July 2004 Archives

z0ink writes "Picked up off of EFFector today a letter to all US Senators on the topic of IICA (Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act of 2004 -- formerly the INDUCE Act). 'In February, EFF proposed an industry-led collective licensing solution that would ensure compensation for copyright owners while minimizing the need for governmental intrusion into the digital music marketplace,' writes EFF Executive Director Shari Steele in the letter. 'It's time for a solution to the P2P conflict that pays artists, not lawyers.' IICA has been covered here on Slashdot with more information available here."

Cory Doctorow, on Siva Vaidhyanathan's new article on using technological "tethers" to force customers into using your products, your whole line of products, and nothing but your products: "It's easy to understand why hardware companies love tethering -- it's a license to screw their locked-in customers out of titanic sums of money -- but that's exactly why smart customers need to reject tethered products."

Dan Gillmor, on his decision to stop purchasing iTunes: "Threats to use copyright law against Real are exactly what you'd expect, unfortunately. Apple wants control over online music, and this is just part of the game.

What we customers want is cross-platform compatibility: standards. What the companies want is lock-in. They may win, but they're only locking me out -- because I won't play by those rules. Which means I've bought my last iTunes Music Store song until Apple starts paying more attention to what its customers want."

A German technology consultant warns that item-level use of RFID tags could create some significant security problems: Privacy advocates may not be the only people taking issue with the current crop of radio-frequency identification tags--merchants will likely have problems with a lack of security as well.... Low-cost RFID tags--many which are smaller than a nickel and cost less too--are already being added to packaging by retailers to keep track of inventory but could be abused by hackers and tech-savvy shoplifters, said Lukas Grunwald, a senior consultant with DN-Systems Enterprise Solutions GmbH. While the technology mostly threatens consumer privacy, the new technology could allow thieves to fool merchants by changing the identity of goods, he said. I recently spent a morning with Peter Neumann, a computer scientist and security expert at SRI. One of the things I carried away from that interview was a much deeper sense of how little attention we tend to pay to security (even though we know how to do it right), and just how much trouble that inattention causes. This piece suggests that it might be wise to pay more attention to those issues before enter the penny-tag world, and start thinking seriously about putting RFID on everything....

Here’s a BitTorrent file that will get you, p2p, the video of the Hearings on the INDUCE Act, prepared by Tom Barger. Watch, and blog the substantial noninfringing use.

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Links to this week's topics from search engine forums across the web: SEMPO Under Fire - Mike Grehan Stirs Up SEMPO Controversy - What Does SEMPO Mean To You? - Overture to Launch Bid Management Tool - Google's IPO Pricing - Could a Virus Shut down Google?

The official release of Skype 1.0 provides added functionalities including integrated PC-to-phone calling to any landline or mobile phone in the world and direct P2P file transfer among Skype users on any computer platform (for now Windows and Linux. Mac...

saccade.com writes "EE Times has a fascinating article on how electronics companies are being sucked into a profitless spiral by the cell phone market. More and more of the small consumer gadgets are being folded into the phone: camera, music player, PDA, GPS, etc. So the market for non-phone gadgets is slowly going away as the phone picks up more functions. However, consumers don't buy most phones; they are given away (or sold very cheap) by the service providers as hooks to get people to sign up for mobile service. So the service providers are demanding (and getting) rock-bottom prices for fancy phones they can give away, and the micro chip companies are forced into brutal competition for a market that is shrinking into a single commodity gadget, the phone."

Freenet, the brainchild of Ian Clarke while a student at the University of Edinburgh, is a free software which lets you publish and obtain information on the Internet without fear of censorship. Nobody controls Freenet, not even its creators, meaning...

Back it up, RealDoll, this new pornorealist product plans to kick your 36"-24"-36" synthetic ass. Formed in the image of Playmate Linn Thomas, the "Talking Love Doll" promises to do what none before have: talk back atcha. "Almost seamless, life-like feeling skin, mannequin hands, feet and head with long flowing hair, large breasts and jointed arms with orbital sockets, multi-speed, Batteries included," says the website, along with claims that the "Wireless, Vibrating" Ms. Thomas is molded from all-new "Futurotic Material." You say Futurotic, I say vinyl. Whatever.

One thing is certain: IANALDU (I am not a love doll user), but even more tempting than the off-the-shelf model would be a haxxored version. She could speak everything from Shakespeare to software user manuals, for the man with the right set of tools. And, no, I actually mean tools. Dollmodding, anyone?

Link to Fleshbot post. Figure out a way to install Elizabot on the damn thing for extra credit.

The VCR/DVD industry wouldn't be here without erotica, dollar for dollar, porn
probably still rules Internet commerce and now these guys may have finally found
a way to launch the consumer robotics market! 

rmb

The New York Times reports that the the 9/11 Report has been "a royalty-free windfall" for publisher Norton.

"The 9/11 Commission Report," the final report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, has remained at the top of the best-seller lists at online bookstores since its release last Thursday.

The report is topping the Amazon charts despite being uncopyrightable and freely available on the web. It's one of the of the few types of works left -- works of government authorship -- that enters the modern public domain.

According to the typical copyright story playing in Washington, this publication and its profits for the publisher shouldn't have happened. What would be the incentive to publish a book that anyone else could freely read and even republish? Yet it seems that some people still want to read on bound paper, and a publisher can still make money by being first to market at a reasonable price. Of course the newsworthiness of the event and subject had plenty to do with this story, but it helps show, as do and
Lawrence Lessig's experience with it, that total control isn't the only workable business model for publishers.

In today's New York Times:

Almost all the electronic records from the first widespread use of touch-screen voting in Miami-Dade County have been lost, stoking concerns that the machines are unreliable as the presidential election draws near. The records disappeared after two computer system crashes last year, county elections officials said, leaving no audit trail for the 2002 gubernatorial primary. A citizens group uncovered the loss this month after requesting all audit data from that election.

This is even worse than it seems. The notion of an audit trail in this case is ludicrous to begin with. Even with a digital backup there's still no way you can trust that the votes cast were the votes recorded. That's the big problem with touch-screen voting machines that lack a voter-verifiable paper trail -- paper that can be used to check the machines' accuracy and be the actual ballot in a recount. And this is only the latest strange incident in Florida's sordid elections record. You have to conclude that the people running elections in Florida are buffoons at best. At worst? The thought is frightening.

Ruffin sez: "a New Zealand company is now making a synthetic "skunk gel" called Skunk Shot that is being used by law enforcement to keep vagrants and junkies out of abandoned buildings." Link

Ernest Miller says,

BoingBoing noted yesterday that JibJab, the creators of the hilarious Bush/Kerry/Guthrie parody were facing threat of a copyright lawsuit by the current copyright holders for "This Land is Your Land." Now, the Home Recording Rights Coalition has issued a press release pointing out that when the television news broadcasts promoted the flash animation they were likely "inducing" people to violate copyright, assuming that the animation isn't fair use. Under the INDUCE Act, that could make the broadcasters liable for literally millions of copyright violations. Heh.

Xeno sez:

When CERT and other security agencies said to stop using IE, I wasn't too concerned as I use Firefox. However, it was quickly brought to my attention that due to shell calls and all Microsoft products being able to ignore your default browser, this still made your system vulnerable through IE. So I took the long painful journey of finding a simple way to remove IE.

Now, I'm getting emails from tons of satisfied people who have followed my instructions and have even their default Microsoft aps (including Windows update) using whatever browser they told it to. Even Microsoft has called me to see how I did it. Unfortunately, they blatantly told me that they won't be including it in their knowledge base 'for obvious reasons'.

Link

(Thanks, Xeno!)

I follow tagging technologies .... Symbol is a strong player in emergent retail technologies. They own a very big part of the handheld barcode scanning market, and have developed hybrid RFID / optical readers. Matrics is one of the premier RFID tag suppliers. This kind of acquisition could accelerate mainstream tagging technology development. Press Release. Symbol Technologies Buys Matrics, Accelerating Its Move Into Radio Tags, BARNABY J. FEDER, NYT 07/28/04 Symbol Technologies, which has been burdened by the fallout from a long-running accounting fraud under previous management, tested the patience of its investors yesterday by announcing an acquisition that is likely to cut into earnings for the next two years at least. Symbol, the nation's leading producer of bar-code systems, said it would pay $230 million to acquire Matrics, a developer of electronic identification tags and wireless devices that read them. Analysts said that the deal should sharply accelerate Symbol's push into the promising field of radio-frequency identification, or RFID, but that Matrics and many other RFID pioneers still faced significant hurdles to becoming profitable .......

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Induce Act.

85.5k JPEG Link

(Thanks, Donna!)

The Glasgow Sunday Herald has a sobering article on the future of energy consumption in China: Switch on a light in your home. Any light. Then list the other uses of domestic electricity. Fridge, freezer, washing machine, tumble drier, vacuum cleaner, computer, DVD player, TV and video, mobile phone chargers, toaster … And that’s just for starters. Now think of China. At present, this vast nation of 1.3 billion inhabitants – and rising – is using the equivalent of one 100-watt lightbulb per head, per year. But its population is developing an insatiable appetite for consumer goods. Forget global terrorism. One of the scariest stories today is how the Chinese are going to meet their energy demands over the next 20 years. While Scotland fumbles with issues of wind farms blighting the landscape, we should wake up to the potential energy horror story that will impact on everyone....

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CNN reports that a computer crashes in May and November 2003 erased votes from Miami-Dade County’s first widespread use of touchscreen voting ...

C|Net News is running a very interesting story about a new blog that is posting military and military-related information supposedly found on P2P filesharing networks (Are P2P networks leaking military secrets?). The blog is See What You Share on P2P....

The Mobility Denial System is an oil-slick-in-a-can, a combination of "Drilling Mud Additive, Flocculent and water" that renders surfaces as slippery as wet ice. Lots of tasty acronyms and buzzwords on the sell page, including "Anti-Traction Material (ATM)" and "Non-Lethal Slippery Foam."

Once applied, the material will degrade or impair the adversary's ability to move. For Interior applications it can be applied to flat, smooth, non-porous surfaces such as linoleum, tile, wood floors or staircases. Exterior applications include sloped, rough, porous surfaces such as concrete, asphalt, and grassy areas.

Link

(via Coolhunting)

Among the goodies you'll find on Kate Pemberton's "endfile" geek-art site are "an extensive casio watch camera diary," and a series of embroidered versions of canned short text message. I hope she posts the other 24 SMS embroidery pieces she's working on -- they're great. Link

I'm at PFIR's "Preventing the Internet Meltdown", where today kicked off with a discussion of intellectual property (the other IP). It was a happy surprise to share the stage with Thane Tierney, of Universal Music Group, who shared our horror at the Induce Act and joined a genuine dialogue about the collision between the Internet and the recording industry. He was willing to think about a world in which the record industry shifts its role from controller and distributor to that of filter. I hope we'll be able to continue that conversation with Thane and others in his business, to move toward a solution that leaves the Internet open to innovation and pays artists and copyright holders.

Also on the panel, Ed Felten commented on the one-way ratchet of copyright legislation; Michael Froomkin called on technologists to spec and build speech-enabling technologies (like Tor); and Carrie Lowe of the ALA called our attention to the copyright-driven inaccessibility of material to libraries and the public they serve. I talked about reclaiming the Internet from amid the copyright-dominated debate in Washington.

Link (via The Cartoonist)

Skype has just announced the official launch of its final version 1.0 release. The very popular and free Voice-over-IP software has recruited over 7 million users around the world in just about one year since its first release. The new...

A bored hacker modified an Eliza programme to act as an IRC sex-chat bot that impersonated an eighteen year old girl (or, rather, impersonated a sex-chat afficianodo of indeterminate gender impersonating an eighteen year old girl). He assumed that people would try to have cyber-sex with his bot and get bored, but in fact a surprising number were convinced and even got off with it.

This is a plot element in Bruce Sterling's brilliant "RU486?" a short story collected in Globalhead -- feminist hackers finance their RU486-running operation with a phone-sex line staffed by automated chatterbots.

It turns out that pornbots are among the class of Eliza-derivatives that can pass a Turing Test (or rather, horny sex-chat boys are among the class of human beings that can't tell a chatterbot from a person -- other groups include psychotherapists, who, in one experiment, couldn't distinguish actual transcripts of therapy sessions with schizophrenics from simulated therapy with schizophrenic chatterbots; and the university student who mistook a chatterbot for his prof in the middle of the night when he IMed same for permission to extend deadline on a late paper).

'eliza' is a program that talks to you, pretending to be a psychologist. its script of possible responses is super tiny, so it doesn't fool anyone. or so i thought.

IRC is a network full of chat rooms (or "channels") where a lot of scary internet people (or "perverts") hang out. my friend reduz found a version of 'eliza' that could go on IRC. he put it on IRC. a lot of people from other countries thought it was a real woman, so naturally they tried to have sex with it. they got frustrated quickly. reduz is a bad man...

so i replaced eliza's tiny, boring script with a massive dumb blonde script that has like 3,800 responses on all sorts of topics, but mostly sex. jenny18 is very horny and she loves talking to horny guys. and everyone knows the best place to talk to horny guys is on dalnet irc sex channels.

Link (Warning, contains links to transcripts of IM-based sex, NSFW)

(via Waxy)

Stefan Bechtold writes that the EU Commission (ok, a staff report) has decided that copyright terms for recordings in Europe should not be increased beyond the current term (50 years after publication), despite the growing pressure of recording labels to increase the term to “save” (as they put it) some of the most important Rock from entering the public domain. The story is getting press in Europe. (Independent, BBC).

This is an extremely important development in this battle. For once, a government-related entity has recognized the truth (or at least, not had its recognition crushed). I’ve already been talking to archives that are working on the idea of releasing all the recordings they can when they pass into the public domain on January 1, as a way of demonstrating the value of a wide range of work becoming available, unencumbered, for widespread use.

Here in the U.S., we’ll be able to celebrate the same in, um, 2019. Till then, for your listening pleasure, an oldie (first posted here last July): a 1937 radio program from the Columbia Workshop about creative works passing from the “copyright lane” into the “public domain“.

Everyone’s seen the brilliant JibJab Flash of Bush/Kerry. The piece claims to be a “parody” of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land.”

As any copyright lawyer recognizes, it is not a “parody” in the sense that “fair use” ordinarily recognizes it. A “fair use” “parody” is a work that uses a work to make fun of the author. JibJab is using Guthrie’s work not to make fun of Guthrie, but of the candidates. (For the now classic case on this, see Dr. Suess v. Penguin Press, where a “parody” of O.J. Simpson using The Cat in the Hat was not “fair use.”)

Guthrie’s publisher’s lawyers too recognize this. As CNN’s Allen Wastler reports, Guthrie’s publisher is now threatening JibJab.

What’s great about this story, of course, is the levels of hypocrisy. Guthrie was not much for property rights himself. It’s said that there is a not-often-sung verse:

But whether Guthrie believed in property rights or not, the key thing this story should do is force us to ask generally: Does a law that makes a political parody such as Jibjab illegal (even if it is not a “parody” in the copyright view of the world) make sense?

(Note to citizens: We’re permitted to change the law.)

(Thanks to Paul Puglia!)

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NewsBot, the personalized news search and aggregation service that MSN has been testing in a number of countries in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa has gone live in the United States.

Chris Cohen has been on a roll analyzing whether various derivative works are satires or parodies. The difference can mean one is legal and the other isn't under a fair use analysis. The basic rule is that a parody, which...

The new MyDoom variant scans your HDD for domains (e.g. craphound.com), then hammers on search engines looking for valid email addresses at that domain (e.g., "GET /default.asp?lpv=1&loc=searchhp&tab=web&query=e-mail+example.com"). The traffic got so bad that it actually took Google down for a while.

Link

(via /.)

Apple just announced a new iTunes mobile version that Motorola will load onto their "mass-market music phones" in the first half of next year. TheFeature's Carlo Longino gives his quick take on the deal:

Plenty of handsets today are capable of playing mp3s, but presumably none do it with the ease and grace -- or inherent coolness -- of Apple's products. It's an interesting move for Apple, which has said in the past the iTunes music store is a loss leader designed to help sell iPods. Presumably, they want to take new Moto phone users and turn them into iPod buyers... That, or this is just the first step towards the much-clamored-for wireless iPod.

First of all, we should agree on what the definition of "ready for the desktop" stands for. For some of us it refers to a graphical user interface in which applications have icons and can be launched in an intuitive manner without the need of complex commands. Even a Commodore 64 running Geos could be "ready for the desktop" by this definition, but the fact is that when we read "ready for the desktop" we understand "ready to replace Microsoft Windows".... [OSNews]

'-- most of the ingredients to integrate Linux into a winning operating system exist and are available now. We need standards and sage political decisions to prepare a good product ready for widespread distribution. If Linux continues to be driven by students who believe in freedom of choice and anarchy rather than in standards, with companies fighting to become the de facto standard alongside proposing their own proprietary systems we will never get there. I want to see the day when I can walk into a store and be able to purchase a so called "Linux application" that I will be able to install with the ease of any Windows and Mac OS X application. This is not possible at the moment, because "Linux" is just not ready for the desktop yet. --'

...John

Real Networks have reverse-engineered Apple's iPod and written a player for its DRM "Helix" format, which they're giving away. This means that you'll be able to play the Helix files you buy from Real on your Apple iPod.

I'm cautiously glad about this. It's the right idea: tech vendors should be writing tools that allow anyone to play anything on anything: it's insane to own an Apple "record player" that only plays Apple "records" -- meaning that if you buy your records from Real, you need to buy another record player.

My only disappointment is that Real is engaged in the same behaviour: Real's records only play on players licensed by Real: it would be much more customer-friendly if Real went into the business of providing us with music in a patent-free, open standard that could be implemented by anyone.

Link

(Thanks, Jeff!)

Update: Ernie Miller's posted a lengthy analysis of this on his blog:

At the BlogOn conference, a Microsoft presenter asked his audience how many of them used Internet Explorer:

Probably 99 times out of 100 when he asks that question all the hands go up, right? Well first there was a pause and then a giggle and then a whoop of laughter as the audience looked around and realized that NO ONE had raised a hand. The presenter was thrown off his mark, but he recovered and said, "Wow! Okay how many of you wish we'd fix IE so you could use it?"

Still no hands....

Informal survey afterwards said the Windows users in the crowd were all using the latest Firefox. Wouldn't it be amazing if Mozilla ended up winning in the end?

Link
(via Waxy)

The House Appropriations Committee apparently wants to see some cuts at the National Science Foundation (NSF) for 2005. Nanotechnology, however, appears to be one small exception. Judging from this quote provided by SpaceRef.com, "nanotechnology" in this instance means the semiconductor industry.

Regarding nanotechnology, the report states, "the Committee remains concerned that researchers are reaching the physical limits of current complementary metal oxide semiconductor process technology and that this will have significant implications for continued productivity growth in the information economy." After commending NSF's activities, the report "encourages NSF to consider increasing research support, where feasible, through this program." More here

The House committee is likely reacting to a request from the Semiconductor Industry Association. In 15 years, the association predicts, it'll be like Midtown Manhattan subways during rush hour on every chip. You just can't pack them in there any tighter. Top down is dying. Bottom-up is on the ascent – whether it's through self-assembly or atomically precise positioning.

So, the group is asking the U.S. government to chip in more money and it's proposing a research institute that will discover what comes next. The goal? Creating an entirely new industry, with new switches, interconnects, materials, memory and manufacturing methods by 2020.

Related News
Chipmakers' Problems Are Speeding Up (BusinessWeek)

Longer term, chip companies are looking at all sorts of exotic solutions, including more use of nanotechnology. Within the next decade, engineers envision using tiny carbon nanotubes as a partial replacement for silicon to cut down on chip overheating. Further out, scientists anticipate being able to make tiny transistors with single-atom switches, requiring infinitesimal amounts of energy to run. More here

Samsung Expands Texas Semiconductor Lines (The Korea Times)

The enlargement represents the second-phase implementation of Samsung's three-year plan to invest $500 million in SAS to make the fabrication plant a world-class facility armed with so-called nano-technology. More here

Nano-Imprinting Promises Even Smaller Electronics (Science a GoGo)

In a discovery that could lead to dramatically smaller computer chips and other electronic components, Princeton scientists have found a way to mass produce devices that are so small they are at the limit of what can be viewed by the most powerful microscopes. More here

NanoBot Backgrounder

Thanks for the nanomemories, Intel

Welcome to our Nano Nightmare

What Would Roger Own? Not Nano

Swatting Millipedes

Abstract Cart

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Suw Charman has written an excellent article for the Guardian on my pal Koleman Strumpf's empirical, quantitative research on the effect of downloading on record sales (he concluded that it doesn't really have one), and the music industry's content-free bluster in reply.

"We consider it a very flawed study," says Matt Phillips, a BPI spokesperson. Both the BPI and the International Federation for the Phonographic Industries (IFPI) have criticised the study for including the Christmas period when people are buying CDs as gifts.

"It's very straightforward to address these kinds of criticisms," says Strumpf. "We got rid of the Christmas season and just looked at the first half of our data. We still find the same effect."...

"Over the period 1999 to 2003, DVD prices fell by 25% and the price of players fell in the US from over $1,000 to almost nothing," says Strumpf. "At the same time, CD prices went up by 10%. Combined DVD and VHS tape sales went up by 500m, while CD sales fell by 200m, so a possible explanation is that people were spending on DVDs instead of CDs."

Link

(Thanks, Suw!)

Great Terra Nova post on the new round of VC funding received by Massive Incorporated, which does in-game product-placement and ads:

** you hack monster for 80pts of damage
** you hack monster for 100pts of damage
>monster: did you know you can get 'monster' discounts at QuickieMart
** you hack monster for 10pts of damage
* you have killed monster
* you gain 1000XP
>would you like to convert these to 1 QuickieMart loyalty point (Y/N)

Link

Glenn Fleishman sez: "Sid Steward is a PDF guru that I've turned to in the past to bookmark and clean up my electronic books. He forwarded a link to a site he's created where he has the 9/11 Commission's report optimized for faster download, and including bookmarks and other PDF add-ons. His site offers a fast full text search of the PDF with links that will open the file and hit those bookmarks." Link

Ernest Miller writes:

Yesterday, Marybeth Peters, the head of the US Copyright Office, testified before the Senate regarding the INDUCE Act. Her testimony was even more radical than the RIAA's. Not only did she (inappropriately) explain what outcome the Appeals Court in the Grokster case should reach and argue (wrongly) that the INDUCE Act wouldn't have a chilling effect on innovation, she actually said she thought the INDUCE Act was not enough. The Register of Copyrights argued that the Betamax decision, which made VCRs legal, should be overturned by Congress. Wow.

The Guardian Unlimited has an article on several recent government or think-tank reports lamenting Britain's low use of renewable energy sources, compared to the rest of Europe. In fact, "Peter Hain, the secretary for Wales, argued this month that every new home should, by law, be fitted with photovoltaic panels to produce solar electricity." Given how cloudy the UK is, such a proposal makes less sense that it would in, say, Greece or the American southwest. But the article also notes that there is another obstacle to the development of renewables in the UK, and by extension many other advanced nations: [A] big hurdle for the UK is that it has a highly developed grid system, one of the world's most advanced, and cheap electricity. [BP executive John] Mogford compares renewables to mobile phones. If a country had no land lines, it would make sense to go straight to mobile phones and skip the huge investment in fixed lines. Similarly, it would be advantageous for a country without a highly developed power grid system to sink resources into solar energy. But in the UK, the incremental cost of adding another power station to the grid is less than putting money into a renewable source such as solar power. This echoes an argument Stuart Hart and Clayton Christensen made in a 2002 Sloan Management Review article on technological innovation and the base of the pyramid, in which they argue that "developing countries... constitute tbe best initial markets for environmentally friendly technologies" and alternative energy: In the developed world, the difficulty facing innovators is the existence of a well-developed, sunk-cost grid system, which... wipes away any cost advantages associated with distributed generation [i.e. solar power, wind turbines, fuel cells, etc.]. In these markets, cost-accounting systems and rate structures that are tailored to the centralized generation of power make it difficult for such technologies to gain a foothold. But distributed generation has much more promise in the developing world. Consider that more than 2 billion people in the world have no access to dependable electric power. For people in distant rural areas, no grid system exists, and the massive capital investments needed to build such systems mean that it could be decades before they are built.... The crucial breakthrough for sustainable energy technologies will not take place in a laboratory. Instead, such technologies must be incubated and refined where they can be profitabily deployed through disruptive strategies, in markets where they do not compete against established systems.......

Mark Frauenfelder, BoingBoinger, freelancer and one of my correspondents in a previous life, quoted me in his latest column in the mobile Internet news site The Feature:

To find out more, I spoke to nanotechnology expert Howard Lovy, the principal author of a new report on nanostorage that was issued this week by the market research firm, NanoMarkets.

Lovy told me the one big advantage of MRAM is instant access. Compared to hard drives and flash memory, which are relatively slow, MRAM is speedy. It's not as fast as SRAM, but unlike SRAM, MRAM is nonvolatile, which means the data doesn't go "poof!" when the power is cut off. MRAM could give mobile phones a much-desired instant-on (and off!) capability.

MRAM also uses a lot less power than solid-state memory since it doesn't have to be continuously refreshed. It only uses power when it is being accessed, and even then, it only needs a small amount. Another advantage is the ultra-high storage capacities that are achievable. "It brings us into the terabyte territory," says Lovy. Were talking not just your entire music library on a chip, but the entire Library of Congress on a sugar cube." More here.

NanoBot Backgrounder

Money for Memory

My 64-bits worth

Thanks for the nanomemories, Intel

Update: Engadget is running a new storage medium roundup. But, then, they blow it by being so hip and more cynical than thou that they fail to see the difference between real technology and chicken sh_t.

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The China Productivity Miracle
July 16, 2004
By John Mauldin

This week we look at China with a few thoughts that are not part of the conventional wisdom, and throw in a comment or two on global money growth, employment problems in the third quarter, and a comment on the presidential race.

I read with dismay this morning the following item in Dennis Gartman's daily letter:

"Why the US has to try to meddle in international trade as often as it does via trade protection is really quite beyond us here at TGL, but it does. Now the US wants to impose limits on the number of socks that China can export to the US, joining bras, knit fabrics and such that were protected late last year. The textile industry here in the US, long given to tariffs and trade protection, is striking again while it thinks it has an audience asking the government to protect it from Chinese imports.

"The importation of socks into the US is a relatively (no it's a very) small industry, averaging less than $50 million/month. This is not steel; this is not autos; this is not grain... this is but $50 million/month that US companies cannot compete with. If consumers want these cheaper socks and if China's exporters can send them abroad and compete with US producers, then so be it: let the socks walk! But to constantly protect indigenous US businesses from competition is anti-capitalist at the very core. Somewhere, this has just gotta stop. Sadly, in an election year is probably won't."

If the Chinese are stealing our jobs, a brand new study by the Conference Board begs the question, "Who is stealing the jobs from the Chinese?" (As we will see, the Chinese actually lost 9 times more textile jobs than the US.)

Released last week, the study shows that between 1995 and 2002 China lost 7 times more manufacturing jobs than the US. In the off chance you have not seen the latest edition of Asian Labour News, I will quote:

"China is losing more manufacturing jobs than the United States. For the entire economy between 1995 and 2002, China lost 15 million manufacturing jobs, compared with 2 million in the U.S., The Conference Board reports in a study released today. "As its manufacturing productivity accelerates, China is losing jobs in manufacturing - many more than the United States is - and gaining them in services, a pattern that has been playing out in the developed world for many years," concludes The Conference Board study.

"According to Robert H. McGuckin, Director of Economic Research at The Conference Board and co-author of the study: "Increased unemployment has also accompanied the restructuring of the industrial sector, but per capita income has risen over the period."

The new report from The Conference Board, the global research and business membership network, is the result of a joint research project with The National Bureau of Statistics of China. The study is based on data for the 51,000 large and medium sized firms in China's manufacturing, mining and the utilities industries. While the study focuses on the larger firms, according to McGuckin, "the same patterns are observed among smaller firms."

Representatives of Yahoo, Google, Ask Jeeves and Looksmart offer an inside glimpse of recent developments at the major search engines.

Interesting story in The Star (Canada) about this weekend's launch of Telesat Canada's new Internet broadcast satellite:

Canadians should care about this moment -- about this particular satellite. Anik F2 is more than just the largest and heaviest of commercial satellites in the world, it's also the first to combine cutting edge Ka-band technology with older and less powerful Ku- and C-band transponders. The latter two will continue to carry Canada's television and telecommunications signals, but the powerful Ka-band "spot beams" will, for the first time, let an Anik satellite deliver two-way, broadband Internet service to any location in North America at a price that's competitive with residential cable or DSL high-speed services.

Link (Thanks, JP!)

TheyWorkForYou is the best political advocacy site I've ever seen: it scrapes the UK Parliamentary record and then turns the debates into an easily searched means of keep tabs on your MP -- and to turn your MP's deeds into the basis for discussion and political activism. A common question from Americans, Canadians and others is how this system might be adapted for their respective governments.

Well, now the TheyWorkForYou team have released the source-code for their app under the GPL, and they're also publishing raw XML feeds of their data-sources for you to mix and munge.

Get busy!

Link

(Thanks, Danny!)

Here's how nano played in the blogosphere today. Alert level: Jade

Get rich quick #143563433 (New Links)

Nano-technology is where it's at. Not since the dotcom era has it been so easy to make lots of moolah with minimum effort. I reckon. More

Public attitudes toward nanotechnology (InstaPundit)

Despite lacking concrete knowledge about nanotechnology, most Americans hold a generally positive view of the emerging science and believe the technology’s potential benefits outweigh its perceived risks. At the same time, most Americans do not trust business leaders in the nanotechnology industry to minimize potential risks to humans. More

Fantastic Voyage at Amazon (fightaging.org)

One of the most respected scientists and futurists in America teams up with an expert on human longevity, to show how we can tap today's revolution in biotechnology and nanotechnology to virtually live forever. More

Hackers on Planet Earth (TECHPopuli)

Also under discussion at the conference were fun ways to harass spammers. Some even discussed plans to build a Hogwarts for Hackers -- a national security college that would teach young adults security skills like lock picking, encryption, rewriting software in cars, running pirate radio stations and building nanotech labs from things stashed in the closet or basement. More

Direct and Related Links for 'Is Internet Explorer on its way out?'

This just in from The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, running a Newhouse News Service story:

Today, scientists envision ever-longer lives, boosted by experimental techniques like these:

Nanotechnology, which sends tiny robots into the body to strike disease, managing molecules and potentially slowing or even stopping aging. More here

Wow. One week out of a nanotech newsroom, and I guess I've missed some important developments. Apparently, the little robots have migrated from the pants to the rest of the body, striking at disease. The "slowing or even stopping aging" phase is only a "potential" benefit.

In reality, nanoparticles are being called into action in the fight against disease. If you want to call them, "tiny robots," that sounds cool, I guess, if you broaden your definition of "robot" a bit. Thanks to the Fresh Prince, robots are again the subject of public fascination and horror, which fits right in with the current state of the nano meme.

Combinex, a product by Advanced Magnetics Inc. (AMEX: AVM, News, Discussion, Web site) doesn't exactly involve "tiny robots," but it does use iron oxide nanoparticles as an imaging agent to help differentiate between healthy and cancerous lymph nodes. AVM is in the process of seeking U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval.

And you know how some groups have managed to successfully paint buckyballs as an evil cancer-causing agent that damages fish and fetuses. Well, in reality, they hold the key to possible cancer treatments or cures, with companies like C Sixty leading the way with preclinical trials and a partnership with at least one fairly significant drug company.

And Australia-based Starpharma is conducting FDA-approved clinical trials of VivaGel, which contains another kind of manmade molecule called the dendrimer, as a treatment for or precaution against HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases. Last November, the company sought volunteers (PDF, 88 KB) for its Phase I study. Starpharma's dendrimer intellectual property comes courtesy of Michigan's Dendritic Nanotechnologies Inc., headed by dendrimer inventor Donald Tomalia, profiled in a previous NanoBot post.

There's more, but you get the idea.

If the Plain Dealer wants to get the scoop on the real "tiny robots," they should send a reporter to an event in their own town Oct. 25-26. The Cleveland Clinic's NanoMedicine Summit. Yes, Cleveland not only rocks, but it's also a world center for nanobiotechnology. The event is part of NANO Week, Oct. 25-29. Recently added to the lineup is "Nanoparticles: Synthesis, Functionalization and Applications for Targeted Drug Delivery." Translation: "Tiny robots" that "strike disease."

OK, Plain Dealer. I take it back. You're right on target.

NanoBot Backgrounder
Nanobots: Body and antibody
Cancer death to cancer detection
Carlo's just a copycat

ETC Group Executive Director Pat Mooney, in a recent paper discussing nanotechnology regulatory issues, brings up a reasonable point:

Ironically, governments are talking about the need to be proactive, failing to admit that they are at least one decade late: nanotech products are already commercially available and laboratory workers and consumers are already being exposed to nanoparticles that could pose serious risks to people and the environment.

It's a question I've posed to a handful of nanotech government, business and academic leaders over the past few years, including Sean Murdock, head of the NanoBusiness Alliance; and Kevin Ausman, executive director of the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology at Rice University.

Here's what I asked Ausman:

Lovy: Do you think this is developing the way it should? At the same time you're studying the health and environmental effects of this stuff, nanotubes are being churned out. Do you think the industry is developing faster than the research into the impact?

Kevin Ausman: I think that the technology is developing faster than the impact research. I think that, however, the technology for any new field normally develops faster than the impact research. And compared to that normal curve, we're ahead of it. We are developing impact research far ahead of where you would expect it to happen.

And here's a snippet of my late-2003 interview with Murdock in Chicago, when he was still executive director of regional nano group AtomWorks. I knew at the time that he was a likely successor for NanoBusiness Alliance co-founder Mark Modzelewski and asked my questions with this in mind.

Lovy: I asked the same question of Kevin Ausman: Do you think the business of nanotech is progressing faster than the research into its risks? Do you think it's progressing the way it should? Titanium dioxide (nanoparticles) has been out there since 1995. Now, CBEN is studying its effects in various situations. Fullerenes are being produced in Japan right now. CBEN is studying their effects now. Is it too late?

Sean Murdock: Let me disaggregate that. Some things you can test for in advance. Some things you can only test as you see products used. Sometimes products are used in unexpected ways … but it's hard to know what those are until you start to have a product in use until see how people are using it. So, that's what I'm saying. It's the type of risk that we're talking about.

Do I think there should be research that's ongoing in terms of the effects of nanoparticles on toxicity. Yes, I think that's at CBEN, I that's happening elsewhere. In the grand scheme of things, it's not like we have megatons of production of nanoparticles that are getting dispersed all over the world right now. Is there some production that's taking place? Yes.

Lovy: Are you saying it's a nonissue today, or an overblown issue?

Murdock: No, I'm saying it's an issue that we need to look at, balance and try to assess. I'm saying that the way that some people have tried to create fear around it, that it could kill us all and do that kind of thing, doesn't reflect the rate at which these things can propagate.

Lovy: But is the study of environmental and health effects of nanomaterials almost an afterthought?

Murdock: No, I would strongly disagree there because it was embedded within the NNI (National Nanotechnology Initiative) plan from the outset. There was a societal and ethical implications workshop back in 2000.

Lovy: Do you think groups like CBEN would have received as much funding and attention now had the alarm not been sounded by groups like ETC and Greenpeace? Do you think that they fired an opening shot that forced the issue sooner than in might have otherwise been dealt with?

Murdock: I don't know that it forced the issue sooner than it would have been dealt with. People looked at this and said, "Look, there are some issues with AgBioTech, we didn't manage the public, didn't think about unintended consequences and we're going to manage it proactively. We're going to be on top of it." The design, from the outset, of the NNI recognized that and had intended to draw these issues. Now, if you're asking, "Has it heightened attention on the issue?" The CBEN (grant) was awarded before ETC Group came out with anything.

NanoBot Backgrounder
Safety and health group launches nano page
Nano's 'No GMO' Mantra
Meet the new nanoboss

The Autocorrect feature in Excel (which drives me bonkers across the whole Office suite) has introduced irreversible errors into genetic research that is tabulated in spreadsheets, because Except autocorrects some identifiers to be dates.

Excel is widely used in genetic research to process microarray data. A microarray chip detects amounts of protein produced from thousands of different genes, enabling researchers to see which particular gene is being expressed in a sample of diseased tissue, for example.

The errors are introduced because some genetic identifiers look very like dates to Excel. If the spreadsheet is not properly set up, it will convert an identifier, such as SEPT2 to a date: 2-Sep. The conversion, the researchers say, is irreversible: once the error has been introduced, the original data is gone.

Link

(via Futurismic)

My latest issue of ScienceMatters@Berkeley is now online. While my Lab Notes site highlights interesting engineering research, ScienceMatters explores the physical sciences, biology, and chemistry. Inside this month's issue:

* The Cellular Mechanic

* An Explosive Theory About Volcanoes

* The Mathematics of High-Tech Highways

A pair of articles use problems with Internet Explorer as tea-leaves that reveal the future of the Web: On eWeek, Steve Gillmor argues that "IE's Failings Point Way to RSS:" "When Microsoft abandoned Internet Explorer development to concentrate on fixing the browser's security vulnerabilities, it opened the door to the emerging RSS revolution." Meanwhile, on the Guardian Online, Ben Hammersley asks "[W]hy did Microsoft stop developing Internet Explorer? Why would a company so vocal about innovation cease work on perhaps the most used application in the world, and for nearly three years?" [via del.icio.us]...

A few months ago, a non-profit group called Project Billboard made up of concerned citizens from the Bay Area, who also happen to be women, purchased some prime billboard space in Times Square on the Marriott Marquis just in time for the Republican National Convention and the elections in November. They signed a contract, and wrote a $368,000 check which was accepted, for the two month lease.

Direct and Related Links for 'Disney gets “techie” with new senior VP'

Direct and Related Links for 'P2P is alive and well'

Our friends at the Foresight Institute are sponsoring the first-ever conference to focus solely on bottom-up nanotechnology, as envisioned by Richard Feynman in 1959.

"This new meeting series will examine all aspects of advanced nanotechnology, also termed molecular manufacturing or MNT: research status, prospects for disruptive applications, and policy issues — including maximizing access for those who would not otherwise benefit."

Bitoogle is a front-end for Google that finds BitTorrent files.

Link

(via Red Ferret Journal)

In one of those curious instances of synchronicity, right as I was sending Red Herring my "Hive mind" piece (the first installment of which is here), Nova Spivacks was posting "Minding the Planet: Minding the Planet: From Semantic Web to Global Mind," which touches on some of the same themes-- or more accurately, exemplifies some of the things I was trying to analyze. Some quotes: This article presents some thoughts about the future of intelligence on Earth. In particular, I discuss the similarities between the Internet and the brain, and how I believe the emerging Semantic Web will make this similarity even greater.... While today most of the intelligence on Earth still resides within human brains, In the near future, perhaps even within our lifetimes, the vast majority of intelligence will exist outside of human brains on the Semantic Web.... I believe that the Internet (the hardware) is already evolving into a distributed global brain, and its ongoing activity (the software, humans and data) represents the cognitive process of an increasingly intelligent global mind.... The evolution of our planetary intelligence has been taking place for billions of years -- it is a natural process, just like the evolution of human intelligence was long ago. The Semantic Web is merely the next step in this process whereby communicable ideas (memes), having already evolved technologies to externalize themselves outside the human mind (i.e. books, recording, software, the Web, etc.) are starting to evolve the ability to propagate intelligently and interact without human intervention. In other words, although today memes are for the most part completely immobile and static unless perceived within a human brain, with the advent of the Semantic Web the cognitive processes for running memes will begin to spread outside the human brain, enabling memes to "run" without depending on humans. It's quite a stimulating piece....

Not Yet Maid: Local resident and giant corporations racing to create helpers of tomorrow (Star-Telegram.com)

Researchers today dream big. They want robots that not only walk but climb, swim and fly.

SRI International, which operates one of the country's leading robotics research centers, is developing artificial muscles that give robots the ability to perform those feats. They hope their technologies will make the stars of I, Robot someday look primitive. ...

(Regis) Vincent (senior research scientist for SRI) said many may fear the creation of sophisticated robots will destroy a large base of the job market. He insists, though, that robots taking over mundane jobs will be beneficial, because "robots don't get bored and it will free humans up to do other things."

More importantly, he said robots will complete tasks that people cannot. He said they will build and repair space stations and they will arrive on Mars to pave the way for humans. Nano-robots will repair damaged organs. More here

Nanobot Backgrounder

Prosaic Potty-Cleaning Nanoparticles

NanoBots as envisioned by Encarta

Nanobots: Body and antibody

Congratulations to Scott Johnson and the rest of the Feedster gang for the launch of Feedster version 2. There are lots of new features to digest, but the ones that most interest me are those that enhance cross-blog conversation. At this URL, for example, I can find a tidy summary of the reaction to this item:
...

See askpang's notes on Nova Spivack on the automatic global mind below.  What will happen, of course, will be near realtime updating, (I envision Moogump antenna-like crawlers serving as a kind of neural propellant).  C'est le meme chose, mon ami!

rmb

Intel announces that their 2nd-Quarter Profits have doubled. This sudden success has been attributed to a flash memory chip commonly used in cell phones and other portable devices.

Still, even with this success under their belt, Intel’s stock has been sinking a bit for this year. The reasons for this are not being blamed on the supply and demand side of the coin. No, rather the fact that chip prices are falling too quickly for Intel to see much of a profit from them.

It has been reported that PC sales in places like Europe, the Middle East and Africa are rising. The current rate of increase is 15.5 percent. With the strides Dell has made by lowering PCs for other countries, I believe this growth rate will drastically increase as time passes.

ChibiOne writes "The Japanese Fair Trade Commission has ordered Microsoft to cut a restrictive contract clause, designed to protect the software giant from patent-related lawsuits by PC manufacturers that sell products using Microsoft's Windows operating systems. Under such provision, Japanese makers would be unable to sue Microsoft even if the software giant's technologies are deemed to violate their patents. The Japan Times Online has the scoop."

Roblimo writes "A study by accounting and consulting giant PriceWaterhouseCoopers claims Canada could lose up to 75,000 IT jobs by 2010 to offshore outsourcing, but could also *gain* 165,000 jobs through U.S. outsourcing contracts. The trick is, according to this story at IT Manager's Journal, that while Indian, Chinese, and Russian programmers may cost 80% less than U.S. programmers, the time zone, language, legal, and other problems involved with sending work half way around the world can eat up much of the labor savings, while Canadian programmers are nearby, speak English with nearly American accents, have a similar culture and legal system, and get paid 40% less than U.S. programmers. Might be time to think about moving North, eh?"

The NYT's registration system and expiring pages have doomed them to google-obscurity. Wired News argues that they've gone from being the paper of record to a Web-era irrelevancy, and all to protect a Lexis-Nexis agreement and to bring in two to three percent of the digital division's profits.

But recently, when I googled the terms "Iraq torture prison Abu Ghraib" -- certainly one of the most intensively covered news stories of the year -- the first New York Times article was the 295th search result, trailing the New Yorker, Guardian, ABC and CBS News, New York Post, MSNBC, Slate, CNN, Sydney Morning Herald, Denver Post, USA Today, Bill O'Reilly on FoxNews and a host of others news sites.

Link

I for one have been a fan of Crucial memory for some time now. Well it seems that the time has come for them to take that next big step - branded memory. This is not a typo, Crucial now has their own line of memory! It is called Ballistix and it is considered to be high grade, premium RAM. Designed just for computer junkies like us who expect the best performance from our RAM.

Mena Trott has stepped down as CEO of SixApart, makers of Movable Type and TypePad, in favour of Barak Berkowitz, one of their Series A investors. Mena's written a heartfelt appreciation of Barak that is an instant classic -- a unique example of a company founder's sincere desire to see her efforts bear fruit, even if she's not's in charge any longer (though she's staying on as President).

At our office, we had phone cables running up and down walls and doorframes and across the floor. This mess was around for months until one day Barak came to work with a T-shirt, some tool-belt type thing and some device to do phone wiring. During the course of the afternoon, Barak installed our phone lines and cleaned up the office.

Incidentally, while he was doing this, Maile, our administrative assistant came in for her first interview with us and saw Barak. A week or two later when we called her in for a second interview I asked that she speak with Barak so that he could interview her as well. After we hired Maile and explained who Barak was she laughed and said "Oh, I thought he was the handyman and that this company really liked to get everyone involved!"

Link

(via Kottke)

Disney -- cash-strapped and slumping -- made an enormous mistake when it declined to distribute Moore's latest blockbuster, Fahrenheit 911.

Michael Moore's headline grabbing documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11," which Disney declined to distribute, grossed more than $80 million in its first three weeks of release, more than any Disney film this year and any documentary ever.

"It's held up fairly well," said Andy Spencer, a '96 graduate who works at Raleigh's Rialto theater. "It was two weeks straight of either sellouts or virtual sellouts."

Link

(Thanks, Pat!)

PHP has gone from strength to strength over recent years. Reputable sources have demonstrated both its phenomenal growth rate, and indicated that it is the most-used Apache module by quite some way, flooring even the twin titans of mod_perl and OpenSSL in the popularity stakes (a fact which some people seem quite keen to gloat about) [1]. Tiobe Software's "Programming Community Index" (a nominal measure of the popularity of programming languages and skillsets) ranks PHP as having climbed so far as to be tussling with Visual Basic over fourth position, only being clearly bettered by the heavyweights of C, C++ and Java. Along with Perl, Apache, GCC and the Linux kernel, it is one of the undisputed heavyweight success stories of Free / Open Source Software. On Tuesday, PHP v.5.0 was finally unleashed upon the world. What is starkly evident is that, whilst the developers have spilled blood to facilitate backwards compatibility, enormous changes have been made, both to the language syntax and its capability. These changes have implications beyond the world of PHP itself: They are representative of a certain trend in programming languages and the advance of technology in general. So do these changes Promote Hyper-productive Programming, or are they just Purloining Heinous Piss ? [2]

“Microsoft has long held the title of undisputed champion of Web browsers, but recent research shows the software giant’s Internet Explorer slipping in popularity for the first time in recent memory. Recent numbers from analytics company WebSideStory revealed a steady downward trickle in market share over the past month. Since June 4, IE witnessed a 1 percent change from 95.48 percent of all Internet users in the United States to 94.16 percent on July 9.”

prostoalex writes "CacheLogic attempted to measure the peer-to-peer network traffic by installing their network monitoring tools in data centers of large ISPs. ...

ajs writes "On July 13, Red Hat announced that they would be re-stating their revenues for the last 3 years. This sent a shock-wave through their stock price, ...

ccnull writes "Who's the #2 Linux vendor in the world? Would you believe Novell? Infoworld takes a look at this long-struggling giant and how it has (and ...

antatack writes "It's already been a year since the Mozilla Foundation was created, and it's been quite a year. The Mozilla Foundation has prospered, our ...

Google has added a keyword based browsing feature to its toolbar, allowing users to type words rather than URLs into the Internet Explorer address bar and automatically see the 'most relevant' site for those terms.

Freeculture.org is throwing a "National Barbie in a Blender Day" to celebrate the victory over Mattel, which sued a photographer for taking pictures of nude Barbies.

Freeculture.org has launched an official site for the National Barbie-in-a-Blender Day project, at www.barbieinablender.org. Users are invited to submit artistic pieces inspired by Forsythe's "Food Chain Barbie" series to blended@barbieinablender.org for the site's upcoming gallery of submitted work.

Link

(Thanks, Alex!)

Dave sez: El Universal (Mexico City) is reporting that the Attorney General of Mexico, Rafael Macedo, had a microchip inserted under the skin of one of his arms to give him access to a new crime database and also enable him to be traced if he is ever abducted.

Bloomberg news added "about 160 Mexican officials will carry the microchip" and that "the chip can't be removed, but will be deactivated after Macedo's term as attorney general expires." Link

The Tolkien estate and Warners have sent out a lawyergram to the owner of shiremail.com, arguing that the word "Shire" belongs to them. The Register traces over 1,000 years of usage of the word "Shire" in England, and enumerates many towns with the word "shire" in their names across the English countryside.

n fact, we don't think it would be too provocative to suggest that JRR Tolkien may have been inspired by over a thousand years of common history when he first came up with the name "The Shire" as the idyllic home country of the books' main protagonists, the hobbits.

However, the legal letter claims that "goodwill in the name has been achieved through sales of such books". Certainly The Shire sounded rather nice as presented in the fictional books, but we suspect the goodwill towards the area in which people live was there before Mr Tolkien even put pen to paper.

Link

From John Borland at CNET:

Several high-profile technology companies and movie studios are expected to announce Wednesday that they have formed a coalition to ensure that high-definition video and other content cannot be pirated in home networks.

Sources familiar with the group's formation said the initial members include IBM, Intel, Sony, Microsoft, Warner Bros., Disney and Panasonic.
The announcement is scheduled to be made at the cross-industry Content Protection Technology Working Group (CPTWG) meeting in Los Angeles, although last-minute membership changes could occur before then.

The alliance marks the culmination of years of tentative and often suspicious contact between the high-tech industry and Hollywood. It will be aimed at developing specifications to protect copyrighted content such as movies inside home networks. If the group is successful, a consumer might be able to download a high-definition movie, store it on a PC, watch it on a television and transfer it to a mobile device to watch while traveling.

Here's a press release that links to a white paper that previews a report on nanomemory and nanostorage that I wrote for NanoMarkets. Here's an excerpt from the release:

"According to NanoMarkets, nanotechnology may soon have the solution to the burgeoning need for data storage. Today, the lowest hanging fruit for nanotechnology is materials. But as nanotubes become commoditized, the "next-hanging fruits" will be found in the memory sector. Here, at last, is where nanotechnology can move beyond mere technological curiosity and begin the true nature of its calling as a technological enabler, disruptor and . . . moneymaker."

See? I can be all about nanobusiness when I want to.

“Broadband Internet access is coming up to 50% of all home Internet users, Nielsen/NetRatings reports. Its May analysis of Internet connections shows that 49% of all home users—62.9 million households—are connecting via broadband. Four years ago, broadband users were 9% of the market with 7.2 million households. In that time, narrowband users have slipped from 74.5 milion households to 66.5 million.”

An anonymous reader writes "The world's largest retailers are developing the EPC Network as the infrastructure for a global rollout of item-level RFID. In many ...

Today would have been R. Buckminster Fuller's 109th birthday. It's also the 50 year anniversary of his patent for the geodesic dome. The Bucky Fuller commemorative postage stamp that Mark posted about here is now available from the United States Postal Service.

"Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all, to feed everybody, clothe everybody, give every human on earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before—that we now have an option for all humanity to 'make it' successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment."

I wrote a short piece for TheFeature about the increasing use of GPS ankle bracelets to track parolees' whereabouts. Link

From the project website: "Pac-Mondrian closes the perceptual distance between fine art and video games by combining Piet Mondrian's Modernist masterpiece 'Broadway Boogie Woogie' with Toru Iwatani's classic video game Pac-Man. The project offers gamers a chance to compete for $2000 worth of cash prizes for high score and level design." Link (Thank you, Snoodles!)

China has revoked Pfizer's patent over Viagra, a move that Lawmeme argues is a precursor to widespread dismissal of pharmaceutical patents.

In what appears to be the first pharmaceutical patent revocation, China has revoked the patent. Not long after the patent was granted, pharmaceutical producers (12 in this account) requested re-examination. It isn't quite clear yet exactly what happened at that re-examination. Some claim the patent failed the detailed description required by Article 26 of China's patent code. Others claim it failed the novelty requirement. Pfizer claims its patent still stands pending appeal. The Viagra patent was already poorly enforced, and now the prognosis looks even more bleak for Pfizer.

Link

“Windows XP Service Pack 2, arguably Microsoft’s biggest service pack yet and the company’s most important security project since the Trustworthy Computing initiative, will be released in August, the company announced Monday. ‘We are on track to RTM [Release to Manufacturing] Service Pack 2 in August,’ a Microsoft spokesperson said. The spokesperson declined to be more specific on whether Microsoft was aiming for early, mid- or late August.”

“Software patents are back on the European agenda and the stakes are high. Are they necessary for innovation or do they impede it? Ben Hammersley investigates.”

My cow-orker Jason Schultz reports on a breaking new DMCA horripilation: a court has ordered a company to stop fixing tape-drives because in so doing, it makes unauthorized access of a copyrighted "Maintenance Code."

A district court in Boston has used the DMCA to grant a preliminary injunction against a third party service vendor who tried to fix StorageTek tape library backup systems for legitimate purchasers of the system.

How is this a DMCA violation? Well, it turns out that StorageTek allegedly uses some kind of algorithmic "key" to control access to its "Maintenance Code", the module that allows the service tech to debug the storage system. The court found that third party service techs who used the key without StorageTek's permission "circumvented" to gain access to the copyrighted code in violation of the DMCA, even though they had the explicit permission of the purchasers to fix their machines.

Link

Lessig points out a documentary on Fox News, one that makes extensive use of clips from Fox, without permission, to make its point, and what this means:

As the Times article describes, Greenwald's style for distributing documentaries may be the beginning of something new -- political criticism, using interviews and clips, making a strong political point, distributed through DVDs and political action groups. (See some other examples here). On what theory does he, and others, have the right to use such material without permission? On the free culture theory we call the First Amendment: Copyright law must, the Court told us in Eldred, embed "fair use"; "fair use" is informed by First Amendment values; the values of the First Amendment most relevant here are those expressed in New York Times v. Sullivan. As with news-gathering, critical political filmmaking needs a buffer zone of protection against the overreaching of the law. And if the potential of this medium -- now liberated by digital technology -- is to be realized, we need clear precedents that establish that critics have the freedom to criticize without having to hire a lawyer first.

Link

(Thanks, Larry!)

Matt Webb bought a 12" Powerbook and got a lemon. He's spent over a month calling Apple, trying to get it fixed, getting ignored, getting promises broken, not having his calls returned, getting the machine returned still broken, sending it back again. This is outrageous: Apple UK needs to do a better job if it plans on retaining customers.

It's happened again. Same problems as last time. mutt can't make temporary files, the computer won't shut down cleanly, then it won't boot (stays at the grey Apple screen) DiskWarrior can't repair it (and it freezes in Target Disk mode). If I go into verbose mode on book, the errors are:

Load of /sbin/mach_init, errno 2, trying /etc/mach_init Load of /etc/mach_init failed, errno 2

The hardware check, on the original CDs, comes back fine.

Coincidentally, it's after about 11 days of usage (again), and after the hard drive has got 45Gb of data on it (again).

I called tech support. Very helpful guy in the Danish tech support call centre. He says the next thing they'll ask me to do is reinstall.

Hang on, I've been here before.

I'm not going through this again.

I know this story. This is the one where I spend days doing what tech support ask, send my computer off, Apple hang onto it for months and send it back, still broken.

Link

(via Plasticbag)

WHATWG's home page asks rhetorically: "Shouldn't this work be done at the W3C or the IETF?" And it answers: "Many of the members of this working group are active supporters and members of the W3C and other standardization bodies. We plan to submit our work for standardization to a standards body when it has reached an appropriate level of maturity." Bingo. That's how things used to work a decade ago when Web standards, and the applications built on them, formed a virtuous cycle of co-evolution.



Another sign of forward motion came from the Mozilla Foundation, which announced last week that it will modernize the long-stagnant Netscape plug-in API in collaboration with Adobe, Apple, Macromedia, Opera, and Sun Microsystems. In other words, everyone but Microsoft. While Internet Explorer sits on the sidelines, benched by Avalon, the rest of the players are creating some excitement on the field. Go, team! [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

Although Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer waxed optimistic about the company's Linux competition in his annual memo to employees, analysts and Linux leaders say Microsoft is losing traction fast and that its battles are "only going to get worse." [Technology News from eWEEK and Ziff Davis]

I think Mr. Steve is fearing the inevitable and seem to be exhibiting denial behavior.

...John

“After being berated by Microsoft for attempting to sell Linux on some of
the company’s desktop systems, Dell has decided to stop selling Windows
altogether. …”Read more…

theodp writes "On the Malaysian leg of a whirlwind Asian tour, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates voiced his concerns over the growing goodwill towards open source, ...

Verified Voting, a nonprofit devoted to fighting paperless electronic voting machines, is holding a national day of "Computer Ate My Vote" protest on July 13. They're asking sites to display a badge and help fight the good fight. See the page below for info on rallies and events in your state.

Link

The drama continues in the case of University at Buffalo professor Steve Kurtz, a member of the Critical Art Ensemble. Kurtz has been under investigation since May when police--who Kurtz called to his home after he awoke to find his wife dead of a heart attack--discovered biological materials used in the respected artist's work. (More background here.) Yesterday, Kurtz was charged with four counts of mail and wire fraud with a maximum prison sentence of 20 years each. Professor Robert Ferrell, chair of the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Public Health, was also indicted for helping Kurtz obtain a bit of harmless bacteria.

"I am absolutely astonished," said Donald A. Henderson, Dean Emeritus of the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health and resident scholar at the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Henderson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bush for his work in heading up the World Health Organization smallpox eradication program and was appointed by the Bush administration to chair the National Advisory Council on Public Preparedness.

"Based on what I have read and understand, Professor Kurtz has been
working with totally innocuous organisms... to discuss something of
the risks and threats of biological weapons--more power to him, as
those of us in this field are likewise concerned about their
potential use and the threat of bio-terrorism." Henderson noted that
the organisms involved in this case--Serratia marcescens and Bacillus
atrophaeus--do not appear on lists of substances that could be used
in biological terrorism.

In this week's NTK Danny O'Brien breaks the most exciting -- and underreported -- news about the forthcoming version of Mac OS X, called "Tiger":

Why have so few people noticed the key element of Tiger? Dashboard provides javascript access to some safe operating system stuff, like drawing primitives on the window canvas. And then, when you load the gadgets up *in Safari*, you get the same access. Meanwhile, Apple made a deal with Opera and Mozilla the same week to add enough to the browser plugin API to provide the same javascript objects on other platforms and browsers. And they all forked off from the W3C last month to set their own standard committee, WHAT-WG. For creating web applications. Just like Joel Spolsky was asking them to do. So we have low-level (but not insecure) javascript access to the desktop, an open (but non-W3C) standard, and cross-platform plugins to support it. DON'T YOU PEOPLE UNDERSTAND? It's BROWSER WARS II - ELECTRIC BOOGALOO!

Link

The European Space Agency, the European Southern Observatory, and NASA just released a free Photoshop plug-in that gives anyone access to archival astronomical images and spectra from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and others:

"If there is anything that unites astronomy, it is the worldwide use of a single file format - nearly all the images of stars and galaxies produced by telescopes on the ground and in space are stored as so-called FITS files. Unfortunately this file format has been accessible to very few people other than professional scientists using highly specialised image-processing tools."

The ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator provides direct access to the full 16-bit color images. For example, this image of the planetary nebula NGC 5979 was made with the FITS Liberator by compositing four individual exposures taken through various filters. Link

Ernest Miller says:

The INDUCE Act will make "whoever intentionally induces" copyright infringement liable for that infringement. Unfortunately, the definition of "intentionally induces" is extremely broad and the proposed law would give copyright holders (such as the RIAA and MPAA) tremendous flexibility in suing developers of new technology and effectively quashing progress that the copyright holders don't like. To foster reasoned debate on this topic, I'm inaugurating a new daily feature at The Importance Of ..., called "Hatch's Hit List." Each entry will give an actual example of a new and innovative device or technology that would be threatened by the INDUCE Act.

Silicon.com reports that schoolchildren in Osaka will start being tracked by RFID: The rights and wrongs of RFID-chipping human beings have been debated since the tracking tags reached the technological mainstream. Now, school authorities in the Japanese city of Osaka have decided the benefits outweigh the disadvantages and will now be chipping children in one primary school. The tags will be read by readers installed in school gates and other key locations to track the kids' movements. The chips will be put onto kids' schoolbags, name tags or clothing, according New Zealand's National Business Review. You have to wonder why they're doing this. School violence isn't a very big problem in Japan-- though a couple spectacular incidents recently may have heightened public sensitivity to it-- and it's not clear from the article whether this is a genuine security measure, an anti-truancy one, or something else....

Anthony Townsend, a recent MIT Ph.D. and one of the best thinkers on the intersection of cities and digital spaces, is spending several months in Korea as a Fullbright Fellow. He's documenting his visit in his Seoul Digital City blog, which I highly recommend as a source on the very interesting goings-on in Korean digital culture. Not only is Anthony an astute observer, but the blog attracts comments from several other people living in Korea who write about digital culture issues....

“Groove Networks Inc. this week will introduce Groove Virtual Office 3.0, the first version of the company’s peer-to-peer collaboration software to offer truly contextual collaboration the way company founder Ray Ozzie envisioned it: The software takes collaboration to users, rather than bring users to the collaboration.”

The Guardian has published a wonderful profile of my pal Phil Gyford, whom you may know from the Pepys's Diary blog -- but who has also helped hack together some of the UK's best political advocacy websites.

His latest project, TheyWorkFor You.com, was launched last month with the intention of bringing parliament closer to the British people. With a team of almost 20 volunteers, Gyford helped build the site, which provides information on members of parliament and a readable version of Hansard, the parliamentary record.

"There's lots of interesting stuff," he says, explaining the motivation behind the site. "But it's so unappealing to read the Hansard site. For example, there's no way that webloggers can link into it. Presenting it in a readable way was something that had been talked about a lot before, but never done. We started making plans for it last August or September, but we probably started working on it properly just before Christmas."

Link

The Associated Press has an interesting article about the translucent concrete developed by Hungarian architect Aron Losonczi. During the mixing process, glass fibers are added to the traditional stone, cement, and water. This enables light to shine through the material. Several variations of the new material are on display as part of a National Building Museum exhibit called Liquid Stone: New Architecture in Concrete. Judging from the Web site, it looks to be a stunning exhibit. Link (to AP article) Link (to Liquid Stone) (Thanks, Gabe!)

On September 24 2001, stock in Stewart Kaiser's start-up company R-Tec was selling for 46 cents a share. That day, Kaiser issued a press release about R-Tec's new device called C-BAND (Chemical & Biological Alarm and Neutralization Defense System.) Four days later, R-Tec shares had risen to $2.40 each and Kaiser sold the 50,000 shares he had just given to his mother. The funny thing is that C-BAND was actually nothing more than a filing cabinet painted yellow and outfitted with a flashing red light. Today, Kaiser and his wife were indicted for securities fraud, obstructing justice, and other bad things. Link

Grassroots Wi-Fi activist Anthony Townsend, co-founder of NYCwireless and Wireless Commons, has published a new article in the architecture journal Praxis. The paper is called "Digitally Mediated Urban Space: New Lessons for Design." From Anthony's blog:

"I sought to lay out the way I've been thinking about the rapid and sometimes chaotic introduction of four classes of digital technology into urban space (wireless, GPS/positioning, GIS, and displays). I investigate these trends in four cases: Times Square and Union Square in New York, Tokyo's Shibuya Crossing, and Seoul's proposed Digital Media City."

Link (via Howard Rheingold's journal on TheFeature)

If you have ever been to a biker bar on the West Coast, or an Orange County shopping mall filled with be-doo-ragged white male teens, you'll get the humor here. If not, click this link first, before you check out these funny blogosphere in-joke t-shirts. BoingBoing reader David says, "Could this be the start of the east coast/west coast blogging rivalry? Will the bloggies become a scene for chaos, frustration, and gunfire? I can see it now ... 'Ain't no blogger like a west coast blogger 'cause a west coast blogger don't stop...'"

Link

yootje writes "Infoworld is running an interesting article about Akamai and the DDoS attack that hit the network of Akamai Tuesday. According to this article ...

Word has it that the regulators in Washington are enamored of Professor (in the School of Computing) Hollaar’s recent paper, Sony Revisited, and that it is in part responsible for Congress’ current infatuation with the Induce Act. Professor Hollaar is a smart guy, and his paper is an interesting and well-researched examination of secondary liability in the context of copyright law. But if Congress thinks this justifies the Induce Act, then there is some deep confusion somewhere. I suspect there are two possible sources for this confusion.

(1) Hollaar discusses the scope of “inducement” liability in the context of patent law. There are some in Congress who seem to think that the Induce Act “merely” carries the same idea to copyright law. This is just a mistake. The scope of the Induce Act as written is far broader than the scope of inducing patent infringement as interpreted. And if “all” Congress wants to do is extend patent inducement to copyright law, then it should amendment the Induce Act to state precisely that. That would be a vast improvement over the existing proposal — not enough to justify it in my mind, but it would make the harm it will cause much much less significant.

(2) Hollaar discusses the purpose and meaning of the Sony case. While his discussion is technically correct enough (though the idea that copyright is the right to protect a “business model” is really not right at all), imho, the Professor, and in turn, the supporters of the Induce Act, are really missing the point of Sony.

As everybody knows, Sony set the rule that when a new technology has the “potential” to support “substantial noninfringing use” of copyrighted material, the maker of the technology would not face secondary liability for copyright infringement.

But what no one (in Washington, at least) seems to understand is why Sony set that standard. It was not because the Supreme Court is filled with copyright infringers who wanted to encourage copyright infringement. It was instead because the Supreme Court was filled with judges not eager to engage in the complex balancing required to judge whether a technology creates more benefit than harm. As the Court stated:

Sound policy, as well as history, supports our consistent deference to Congress when major technological innovations alter the market for copyrighted materials. Congress has the constitutional authority and the institutional ability to accommodate fully the varied permutations of competing interests that are inevitably implicated by such new technology.

Why is that a great idea? Because (isn’t this obvious to Republicans?) courts are awful, expensive, and slow institutions for judging the economic effect of new technology. Soviet planners with better lighting. And rather than bury innovators in years of litigation before their innovation gets to market, the Sony rule says: let the innovation go, if there is a potential for a substantial noninfringing use, and if Congress wants to regulate it more, then let Congress weigh the benefits of the technology against its costs.

Ignoring this extremely sensible separation of powers principle has already cost Silicon Valley dearly. See, e.g., ReplayTV. ReplayTV is the digital equivalent of the VCR. It does the job more efficiently, and it promised to do some things the VCR couldn’t do, too. But under the principle of Sony (innovate first, regulate later), it should plainly have been allowed into the market without intervention by the courts. Yet precisely the opposite happened. Content owners sued ReplayTV. It was dragged into federal litigation for many many months defending its new technology. And before the case could be resolved, the company effectively declared bankruptcy.

Is this the future Senators Hatch and Leahy want for all new technologies that impact copyrighted material? Will every Apple be forced to defend its innovation in a federal court? Will federal judges become the arbiters of good technology? Will technology firms be forced to spend more on lawyers than on R&D?

Whatever the lobbyists say about this bill, this is the single most important fact that we should not forget: It is a lawyer employment act. It will force technologists into court before they get to enter the market place. It will shift responsibility for striking the balance in copyright law from Congress to unelected federal judges.

That’s not a bad thing for me, or my kind. I, after all, think the courts have some role here (in setting the limits of copyright), and I, after all, make lawyers for a living. But for an already overregulated Silicon Valley, it is another nail in the coffin by the regulating-obsessed in Washington.

They Might Be Giants have put their new album online as MP3s, for $0.99 each, with the whole disc available for $9.99. The disc costs $18, and the band has refused to withhold material from the Web version to make up for the discrepancy, listening to fans who insisted that they wanted to buy the disc online.

Link

(Thanks, Jon!)

NEC has announced that its batteries will have cryptographic authentication schemes to prevent "low-quality counterfeits." Jason Schultz comments on the way that the DMCA turns such a sytem into a license to screw your customers by shutting out competitors who make cheaper batteries:

The software will be introduced in Japanese digital cameras by year's end and is expected to be used in 50 million units by 2007. The software is ideal for use in mobile phones and batteries, but NEC Electronics is also considering extending this technology to "smart" keys, printers and ink cartridges, as well as bundling the technology into hardware options.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, software-based authentication is the wave of the future. And now, with the DMCA, a near-monopoly! Future, here we come.

Link

Senator Hatch (who used to understand stuff) has introduced the INDUCE Act, which will criminalize the act of inducing another to commit a copyright violation. This is a brand new theory of copyright liability, which, as this floor statement makes clear, is directed at overturning Sony with respect to p2p.

The proposal alone is troubling enough. But the outrageous part is that there is talk that this massive new layer of federal regulation of technology will happen without hearings — indeed, that it will be passed in the next weeks.

Whatever the merits of this new regulatory program are (and, imho, there are not many), it should not happen without an opportunity for Congress to consider the full implications of this new regulation. The ramifications of this reach far beyond p2p.

As most of us know, the EFF has been after certain IT related patents recently. You may not, however, be aware of which patents are under attack.Patents identified by the EFF for challenge include:— a method for administering tests over the Internet— a system and method for playing games on a network— a method and apparatus for implementing a computer network/Internet telephone system (VoIP)— an audio and video receiving and transmission system— a system for generating, distributing, storing, and performing musical work files“What makes these patents among the worst of the bunch (is) the fact that their owners are threatening and filing suits against small businesses, individuals, and nonprofits, not to mention the threats to free expression and innovation that each of them pose,” the EFF said on its Web site.

Dieppe writes "Robot couriers are being used in hospitals CNN. The robots are being used as delivery 'bots to deliver medicine and other hospital supplies. ...

An anonymous reader writes "Possio AB has launched a Linux-based wireless access point that allows users to connect to the Internet through 3G ...

Raul654 writes "Today Wikipedia reached the 300,000 article mark. Wikipedia is a 3-year-old non-profit project to build an encyclopedia using WikiWiki ...

The Vatican Library is one of the world's great libraries. Not only does it have a remarkable collection of manuscripts, incunabula, and books; if you're a church historian, a medievalist or early modernist, or theologian, it's one of the places you're likely to see colleagues, and be seen. (Indeed, spending time in a research library or archive is one of the ways graduate students become real scholars, and become recognized as peers.) You would think that this is library wouldn't have a problem with theft, given that the penalties the institution has at its disposal are rather more severe than those of your local public library. But some materials do go missing from time to time. There's also a more mundane problem of misplacing things: the main reading room has something like 120,000 books, and as with any library, a misplaced book is as good as lost. So the Vatican Library is putting RFID tags in the books in its reading room. The Guardian recently had an overview of the project, while this paper explains in greater technical detail how the Vatican Library uses RFID in its reading room. Like Wal-Mart, the Vatican is adopting RFID for logistics and security reasons: their system lets you swipe an entire row of books, and tell if one is missing or out of place. According to library prefect Ambrogio Piazzoni, "You just walk in front of a shelf and you can immediately see on the screen a list of all the books and their contents. If a book is missing, or in the wrong place, the computer signals the fact with an alarm sound." The system also lets you collect information about use patterns. As one article explains, An additional objective of this project is the automatic monitoring of the books: how often they are taken from the shelves, the statistics of their use in order to optimize space, monitoring the various routes they following by having electronic gateways in the printed books reading room. All of these are reasons that any of the fifty or so libraries that have RFID-tagged their collections would give. As anyone who follows RFID knows, widespread item-level tagging is years away-- at least until penny tags (and cheap readers) are available-- but library books are expensive enough to make today's RFID tags interesting. But as the Catholic News Service notes, there is one unusual aspect of the project: each book or document's catalog data -- such as its title, author, number of pages, date published -- will be inserted into the book's chip. This way even readers at the library can aim their handheld computer at a book and get its catalog information without having to reach up and take it down. This is an unusual practice: the more standard practice is to have an ID number of chip that points to a database record that contains biblioigraphic metadata. The Vatican Library can do this because its books are noncirculating: there's no assumption that they'll leave the Library and be subject to interrogation by outsiders. Indeed, people who are interested in charting the likely futures of RFID would be wise to look closely at what's going on in libraries. Libraries will be one of the most useful places for seeing how users react to item-level RFID tagging, and how they deal with the privacy and security issues. Library practices have long been subject to public debate and self-examination, and in contrast to many industries or institutions that will be experimenting with item-level RFID tags in the next few years, the library community has a history arguing about the larger implications of its policies. (One reason tags normally contain a unique ID that points to a database record, rather than carrying any bibliographic or patron information, is that it gets around some of the privacy worries-- but as this recent paper argues, it doesn't eliminate them.) [via RFID in Libraries, a microblog that is must-reading for RFID use in libraries.]...

Knowledge@Wharton asks Will RFID Spark the Next Revolution in Retailing?. The short answer: maybe, maybe not. Also, there's an upcoming FTC meeting on RFID: Applications and Implications for Consumers....

An interview in Technology Review with Sandy Hughes, P&G's global privacy director, on RFID and its implications for consumer privacy. And an Economist article on RFID's rollout....

First, my apologies for being offline for the past week. I was traveling for several days last week, then was laid low upon my return by a stomach bug. However, I'm back now, and have a backlog of posts to get online. First off: Adam Zawel, an analyst at the Yankee Group, predicts that Multibillion-dollar investments in radio frequency identity (RFID) tags will affect four million US employees by 2007....some of these workers will lose their jobs, but most will see them migrate from mundane to 'more value-added' positions....

Microsoft Corp.'s business ambitions have never wavered. Microsoft was founded in 1978, went public in 1987, and has since grown to become the world's largest technology company and one of the world's largest publicly traded companies. It has as an enormous cash balance of around $55 billion on its balance sheet and 93 percent share of the consumer software market. Investors typically regard MSFT stock as a no-risk investment with a stock price that will keep going up. However, that is not the case. [IT Manager's Journal]

I think Microsoft has peaked to a point where the right head doesn't know what the left head is saying or doing.

...John

Eddie Forouzan has joined up with Kyocera Wireless Corp. to work on boost battery technology. Forouzan, who has recently worked as a team leader and battery technologist for ABIOMED, Inc., helped to develop an implantable battery pack for the company’s own bionic heart - among other products that they are working on.

Have custom built parts designed while you are online! This is truly cool, folks! Download the CAD software from the eMachineShop, design your part, place the order, and the automated shop will make it for you!

Michael Moore was quoted in the Sunday Herald today as welcoming the free copying and distribution of his film on the 'Net for noncommercial use.

The activist, author and director told the Sunday Herald that, as long as pirated copies of his film were not being sold, he had no problem with it being downloaded. "I don't agree with the copyright laws and I don't have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people as long as they're not trying to make a profit off my labour. I would oppose that," he said. "I do well enough already and I made this film because I want the world, to change. The more people who see it the better, so I'm happy this is happening."

Significant words, to be sure, but reading these comments -- made after the film's unprecedented big bang opening -- how amazing it would be for a director of Moore's stature to release work under a Creative Commons license, or to make comments of that nature before the movie comes out?
That's not likely any time soon, for a variety of business reasons. As BoingBoing reader Alex Strasheim writes, "I don't think [Moore's comments about filesharing were] so much an endorsement of piracy as it was him saying that he's not losing much sleep over it."

Quentin Tarantino made similar "laissez-faire" comments about unauthorized copying and distribution of Kill Bill v.2 a few weeks ago. All of this is interesting stuff, but it points to how confused we are as a society about the economic and cultural role of filesharing. Some say it's all too convenient for high-profile filmmakers to give P2P the thumbs up as an afterthought, when their work has already performed well at box office. Others argue that Moore has a sort of ethical obligation to support the free distribution of F9/11, because some of the under-reported facts it contains "belong" to the American people.

But laws that make filesharing punishable by fines or imprisonment don't take into account whether or not a given film had great box office numbers, or contained information that was of social significance. Anti-P2P laws exist already. More of them, with broader enforcement resources and heavier penalties, are on the way. Isn't saying that we're sort of okay with noncommercial P2P filesharing some of the time, but not others, like being a little bit pregnant?

The position of Lions Gate Films, F9/11's distributor, isn't vague. Some of Moore's detractors have been posting copies of the film and Bittorrent pointers online. In response, Lions Gate Films Releasing president Tom Ortenberg told CNN:

"I think it's deplorable what enemies of 'Fahrenheit 9/11' are doing. We are currently looking into our legal options. We are not going to tolerate anybody trying to infringe on (this film's release)."

Link (Thanks, Boris, and Jean-Luc)

Update: An American BoingBoing reader who's a military man in Afghanistan (requesting anonymity) writes, "Every other week here in Kabul, a bazaar is held on our base where local products are sold. Some of those "local products" are pirated movies. I just thought you'd like to know that Fahrenheit 9/11 was the big seller here this Friday."

Update 2: BoingBoing reader J. Greely asks whether or not Moore's comments could disqualify this film from Oscars consideration, based on this section of the 2003 Academy Awards rules (2004 rules aren't yet online). IANAL, but I think this language means that the Academy intends to bar films "officially" released online by the film's maker or distributor, and has nothing to do with online distribution initiated by the public -- whether or not the filmmaker condones it. Snip:

3. No television or internet transmission shall occur at any time prior to, or within the six months following, the first day of the qualifying run or the festival win. Any documentary which is transmitted anywhere in the world in any version as a television or internet program within that period will automatically be disqualified from award eligibility.

The curse of complexity is the bane of every security administrator, so UNIX users take your pick: would you like BSD or Linux? [SecurityFocus]

'-- Windows is horribly complicated. Internet Explorer, one of the core components of Windows, is also horribly complicated. This complication leads to insecurity, and plenty of real-world examples of this insecurity are available all over the Web. Fixing some of these issues isn't a matter of fixing a few lines of code, but in many cases, redesigning the way the application works. Why does Microsoft not patch some of the issues that are still unfixed in Internet Explorer? Because the complexity of the application makes fixing a lot of these problems, which derive from a complex set of inter-system interactions, a daunting task. I'm not saying this to defend Microsoft, but to demonstrate the problems that complexity brings about. -- Complexity is a double-edged sword, and both BSD and Linux wield it differently. One thing, however, remains certain; unlike Windows, we know which way the blade goes. '

...John

This month's issue of Wired Magazine includes a feature about robotics for which I was one of several contributors:

Consider the progress of just the past 15 years. There are now robots that can get around on two legs, participate in simple conversations, and manipulate objects in rudimentary ways. Of course, we don't yet have a bot that can navigate downtown Manhattan, tie its shoelaces, or even tell a chair from a desk. MIT's Cynthia Breazeal holds out hope that within five years, robots will cross a critical threshold, becoming partners rather than tools - in other words, we'll have friends, not appliances. And while there are a number of extremely complex problems to solve before we can make something as advanced as Sonny, the star of I, Robot, we're getting there, one piece at a time. To find out where the state of the art lies, Wired surveyed the projects that might one day add up to an android just like the rest of us.

Devices will be as much as 50 percent cheaper later this year, researcher says. [PCWorld.com - Latest News Stories]

This future news sound interesting.

...John

“This morning, Microsoft unveiled its new MSN Search portal, a Web site that looks suspiciously similar to that of market leader Google. Microsoft’s search engine plans had been widely reported, but few had expected the new MSN Search to so closely resemble Google.com, especially after the Microsoft unit’s last major product, the MSN toolbar for Internet Explorer (IE), had so closely resembled Google’s toolbar. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but does site this go a bit too far?”

CEO of Oracle, Larry Ellison testified Wednesday in an antitrust case involving the attempted takeover of PeopleSoft. Oracle’s CEO testified that it would be in his companie’s interest to continue supporting PeopleSoft’s products if the takeover was allowed to go through. The Justice Department disagrees and believes that Oracle’s acquisition of PeopleSoft would reduce the number of vendors of specific specialized software.

The software in question is critical to human resources and corporate finances departments for large corporations. This entire legal battle is the aftermath of a hostile takeover attempt by Oracle that was then halted by a lawsuit from the Justice Department.

Microsoft apparently requires “greater clarification” on which specific files need to be removed so that it can comply with the EU’s court ruling. Microsoft has been ordered to remove it’s Media Player from Windows immediately, but apparently this has caused some confusion.

Now if someone asks me to remove a program from my computer, I know that I am competent enough to understand what “files need to removed”. I believe this is just another Microsoft stall tactic and should be looked upon as such.

Skapare writes "O'Reilly Network's LinuxDevCenter has a great article summarizing the indemnification possibilities for businesses considering switching to (or ...

securitas writes "The New York Times' Barnaby Feder reports on Delta Air Lines' plans to invest $25 million in RFID luggage tracking hardware and software over ...

“Opera Software today announced it has joined in alliance with Mozilla, Apple, Macromedia, and Sun Microsystems to develop plugin technologies that will enrich the Internet experience offered with the Web browsers developed by the supporting companies of this initiative. The companies have set to enable developers to build Web browser plugins more securely and efficiently. The announced alliance is working to extend the Netscape Plugin Application Program Interface (NPAPI) to support an advanced plugin model based on open Web standards.”

The Lowdown on XP Service Pack 2 RC2Scot Finnie’s latest newsletter is out and the lead article is a deep dive into XP SP2 RC2. Go take a look!

Students beware, internet inspired plagiarism has hit a brick wall in the form of new anti-plagiarism software. Designed to scan the internet and seek out 4.5 billion web pages, teachers can check the originality of their students work with the tap of a few keys. To date, the software has in fact proved it’s worth by locating positive results for students copying the work of others. While this bad news for cheaters, great news for schools.

Microsoft is “temporarily” off the hook with the European Union Commission according to BetaNews.com reporter, David Worthington. The freeze on Microsoft’s remedies ties in with their appeal still in the works. Microsoft spokesperson Jim Desler was quoted as saying; “We believe that suspension is in order and is necessary as the remedies will not only hurt Microsoft, they will hurt many other software development companies and web site developers who have built products for the Windows platform. Most importantly, they will also harm consumers by limiting choice and degrading the usability of personal computers”. Hmm, limiting choice indeed.

GillBates0 writes "Wired's reporting that a social networking software company called Affinity Engines has filed a lawsuit against Google, claiming that much ...

ObsessiveMathsFreak writes "The Inquirer is reporting that Microsoft is offering a preview of its new search technology. The search engine preview has a ...