The Newspaper Shop -- Thursday edition

[walktalker]

Wanna have a news version of Maxwell's demon ?

Microsoft: Is there life after the cube?
Microsoft on Thursday opened its Center For Information Work, a laboratory that will let technicians and other researchers explore ways to improve life at the office. The center, located in Redmond, Wash., will match people with technological prototypes that are still five or so years away from becoming products and see what works. For example, the company is currently tinkering with RingCam, a video camera that captures a 360-degree view of a room. Potential applications include a videoconferencing situation where several people seated around a table need to be featured on the screen, said a Microsoft representative. Another experimental prototype is BroadBench, a giant, semicircular LCD display that features three independent viewing regions.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-959688.html

Spam glut spawns a new industry
Spam may be a costly and seemingly unstoppable nuisance, but the trend offers an opportunity for companies developing technology to fight it, according to a new report from market research firm IDC. The report, released Thursday, predicts that a growing glut of spam will help propel the worldwide daily volume of e-mail from 31 billion messages this year to 60 billion in 2006. The report comes as legislators are passing new rules aimed at limiting spam, and victims are increasingly turning to the courts to fight back against spammers. America Online, for instance, won an injunction and a monetary settlement against a purveyor of pornographic e-mail. But the real battle over spam will likely take place at the technology level.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-959694.html

Will Tablet PC read your chicken scratch?
Microsoft is looking for a better way to make sense of your chicken scratch. The current version of its Tablet PC operating system, which lets computer users control their machines with a pen-like device instead of just a mouse and keyboard, matches people's scrawls against the company's own database of handwriting samples. The idea is to ensure that the unlimited variety of T's that human hands can produce will, in fact, be recognized as T's. Even though the software, due to appear in devices Nov. 7, can match against the many different types of handwriting in its database, it can't adapt to an individual user's style of writing and learn, for example, that the person never crosses his or her T's.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-959581.html

Web habits: New moms serious, dads not
Women change their Web habits more than men when they become parents, according to a new study by an Internet market research group. ComScore Networks found that family community sites and home furnishings retailers attracted the highest percentage of new and expectant moms. Toy retailers then porn sites, respectively, garnered the highest concentration of dads. ComScore spokesman Max Kalehoff said gaming, porn and sports sites have always been popular among young men. That trend doesn't seem to change much immediately before or after they have children. "It's kind of business as usual for the men, except for buying toys," Kalehoff said.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-959674.html

Superstars sing file-swapping blues
Got unauthorized MP3s? Record labels are launching a multimillion-dollar public interest-style ad campaign to make sure you don't. On Thursday, a coalition of artists and labels will start running print, radio and TV ads featuring dozens of major recording stars who compare file swapping with stealing. The ads, reminiscent of the American Dairy Association's Got Milk or MTV's Rock the Vote campaigns, are designed to shame people out of illegally swapping music. They feature big-name artists such as Madonna, P. Diddy and Sting. One of the ads contains quotes from a variety of singers, including Britney Spears.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-959537.html
http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,55393,00.html

The new "copyspeak"
Hollywood, the music industry, select policy-makers and now the Justice Department have adopted a new "copyspeak" that equates the downloading of files from the Internet with "piracy," "stealing" and "shoplifting." The pervasive theme of copyspeak is that downloading from the Internet is both illegal and immoral. It is neither. No doubt this era's rapid shift to digital technology is changing the rules of the game -- there is little doubt that some use the benefits of technology to make and distribute unauthorized copies for personal financial gain in clear violation of copyright law. But we've been down the road of technological advancement before. How we resolve this latest tension between copyright and technology will define our future ability to communicate, create and share information, education and entertainment. Indeed, if the play button becomes the pay button, our very ability to raise the world's standard of living and education will be jeopardized.
http://news.com.com/2010-1071-959513.html

Tech firm tells Universal to pay up
A small technology marketing company is suing Vivendi Universal's Universal Music Group, saying the record label cut it out of a deal to promote Bon Jovi's latest album. The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the Southern District Court of New York, was brought by New York-based DownloadCard, whose technology helps record labels promote store-bought albums with Web tie-ins. The company charges Universal Music, a customer of DownloadCard, with appropriating its system for the upcoming U.S. release of Bon Jovi's "Bounce," due out in stores Oct. 8. "They're not allowed to take all of our work and cut us out of the equation," said Stephen Kramarsky, plaintiff's attorney and a partner at Dewey Pegno & Kramarsky. "So we're seeking to prevent Universal Music from releasing or distributing any products that use our technology.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-959709.html

IBM helps firms charge for Web services
IBM will soon sell new e-business software designed to make it easy for telecommunications service providers, banks and other companies to charge for their Web services. The technology, currently code-named Project Allegro, will let businesses track the use of Web services so they can bill customers through a variety of subscription-based models, such as pay-per-use, said Bob Sutor, IBM's director of e-business standards strategy. The software is also designed to ensure service quality by monitoring the Web service and seeing to it that transactions occur in a timely manner, Sutor said. Like software rivals Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, BEA Systems and others, IBM believes the future of software lies with Web services, functions that let companies interact with one another and with consumers to conduct business via the Internet.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-959703.html?tag=fd_top

Linux gets a break
For the first time in years, Microsoft’s unassailable lead in computer operating systems is being challenged by manufacturers offering Linux software. Even a puny challenge is better than none. If IBM likes it, then it must be all right. That, at least, is what supporters of Linux, an operating system for computers, are hoping. Unlike Microsoft Windows, Linux holds no secrets for programmers. Its source codes can be read like an open book, which makes them easy to adapt to individual needs and cheaper to buy. After years in the doldrums as Microsoft forged ahead in market after market, Linux is making a comeback — and in an unexpected market. Thanks to its stability as an operating system and the fact that it can be made secure, Linux is fast catching on among retailers.
http://www.economist.com/agenda/disp...ory_id=1338664

Profits from piracy
Earlier this summer, Microsoft and China, two inscrutable monoliths waging a protracted cold war over copyrights and software pricing, finally decided to settle their differences via a three-year, $750 million "memorandum of understanding," the largest deal ever between the Chinese government and a foreign software company. Details of the "understanding," announced in June, were both vague and open-ended. About the only overlap between both parties' descriptions was that Microsoft was supplying the $750 million and China was supplying the human resources. Still, given the background of the relationship, it seemed a safe bet that China's 92 percent software piracy rate -- second worst in the world, according to the Business Software Alliance -- had been a central issue during the negotiations. Or maybe not.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/20...ted/index.html

Straight from the lab: technology's first draft
Japan-based NGK Insulators has transformed an experimental battery — which Ford Motor pursued for use in electric cars for more than 30 years — into a technology that could help manage the production of electric power. Each cell in the sodium and sulfur battery produces two volts when positively charged sodium ions pass through a ceramic tube and combine with negatively charged sulfur. Earlier versions of the technology could provide about 50 kilowatts, enough to supplement an office building’s power supply during peak hours. By improving the ceramic’s purity, NGK was able to reduce its thickness by 25 percent, to 1.3 millimeters. That in turn lowered its electrical resistance. The reduced resistance, combined with an altered design, allows the new battery to switch on in less than a millisecond and deliver 250 kilowatts, enough to supply backup juice during temporary power failures.
http://www.technologyreview.com/arti...e11002.asp?p=0

Molecular memories
In October 1970, the newly formed Intel publicly released its first 1103 dynamic random access memory chip. It was a stunning technological advancement, making it possible to store 125 bytes (1 kilobit) of data, roughly the storage required for a two-line definition in a dictionary. It eventually displaced the vacuum tube, taking a place alongside the microprocessor to become one of the main driving forces of the personal computer revolution. And since the mid-1980s, researchers have been able to double magnetic density every 18 months. But this year the pace of memory took an enormous leap with two research advancements in molecular electronics.
http://www.herring.com/columns/2002/...rat092502.html

PS2 to pack in TV recording
Now that the PlayStation 2 game console can be hooked up to the Internet, Sony is ready to upgrade the machine further so it can record television shows. Although the timing and details of the move have not been decided, Sony said, it is set to make its game console more like a consumer electronics device. "Our thinking is that it would be more convenient for consumers to enjoy home networking and manage broadcasting content as well," said Kenichi Fukunaga, a spokesman for Sony Computer Entertainment, the Sony subsidiary that developed the PlayStation. Sony has been trying to transform PlayStation 2, which has sold 40 million units globally, into a home entertainment hub that lets people shop online and store music or movies. Adding the ability to store TV programs on a hard disk could give Sony an edge over rival Microsoft, which is also eyeing the home entertainment business as an untapped source of revenue.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-959608.html?tag=cd_mh

The Undoing of a Star Scientist
Jan Hendrik Schön seemed to be a modern day alchemist. He appeared to be able to manipulate atoms with amazing grace. He seemed to be able to force electricity to do seemingly impossible tricks, and claimed he'd found ways to make working molecule-sized electronic components. The results of many of his experiments contradicted known laws of physics. Other scientists were unable to duplicate Schön's work. Some said the young man must have magic hands. But not all. In May, Lucent Technologies, which runs Bell Labs where Schön worked, responded to growing queries about Schön by appointing an independent committee to investigate. The results were released Wednesday, validating what many physicists already theorized months ago. The committee believes Schön made up or altered experimental data at least 16 times between 1998 and 2001.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,55410,00.html

War Dilemma: Iraq Weapon Disposal
Despite predictions that U.S. armed forces will roll over any Iraqi resistance, there's a "major wild card" in American war plans, according to defense analysts. Even if the American military can actually find where Saddam Hussein has hidden his chemical and biological arms -- and that's a big if -- the military has no way of quickly and safely destroying these weapons once they've been tracked down. Drop a conventional bomb on a biological or chemical weapons storehouse, and "you haven't defeated the weapon, you've caused it to deploy," Dr. Steve Ramberg, chief scientist at the Office of Naval Research (ONR), said. Spores or gas could be spread up to hundreds of miles around, depending on weather conditions. And with many of Saddam's suspected facilities in and around Baghdad, thousands upon thousands of civilians could suffer and die.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,55399,00.html

Why Some With HIV Are Healthier
Researchers have solved a 16-year-old mystery of the AIDS virus thanks to a protein analysis technology. Researchers at Rockefeller University in New York have used a protein chip technology to identify three proteins, called alpha-defensins, that allow a small number of HIV patients to remain healthy after contracting HIV. They hope their findings will lead to a treatment for AIDS, which affects 40 million people worldwide and has killed 25 million. "This is not going to be the ultimate solution but it is another weapon we can use in our arsenal against HIV," Dr. David Ho of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Rockefeller, who helped lead the study, said in a telephone briefing.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,55417,00.html

Open-Source Tug of War Heats Up
Legislation advocating government use of open-source software is un-American, anticompetitive, bad for business and hell on the economy and taxpayers, according to the Initiative for Software Choice. Over the past year or so, more than two dozen governments have passed or proposed nearly 70 laws or policy changes that stipulate or strongly encourage governmental use of open-source software. The Initiative for Software Choice has been lobbying against such laws since May, and intends to step up its efforts over the next few weeks to block the adoption of pending open-source preference proposals in Europe and South America.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,55354,00.html

GM's Hy-Wire Brakes Driving Mold
Several hours into a long car trip your eyelids grow weary, but you really don't want to get out in the rain to switch drivers. No problem -- just pull over and pass the controls to your right. The ability to move the steering mechanism is just one of the many innovations in the Hy-wire, a concept car unveiled Thursday at the Mondial De L'Automobile (World of the Car) tradeshow in Paris. While auto makers have long showcased "car of the future" designs, General Motors has created a working vehicle it claims could be road-ready by 2010.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,55390,00.html

DTV's Political Stakes Run High
Broadcasters and cable television system operators squared off in front of Congress Tuesday, angling for advantage in a proposed bill that would require them to switch to digital signals by the end of 2006. Lawmakers, meanwhile, fretted that consumers could ultimately suffer the most if their existing TVs, VCRs and other video devices become obsolete in the next four years. The political costs for a botched transition could be high, suggested New York Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel. The marathon five-hour hearing in front of the House of Representatives telecommunications subcommittee underscored the high stakes of the transition to digital, which promises to bring sharper pictures and increased offerings to consumers' living rooms.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,55400,00.html

Stanford Law Professor seeks to overturn the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act
Opening arguments are set to begin early next month in Eldred vs. Ashcroft, a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that will decide the future of copyright law, including how and when artists and writers can build upon the work of others. At issue is the constitutionality of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which was enacted in 1998 with strong support from Hollywood's politically powerful studios. The law extended the length of copyrights for an additional 20 years (or more in certain cases) and gave new protections to corporations that own copyrights. Opponents -- which include dozens of the nation's leading law professors, several library groups, 17 prominent economists, and a coalition of both liberal and conservative political action groups -- say it serves no legitimate public purpose, violates the clear intentions of our nation's founders regarding copyrights and is unconstitutional.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...26/bonoact.DTL

Ground Zero Air Polluted by Diesel Equipment
Diesel pollution from construction equipment and diesel generators at the site of the collapsed World Trade Center towers poses a health threat to some lower Manhattan residents, a new study warns. The same study also provides some good news for local residents, suggesting that apartments and offices near Ground Zero should, after a proper cleaning, be safe for living and working. Professor Thomas Cahill from the University of California at Davis said he found little evidence that very fine pollution particles remain in indoor spaces near Ground Zero once the areas have been cleaned according to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) guidelines. But his research, performed in collaboration with the American Lung Association of the city of New York, also shows that the concentration of diesel pollution in lower Manhattan is quite high, which could cause breathing problems in some people.
http://ens-news.com/ens/sep2002/2002-09-25-06.asp

Acidic clouds of Venus could harbour life
The acidic clouds of Venus could in fact be hiding life. Unlikely as it sounds, the presence of microbes could neatly explain several mysterious observations of the planet's atmosphere. Venus is usually written off as a potential haven for life because of its hellishly hot and acidic surface. But conditions in the atmosphere at an altitude of around 50 kilometres are relatively hospitable: the temperature is about 70 °C, with a pressure of about one atmosphere. Although the clouds are very acidic, this region also has the highest concentration of water droplets in the Venusian atmosphere. "From an astrobiology point of view, Venus is not hopeless," says Dirk Schulze-Makuch from the University of Texas at El Paso.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992843

Computer Pings May Measure Light Speed
Ping's author, U.S. Army research computer scientist Mike Muuss (pronounced "moose") described his invention as "a little thousand-line hack I wrote one evening" in 1983 "which practically everyone seems to know about." So well known is ping that Muuss was widely mourned by the programming community two years ago after his death at 42 in a head-on auto collision. Although computer scientists have attributed the name "ping" to an acronym -- Packet Internet Groper -- Muuss said otherwise: "I named it after the sound a sonar makes." Network system administrators use pings to ensure computers are operating and network connections are intact. A computer sends the ping, a small data packet of about 100 bytes, through the network to another computer -- then waits for and records a return packet. Its arrival confirms that all systems are operational.
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/19513.html

Which Technology Will Last?
Your computer seems outdated before you walk out of the electronics store. Your VCR is a dinosaur, and your record collection a fossil. Modern electronics seem destined for reinvention at an ever more relentless pace. And yet some innovations of the past, equally revolutionary in their day, endure for generations. In this special report, Forbes looks at the idea of obsolescence and why ideas themselves seem to survive. Click on the links at right to see our predictions for what will be rendered obsolete when, and by what.
http://www.forbes.com/2002/09/11/0910techpackage.html

Lorenzo's oil finally proven to work
The controversial do-it-yourself medicine that inspired the heart-rending movie Lorenzo's Oil has finally been proved to work. The new research ends years of uncertainty about the treatment and demolishes the claims of experts who repeatedly said it was a worthless quack remedy. New Scientist has learned that Hugo Moser, the neurologist and doctor played by Peter Ustinov in the film, will on Saturday unveil the positive conclusions of a 10-year investigation into the oil's effects on a group of boys affected with the same genetic condition as Lorenzo. Normally carriers of the genetic defect are at high risk of developing adrenoleukodystrophy, causing them to progressively lose the ability to move, hear, speak and - finally - breathe.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992851

More news later on

[TankGirl]

Originally posted by walktalker
Wanna have a news version of Maxwell's demon ?

Sounds cool!

Real-life versions of Maxwellian demons (with their entropy lowering effects of course duly balanced by increase of entropy elsewhere) actually occur in living systems, such as the ion pumps that make our nervous systems work, including our minds. Molecular-sized mechanisms are no longer found only in biology however, it's also the subject of the exciting new field of nanotechnology.

So Maxwell's demon is an icon for our times, sitting at the crossroads of information and the physical universe.

Hmmmmm..... yes, that would be a good description of our vigilant newsman!

Originally posted by walktalker:
The new "copyspeak"
Hollywood, the music industry, select policy-makers and now the Justice Department have adopted a new "copyspeak" that equates the downloading of files from the Internet with "piracy," "stealing" and "shoplifting." The pervasive theme of copyspeak is that downloading from the Internet is both illegal and immoral. It is neither. No doubt this era's rapid shift to digital technology is changing the rules of the game -- there is little doubt that some use the benefits of technology to make and distribute unauthorized copies for personal financial gain in clear violation of copyright law. But we've been down the road of technological advancement before. How we resolve this latest tension between copyright and technology will define our future ability to communicate, create and share information, education and entertainment. Indeed, if the play button becomes the pay button, our very ability to raise the world's standard of living and education will be jeopardized.
http://news.com.com/2010-1071-959513.html

An excellent essay, recommended.

- tg