The Newspaper Shop -- Wednesday edition

[walktalker]

Will Mozilla get stomped by Godzilla?
The owner of the Godzilla trademark has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the small-time blogging site Davezilla, sparking concerns that AOL Time Warner-sponsored Mozilla.org could be the Japanese monster's next target. The letter, sent by U.S. law firm Seyfarth Shaw on behalf of Japanese retail and entertainment company Toho, claims that Dave Linabury's Web site Davezilla infringes on Toho's Godzilla trademark both in name and in its lizardlike mascot. Seyfarth Shaw declined to comment. Linabury, an information architect for General Motors in Warren, Mich., said he wouldn't knuckle under to Godzilla.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-949804.html

Dodging pop-ups with Mozilla
Mozilla 1.0, the open-source technology whose coding is the basis for America Online’s latest Netscape browser, is garnering favor for a new feature that helps block irksome pop-up advertisements. But don’t expect to see the tool in the coming full release of Netscape 7.0. Mozilla 1.0, launched in early June as the first public version of the Netscape-inspired open-source browser, lets Web surfers easily zap unsolicited windows known as pop-up ads -- which are widely used by mainstream sites including AOL and its subsidiary Netscape Communications. Though heralded by Mozilla users, a group largely comprising Web developers, the tool didn’t make the cut for the preview version of Netscape 7.0, due out in May, and won’t appear in its upcoming launch, according to the company. But this fact, analysts say, is blatant self-protection.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-949572.html

Radio gear pushes TV for emergencies
Wireless equipment makers are beginning to unveil radio products that work in a spectrum meant for the exclusive use of emergency workers. Motorola introduced base stations on Monday that create a private radio network for emergency workers. Last year, Motorola and others began selling handheld radios that worked in the set-aside spectrum, located within the 700MHz to 800MHz bands. Other equipment makers are expected to follow suit. Start-up Flarion, along with global aerospace and defense company Northrup Grumman, is trying to sell federal regulators on the idea of a nationwide wireless network for emergency workers. The network could find a home in the set-aside 700MHz swath, said Ronny Haroldsvik, senior director of marketing strategy at Flarion.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-949745.html

Report: File swapping sites to thrive
Digital distribution of music through services such as Morpheus and Kazaa will continue to thrive with use peaking in 2005, according to a report released Wednesday. The Yankee Group predicts 7.44 billion unlicensed audio files will be swapped in 2005, up from 5.16 billion among consumers aged 14 and older in 2001. After 2005, Yankee predicts free music swapping will begin to decline. Yankee projects 6.33 billion unlicensed audio files will be swapped in 2006. If Yankee's projections are right it could be bad news for the recording industry, which has been launching their own pay services and working to thwart unlicensed music swapping. The entertainment industry is also pondering legal moves against individuals.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-949724.html

Unix pioneer an open-source killjoy?
Sun Microsystems began selling its first general-purpose Linux servers this week, but Bill Joy, Sun's chief scientist and a pioneer in designing Unix, has voiced doubts about Linux's open-source underpinnings. "The open-source business model hasn't worked very well," Joy said at an event here Tuesday to introduce a squad of new software executives at Sun. A business link, he said, is important for ensuring customer support that doesn't rely on volunteer help and for letting market forces select between competing packages such as the KDE and Gnome software that give Linux a graphical user interface. "With open-source software, it's more the ego that sorts it out," Joy said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-949812.html?tag=fd_top

Online smoking sales choking states
Online sales of cigarettes could be costing states millions of dollars in unpaid taxes, according to a new report. Almost all states charge taxes on the sale of cigarettes, but the issue has come to the fore as municipalities such as New York City and other locales raise taxes to close budget gaps. As with many other products, one of the attractions of purchasing cigarettes online has been the avoidance of those taxes. A report from the General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, pointed to a Forrester Research study that predicts Internet tobacco sales in the United States will exceed $5 billion in 2005 and the states will lose about $1.4 billion in tax revenue from these sales.
http://news.com.com/2100-1017-949731.html?tag=fd_top

Arrogance, Thy Name Is Microsoft
Microsoft has long been the big grizzly of the software industry, lacerating any competitors who dared to cross its path. But now it has become ensnared in a trap of its own making. And in its efforts to escape, it may end up gnawing off its own foot. That could create the first real opportunity in 15 years for Apple to take share in the corporate market. Microsoft's trap was to let itself get hooked on mediocrity. Rather than invent exciting new products, the company focused on selling incremental improvements of its flagship Office suite every two or three years. But users have wised up. Increasingly, they're not willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a package of small changes. Recent industry surveys show that users now only upgrade software such as Office when they buy a new computer, sales of which have slowed sharply in the past two years. Microsoft doesn't plan to free itself from this trap by reinventing Office.
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...20814_0119.htm

Red Hat, Sun to boost desktop Linux
Red Hat and Sun Microsystems are gearing up to sell Linux for desktop computers, the companies' chief executives said Tuesday. Red Hat, the top seller of Linux software and services, will release in coming months a new version of its software for corporate desktop computers that follows in the mold of its high-end server version, Chief Executive Matthew Szulik said in an interview. And Sun will use Linux inside its own company on desktop computers as a part of a plan to cut real estate costs, and plans eventually to offer a Linux desktop product, Sun CEO Scott McNealy said in the opening keynote address of the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-949679.html?tag=cd_mh

Schools not making the grade in Web use
Computers may now be nearly as common as blackboards and lockers in U.S. schools, but they are not meeting the needs of Internet-savvy students, according to a study released Wednesday. Students hoping to research science projects or term papers online face a "digital disconnect" in the classroom as they are often stymied by restrictive access policies and content filters, the report said. Many students have a limited ability to explore on their own because they are not taught basic typing and computer skills and homework assignments do not push them to develop their skills, the report said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-949829.html?tag=cd_mh

Apple chip breakthrough confounds physicists
A remarkable achievement by Motorola in the new PowerMac computers promises to set the scientific world alight. Apple claims that "the faster-than-light processor speed gets an additional boost with an advanced cache memory architecture that provides ultrafast, dedicated memory with massively enhanced throughput." Faster than light? Apparently so. Until now this achievement has been limited to small particles, such as photons, as apparently Feynman suggested that the speed of light was only an average.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/26681.html

Digital forgery attacks website security
Counterfeit website security certificates can be generated and used make sites appear secure when they are not, says a US computer programmer. The trick could tempt surfers into handing over personal information, such as credit card details. The forgery technique relies on the way Microsoft's Internet Explorer handles the security certificates that verify the identity of a web site, says Mike Benham. These certificates are used to establish an encrypted connection to a web site so that private information can then be safely handed over. Benham says that when certificates are signed in a certain way Internet Explorer fails to check that they are legitimate. He says anyone with a basic certificate can generate as many counterfeit certificates as they like for other sites.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992669

China To Launch Fourth Unmanned Space Capsule This Year
China will launch its fourth unmanned space capsule this year, taking the country closer to sending a human into orbit, state television said Tuesday. The capsule will be technically identical to a craft capable of carrying a crew, the report said. It didn't give a date for the launch. State media say China plans to launch a human into orbit within three years. It would be only the third country able to do so on its own, after Russia and the United States. The third Shenzhou capsule -- whose name means "Sacred Vessel'' -- was launched in March carrying a mannequin in a space suit. After the re-entry portion of the craft landed in northern China, officials said the seven-day flight was a success.
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches...te_020813.html

The Sorcerer of Sony
On any given day, you can find John Smedley smiting the odd necromancer or brandishing his sword alongside wood elves who want to kill the emperor of the snakelike Shissars. Sometimes, though, he just strolls around observing his fellow citizens. To you, they might look like knights, wizards, and ogres, scuttling across a three-dimensional landscape of castles, caves, and dank swamps. But to him, they must look like money. Smedley, 33, is the chief operating officer of Sony Online Entertainment, where he's master of the virtual boomtown known as EverQuest. Once a destination for the fringe Dungeons & Dragons crowd, the online role-playing game now has 433,000 paying customers who generate $5 million a month for the Japanese entertainment giant. Given the 40 percent gross-profit margins, and the fact that this world practically runs itself, the dragon-slaying business is looking pretty good these days. It's so good that virtual worlds like EverQuest are fast becoming the hottest thing online.
http://www.business2.com/articles/ma...,42210,FF.html

'Handmade' cloning cheap and easy
Handmade cloning, a new way to create genetically identical copies of animals, is not only cheaper and simpler than existing methods, but appears to work better too. "It's so much simpler than anything we are doing today, it's dramatic," says Michael Bishop, ex-president of Infigen, a cattle-cloning company in Wisconsin. "It's a huge step towards roboticising the whole process." The technique could speed up the introduction of cloning in farming, where the aim is to clone the best milk or meat-producing animals. And conservationists in South Africa could soon use it to clone endangered species. The technique was developed by Gábor Vajta at the Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences in Tjele together with Ian Lewis, programme leader for the Cooperative Research Centre for Innovative Dairy Products in Australia. Details of the method will soon be published.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992670

Synchronicity is key to hearing ET
Our best chance of picking up a broadcast from intelligent aliens is when the Earth is closest to being directly between our Sun and the transmitting alien star, according to Robin Corbet of the Universities Space Research Association. Not only does that position minimise any interference from the Sun in the signal, but it also has a psychological significance. At that point, we are technically closest to the aliens, even if it is only by a tiny fraction of the distance between us. Humans are not deliberately trying to attract the attention of alien civilisations, but we do listen out for signals that they might be trying to send us. However, the sky is so big it is like looking for a needle in an infinitely large haystack.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992672

Pay services will help industry recover, new report say
Global music revenues will continue to decline for the next few years, but the industry will recover as fee-based digital downloads flourish, according to a new online consumer study. Downloading music from the Internet will reach $2 billion in sales, or 17 percent of the music business in 2007, Forrester Research projected Monday. Global CD sales declined 5.1 percent last year and the industry’s pain isn’t over yet. The music industry will suffer an additional sales decline of 6 percent next year, dropping to $10.7 billion in sales in 2003, according to the report. And while people who frequently download music from a file-sharing site (more than nine times a month) say they’ll decrease their record buying about 2 percent over the next year, that doesn’t account for a two-year decline in music sales, the report states. In fact, more than two-thirds of CDs sold in the United States are bought by people who rarely, if at all, use digital downloading technology, says Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff, author of the report.
http://msnbc.com/news/793143.asp

Opening the Door for New Storage Options
A long-running legal battle that has significantly delayed the ability of many companies to produce next-generation optical disc players and recorders has come to an end as Japan's Nichia and Toyoda Gosai announced they decided to reach a settlement. The two companies announced their decision in a brief statement on Friday that said they have "agreed to respect any and all patent rights which the other party owns and to enter into negotiations in good faith in order to come to an end of any and all disputes and suits in and outside of Japan." More detailed information or commentary was unavailable because of week-long holidays currently taking place at both companies. The agreement comes less than a month after the Tokyo High Court overturned a ruling by the Japan Patent Office concerning a Toyoda patent that had been ruled invalid. The decision, delivered on July 18, was the ninth in a series of patent infringement lawsuits heard in front of the court and the eighth that Toyoda had won.
http://idg.net/ic_934730_1794_9-10000.html

More news later on

[TankGirl]

A great issue again - thanks WT!

China To Launch Fourth Unmanned Space Capsule This Year
China will launch its fourth unmanned space capsule this year, taking the country closer to sending a human into orbit, state television said Tuesday. The capsule will be technically identical to a craft capable of carrying a crew, the report said. It didn't give a date for the launch. State media say China plans to launch a human into orbit within three years. It would be only the third country able to do so on its own, after Russia and the United States. The third Shenzhou capsule -- whose name means "Sacred Vessel'' -- was launched in March carrying a mannequin in a space suit. After the re-entry portion of the craft landed in northern China, officials said the seven-day flight was a success.
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches...te_020813.html

China's determined efforts to conquer space are interesting. I believe that they will also succeed - if not in three years soon anyway. There's a superpower with great human and technological potential and a future. Running on Linux.

- tg