NewsScan Daily, 3 February 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 3 February 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        P2P Case Heads Back to Court
        Cell Phone Shipments Up 20%
        SCO Scrambles to Launch New Web Site Following Attack
        Shoppers Spooked by Spam
        New Twist on Text Messaging

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Worth Thinking About: The Minds We Think With

P2P CASE HEADS BACK TO COURT
      A federal appeals court in California will review a lower court 
ruling made last spring that held distributing P2P software tools such as 
Grokster and Morpheus was legal and absolved the parent companies of 
responsibility for copyright infringement occurring on those networks. That 
ruling was a surprise setback for the entertainment industry, which had 
prevailed in previous efforts to shut down Napster and other file-swapping 
sites. In his decision last April, Judge Stephen Wilson wrote: "Defendants 
distribute and support software, the users of which can and do choose to 
employ it for both lawful and unlawful ends. Grokster and Streamcast are 
not significantly different from companies that sell home video recorders 
or copy machines, both of which can be and are used to infringe 
copyrights." In its appeal, the recording industry will argue that Wilson's 
analysis was flawed, citing earlier decisions in the Napster case, in which 
judges said that the VCR analogy (known as "substantial noninfringing use" 
in legal circles) does not apply if a company knows its products are being 
used for illegitimate purposes. "We believe (Grokster and Streamcast) are 
operating just like Napster and fall under the Napster ruling that the 
court handed down three years ago," says an attorney for the Motion Picture 
Association of America. "They do have one thing Napster lacked, and that is 
a good business model. They are making millions of dollars off of content 
that is not theirs." (CNet News.com 2 Feb 2004)
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5152269.html?tag=nefd_top

CELL PHONE SHIPMENTS UP 20%
      Shipments of mobile handsets rose 20% in 2003 to 516 million units -- 
an all-time record, according to Massachusetts research firm Strategy 
Analytics. Those figures were confirmed in another study by Gartner, which 
said that shipments "exceeded" 510 million units. That was good news for 
South Korean duo Samsung and LG Electronics, which saw their market shares 
rise to 10.8% and 5.3%, respectively. But Motorola's market share slipped 
from 16.3% in 2002 to 14.5% last year, and Nokia's share dipped slightly 
from 35.1% to 34.8%. (Wall Street Journal 3 Feb 2004)
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107581443816019150,00.html (sub req'd)

SCO SCRAMBLES TO LAUNCH NEW WEB SITE FOLLOWING ATTACK
      SCO Group, which saw its Web site taken out by the MyDoom computer 
worm, launched a new Web site yesterday (www.thescogroup.com), which will 
serve as its temporary Web site until the worm's barrage against 
www.sco.com slacks off. "We expect hundreds of thousands of attacks on 
www.sco.com because of these viruses. Starting on Feb. 1 and running 
through Feb. 12, SCO has developed layers of contingency plans to 
communicate with customers, resellers, developers, partners and 
shareholders," said the company in a statement. The virulence of the MyDoom 
worm sent a shudder through the Internet security community. "With such a 
program you could really take out any major Web site on the Internet," says 
Raimund Genes, European president of security firm Trend Micro. 
(Reuters/New York Times 3 Feb 2004)
http://partners.nytimes.com/2004/02/03/technology/03worm.html

SHOPPERS SPOOKED BY SPAM
      Spam is putting a damper on e-commerce, according to a survey 
published by the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue, which indicates that 52% 
of respondents are shopping less on the Internet or not at all because of 
concerns that information disclosed in such transactions will generate more 
junk e-mail. "It is very clear that the majority of citizens are very 
troubled by unsolicited commercial e-mails. It is also very clear that bona 
fide businesses are losing money because the disreputable image of spam is 
making consumers uneasy about engaging in e-commerce." The results were 
released at an anti-spam summit held by the Organization for Economic 
Co-operation and Development (OECD), which is calling for international 
cooperation in tackling the scourge of spam and restoring consumer 
confidence in electronic commerce. "Most governments do view the Internet 
as a key to global economy. Spam certainly has the capacity to interfere 
with that," says Peter Ferguson, chairman of the OECD working party on 
information security and privacy. (Reuters/Washington Post 2 Feb 2004)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6139-2004Feb2.html

NEW TWIST ON TEXT MESSAGING
      No more digging around for a scrap of paper to jot a new 
acquaintance's phone number down on or suffering the frustration of losing 
a potential contact's business card, thanks to a new two-way texting system 
set to launch in the U.K. You simply send your new friend's or contact's 
name to a five-digit phone number, and within seconds all of their 
information is texted back and stored on your phone like an electronic 
business card. Up until recently, two-way texting has been aimed at the 
corporate market, with use mainly restricted to news agencies and large 
businesses. But those services, which deliver things like headlines, stock 
prices and sports scores to customers' phones, are very expensive -- about 
£500 a month. Next week a startup called iTagg will launch a service 
targeting small businesses and individuals, priced at £9.99 a year, plus 
small additional fees for texts sent and received. The keywords texted to 
iTagg's five-digit number are called mobile domain names. Users register 
their unique mobile domain names and then type in the information that they 
wish to distribute as a response text. They can also add up to 20 secondary 
keywords, such as "JohnDoe vacation," which would then send itinerary and 
backup contact details to the requesting handset. The concept should have 
appeal to individuals and small businesses, says Steve Procter, managing 
director for Messages, which will operating iTagg. Real estate agents could 
set up a mobile domain name that generates house listings and further 
details, or local music clubs could advertise their evening show times and 
ticket prices. (BBC News 2 Feb 2004)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3451055.stm

*****

FLASH CARD
      "The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old 
ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into 
every corner of our minds." (John Maynard Keynes)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: THE MINDS WE THINK WITH
      Linguistics professor George Lakoff and philosophy professor Mark 
Johnson have co-authored a book about how empirical science has changed the 
way we think about the minds we think with:
      "Reason has been taken for over two millennia as the defining 
characteristic of human beings. Reason includes not only our capacity for 
logical inference, but also our ability to conduct inquiry, to solve 
problems, to evaluate, to criticize, to deliberate about how we should act, 
and to reach an understanding of ourselves, other people, and the world... 
It is surprising to discover, on the basis of empirical research, that 
human rationality is not at all what the Western philosophical tradition 
has held it to be. The changes in our understanding of reason include:
      "Reason is not disembodied, as the tradition has largely held, but 
arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experience. This 
is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; 
rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself 
comes from the details of our embodiment. The same neural and cognitive 
mechanisms that allow us to perceive and move around also create our 
conceptual systems and modes of reason. Thus, to understand reason we must 
understand the details of our visual system, our motor system, and the 
general mechanisms of neural binding. In summary, reason is not, in any 
way, a transcendent feature of the universe or of disembodied mind. 
Instead, it is shaped crucially by the peculiarities of our human bodies, 
by the remarkable details of the neural structure of our brains, and by the 
specifics of our everyday functioning in the world.
      "Reason is evolutionary, in that abstract reason builds on and makes 
use of forms of perceptual and motor inference present in 'lower' animals. 
The result is a Darwinism of reason, a rational Darwinism: Reason, even in 
its most abstract form, makes use of, rather than transcends, our animal 
nature. The discovery that reason is evolutionary utterly changes our 
relation to other animals and changes our conception of human beings as 
uniquely rational. Reason is thus not an essence that separates us from 
other animals; rather, it places us on a continuum with them.
      "Reason is not 'universal' in the transcendent sense; that is, it is 
not part of the structure of the universe. It is universal, however, in 
that it is a capacity shared universally by all human beings. What allows 
it to be shared are the commonalities that exist in the way our minds are 
embodied.
      "Reason is not completely conscious, but mostly unconscious.
      "Reason is not purely literal, but largely metaphorical and imaginative.
      "Reason is not dispassionate, but emotionally engaged."

See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465056741/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for "Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to 
Western Thought" by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson -- or look for it in 
your favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations 
to adult literacy programs.)

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