The Newspaper Shop -- Monday edition

[walktalker]

Web authors pledge allegiance to IE
When he co-founded Netscape Communications in 1994, Jim Clark introduced a Web browser that promised computer users a way around the Microsoft juggernaut. Now online photo print shop Shutterfly, another Clark-founded venture, has a succinct warning for visitors who come to the site using the latest versions of Netscape: Beware. Versions 6 and higher of the browser are "unsupported," meaning people who use them cannot take advantage of several site features and may run into glitches not found with Microsoft's Internet Explorer, according to a browser error message being published on the site as of last Wednesday.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-941935.html

Online music services face criticism
Record industry executives and critics are trading barbs at an industry conference this week, with an outspoken legislator saying major labels' online subscription services may amount to a "duopoly." Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., warned Monday that the recording industry's efforts to sell music on the Internet could have anti-competitive implications. During a keynote address at the Jupiter PlugIn online music conference here, the congressman also roundly criticized the recording industry's moves to prevent piracy of their copyrighted works. Among the topics targeted by Boucher's address were the recording industry's attempts to protect CDs, existing federal copyright law, and future legislation that could give content providers more power to take matters into their own hands.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-942152.html

Programmer puts penguin on Xbox
A German programmer says he has made the first step towards running the Linux operating system on Microsoft's Xbox games console -- without running into any legal entanglements. Michael Steil, a German programmer, has built an application called "Linuxpreview," which is touted as the first application to run on Xbox without using tools from the official Xbox Software Development Kit (SDK), and is the first step toward essentially turning the Xbox into a Linux-based PC. The application makes the Xbox LED flash and draws a penguin on the Xbox start-up screen. It also generates the message "Xbox Linux Coming Soon!" as well as a link to the Xbox Linux Web site.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-942054.html

Spin doctors create quantum transistor
Canadian researchers have announced the laboratory creation of what they are calling a "spintronic transistor." According to a paper published in the American Physical Society's Physical Review Letters, physicists at Ottawa's Institute for Microstructural Sciences are the first to connect a quantum dot to spin-polarized leads. Although this is a very long way from any production device, it opens up a whole new field of electronic devices. It is especially significant for quantum computing, where spin state is an integral part of the equations at the heart of much of the work being done.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-942121.html

Microsoft changes tune on Linux
Microsoft appears to be changing its tactics in its ongoing spat with the Linux and open-source world by taking a booth at this August's LinuxWorld Expo for the first time. The Windows giant has never ignored the Linux show, often sending executives along to scope out the terrain and pitch Microsoft's point of view, but it has never taken the step of renting a booth. Senior executives, including chairman Bill Gates, have long preferred a more caustic form of engagement with open source and its underlying philosophy, calling it a "cancer" and arguing that "Free Software" goes against everything that capitalism stands for.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-941951.html

New worm eats into Kazaa
The Kazaa file-swapping network has been hit by another worm, just months after the first such attack, according to antivirus vendors. Antivirus company Sophos said it had received several reports of the KWBot worm in the wild. KWBot appears to be the second worm to hit the Kazaa network, which fell prey to the Benjamin worm in May. KWBot spreads in a similar way to Benjamin in that it alters Windows registry keys and then disguises itself as files that are likely to prove popular with file-swappers. It makes particular use of the names of movies and applications.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-942033.html

EC report advises open source for Europe
European administrations should share open-source software resources, according to a report published on Monday by the European Commission. The report, called Pooling Open-Source Software, recommends that European administrations should share software on an open-source licensing basis, to cut soaring e-government information technology costs which, it says, are set to rise by 28 percent to 6.6bn euros this year. Pooling would be achieved by a clearing house, to which administrations could "donate" software for reuse, according to the report, which was financed by the Commission's Interchange of Data between Administrations (IDA) program.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-942055.html

Terrorism plays new role in Web, games
Advertisements for suicide bombers, promotions of violence and "shoot-em-up" games have proliferated on the Internet since the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center. "Extremist groups are undoubtedly spending more of their efforts online," Rabbi Abraham Cooper told a news conference convened for the release of the center's annual report on the spread of racism and violent hatred on the Internet, "Digital Hate 2002." The Jewish organization, which is named after a Holocaust survivor and has grown to monitor global racist activity against a range of groups, said its researchers, who examined 25,000 Web sites per month, had identified 3,300 as "problematic," up from 2,600 a year ago.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-942098.html?tag=fd_top

Imitation nation
Mainland China is the piracy capital of the world. China's imitation industry feeds not just its own economy, but those of other nations as well; 46 percent of the pirated goods sold in America come from China, according to the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA). The Quality Brands Protection Committee (QBPC), an anti-piracy body under the auspices of the China Association of Enterprises with Foreign Investment, claims that government statistics show that counterfeits outnumber genuine products in the Chinese market by 2 to 1. Pirated audiovisual materials occupy 95 percent of the market in large cities, and the proportion approaches 100 percent in the rural interior. Stricter laws have stemmed the tide only slightly, because anti-piracy law, like most of Chinese law, is enforced haphazardly at best, and everyone knows it.
http://salon.com/tech/feature/2002/0...ion/index.html

Life's a junket for programmers in India
Cheap hardware, free trips to the United States and all the popcorn you can eat -- life's a junket if you're a computer programmer in India. In their tussle to dominate the emerging industry for Internet-based services, industry giants Microsoft and Sun Microsystems are doling out incentives as they woo programmers worldwide to back their rival software. The courting is particularly competitive in India, where by some estimates more than 10 percent of the world's programmers work for some of the industry's lowest wages.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-941796.html?tag=cd_mh

Gnutella pioneer Gene Kan dies
Programmer and peer-to-peer pioneer Gene Kan has passed away. Kan, 25, rose to prominence online as one of the most articulate spokesmen for the Gnutella file-swapping community at the height of the Internet's love affair with peer-to-peer software. He was cremated Friday, according to friends. It was not immediately clear how he died. A soft-spoken man with a talent for coining phrases that cut neatly through technical complexities, Kan fell into the limelight almost accidentally.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-942180.html?tag=cd_mh

Casio exposes ultrathin camera
Electronics manufacturer Casio has unveiled a credit card-size digital camera that also boasts digital-audio playback, voice recording and the ability to create short movies. The Exilim EX-M1 is 12 millimeters thick and comes with 1.3-megapixel resolution and a 4x digital zoom. Images can be stored via 12MB built-in memory or on a Secure Digital or Multimedia flash memory card. The EX-M1 sports a built-in microphone and speaker for voice recording. It will also record short movies with sound. A pair of earphones and a remote control with a liquid-crystal display are also supplied.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-941989.html?tag=cd_mh

Deep Link Foes Get Another Win
Links may appear to be helpful little bits of code that whisk site visitors across the Web, but in reality they are vampires that sneak in uninvited and suck the life out of other websites. That may seem a bit extreme, but recent legal rulings and the service terms of an increasing number of websites adamantly claim that links are nothing more than tools used to steal content, corrupt journalistic ethics and wreak havoc with corporate profits. In the latest case, the Bailiff's Court of Copenhagen ruled last Friday in favor of the Danish Newspaper Publishers Association, which claimed that Danish company Newsbooster violated copyright laws by "deep linking" to newspaper articles on some Danish newspapers' Internet sites.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,53697,00.html

Stillborns Re-Touched by an Angel
When Marty Mueller's baby was stillborn a few weeks before she was due to give birth, she and her husband spent several hours at the hospital, holding their son, grieving, and snapping photographs before sending him to the mortuary. As the day wore on, Troy's skin became discolored, and the signs of decay were clearly visible in the developed pictures. So Marty, a professional photographer, did what came naturally to her: she re-touched the snapshots to make them look better, digitally creating the rosy-cheeked, healthy baby she never had.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,53624,00.html

Supercomputing: Suddenly Sexy
In a former life Steve Chen was something of a legend in supercomputing, leading Cray's design team during its most successful years. He once hoped to build a supercomputer that could predict tomorrow's weather today. That challenge has been answered by NEC, and then some, with its new Earth Simulator, based in Japan. While real-time weather forecasting is a snap for this processing monster, it's intended for something even more important: disaster prediction. It is currently running through a battery of tests, but it will ultimately act as Japan's first line of defense against the massive, and frequent, typhoons that scour its rocky coast.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,53475,00.html

Can Computers Fly on the Wings of a Chicken?
In late June, a chemical engineer from the University of Delaware filed a patent that described a new generation of microchips. The patent proposes to replace silicon -- which has long served as the basis for microchips -- with another material. And what might this mystery component be? Chicken feathers. Richard Wool understands that nonspecialists will find this strange. But he's used to it. Wool and his colleagues at the university's ACRES project (Affordable Composites from Renewable Sources) have been developing new uses for plant fibers, oils and resins. Using such raw materials as the humble soybean, Wool and his colleagues are designing prototypes for everything from simple adhesives to hurricane-proof roofs.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2002Jul7.html

Astronomy's next big thing
The Owl (Overwhelmingly Large Telescope) is an awesome project which requires international effort to make it happen. This huge telescope - its main mirror would be more than 100 metres across - would have a predicted resolution 40 times better than the Hubble Space Telescope and a sensitivity several thousand times greater. It would be sited at an altitude of 5,000 metres and would be operated almost as a space observatory, with a base camp for the human operators nearby at a lower height of no more than 3,000 metres.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci...00/2116605.stm

Russia Proposes Sending Team to Mars
Russian space officials proposed an ambitious project on Friday to send a six-person team to Mars by the year 2015, a trip that would mark a milestone in space travel and international space cooperation. Russia's space program hopes to work closely with the American agency NASA and the European Space Agency to build two spaceships capable of transporting the crew to Mars, supporting them on the planet for up to two months and safely bringing them home, said Nikolai Anfimov, head of the Central Research Institute of Machine-Building. The roughly 440-day trip is expected to cost about $20 billion, with Russia suggesting it would contribute 30 percent.
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches...rs_020706.html

Earth 'will expire by 2050'
Earth's population will be forced to colonise two planets within 50 years if natural resources continue to be exploited at the current rate, according to a report out this week. A study by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), to be released on Tuesday, warns that the human race is plundering the planet at a pace that outstrips its capacity to support life. In a damning condemnation of Western society's high consumption levels, it adds that the extra planets (the equivalent size of Earth) will be required by the year 2050 as existing resources are exhausted. The report, based on scientific data from across the world, reveals that more than a third of the natural world has been destroyed by humans over the past three decades.
http://www.observer.co.uk/internatio...750783,00.html

Light turns into glowing liquid
Light can be turned into a glowing stream of liquid that splits into droplets and splatters off surfaces just like water. The researchers who've worked out how to do this say "liquid light" would be the ideal lifeblood for optical computing, where chips send light around optical "circuits" to process data. Liquid light sounds like a contradiction, since the three phases - gas, liquid and solid - usually only apply to atomic matter. Although researchers sometimes talk about a light beam as if it's a gas, because the photons move around randomly within the beam and can exert pressure due to their momentum, they don't usually mean it literally - until now. You really can think of light as a gas, says Humberto Michinel's team at the University of Vigo in Ourense. And like any gas, it can be made to condense into a liquid.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992497

US Commerce Department Wants Public's Opinion on Digital Rights Management
The continued hoopla over online music has taken another turn in the Federal government. This time the United States Department of Commerce Technology Administration (TA) is holding a public workshop on digital entertainment and rights management (DRM). The information the TA collects will presumably find its way to the various hearings Congress holds as it tries to gauge what laws it should impose upon Net music technology. This includes gauging how the voters will feel about any restrictions DRM will potentially bring them. As this is a public hearing, anyone can attend. More important, the TA is taking public comments via email.
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2...iccomment.html

"Random walkers" may speed peer-to-peer networks
Peer-to-peer computing could reach new levels of power and stability by having a few messages "walk" between machines rather than many flood across the whole system, according to research by US scientists. Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing connects together a large number of different computers, thereby pooling their resources. It provides a very efficient way of storing and accessing large amounts of data, as shown by the success of music file sharing networks such as Gnutella. However, the current way P2P networks are organised means that when the network involves more than a few tens of thousands of machines, searching becomes very slow.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992510

More news later on

[greedy_lars]

I this unreplied newsworthy thread