NewsScan Daily, 8 March 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 8 March 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        PTO Rejects Eolas Patent Claim
       Virgin Group Joins Online Music Fray
        New Worm Masquerades as MS Update
        New Sensor Monitors Hard Drive Health
        Background Check-in-a-Box

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber: René Descartes

PTO REJECTS EOLAS PATENT CLAIM
      In a move that could cripple their lawsuit against Microsoft, the 
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has reached a preliminary decision to 
invalidate Eolas Technologies' and the University of California's patent on 
Web browser technology. Eolas and UC had won a $521 million verdict against 
Microsoft last year for infringing on their patent in its Internet Explorer 
browser, a decision that was upheld last month by an Illinois federal 
judge. The software giant had already started to make changes to Internet 
Explorer to comply with the court's ruling, but suspended those changes 
last month in hope of a reprieve by the PTO. "We have maintained all along 
that, when scrutinized closely, this patent would be ruled invalid," said a 
Microsoft spokesman. Meanwhile, Eolas attorney Martin Lueck said it was not 
uncommon for the PTO to invalidate a patent claim as the first step in the 
review process and remained upbeat about the final outcome of the 
litigation. (Reuters/CNet News.com 5 Mar 2004)
http://news.com.com/2100-1023_3-5171073.html?tag=nefd_top

VIRGIN GROUP JOINS ONLINE MUSIC FRAY
      Virgin Group is planning to launch its own branded Virgin Digital 
online music and music video business in the U.S. and the U.K. by late 
summer. The company will offer customers two options -- one will enable 
consumers to purchase music on a per-song or per-album basis, and the other 
will be a subscription-based service, which will allow paid-up members to 
listen to as much streamed music as they like. Virgin Digital will offer a 
library of some 700,000 songs, featuring the usual rock 'n' roll fare along 
with a wider selection of jazz, blues and classical music than is available 
on many other services. Virgin Group is joining an increasingly crowded 
field of online music purveyors, says Phil Leigh, a senior analyst with 
Inside Digital Media. "In the early stages of a gold rush, you've got a lot 
of prospectors out there," says Leigh, who forecasts the beginning of 
online music consolidation by the end of the year. (Wall Street Journal 8 
Mar 2004)
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107870329360248703,00.html (sub req'd)

NEW WORM MASQUERADES AS MS UPDATE
      The latest variation on the Sober worm -- Sober.D -- tries to trick 
recipients into opening it by disguising itself as a Microsoft Update 
message. "It arrives in an e-mail that pretends to be a patch to protect 
against a version of MyDoom," says a senior consultant at antivirus firm 
Sophos. "The e-mail appears to be a Microsoft patch so people will of 
course double-click on that attachment." Once a user clicks on the file, 
the worm scans the PC to see if it's already infected -- if not, it 
installs itself and uses its own SMTP engine to send copies of itself to 
e-mail addresses found on the victim's PC. Microsoft emphasizes that it 
does not send patches via e-mail and that users should ignore such 
messages. (ZDNet 8 Mar 2004)
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-5171243.html

NEW SENSOR MONITORS HARD DRIVE HEALTH
      Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a new 
heat-sensitive sensor that can alert computer users to imminent hard drive 
failure. "Essentially what we are trying to do is save the life of the 
computer hard drive. Hard drives get hot and the sensor is designed to pick 
up the slightest temperature variation," says CMU scientist Michael 
Bigrigg. The researchers predict that by using the dime-sized sensor they 
may be able to extend the lifespan of a computer hard drive beyond its 3.1 
year average by tracking how much daily heat a hard drive endures. (Science 
Daily 4 Mar 2004)
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/03/040304073454.htm

BACKGROUND CHECK-IN-A-BOX
      ChoicePoint is marketing a new product aimed at security-conscious 
employers who want to make sure their new hires are trouble-free. Stacked 
between gallon jars of mayonnaise and office furniture at Sam's Club, the 
ChoicePoint check-in-a-box package urges shoppers to "make better hiring 
decisions" by purchasing the $39.77 product, which contains a CD-ROM that 
allows users to tap into ChoicePoint's online databases. The new marketing 
effort signals data vendors' shift toward small businesses, which have 
lagged behind large corporations in conducting criminal background checks 
when hiring. Privacy advocates warn that such products put too much 
information at the fingertips of anyone with $40 to spend, and argue that 
ChoicePoint's requirement that users have a business license provides 
inadequate safeguard against the product's abuse. "If Joe's Bait Shop… goes 
out and buys this thing with a business license and then he wants to find 
out information about a neighbor, then he would be able to essentially do 
that," says the head of the Georgia Association of Professional Private 
Investigators. (AP 8 Mar 2004)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040308/D8166SRG0.html

*****

FLASH CARD
      "Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too 
large quantities." (Lord Dunsany)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: RENÉ DESCARTES
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the French philosopher René Descartes 
(1596-1650).
      Believing that his self-awareness of his own existence was beyond 
skeptical doubt, he fashioned his famous Cogito ergo sum ("I think, 
therefore I am") into the basis for regaining knowledge of the world called 
into doubt by methodical skepticism.
      Descartes is also the father of "the mind-body problem." He claimed 
that human beings are composites of two distinct substances, mind and body, 
where the mind is a conscious or thinking being (i.e., it understands, 
wills, senses, and imagines), and the body, on the other hand, is a being 
extended in length, width, and breadth. Minds are indivisible, bodies are 
infinitely divisible. Descartes argued that bodies differ from how they 
appear through senses. Colors, sounds, tastes, smells, heat, and cold are 
merely sensations existing in thought, and there is nothing in bodies that 
resembles them, just as there is nothing in bodies that resembles our 
sensation of pain. All the phenomena in the created world external to human 
beings, such as gravity, magnetism, and the cohesion of bodies, as well as 
the complex functioning of living organisms including human bodies, he 
believed could be explained solely by mechanistic physics, that is, by the 
motions and collisions of bodies.
      Descartes was educated at the Jesuit academy of La Fleche in 
traditional Aristotelian philosophy. After receiving a law degree in 1616 
at the University of Poitiers, he traveled through Europe as a volunteer in 
a Dutch and then a Bavarian army. In his early twenties he began working on 
problems in mathematics and mechanics under the influence of the Dutch 
scientist Isaac Beeckman. His three most important philosophical works, the 
"Discourse on Method," the "Meditations on First Philosophy," and the 
"Principles of Philosophy," were all published in the period from 1637 to 
1644. In mathematics Descartes is famous for the unification of algebra and 
geometry, and the term "Cartesian coordinates" were of course named after 
him. Descartes influenced the whole course of modern philosophical enquiry, 
and the Cartesian quest for certainty gave Epistemology the central place 
in philosophical thought it has maintained to this day.

See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/046087411X/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for an English translation of the major works of Descartes -- or look for 
it in your favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book 
recommendations to adult literacy programs.)

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