The Newspaper Shop -- Wednesday edition

[walktalker]

SBC claims Web frames patent
SBC Communications is claiming a wide-ranging patent on Web frames that could affect hundreds of sites that use the technology. In a letter sent to at least one company that uses frames on its Web site, SBC said it is entitled to as much as $50 million in licensing fees, although actual figures would depend upon a company's revenue. Museum Tour, a Milwaukie, Ore.-based seller of educational products, received a letter from SBC last week accusing it of infringing two of its patents. In the letter sent to Museum Tour President Marilynne Eichinger, SBC's Harlie Frost, president of intellectual property, pointed out that the Museumtour.com Web site contains tabs pointing to different Web pages within the site, and those tabs are in a frame that does not disappear as a person navigates the site.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-981446.html

Judge sets "Java in Windows" timetable
Update A federal judge in Baltimore on Tuesday set a schedule that Microsoft must meet for including Sun Microsystems' Java programming language with its Windows operating system. The decision by U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz had been expected after the judge ruled on Dec. 23 that Sun stood a good chance of winning its antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft and told both sides to craft a preliminary injunction. Teams of lawyers from the companies worked through the weekend and handed the proposed order to Motz on Monday. In the 11-page order, Motz gave Sun what it requested when filing the lawsuit: an injunction ordering Microsoft immediately to stop distributing incompatible versions of Sun's Java interpreter and to begin shipping authorized versions with Windows and Internet Explorer in four months. The injunction will remain in effect until a trial takes place or an appeals court lifts the requirements.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-981381.html

Nvidia adds special FX for workstations
Graphics chip leader Nvidia plans to announce Tuesday a new line of high-end chips for graphic artists, mechanical designers and other professionals. The new Quadro FX chips are the next step in Nvidia's Quadro line of graphics chips for workstations, which are high-performance PCs used for computer-assisted drafting, 3D animation and other demanding tasks. Workstations are a relatively small but profitable segment of the PC business, with annual sales of around 1 million units. News of the chips follows the announcement in November of the GeForce FX chip, designed for consumer and business PCs. The GeForce FX, expected to become available to consumers in March, has been the subject of repeated delays, mostly linked to Nvidia's shift to a more efficient 0.13-micron chipmaking process.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-981340.html

Silicon Valley bust turns back the clock
The tech bust has turned back the economic clock in the Silicon Valley, according to a report on the region scheduled for release Friday. Office lease rates, venture capital investments and salaries have dropped to near-1998 levels, wiping out the gains made over the past five years, according to an annual report by Joint Venture: Silicon Valley. In a grim assessment of the region, which once boasted legions of dot-com highfliers, the Joint Venture report said that Silicon Valley has lost more than half of the jobs created during the boom.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-981479.html

Real releases digital media source code
RealNetworks on Wednesday made available the source code for sending video and audio over the Internet to other software and hardware makers. The release of the code, called the Helix DNA Server, is part of RealNetworks' push to create a universal technology for sending and receiving digital media in order to fend off crosstown rival Microsoft. Late in 2002, Seattle-based RealNetworks had already announced two other components of its Helix technology: the software player used to receive digital streams, and encoding software used to convert raw content into digital format. With all three components, developers such as mobile phone manufacturers can create systems that can send and receive digital content in any format, said Dan Sheeran, vice president of media systems at RealNetworks.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-981522.html?tag=fd_top

RIAA wins battle to ID Kazaa user
A federal judge on Tuesday ordered Verizon Communications to disclose the identity of an alleged peer-to-peer pirate in a legal decision that could make it easier for the music industry to crack down on file swapping. In what is widely viewed as a test case, U.S. District Judge John Bates said the wording of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requires Verizon to give the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) the name of a Kazaa subscriber who allegedly has shared hundreds of music recordings. Bates said, "The court disagrees with Verizon's strained reading of the act," and ordered Verizon to comply with the DMCA request from the record labels.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-981449.html?tag=fd_top

Hacker Mitnick's Internet homecoming
Notorious computer hacker Kevin Mitnick is going online Tuesday for the first time in nearly a decade. The event marks the end of a long journey for the 39-year-old convicted cybercriminal. Mitnick began his trip through the U.S. legal system in February 1995, when he was captured in a raid and sent to jail for almost five years for computer crimes against companies including Sun Microsystems and Motorola. The prison term was followed by another three and a half years of restrictions regarding Mitnick's access to computers and the Internet. "The greatest relief is that I am no longer subject to any conditions of supervised release," Mitnick said in an interview Tuesday. "I am a free man." Mitnick, whose Internet homecoming happens at 4 p.m. PST on TechTV's ScreenSavers, said he will first go to the Web site of his girlfriend, Darci Wood, a former TechTV producer.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-981470.html?tag=cd_mh

Kennedy hopes accessible site leads way
Sen. Edward Kennedy's office unveiled a revamped Web site Tuesday, one of the first congressional sites to fully comply with federal laws requiring accessibility for disabled users. Ngozi Pole, office manager for the long-serving Massachusetts Democrat, said the office redesigns the Web site every few years, and the priorities this time were allowing nontechnical office workers to easily contribute to the site, and achieving full accessibility compliance. Section 508 of the federal Rehabilitation Act requires that all government Web sites be fully accessible to users with physical, sensory and cognitive disabilities. Accessibility poses a number of challenges, such as making sure all relevant page content can be scanned by "screen readers," audio programs that read computer text out loud for blind users.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-981456.html?tag=cd_mh

Via chips away at security issues
Via Technologies is promising to put a padlock on PC data. The chipmaker, best known in the United States for its Apollo chipsets, will announce on Tuesday a new C3 processor that includes a data security feature, dubbed Padlock. According to Via, the C3 will ship by month's end. The 1GHz processor incorporates a random number generator, a tool used in file encryption. Software makers can use a programming tool from Via to write applications that, in turn, use the generator to encrypt their files. The need for better data security has been highlighted lately by the rise of identity theft and developments such as a recent MIT study showing the ease with which old hard drives can yield sensitive information.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-981394.html

RIAA's Rosen Sets Sights on ISPs
The Recording Industry Association of America wants to go after the companies that provide you with your Internet access. Here are some of the printable reactions since RIAA chief Hilary Rosen presented the proposal last weekend, during which she said Internet service providers would soon "be held accountable" for money the music industry has lost due to file-swapping services: It's stupid. Unethical. Illegal. Insane. "Blaming ISPs for giving these hardened criminals the bandwidth for perpetrating their heinous file-sharing acts is akin to blaming the highway department for creating roads that are used by dope smugglers," said security consultant Robert Ferrell. "It just doesn't make sense."
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,57326,00.html

Annoying Spam List: Annoying Spam
If there's one thing more loathsome than getting spammed, it's getting spammed about spam. One might call it spam spam. So when a Northern California company broadcasted an unsolicited mass mailing to the press on Tuesday with the subject line "ANTI-SPAM LEADER SURFCONTROL CITES TOP 10 MOST ANNOYING SPAM IN 2002," it was, well, a tad annoying. Not only are Internet scribbles typed in all caps the equivalent of offline shouting, the ploy is also a time-honored technique used by spam-meisters, along with misspellings and exclamation points. Indeed, most filtering systems intercept messages with subject lines in all capitals and reroute them to a junk folder.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,57329,00.html

Song Search: A Real Humdinger
For better or worse, technological advances have transformed the music industry, but technology may now help even the tone-deaf to name that tune. Software developed by Germany's Fraunhofer Institut, the creators of the MP3 digital audio format that is now ubiquitous across the Internet, have a solution. It's called "Query by Humming," a type of melody-recognition software program on display at this week's Midem music conference in Cannes that identifies a song by title and composer based on a person humming a few bars into a microphone. Fraunhofer officials a number of firms are working on rival humming-recognition products, and that there have even been calls by some developers to do a "hum-off" competition aiming to settle the score over whose product is best.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,57317,00.html

[multi]

RIAA wins battle to ID Kazaa user
A federal judge on Tuesday ordered Verizon Communications to disclose the identity of an alleged peer-to-peer pirate in a legal decision that could make it easier for the music industry to crack down on file swapping. In what is widely viewed as a test case, U.S. District Judge John Bates said the wording of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requires Verizon to give the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) the name of a Kazaa subscriber who allegedly has shared hundreds of music recordings. Bates said, "The court disagrees with Verizon's strained reading of the act," and ordered Verizon to comply with the DMCA request from the record labels.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-981449.html?tag=fd_top

shit WTF is this going to mean!?!?

[TankGirl]

Originally posted by walktalker
SBC claims Web frames patent
SBC Communications is claiming a wide-ranging patent on Web frames that could affect hundreds of sites that use the technology. In a letter sent to at least one company that uses frames on its Web site, SBC said it is entitled to as much as $50 million in licensing fees, although actual figures would depend upon a company's revenue. Museum Tour, a Milwaukie, Ore.-based seller of educational products, received a letter from SBC last week accusing it of infringing two of its patents. In the letter sent to Museum Tour President Marilynne Eichinger, SBC's Harlie Frost, president of intellectual property, pointed out that the Museumtour.com Web site contains tabs pointing to different Web pages within the site, and those tabs are in a frame that does not disappear as a person navigates the site.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-981446.html

Every time I see some greedy company demanding license fees for something as simple and commonly used as a double click, based on some old patent that some ignorant patent office clerk has happened to grant... I feel like .... sheer abuse of the patent system.... we all would be much better off if all software and algorithms were non-patentable.

Anyway, thanks for the news, WT!

- tg