that portions of its code appear in the latest versions of the Linux kernel - the heart of the operating system. SCO first filed a lawsuit against IBM on 7 March, claiming it had violated a contract by copying propriety code into the kernel.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994034

Most efficient solar cell yet revealed
The race to develop cost-effective solar power has sped up with the announcement of the world's most efficient photovoltaic cell yet. Spectrolab, a subsidiary of Boeing based in California, US, has created a photovoltaic cell capable of converting 36 per cent of the Sun's rays into electricity. By contrast, ordinary existing solar cells are between 10 and 15 per cent energy efficient. Solar power experts have welcomed the development, but point out that much work remains to be done before the Sun's energy can be much more widely harnessed. In particular, the design used by Spectrolab is still relatively expensive to manufacture and it is not suitable for use in every location.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994033

Supporters back away from software bill
The key supporters of a software-licensing bill that critics say promotes corporate rights over those of consumers have, in the face of mounting opposition, decided to quit lobbying for its enactment. The Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA), drafted four years ago, is meant to protect software developers from intellectual property theft by resolving conflicting software licensing laws that vary from state to state. But critics have complained that the proposed laws favor corporate interests over those of consumers. They say it grants software makers too much freedom in restricting the use of their products and in dictating settlement terms for conflicts. UCITA has been enacted in only two states, Maryland and Virginia, since the group of law experts that drafted the bill began its enactment campaign.
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/article.../08062003c.php

They love it at Linux
The Linux operating system is getting so popular and evolving so quickly that just about everyone wants to be on the bandwagon. At this week's LinuxWorld convention in San Francisco, there's been talk that open-source software is a disruptive force that is changing the status quo in the computing establishment. But no one wants to admit that they're being disrupted. Just who are the losers as the Linux programming community grows and the open-source operating system widens its reach from cell phones to supercomputers? Microsoft certainly seems to be the establishment company that is now a victim.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...ey/6477949.htm

Govt criticises Iceland's slaughter for science programme
The Government said there was "no justification" for any country to carry out a lethal whaling programme in the interests of "science". Foreign Affairs Minister Phil Goff and Conservation Minister Chris Carter yesterday joined other countries and conservation groups in criticising Iceland's announcement it planned to begin hunting whales for so-called scientific purposes. Iceland's Ministry of Fisheries said Iceland planned to hunt 38 minke whales for scientific purposes beginning this month. "This is disingenuous. There is no justification for any country to carry out a lethal whaling programme in the interests of science when modern non-lethal research techniques can generate all the information required by the International Whaling Commission's (IWC) scientific committee," the ministers said.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,...2a7693,00.html

More news later on

[RDixon]

The SCO attack on Linux is heating up.
It will be interesting to watch over the next few months to see what develops next.