NewsScan Daily, 29 October 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 29 October 2003 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
       Berners-Lee Sides With Microsoft in Patent Case
       Palm Splits Into New Hardware and Software Companies
       Valenti on Digital Piracy
       Whole Lotta Data Piling Up
       Media Tots

FEATURES
       Flash Card
       Honorary Subscriber: Man Ray
       Memo From Maelstrom

BERNERS-LEE SIDES WITH MICROSOFT IN PATENT CASE
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has come out on Microsoft's side in a
patent-infringement lawsuit the company has on appeal. A lower court awarded
$521 million to a researcher who holds a patent the Web consortium contends
is based on "prior art" that was not considered when the patent was granted
(nor was it considered in the Microsoft trial). W3C director Tim Berners-Lee
has asked that the U.S. the patent office begin a review of the patent "to
prevent substantial economic and technical damage to the operation of the
World Wide Web."(New York Times 29 Oct 2003)
http://partners.nytimes.com/2003/10/29/technology/29soft.html

PALM SPLITS INTO NEW HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE COMPANIES
Palm Computing has split into two firms: PalmSource (a software company) and
PalmOne (a hardware company). PalmOne holds 36% of the handheld market,
though challengers Hewlett-Packard (25%) and Dell (6%) have made significant
inroads in that market.  Since 90% of Palm's sales came from the hardware
side, the pressure is now on the new software company to make a marketing
breakthrough. Information technology consultant Rob Enderle says, "Right now
I'm more concerned about PalmSource. Of the two, PalmSource is the one that
requires a fairly large base of hardware manufacturers and right now they
are fairly limited. They really need a licensee in the enterprise space like
a Dell or IBM or an HP." PalmSource chief executive David Nagel says he
wants to carefully seek out only high-quality companies to license the
operating system, rather than sell device software to as many takers as
possible. "We want to grow the market, not just slice it into a million
pieces." (San Jose Mercury News 29 Oct 2003)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/7130210.htm

VALENTI ON DIGITAL PIRACY
Dick Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, sees
the fight against digital piracy as vital to America's economic future:
"Piracy is a fact plain and real, with the unwanted prospect of its rapid
spread in the future. Antipiracy must take precedence over everything.
Current conservative estimates indicate that the film industry loses $3.5
billion each year to hard-goods piracy (counterfeit DVDs, VHS tapes and
optical discs). That figure does not take into account the damage done by
online piracy. The digital world with its zeroes and ones and perfect copies
of originals has changed the movie landscape forever, which is why the movie
world's priorities have been permanently altered. The industry wants to use
the Internet to dispatch films to consumers. But as we do, we must also
challenge piracy and defeat it with every weapon we can summon -- and we
will succeed, I am convinced -- or one day we will sit upon the ground and
tell sad stories of the decline and fall of America's greatest artistic
triumph and an awesome engine of job and economic growth." (Wall Street
Journal 29 Oct 2003)
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB10673814894910500-search,00.html?collecti
on=wsjie%2F30day&vql_string=valenti%3Cin%3E%28article%2Dbody%29 (sub. req'd)

WHOLE LOTTA DATA PILING UP
A study conducted at UC Berkeley reports that in 2002 people around the
globe created enough new information to fill 500,000 U.S. Libraries of
Congress (which is the equivalent of a stack of books 30 feet high per
person). Berkeley Professor Peter Lyman says that how and to what extent all
that information is used will be the subject of another study. (USA Today 29
Oct 2003) http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-10-28-paperful-office_x.htm

MEDIA TOTS
According to the 1,065 parents surveyed for the Kaiser Foundation-sponsored
national study "Zero to Six: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants,
Toddlers and Preschoolers," a quarter of children under 2 years old have TVs
in their bedrooms, and two-thirds of kids under 2 use some kind of screen
media (computer, DVD, TV) on a typical day, for an average of about two
hours a day. And for children under the age of 6, the average of two hours a
day spent with screen media is more than three times the amount of time they
spend reading or being read to. (Washington Post 28 Oct 2003)
 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31913-2003Oct28.html

*****

FLASH CARD
     "The only true exploration, the only real Fountain of Youth, will not
be in visiting foreign lands, but in having other eyes, in looking at the
universe through the eyes of others." (Marcel Proust)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: MAN RAY
     Today's Honorary Subscriber is the American painter, photographer, and
filmmaker Man Ray (1890-1976) who rose to prominence in the 1920s and '30s
as a notable pioneer figure in the Dada, surrealist and abstract artistic
movements. His importance stems from his numerous technical innovations in
various media. Man Ray's original name was Emanuel Rabinovitch. He was born
in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of an artist and photographer. He
grew up in New York City, where he studied architecture, engineering, and
art and became a painter. In 1915 he met the French artist Marcel Duchamp,
and together they collaborated on many inventions and formed the New York
group of Dada. Like Duchamp, Ray began to produce "ready-mades,"
commercially manufactured objects that he designated as works of art, among
the best known of which is "Le Cadeau" (1921; "The Gift", a flatiron with a
row of tacks glued to the bottom.
     In 1921 Ray moved to Paris and became associated with the group of
Surrealist artists and writers headed by André Breton. To finance his
painting Ray took up photography. He experimented with the medium endlessly,
rediscovering how to make "cameraless" pictures, or photograms, which he
called rayographs. He made them by placing flat and three-dimensional
objects of various opacities on light-sensitive paper, which he exposed to
light and developed. In 1922 a book of his collected rayographs, Les Champs
délicieux ("The Delightful Fields"), was published. He also rediscovered in
1929 the technique called solarization, which renders part of the
photographic image negative and part positive by exposing a print or
negative to a flash of light during development. He was the first to use the
process (known since the 1840s) for aesthetic purposes.
     While living in Paris during the pre-World War II years Ray became a
successful fashion and portrait photographer, earning commissions from
virtually every cultural celebrity. In his portrait photographs, he remained
an inventive experimenter. For example, in one portrait he gave the subject
three pairs of eyes, and in his 1924 photograph, "Violon d'Ingres" he
photographically superimposed f-shaped holes onto the back of a female nude
so that the woman resembled a violin. He also continued to produce
ready-mades. One, a metronome with a photograph of an eye fixed to the
pendulum, was called "Object to be Destroyed" (1923)--which it was by
anti-Dada rioters in 1957. He also made the films Anemic Cinema (1924; in
collaboration with Duchamp) and L'Étoile de mer (1928-29; "Star of the
Sea"). In another short film, Le Retour à la raison (1923; "The Return to
Reason"), he applied the rayograph technique to motion-picture film, making
patterns with salt, pepper, tacks, and pins.
     In 1940 Ray escaped the German occupation of Paris by moving to Los
Angeles. Returning to Paris in 1946, he continued to paint and experiment
until his death in 1976. In 1948 he published "To Be Continued Unnoticed"
and "Alphabet For Adults." "Self Portrait", his autobiography, came out in
1963.

See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/3927258660/newsscancom/ref=nos
im for "Man Ray: Photography and Its Double" -- or look for it in your
favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to
adult literacy programs.)

MEMO FROM MAELSTROM
     We received another letter from our hacker friend, maelstrom:
                    ***
     So now the big, bad music companies and the RIAA (Recording Industry
Association of America) have decided to go after teenagers and Mom's and
Pop's for illegal downloading of copyrighted music instead of facing the
problem full-on and figuring out a secure copyrighting system themselves.
(They've tried, but all of their efforts have been crap.) Don't they know
they could have gotten bigger bucks if they had gone after counterfeiters in
China, Taiwan, India, Korea, and other Asian counterfeiters? Nooooo. Let's
pick on the little guys -- especially the 12-year-olds who downloaded
something from Granma's and Grandpa's machine while they were visiting over
the summer vacation. The RIAA knows that a threatening notice to most senior
citizens will result in the party just paying the bill rather than
challenging the veracity of their claims. Boo-Hiss, RIAA.
     The RIAA says that music sharing has got to stop because sales of CDs
has plummeted. HUH? I buy just as many as I used to and I even buy some CDs
that I would not have considered because I've heard their songs online and
liked them. When cassette tapes came out, the record companies made the same
claims (that sales would drop), but that apparently never happened. Have the
RIAA considered that we are in a recession/depression (depending upon your
point of view and your bank account)? And, the prices of CDs have RISEN
instead of going down! Where's the reason in that? It doesn't cost the
recording companies any more money to record an album and new technology had
made creating CDs cheaper than before. Maybe if they lowered their prices to
reflect reality, they'd see an increase in sales.
     Speaking of copywriting... how may of you have looked at amazon.com
recently? Did you know that you can read entire books online without paying
for them? Amazon says you can only see 20% of the book by entering key
search phrases but, if you enter the name of the book and that name appears
on every page, the entire book appears online. I've done that recently with
quite a few technical books and was able to read them in their entirety.
Amazingly, Amazon says this is not hurting the authors and that they've
looked at the contracts with publishers and nothing prevents them from doing
this. Well, I, for one, have foregone buying technical books costing $75 or
more because they can be viewed online and I can get what I want from the
web pages. How long before the Asian countries known for counterfeiting
figure out a way to get around Amazon's "security" measures and start
printing these books for less?
     All this leads to ethics... what's right and what's wrong. Not that I'm
putting hackers up as superior role models, but we, as a country, do lack
corporate role models with a strong sense of ethics. I'm not just talking
about Enron and WorldCom, either. I recently ran into a friend of mine
recently who runs a small, regional ISP. Apparently he is having trouble
selling DSL services to small businesses. Not because his services are too
expensive (they are dirt cheap!). The reason is that many of the small
businesses he walks into have set up wireless access points and have
discovered that they can simply connect to the business next door or the one
down the street that are also running wireless networks. Some of these
bigger networks that are being siphoned off are banks, real estate
companies, and even a public relations firm. None of these companies have
done anything to hide -- much less secure-- their wireless networks from
casual observers and they don't realize that they have dozens of small
businesses piggy-backing off their paid-for services. None of these small
businesses has thought to walk next door -- or down the street -- to the
companies with free access, and tell them that their networks are wide open.
     Many of these small businesses hire students from the nearby college --
students who have computers themselves, no doubt. I would be willing to bet
that these students surf off these corporate networks when they go for
coffee down the block. Are they hackers, then? Are the companies they work
for any better?
     Yes, there is such a thing as "white hat" hacking and I've been doing
it for nearly 12 years. Whenever I discover a security hole in someone's
network, I tell them. More often than not they choose not to heed my
warnings and advice on how to secure their networks. But, at least I tried.
Maybe I should go into the business of finding these open wireless corporate
networks and telling them about their business neighbors who are hogging
their bandwidth. I think I could be in the money for a long, long time.
     later,
            maelstrom

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