The Newspaper Shop -- Friday edition

[walktalker]

FM station: Copyright fees killed Webcast
The first commercial radio station to stream its programming live via the Web has quit, making good on threats that it would have to pull its Webcasts in the face of royalty fees. Watsonville, Calif.-based KPIG called the decision to stop Webcasts of its FM broadcasts Thursday "a sad day in the cybersty" but said it hoped the decision was only temporary. The Web site will continue to offer copies of live recordings made in the station's studio and still will post a real-time playlist of songs. Bill Goldsmith, KPIG's Web consultant, said the fees cost the station about $3,000 a month -- too much to support an Internet operation that barely breaks even.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-945196.html

Week in review: To pay or not to pay
Mac fans flocked to the Macworld Expo in New York to watch Apple Computer trot out new hardware, software and even a Web services plan -- but it might be a challenge getting people to pay for the offerings. Apple CEO Steve Jobs kicked off the trade show by unveiling new iPod digital-audio players and a new flat-panel iMac. The new iPod players include models built specifically for computers that use Microsoft's Windows operating system. Apple lowered the price of the existing 5GB iPod and a redesigned 10GB model, which is thinner and comes with a new case and remote control. Jobs also introduced a beefier 20GB iPod for $499. The iPod stable now includes three models for Mac users and three models for Windows users with MusicMatch software.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-11-945212.html

The world according to Bill Gates
E-mail has become a publishing medium for market researchers, spammers, exiled political dissidents and people selling ostrich jerky. And now, it will be used by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. Gates, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and other executives will periodically issue newsletters on the company's views about the role of technology and public policy, according to the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant. The first volume of the newsletter, about Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing initiative, went out Wednesday and was penned by Gates. The four-page e-mail gives an overview of the initiative and provides tips on how companies can make their computing environments more secure.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-945055.html

Roll-up TV makes plastic fantastic
First they went wider, then flatter, and now televisions are set to go floppy. Roll-up, flexible televisions, akin to the melting watches of Salvador Dali's surreal landscapes, have become possible because of a glowing plastic compound perfected in the laboratories of Britain's Cambridge Display Technology ( CDT). Roll-up televisions will allow viewers of the future to flip their sets out of sight like projector screens and will come with a similar price tag to bulkier boxes.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-945112.html

Earthlink wins $24 million from spammer
EarthLink has won more than $24 million in a claim against a spammer, but the real victory is in preventing members from being spammed, the company says. EarthLink filed its claim against Tennessee resident K.C. "Khan" Smith in August 2001, accusing him of violating federal and state Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statutes, the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984, the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 and various state laws. The Internet service provider moved for summary judgment in a federal court, and the judge ruled in EarthLink's favor after Khan failed to show up for the hearing or contest the claim.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-945169.html

Ogg Vorbis official release is here
Members of the Ogg Vorbis project have unveiled release 1.0 of their software, an open-source alternative to the MP3 format. The official release of the audio encoding and streaming technology has been widely anticipated by enthusiasts of open-source software. Ogg Vorbis is completely royalty-free, meaning companies can incorporate the technology into their software without cost. The team behind the Ogg Vorbis format is the Xiph Foundation, which serves as a nonprofit parent for the open-source development effort. "After years of research and development, Ogg Vorbis is finally ready for public release," Emmett Plant, CEO of Xiph, said in a statement posted on the foundation's Web site.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-945228.html?tag=fd_top

Federal bill targets electronic waste
Hoping to wake the country from its "e-waste nightmare," a U.S. congressman has introduced a bill intended to address the increasing volumes of obsolete computers. The Computer Hazardous-Waste Infrastructure Program (CHIP) Act would require the Environmental Protection Agency to administer a grant program that would help set up computer recycling across the United States. The program would be funded by a fee of up to $10 on all retail sales of desktop and laptop PCs and computer monitors. The bill, introduced Thursday by Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Calif., is the first such legislation to appear at the federal level. A number of states, most notably California, have similar bills under consideration as their budgets tighten and the costs of collecting and handling discarded electronics grow.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-945089.html?tag=fd_top

Taking Programming to the Extreme
Most programmers are no more satisfied with software quality than their customers. Now a growing number are trying to find ways to create solid software in a market that expects new products and enhancements and wants them fast. Increasingly, software companies are turning to development strategies with names like “agile development” and “extreme programming” — adrenaline-charged catchphrases well-suited to coders’ self-image as rugged heroes of the information age. In reality, the trend — which has a long history — signals a rejection of prima donna programming in favor of teamwork and collaboration.
http://www.technologyreview.com/arti...rman071902.asp

The year of the web worm
This time last year the computer virus called Code Red was supposed to bring the internet to a screeching halt. With the benefit of hindsight we now know that the net was never in danger of being crippled by the virus, but at the time the danger seemed very real. The FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Centre took the almost unprecedented step of announcing that Code Red posed a serious danger and could "degrade services running on the internet". One security expert even predicted that the program could cause a net "meltdown". The fear of a global net slowdown was stoked by the methods the Code Red virus, more properly called a worm, used to spread.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci...00/2138927.stm

High-tech hangout turns amateurs into digital video pros
Here on a scrappy stretch of the Bowery, once known as the city's boulevard of lost souls, a new digital video school, screening room, computer retailer and bar is New York's latest high-tech hangout. It could also be the seat of a revolution in television, according to owner Michael Rosenblum, a former CBS-TV producer who is capitalizing on the fact that falling prices and improved technology have put professional filmmaking in the hands of ordinary people. Today, almost anyone can edit a TV-quality film in his or her own living room. For the price of a two-week holiday in Hawaii, amateurs can buy a laptop, a handheld camera and software such as Apple Computer's Final Cut Pro. Five years ago, they would have had to mortgage their homes.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...al/3686552.htm

Better Instant Messaging Through Linux
Written for the Linux operating system, Gaim may be the best instant messaging program around. Originally written in a college dorm room to emulate AOL's Instant Messenger, it now works not only with the IM protocols championed by Microsoft and Yahoo! but also with older, lesser-known versions like ICQ, Jabber and Zephyr. At one point, AOL sent its lawyers after the IM client, but the programmers who wrote it say Gaim's future looks bright. Like many pieces of software available on Linux, Gaim is free and maintained not by a for-profit company but a band of programmers working in their spare time. Unlike other such open source efforts, though, Gaim works better than any of the for-profit versions.
http://www.forbes.com/2002/07/16/071...artner=newscom

Selling secure laptops no open-shut case
Rop Gonggrijp admits that it's not a promising time to start an Internet privacy company. The founder of NAH6 knows all about flops such as Privada, abandoned software such as PGP and SafeWeb, and struggling firms such as Zero Knowledge. Yet Gonggrijp believes it's possible for his new company to find buyers for its innovative products, which include an encrypted PC, a secure cellular phone and a better way to do secure e-mail. To encourage broad adoption, Amsterdam-based NAH6 plans to release much of its work as open-source software for noncommercial use.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-944715.html?tag=cd_mh

Tech activists protest anti-copying
Enthusiasts of free software disrupted a Commerce Department meeting Wednesday, insisting on their right to debate the entertainment industry over anti-copying technologies. About a dozen vocal tech activists in the audience challenged speakers, including Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), who equated piracy with theft and applauded digital rights management. "I'm going to accord you the utmost respect," Valenti said. "I'm going to listen to you, but let me finish...The first thing we ought to exhibit is good manners." The activists, mostly from New Yorkers for Fair Use, interrupted Valenti with hoots and jeers from the back of the room until the former presidential aide offered them the chance to reply.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-944668.html?tag=cd_mh

Tough talk on Web radio copying
The Recording Industry Association of America said Wednesday that it has begun pressing for anti-copying technology in future digital radio standards. Mitch Glazier, the association's top lobbyist, said the RIAA is contacting IT and consumer electronics groups to ask them to consider a "broadcast flag" for digital music sent through the Internet, satellite or cable. The RIAA's move seems likely to escalate a bitter war of words between the entertainment industry, some hardware makers and open-source aficionados. On Monday, CEOs of some of the largest tech companies including Intel, IBM and Microsoft in a letter to their counterparts in Hollywood stressed a "market-based approach to standards-setting" instead of new government regulations.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-944640.html?tag=cd_mh

Is your cable guy a spy?
On the heels of plans for new powers to patrol people's Web use, the U.S. government is again turning to technology to monitor suspicious activity in the name of fighting terrorism. The government has unveiled more details of its Terrorist Information and Prevention System (TIPS), a plan to recruit volunteers across the country who will keep tabs on dubious or suspicious behavior. "The program will involve the millions of American workers who, in the daily course of their work, are in a unique position to see potentially unusual or suspicious activity in public places," according to the TIPS Web site. Such workers also could include letter carriers, meter readers and others who would have access to private homes.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-944555.html?tag=cd_mh

Linux: Xbox Got More Than Game
Microsoft wants to control every living room across the country, making the computer the centerpiece of the home entertainment network. The Xbox, Microsoft's video-game console, has long been rumored to be at the core of that strategy, a dream that may soon come true thanks to a team of hackers who are transforming the game console into a home computer. The rub is that the newly hacked system will run without any Microsoft software. The Xbox Linux Project -- comprising programmers in Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom -- began hacking a Linux operating system that would work with the game system, which now costs under $200.
http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,53895,00.html

Doc, You Sure About the Cure?
Decades ago, patients with broken ribs wore a belt that held their bones in place and eased their pain. A harmless treatment, right? It's not a drug, it's not an invasive treatment, it's just a cloth strap that eases patients' pain. But because they couldn't take a deep breath or cough while wearing the belt, some developed pneumonia, and some died. Doctors decided the risks weren't worth the benefits and stopped putting belts on people with broken ribs. Now, they just prescribe painkillers. It's one example of how a treatment that seems beneficial or at least not likely to cause harm can over time prove life-threatening.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,53976,00.html

JPEG Patent Claim Sparks Concern
Since 1986, Patent No. 4,698,672 has done little more than languish in the archives of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Government examiners first issued the patent, which covers a "coding system for reducing redundancy" to a San Jose, California, company called Compression Labs. The approval came more than a decade before the digital imaging technology known as JPEG reached mass-market popularity. Sixteen years later, however, the Austin, Texas, software developer that now owns the patents is seeing fresh value in an old document. The company, Forgent Networks, says the patent directly applies to a compression technique used in the creation of JPEG images.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,53981,00.html

The Moral Minority
It was no less a scientific superstar than James Watson himself — cofounder of the US's Human Genome Project and Nobel discoverer of DNA — who imbued the amorphous field of bioethics with the political and moral suasion it commands today. He did so in the time-honored way: by throwing money at it. In 1989, Watson stunned the scientific community when he committed 3 percent of the genome project's $3 billion budget to ethics research. Why? "To preempt the critics," as he later put it. It worked, and now bioethicists are sprouting up like mushrooms in the postgenome world. They advise Congress, regulatory agencies, biotech startups, and big pharma on issues of brutal perplexity: Human cloning. Stem cell research...
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.08/view.html?pg=2

Abortioniscybersquatting.com
Type in DrinkCoke.org into your Internet browser and you won't see the famous loopy logo or any reference to the caffeinated brown fizz. What you will see are plenty of photographs of dismembered, bloody fetuses. The venerable soft-drink maker, along with dozens of other businesses, news media organizations, school districts and celebrities, has been targeted in a recent cybersquatting campaign using known trademarks and names to drive traffic to the gruesome content of www.abortionismurder.org.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,53968,00.html

With False Numbers, Data Crunchers Try to Mine the Truth
Two I.B.M. researchers have devised software that seeks to get around this information age impasse. Rakesh Agrawal and Ramakrishnan Srikant, computer scientists at the I.B.M. Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., have devised a data-mining program that would cloak individual truthful answers that people might enter once their trust was won but still recover important characteristics of the overall group. For instance, instead of recording the answer "41" to a nosy question like "How old are you?" the software automatically adds a random number of years within a specified range, say minus 30 to plus 30, to the answer. No record of initial answers is kept.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/18/te...ts/18NEXT.html

Second law of thermodynamics "broken"
One of the most fundamental rules of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, has for the first time been shown not to hold for microscopic systems. The demonstration, by chemical physicists in Australia, could place a fundamental limit on miniaturisation, because it suggests that the micro-scale devices envisaged by nanotechnologists will not behave like simple scaled-down versions of their larger counterparts - they could sometimes run backwards. The second law states that a closed system will remain the same or become more disordered over time, i.e. its entropy will always increase. It is the reason a cup of tea loses heat to its surroundings, rather than being heated by the air around it.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992572

Tweaking Single Gene Makes Mice Brainier
Scientists have succeeded in making brainier mice. Whether the animals were actually smarter remains unknown, but their cerebral cortex surface area was significantly larger than that of normal mice. The findings, published today in the journal Science, may help explain how human brains came to be disproportionately large compared to those of other species. As the largest structure in the brain, the cerebral cortex harbors two-thirds of the brain's neurons in a thin layer.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?art...880000&catID=1

China plans software to rival Windows
China plans to create a computer desktop operating system that could rival Microsoft's Windows range, according to a Chinese news report. Some experts believe the code for such a system could be pulled together from "open source" software already available for free. The Chinese newspaper People's Daily reports that a group of 18 Chinese companies and universities have begun working on the operating system. The report says it will be designed to have similar functionality to Microsoft's Windows 98 platform, and will be built to run Microsoft's office software. It should be ready within about a year.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992573

House Committee Votes to Ease Copyright Restrictions on Distance Education
The enactment of a bill that would make it easier for educational institutions to use films and songs in online instruction was all but assured Wednesday after a key House of Representatives committee approved the legislation. The House Judiciary Committee unanimously approved the bill, the Technology Harmonization and Education Act (S 487), on a voice vote without debate. It is identical to a bill the Senate approved in June 2001. The legislation would expand the exceptions under the Copyright Act of 1976 that allow colleges and schools to use copyrighted material for instruction without securing copyright holders' permission.
http://chronicle.com/free/2002/07/2002071801t.htm

Cable company to offer digital recording option
Time Warner Cable will start letting some of its customers pause live television and digitally record programs through a new set-top box that is similar to those sold by TiVo and ReplayTV. The nation's second-largest cable company said Wednesday it will offer the cable set-top boxes with digital video recorders by the end of summer in some markets. Time Warner said it is not yet sure where the service will be offered or at what price. The decision seems at odds with the position of executives in other parts of the AOL Time Warner empire who have expressed alarm at the impact that personal video recorders will have on broadcast networks that rely on advertising for revenue.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/ptech/0....ap/index.html

Copyright enforcer Ranger Online caught stealing content
Internet spyware outfit Ranger Online has taken considerable heat for a little gimmick it's developed which, in the words of MSNBCi columnist Bob Sullivan, "cruises file-swapping networks like Gnutella to find copyrighted materials, hunts down the IP address of the poster, then discovers which Internet service provider is being used. Soon after, the MPAA sends its form letter to the ISP. Under the Digital Copyright Millennium Act, Internet providers are compelled to stop distribution of copyrighted materials when they are notified, so the ISP in turn forwards the note to the user, along with a threat of disconnection."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/26250.html

More news later on

[alphabeater]

yay!! ta walktalker

[greedy_lars]

damn dood, thars some good ones in there. good work!

[TankGirl]

Kudos to the Newsman that rocks!

This was my favorite:

Second law of thermodynamics "broken"
One of the most fundamental rules of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, has for the first time been shown not to hold for microscopic systems. The demonstration, by chemical physicists in Australia, could place a fundamental limit on miniaturisation, because it suggests that the micro-scale devices envisaged by nanotechnologists will not behave like simple scaled-down versions of their larger counterparts - they could sometimes run backwards. The second law states that a closed system will remain the same or become more disordered over time, i.e. its entropy will always increase. It is the reason a cup of tea loses heat to its surroundings, rather than being heated by the air around it.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992572

- tg

[twinspan]

heheh, copyright enforcers Ranger caught violating copyright; can't wait for the lawsuit

as usual, nice post, walkertalker.