NewsScan Daily, 16 March 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 16 March 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        It's Official: Toshiba's Teeny Hard Drive Is World's Smallest
        Starbucks to Offer Music to Go
        Latest E-Mail Worms Use Password Trick to Foil Filters
        Piracy Extradition Case Adjourned
        LexisNexis Finds New Market in Prisons
        'Nanograss' Changes From Slick to Sticky

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Worth Thinking About: Closed Windows of Opportunity

IT'S OFFICIAL: TOSHIBA'S TEENY HARD DRIVE IS WORLD'S SMALLEST
      Guinness World Records has certified that Toshiba's .85-inch hard 
disk drive is the smallest in the world. The company says the tiny drives 
squeeze up to 4 gigabytes of storage into a stamp-sized device that will 
find a use in products such as cell phones and digital camcorders. 
"Toshiba's innovation means that I could soon hold more information in my 
watch than I could on my desktop computer just a few years ago," says 
Guinness science and technology editor David Hawksett. (Reuters 16 Mar 2004)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=YX5ZXPK3QKXTUCRBAEZSFEY?type=technologyNews&storyID=4575033&section=news

STARBUCKS TO OFFER MUSIC TO GO
      Starbucks is adding a new item to its coffee and Internet menu --it's 
launching an in-store music service that will allow customers to choose 
among 250,000 tracks, order the ones they want and have them burnt onto a 
CD to take with them when they leave. The service will debut in a Starbucks 
in Santa Monica, California and it will be gradually rolled out over the 
next two years to all 2,500 stores in the U.S. Starbucks has already inked 
licensing agreements with most of the major music labels and prices are 
expected to be along the lines of Apple's iTunes brand, which sells songs 
for 99 cents a track. "This is not a test," says Starbucks chairman Howard 
Schulz. "We're going for it." But some analysts expressed doubt that the 
company's service staff will be prepared to deal with music-to-go orders. 
"Your typical barista may be great at making espresso but is not in a 
position to fix the broken CD burner," warns Josh Bernoff, a digital music 
analyst. (BBC News 12 Mar 2004)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/3505738.stm

LATEST E-MAIL WORMS USE PASSWORD TRICK TO FOIL FILTERS
      The most recent versions of the pesky Bagle worm -- Bagle N and Bagle 
O -- arrive in a compressed and password-locked .zip or .rar file with the 
password included in the body of the e-mail along with a message urging the 
recipient to open it right away. This latest technique is designed to foil 
corporate e-mail filters that may block ordinary zipped attachments but 
allow password-protected documents to pass through the network's defenses 
unimpeded. Once the attachment is unlocked, the worm is then forwarded to 
everyone in the victim's e-mail address book. "The worm's author is 
sneakily trying to make it more difficult for antivirus products to scan 
inside the password-protected files," says Graham Cluley, a researcher with 
U.K cybersecurity firm Sophos. (New Scientist 15 Mar 2004)
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994777

PIRACY EXTRADITION CASE ADJOURNED
      A Sydney, Australia court is to decide if Hew Raymond Griffiths, 41, 
who is alleged to have headed an international software piracy ring known 
as "Drink or Die," should be extradited to face charges in the U.S. 
Griffiths had been indicted by a grand jury in the state of Virginia with 
one count of criminal copyright infringement and one count of conspiracy to 
commit criminal copyright infringement. If convicted he faces up to 10 
years imprisonment and a $500,000 (US) fine. Griffith's barrister argued 
the U.S. had not made out a case for extradition, having failed to prove 
dual criminality -- that what his client allegedly did in the U.S. would 
also have been a crime in Australia. However, the Commonwealth DPP refuted 
that argument, saying it had made a valid case for extradition in relation 
to both criminal copyright and conspiracy. (The Australian 12 March 2004, 
rec'd from John Lamp, Deakin University)
http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,8945543%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html

LEXISNEXIS FINDS NEW MARKET IN PRISONS
      LexisNexis, the market leader in legal databases whose product is 
commonly found in law offices, schools and libraries, has attracted a new 
market of subscribers -- prisons. The company has installed 
damage-resistant computer kiosks in four facilities in Hawaii and five in 
California. The kiosks consist of a touch-screen display covered in 
shatterproof glass inside a steel box bolted to a wall. "We've taken a 
crowbar to it. It doesn't shatter," says Bill Carter, a LexisNexis VP. The 
kiosks have received rave reviews from prison officials who say they have 
replaced hard copy versions in the prison libraries. "We don't have 
problems with inmates tearing pages out or defacing the books," says a 
Riverside County, California law official who adds that the inmates prefer 
the kiosks because they can simply type in a topic and receive information 
on related statutes. "You see this wall of books facing you and you don't 
know where to begin." In addition, the electronic option relieves prison 
library staff of the time-consuming task of inserting printed updates into 
the law books as well as saves on shelf space. (AP 16 Mar 2004)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040316/D81BFIA80.html

'NANOGRASS' CHANGES FROM SLICK TO STICKY
      A new chameleon-like material developed at Bell Labs repels water 
droplets like a newly waxed sports car but, with the flick of a switch, 
becomes absorbent like a sponge. Dubbed "nanograss" by the scientists at 
Bell Labs, the material is made of silicon with a layer of microscopic 
blades of grass or "nails" sticking up about one-four-thousandth of an inch 
from the surface. They're coated with a polymer that repels liquid, forcing 
droplets to rest on top of the fibers -- sort of like a person lying on a 
bed of nails. But when an electrical voltage is applied to the silicon, it 
creates an electric field that draws the liquid down into the spaces 
between the nails, wetting the surface. "So it becomes like a sponge," says 
Dr. Tom N. Krupenkin, the Bell Labs scientist who led the research. 
Potential applications for the technology include tiny batteries that could 
use the nails to keep chemicals from mixing until precisely when 
electricity is needed. It could also be used to cool future computer chips 
by allowing droplets to permeate only the surfaces that are hot. And using 
the material as a coating for boat hulls could allow them to slice through 
the water much more efficiently. (New York Times 16 Mar 2004)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/16/science/16NANO.html

*****

FLASH CARD
      "A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist 
sees the opportunity in every difficulty." (Winston Churchill)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: CLOSED WINDOWS OF OPPORTUNITY
      In his memoir, social historian and librarian Dee Brown relates this 
incident illustrating that windows of opportunity close as well as open:
      "One of the Elliot boys was always surprising us with his mechanical 
abilities. This Elliot boy, in his middle teens invented a device that 
might have made him wealthy had the technology of radio not been moving so 
swiftly in the 1920s. When he began working on his invention, almost every 
family owned a radio (Atwater Kent and Crosley were the big names) and the 
objective was to tune in as many distant broadcasting stations as possible. 
People would brag about picking up Chicago or Cincinnati or Kansas City, 
but the problem was that listeners did not know what city they had tuned in 
until an announcer spoke at the end of the program. To solve this 
difficulty, the Elliot boy removed the front panel of his radio, replacing 
it with a map of the United States. He then installed tiny red light bulbs 
at each city location, and manipulated the innards of his radio set so that 
when KDKA was being received, for example, the city of Pittsburgh's red 
light would brighten.
      "After perfecting his invention, the Elliot boy fell into the mare's 
nest of the U.S. Patent Office and its lawyers, who even back in those 
simpler days spent considerable effort at discouraging Americans from 
inventing things. Month after month went by while the Elliot boy dickered 
with Powel Crosley, who appeared eager to add the city-finding map to some 
of his radio models as soon as a patent was granted. Just about the time 
that preparation's were underway to put the Elliot map radio set into 
production, networks of stations began forming around the country. Most 
stations rapidly joined the networks, and almost every night the same 
broadcasts were beaming out from dozens of cities. People now began talking 
about the different programs. No longer did it matter which city a set was 
receiving. And so the Elliot boy lost his chance to become a millionaire. 
This had little effect on his peers, however. We continued to think of him 
as a mechanical genius."
                                                       ***
See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/ref=s_sf_b_as/103-77630 
02-5487864 for Dee Brown's "When the Century Was Young: A Writer's 
Notebook" -- or look for it in your favorite library. (We donate all 
revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy programs.)

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