NewsScan Daily, 21 May 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 21 May 2003 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        New Media Watchdog Group
        Privacy Advocates Doubt Pentagon Promises on Spying
        Juniper Touts 'Hotspot-in-a-Box'
        Einstein Papers on the Internet
        Internet Filtering Bill Stalled
        W3C Adopts Policy on Patents

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Worth Thinking About: After the Bang

NEW MEDIA WATCHDOG GROUP
A new group called Common Sense Media  is introducing a Web-based media 
ratings system for ranking entertainment products based on language, 
violence, and "adult" content delivered through TV shows, movies, albums 
and video games. The financial backers of the project include investment 
broker Charles Schwab, Qwest founder Philip F. Anschutz, and other 
well-known business people. Former FCC chairman William E. Kennard, one of 
the new group's board members, says: "There is a huge amount of frustration 
among parents, including myself, that the media are not giving parents 
enough information to judge what's appropriate for our kids. We envision 
this organization, first, to give parents a way to protect themselves, to 
judge what's coming into their home; second, to give them a chance to 
channel their frustration to people who know how to influence policy." (New 
York Times 21 May 2003)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/21/business/media/21MEDI.html

PRIVACY ADVOCATES DOUBT PENTAGON PROMISES ON SPYING
The Pentagon has changed the name of its planned anti-terrorist 
surveillance systems, but critics say the fundamental program remains the 
same and would risk violating citizens' privacy if fully implemented. Now 
renamed the Terrorist Information Awareness program (from Total Information 
Awareness), the system would broaden government surveillance activities to 
encompass passport applications, visas, work permits, driver's licenses, 
car rentals and airline ticket purchases as well as databases including 
vast amounts of personal information, such as financial, education, medical 
and housing and identification records. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a major 
opponent of the TIA, says, "What most Americans don't know is that the laws 
that protect consumer privacy don't apply when the data gets into 
government's hands. Lawfully collected information can include anything, 
medical records, travel, credit card and financial data." Testing of the 
system is already underway, raising privacy advocates' concerns about 
"false positives" based on erroneous data. "If TIA is relying on personal 
information contained in databases to determine whether someone is a 
suspect, what recourse does that person have whose information has been 
entered incorrectly?" says a spokeswoman for the Free Congress Foundation, 
which estimates that an error rate as small as .10% could result in more 
than 30,000 Americans wrongly being investigated as terrorists. (AP 20 May 
2003)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20030520/D7R5BBUG0.html

JUNIPER TOUTS 'HOTSPOT-IN-A-BOX'
Juniper Networks is launching a low-priced networking gear package aimed at 
enabling businesses, such as hotels and restaurants, to set up their own 
WiFi hotspots at minimum cost. The Juniper bundle, priced at $800, costs 
less than half of similar systems sold by Cisco and other competitors. 
Telecom carriers spent about $500 million last year on WiFi equipment to 
add hotspots to their networks and that number is expected to grow 
significantly. "Big guys, like Verizon, are saying, 'I'm not going to lose 
to these little ISPs,'" says Jim Ciociolo, VP of Colubris Networks, which 
is partnering with Juniper to market the system. (CNet News.com 20 May 2003)
http://news.com.com/2100-1039_3-1008167.html?tag=fd_top

EINSTEIN PAPERS ON THE INTERNET
A new Web site < http://www.alberteinstein.info/ >, created by the 
California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and the Albert Einstein 
Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is making available 
hundreds of Albert Einstein's scientific papers, personal letters and 
humanist essays dating back to Einstein's youth. Included  are Einstein's 
papers on relativity, the quantum theory of light and matter, and 
education, international affairs and pacifism. (San Jose Mercury News 21 
May 2003)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/5905858.htm

INTERNET FILTERING BILL STALLED
An attempt in Oregon to require libraries to install filtering software to 
protect children from explicit content on the Internet has stalled in 
committee. Defending the bill against charges that it violates 
Constitutional protections for freedom of speech, attorney James 
Leuenberger argues: "The government clearly can decide on limits of what it 
can or cannot say. To the extent the library wants to accept funding from 
the state, the state should have the ability to tell the library what it 
should or should not express." Connie Bennett, president of the Oregon 
Library Association and director of the Eugene Public Library, says the 
bill is "an unfunded mandate." (AP/USA Today 21 May 2003) 
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-05-21-oregon-filters_x.htm

W3C ADOPTS POLICY ON PATENTS
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has approved a policy on patents that 
requires all those who participate in the development of a W3C 
recommendation must license essential claims on a royalty-free basis. It 
also requires W3C members to make disclosures on patents they own and 
requests that anyone else who sees technical drafts share their knowledge 
of patents which may be essential. At the same time, the policy suggests a 
process for handling unexpected patent claims that are inconsistent with 
the terms of the W3C Patent Policy. In that instance, the W3C will convene 
a Patent Advisory Group, which may then recommend: a legal analysis of the 
patent, the removal of the patented feature, or cessation of work in that 
area altogether. The W3C's efforts to create a patent policy have been 
contentious since it first released its Patent Policy Framework Draft in 
2001, says Daniel Weitzner, chair of the Patent Policy Working Group, who 
cautioned technology companies against trying to exploit the patent 
exception process. "Anyone who thinks that's going to be an easy way to 
squeeze fees out of Web standards I think is mistaken," says Weitzner. 
(Internet News 21 May 2003)
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/2210201

*****

FLASH CARD
"It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the 
best, you very often get it." (W. Somerset Maugham)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: AFTER THE BANG
      Travel writer turned science consumer, Bill Bryson, has taken on the 
challenge of explaining some challenging scientific concepts in layman's 
language:
      "The Big Bang theory isn't about the bang itself but about what 
happened after the bang. Not long after, mind you. By doing a lot of math 
and watching carefully what goes on in particle accelerators, scientists 
believe they can look back to 10-43 seconds after the moment of creation, 
when the universe was still so small that you would have needed a 
microscope to find it. We mustn't swoon over every extraordinary number 
that comes before us, but it is perhaps worth latching on to one from time 
to time just to be reminded of their ungraspable and amazing breadth. Thus 
10-43 is 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001, or 
one-10-million-trillion-trillion-trillionths of a second.
      "Most of what we know, or believe we know, about the early moments of 
the universe is thanks to an idea called inflation theory first propounded 
in 1979 by a junior particle physicist, then at Stanford, now at MIT, named 
Alan Guth. He was thirty-two years old and, by his own admission, had never 
done anything much before. He would probably never have had his great 
theory except that he happened to attend a lecture on the Big Bang given by 
none other than Robert Dicke. The lecture inspired Guth to take an interest 
in cosmology, and in particular in the birth of the universe.
      "The eventual result was the inflation theory, which holds that a 
fraction of a moment after the dawn of creation, the universe underwent a 
sudden dramatic expansion. It inflated -- in effect ran away with itself, 
doubling in size every 10-34 seconds. The whole episode may have lasted no 
more than 10-30 seconds -- that's 
one-million-million-million-million-millionths of a second -- but it 
changed the universe from something you could hold in your hand to 
something at least 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times bigger. 
Inflation theory explains the ripples and eddies that make our universe 
possible. Without it, there would be no clumps of matter and thus no stars, 
just drifting gas and everlasting darkness."

See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0767908171/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for Bill Bryson's "A Short History Of Nearly Everything" -- or look for it 
in your favorite library. [We donate all revenues from our book 
recommendations to adult literacy programs.]

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