The Newspaper Shop -- Tuesday edition

[walktalker]

Can WirelessUSB bite Bluetooth?
Cypress Semiconductor is introducing a new technology that it says could leapfrog Bluetooth and other standards to create a standard for wirelessly linking peripherals such as mice and keyboards to a PC. The company's new WirelessUSB chip operates in the unregulated 2.4GHz band, offering lower latency than 27MHz, 433MHz and 900MHz devices, while being simpler and less expensive to implement than Bluetooth, Cypress said. The CY694X chip can connect as many as seven devices up to 10 meters with a latency of less than 20 milliseconds (ms) -- this latency can drop to just 8ms when four devices are connected. WirelessUSB's low latency compared with the more-established 27MHz, 433MHz and 900MHz devices is intended to appeal to makers of gaming peripherals, which require latency lower than 30ms.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-964560.html

IBM "Thinks" PC speed isn't so critical
IBM unveiled a marketing strategy Monday aimed at attracting corporate buyers by putting an emphasis on PCs that are easier and cheaper to manage. At a presentation for analysts, customers and reporters here, the company described its "Think" campaign as recognition that PC buyers are less concerned with speed and more interested in getting the most out of their machines. The heart of the campaign will be software designed to make IBM computers easier to use and quicker to recover from disaster. For example, the software will help restore a system after a failure, automatically configure network and Internet connections, and improve security.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-964499.html

Nokia plays with cell phone glitz
Nokia, the world's No. 1 cell phone maker, has set sales targets for its color-screen models, which it hopes will ignite growth in the stagnant wireless industry. Nokia CEO Jorma Ollila said Tuesday that his company will ship between 50 and 100 million mobile phones with color screens in 2003. He did not give a comparable number for 2002, but market estimates are for the Finnish company to sell just several million units. Ollila also told the company's annual mobile Internet conference in Munich that more than half of the Nokia phones sold next year will use multimedia messaging (MMS), which lets people send and receive pictures and sound clips to and from mobile phones.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-964566.html

Study exposes shaky Web "facts"
Many Web sites are putting surfers at risk by providing information that is inaccurate and misleading, research published on Monday claimed. Consumers International -- which is made up of over 250 consumer organizations including the UK's Consumer' Association -- has conducted a global survey of online content, and warns that many health, finance and price-comparison Web sites are guilty of a wide range of bad practices. According to Consumers International, 49 percent of health and financial sites fail to give appropriate warnings, such as advising people to consult a professional before acting on their advice.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-964605.html

"Evil" of e-mail derails knowledge worker
Boosting the productivity of knowledge workers is key to their company’s survival, and only limited progress has been made in addressing the problem, according to analyst firm Gartner Group. Speaking on Monday at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Cannes, Gartner analyst Andy Kyte said: "We have had 30 years of making the typewriter go faster, of producing a set of orders electronically, of producing the invoices electronically -- of making the post go faster... now all this will win you is competitive parity." Kyte said there is even evidence that some IT technology is positively working against the productivity of knowledge workers -- citing the "evil" of e-mail as the single greatest thief of a knowledge workers time. A knowledge worker is an employee whose knowledge about their area, as well as their skills in actually doing their job, is valuable.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-964557.html

AOL loses Net privacy ruling
The Virginia Supreme Court ruled against America Online in its efforts to protect the identity of one of its 35 million subscribers by asking the court to quash a subpoena calling for the member's name in an issue that goes to the heart of the anonymity of the Internet. The ruling against the world's largest Internet service provider, based in Dulles, Va., was the latest in the evolution of privacy laws as they pertain to the Internet and identities of Web surfers, privacy experts said. "The law is very unsettled and still being written. Any decision by the highest court of any state -- particularly the one where AOL resides -- is significant,'' said David Sobel, general counsel at Electronic Privacy Information Center.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-964522.html

Florida calls electronic voting smooth
A touch-screen voting machine broke down this morning in Florida, and a handful of optical ballot scanners malfunctioned. But Florida officials insist that its first statewide electronic vote is going smoothly. It had better, say elections observers and Floridians alike. The state's technical difficulties threw the 2000 presidential election into uncertainty, and polls opened late in some counties last year. But more than just the state's reputation is at stake Tuesday, as the nation scrutinizes the touch-screen technology meant to banish the specter of hanging chads to the history books.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-964609.html?tag=fd_top

Merger could spawn more copyproof CDs
Two leading copy-protection technology companies announced Tuesday that they are merging, in a deal that could help speed the move of controversial copyproof music CDs to market. Macrovision, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based company, said it will acquire Israeli company Midbar Tech, with the intention of joining the rival anti-copying technologies from the two companies. Both companies' products have met resistance from consumers and record labels, and together they hope to overcome market skepticism, they say. Analysts said the deal would likely help smooth some of the bumps in the path toward general acceptance of anti-piracy technology for music CDs, although the consolidation fell far short of a guarantee of success for the industry sector.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-964590.html?tag=fd_top

Philips touts PC DVD-rewritable design
Philips Electronics has developed a reference design for DVD-rewritable drives in PCs in a push to promote the DVD+RW format. The consumer electronics giant's semiconductor division on Monday debuted the main guts of a DVD+RW drive, including an integrated chipset, optical pickup unit, firmware and reference design, that can record speeds up to 8X. The company will license and sell components for the drive and expects manufacturers to have them available in the first half of next year. "In the PC world, time to market is everything, and the rational here is to help drive makers to hit those tight windows and give them the quickest time to market," said Roger Gregory, a marketing manager in the company's semiconductor group.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-964597.html?tag=fd_top

Kofi Annan's IT challenge to Silicon Valley
The new information and communications technologies are among the driving forces of globalization. They are bringing people together, and bringing decision makers unprecedented new tools for development. At the same time, however, the gap between information "haves" and "have-nots" is widening, and there is a real danger that the world's poor will be excluded from the emerging knowledge-based global economy. Information technology is extremely cost-effective compared with other forms of capital. Modest yet key investments in basic education and access can achieve remarkable results. Estonia and Costa Rica are well-known examples of how successful IT strategies can help accelerate growth and raise income levels. But even some of the least-developed countries, such as Mali and Bangladesh, have shown how determined leadership and innovative approaches can, with international support, connect remote and rural areas to the Internet and mobile telephony.
http://news.com.com/2010-1069-964507.html?tag=fd_nc_1

Text messaging for the blind
A way to enable sight-impaired or blind people to use text messaging has been developed by BT's research arm. BTexact has come up with technology that allows users to send text messages to a handheld computer which in turn reads the message to them. The natural-sounding voice can recognise text messaging shortcuts. If it does not recognise a word, it will read it out phonetically. The idea came about after a group of partially-sighted youngsters visited a BT technology project last year.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2403913.stm

RealNetworks signs wireless deal
A new deal will let RealNetworks offer content providers and wireless carriers the ability to use the MPEG-4 compression standard to stream audio and video to next-generation cell phones and other mobile devices. The agreement, announced late Monday, expands an already existing relationship between the streaming-media company and Envivio, a San Francisco-based spinoff of France Telecom whose software encodes video in accordance with the MPEG-4 standard. When RealNetworks first said it would offer MPEG-4 support, in December, it did so through Envivio plug-ins. MPEG-4 is the successor to MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, the technologies behind the MP3 audio explosion. Like its predecessors, MPEG-4 includes audio and video technologies that condense large digital files into smaller ones that can be easily transferred via a network.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-964520.html

China's Cyberwall Nearly Concrete
While the Great Wall no longer deters would-be invaders from entering China, experts meeting in Washington on Monday said the Chinese government continues to maintain a nearly rock-solid cyberwall. At a panel discussion held by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, experts warned that China has recently improved its censorship technology -- much of which is provided by U.S. companies. The panel also claimed that China now employs some 30,000 "Internet police" to monitor its citizens, and that is has increased arrests of dissidents and journalists posting illegal content on the Internet. Congress created the China commission in October 2000 to monitor human rights in the Communist country. "I was the first victim of Chinese censorship on the Internet," said Lin Hai, a Shanghai computer scientist who spent 18 months in a Chinese prison for distributing forbidden e-mail addresses to an online dissident magazine.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,56195,00.html

Watch the Vote on VoteWatch
Voters on Tuesday don't have to wait for the pesky media to digest stories of suspicious goings-on at the polls. A new website called VoteWatch will share voters' concerns in real time (or at least as soon as they can get home and log on). Frustrated by the media's focus on dangling chads in 2000 while 50,000 voters in Florida were erroneously listed as felons and prevented from voting, Steven Hertzberg has launched VoteWatch as a "repository of voter complaints." "VoteWatch.US is a new website allowing voters to register concerns about their vote immediately -- an important development, because by the time anybody catches most election errors, it's too late to remedy," said a press release from Hertzberg, who did not respond to interview requests. The website provides a forum organized by state and topics of discussion. It's designed to allow voters to report issues regarding access to polls, intimidation, questionable vote counting and discrepancies in tabulation.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,56192,00.html

Plane Spotters: Hobbyist or Spy?
Displaying piles of Greek military data from commercial manuals and the Internet, defense lawyers Tuesday challenged a ruling that British and Dutch aviation enthusiasts had filled notebooks with secrets that put Greece in peril. "Do you really think they came here to spy?" Judge Giorgos Efstathiou asked the Greek air force officer whose testimony helped convict the 12 British and two Dutch plane spotters of espionage-related charges. Their appeal once again pitted Greece's tight military security against the pastime of cataloging the movements of warplanes. In the first trial, defense lawyers struggled to explain the hobby to baffled Greek judges. This time, they sought to show the three-judge appellate panel that information jotted down by plane spotters is available in stores and on websites.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,56214,00.html

Climbers Rock on Wall of Lights
Rock climbers are a unique breed. They're adrenaline junkies, constantly looking for new challenges. But real cliffs aren't always accessible to city dwellers. And the next-best things -- climbing gyms -- are often located in remote warehouse districts that afford them the necessary space. Plus, scaling the same wall over and over can get kind of boring. Jim Strickler has invented an indoor climbing wall that can be set up almost anywhere and instantly mapped with completely new routes, lighted by glowing footholds. "We want to downsize the facilities -- take them out of industrial zones and bring them into neighborhoods, and make more of a community-based experience for the individual," Strickler said.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,56104,00.html

College Kids: A Day in the Life
At the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia in Spain, students play fútbol, dance at discotecas and live in apartments or at home with their families. Thousands of miles away, students at MIT in Boston build robots, play football and go to fraternity parties. A university-sponsored online community gives students from both places a virtual glimpse into college life abroad -- from complex lab experiments to volunteer work, sports and social events. "Students who aren't aware of what universities are like outside of the U.S. often assume everything is the same," said Douglas Morgenstern, a senior lecturer in Spanish foreign languages and literatures at MIT. The site, MITUPV, unites students from MIT and the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia to exchange views about cultural differences while honing their language skills.
http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,56082,00.html

FTC: Where Spam Goes Off to Die
Sex swindles, credit card cons, dubious diet plans, drugs to grow hair and other body parts -- if it arrives in an unsolicited e-mail, the Federal Trade Commission wants it. Since 1998, the Federal Trade Commission has asked people to forward any and all spam to a special e-mail address: "uce@ftc.gov." Consequently, the FTC now has the most complete spam database in the world, a collection of over 20 million missives containing the solutions to all human wants and woes. But what do they do with all that spam? "I always figured uce@ftc.gov was a government-sponsored virtual garbage can," said Mick Ventura, a Manhattan systems administrator. "My tax dollars at work -- make spam go away by auto-forwarding it to the FTC, they'll do your deleting for you." Perish the thought. Delete is a dirty word to the FTC.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,55972,00.html

The FBI Has Bugged Our Public Libraries
Some reports say the FBI is snooping in the libraries. Is that really happening? Yes. I have uncovered information that persuades me that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has bugged the computers at the Hartford Public Library. And it's probable that other libraries around the state have also been bugged. It's an effort by the FBI to obtain leads that it believes may lead them to terrorists. Many members of the public regularly use computers in libraries to access the Internet for research purposes or to locate information about particular interests. It's also not uncommon for students and others to communicate with friends and relatives through e-mail from there.
http://www.ctnow.com/features/lifest...nov03col.story

Chinese province issues swipe IDs to Internet cafe users
People in the central Chinese province of Jiangxi who use cybercafes are having their online activities monitored by police. Anyone who wants to use a cybercafe must now carry an Internet identity card containing personal details including their name and address. These details are then logged onto a police database. Each time someone visits a cybercafe in Jiangxi their card is swiped enabling authorities to see who is online and what sites they're accessing. AP reports that this enables police to block access to certain sites, or even prevent individual users from using the Net. According to official sources the new system was introduced last month to identify criminals operating online and to prevent crimes. Critic claim this yet further evidence of the hard-line approach taken by the Chinese authorities and its continued nervousness surrounding unfettered access to the Net in China.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/27939.html

3D images offer new perspective
A new method of producing digital images could change many elements of design and teaching, say researchers in Scotland. They have come up with a new tool which they say will be of use to car designers, trainee doctors and could even be used to teach maths. Developed at the Glasgow School of Art, the new software dispenses with the need to use a mouse or keyboard. Instead, the user dons a small pair of glasses which project the image in 3D and using a pair of what look like wired gardening gloves, manipulate the image. The image appears as a projection in front of the viewer, they can walk around it, bend and stretch it and even get inside it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2397907.stm

Cannabis drugs pass testing 'milestone'
Cannabis-based drugs could be prescribed in the UK as early as 2003, following successful final-stage trials in patients with multiple sclerosis. Compared with standard treatments alone, the drugs significantly improved symptoms of MS and reduced pain caused by other types of nerve damage, GW Pharmaceuticals has announced. The company is the sole UK holder of a licence to cultivate and supply cannabis for medical research. "These results represent a milestone in the pharmaceutical development of cannabis-based medicines," says Geoffrey Guy, GW's executive chairman. "Subject to regulatory approval, we are now on track to deliver our first prescription medicine to the UK market next year." Existing legislation would have to be altered to permit doctors to prescribe cannabis-based medicines.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993011

Homosexuality is biological, suggests gay sheep study
A study of gay sheep appears to confirm the controversial suggestion that there is a biological basis for sexual preference. The work shows that rams that prefer male sexual partners had small but distinct differences in a part of the brain called the hypothalamus, when compared with rams that preferred to mate with ewes. Kay Larkin and colleagues from Oregon Health and Science University found the difference was in a particular region of the hypothalamus - the preoptic nucleus. The region is generally almost twice as large in rams as in ewes. But in gay rams its size was almost identical to that in "straight" females. The hypothalamus is known to control sex hormone release and many types of sexual behaviour.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993008

Ghosts of Impacts Past: Ancient Hidden Craters on Mars Revealed
A father-daughter science team has found what they say are the oldest known impact craters on Mars, ghostly structures that could only be discerned with special software and the latest elevation data. Images obtained by SPACE.com reveal hints of circular outlines and subtle depressions that appear to be craters created during tremendous asteroid or comet impacts that pummeled the Red Planet’s original crust 4 billion years ago or more. The features have since been mostly buried or eroded away. If the entombed craters exist as suspected, then the current visible surface of Mars does not represent the original crust, as some scientists have thought.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...ts_021105.html

New devices let wary parents keep constant watch on their kids' driving habits
Ah, to be 16 again. The freedom that comes with that age is the greatest thing that can happen to a kid. Celebrate the birthday, make a side-trip to the DMV, and before you know it you have your own set of keys and an official, government-issued piece of identification -- aka a driver's license. Teen-age drivers all over the United States are now facing a new test by being constantly watched. An array of new "black box" devices for cars is on the market, all in an effort to make roads safer and teen-agers better drivers. See how it works, tonight on "Tech Live." Remember the people around you when you first got behind the wheel? As happy as your parents were to give up carpool duties, new fears took over, such as worrying and wondering while their teen-ager is out on the open road. Teen-age drivers may be the butt of many jokes, but the concerns are real.
http://www.techtv.com/news/culture/s...406178,00.html

Marketers Try to Turn Web Pirates Into Customers
"A growing group of online marketers have a new name for the millions of people who use Internet file-trading software to steal music: "customers." The ranks of these marketers include independent bands with little to lose and established companies like Microsoft. What they have in common is that they are starting to view the masses of Internet pirates as a possible source of revenue. They have begun to experiment with promoting their wares on file-trading services, which are typically used to obtain unauthorized copies of music, movies or software. Some entertainment industry officials condemn those marketing efforts as giving support to services that encourage the theft of other people's intellectual property. But the organizations promoting file-traders see it as a way to lure people away from piracy by providing them with authorized material to download — and, in some cases, asking them to pay for it.
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/article.../11042002d.php

The Death Of The Internet
The Internet’s promise as a new medium -- where text, audio, video and data can be freely exchanged -- is under attack by the corporations that control the public’s access to the 'Net, as they see opportunities to monitor and charge for the content people seek and send. The industry’s vision is the online equivalent of seizing the taxpayer-owned airways, as radio and television conglomerates did over the course of the 20th century. To achieve this, the cable industry, which sells Internet access to most Americans, is pursuing multiple strategies to closely monitor and tightly control subscribers and their use of the net. One element can be seen in industry lobbying for new use-based pricing schemes, which has been widely reported in trade press. Related to this is the industry’s new public relations campaign, which seeks to introduce a new "menace" into the pricing debate and boost their case, the so-called "bandwidth hog." But beyond political and press circles are another equally important development: new technologies being developed and embraced that can, in practice, transform today's open Internet into a new industry-regulated system that will prevent or discourage people from using the net for file-sharing, internet radio and video, and peer-to-peer communications.
http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/6600/view/print

More news later on