NewsScan Daily, 2 June 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 2 June 2003 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Altnet and Kazaa Push Legit P2P Network
        Videogaming Grows Up
        Iraqi Artifacts Breathe New Life on the Web
        Fund the Scientists, Not the Machines, Say Bell and Gray
        Satellite Radio Ready for Lift-Off
        A Moment of Silence for the Mob

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        News Flash: The Internet World Gone Mad
        Worth Thinking About: Experience

ALTNET AND KAZAA PUSH LEGIT P2P NETWORK
Sharman Networks' Kazaa and Brilliant Digital Entertainment's Altnet are 
teaming up to launch a new phase of peer-to-peer networking, harnessing the 
capacity of tens of millions PCs to swap authorized copies of games, songs 
and movies. Giving people an incentive to trade in legitimate files could 
create a powerful new business model for the entertainment industry and 
reduce file-swapping networks' role as hubs of online piracy, says Altnet 
CEO Kevin Bermeister. "The minute you begin shifting unauthorized files out 
of people's shared folders, the peer-to-peer networks (as sources of 
copyright infringement) begin to disappear. Lawsuits are the stick 
approach. This is the carrot." Customers who sign up for the new service 
will agree to install high-security file-swapping software and host files 
that are authorized for distribution through the network. "Peer Points" 
will be awarded each time someone uploads a file, with the points 
redeemable for a variety of bonuses ranging from free access to paid 
content to sweepstakes entries for big-ticket items such as cars or cash. 
The new Altnet service and a revamped version of the regular Kazaa 
file-swapping software are expected to be released in test form later this 
week. (CNet News.com 1 Jun 2003)
http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-1011827.html?tag=fd_top

VIDEOGAMING GROWS UP
It used to be that young people interested in learning how to create 
videogames attended special schools, such as the DigiPen Institute of 
Technology in Redmond, Wash., or Full Sail in Orlando, Fla., but now 
videogaming is going mainstream, with traditional universities such as 
Southern Methodist University, MIT and the University of Michigan 
incorporating game-specific classes and programs into existing curriculum. 
"It's still a pretty immature media, but a discipline for actual game 
development is starting to make sense," says a Jupiter Research analyst. 
The videogame industry employs about 30,000 people in the U.S. and demand 
is expected to grow by about 15%, or 5,000 jobs a year, estimates David 
Najjab, director of SMU's new school of videogame making. (AP 31 May 2003)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20030531/D7RC9B1G1.html

IRAQI ARTIFACTS BREATHE NEW LIFE ON THE WEB
Computer scientists, archeologists and art historians at the University of 
California-Berkeley are collaborating to create a virtual version of Iraq's 
National Museum, reconstructing images of the museum's smashed or stolen 
vases, statues and cuneiform tablets from archived photos and historical 
records. "The dream is to create a kind of virtual atlas of these cultural 
gems, and help keep any more of them from being lost," says Ruzena Bajcsy, 
director of UC Berkeley's Center for Information Technology Research, which 
is spearheading the effort. Academic and cultural institutions -- ranging 
from the University of Pennsylvania to the British Museum and the United 
Nations -- are working to build a virtual catalog of the museum's 
collections. But the effort goes further than just helping catalog 
treasures that were lost or stolen in Baghdad -- the project's goal is to 
generate a much larger database, complete with photos, maps, drawings and 
text to illustrate the full range of Iraq's historical artifacts. The final 
product will include everything from 3D images of tiny art objects to 
entire virtual tours of Iraqi archeological sites. "We want to make this 
easy to use, not only for teched-up scholars but for students and anyone 
else," says Robert Price, UC Berkeley's associate vice chancellor for 
research. "The idea here is to put the best information technology at the 
service of the arts and humanities." (Los Angeles Times 2 Jun 2003)
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-me-museum2jun02,1,6029318.story?coll=la 
%2Dheadlines%2Dtechnology

FUND THE SCIENTISTS, NOT THE MACHINES, SAY BELL AND GRAY
Influential computer scientists Gordon Bell and Jim Gray say that "today's 
supercomputer centers will become superdata centers in the future," and 
that federal money should be diverted from machines and given directly to 
people: "The core of our argument is to give money back to the sciences and 
let them do the planning." They believe that huge storehouses of digital 
data are increasingly playing a critical role in scientific research, and 
also that innovations in data-storage technology are significantly 
outpacing progress in computer processing technology. What they want to see 
are planning and funding strategies that invest in "data-centric," 
"information-centric," and "community-centric" approaches that make use of 
inexpensive clusters of linked computers running the Linux operating 
system. (New York Times 2 Jun 2003)
http://partners.nytimes.com/2003/06/02/technology/02SUPE.html

SATELLITE RADIO READY FOR LIFT-OFF
After a slow start, satellite radio is achieving real successes, and the 
two satellite radio companies -- XM and Sirius -- are both doing well. XM 
currently charges $10 a month and offers its 500,000 subscribers 70 music 
channels and 31 news, talk, and information channels, some of which have 
commercials; Sirius, which got a later start than XM, charges $13 a month 
and offers its 68,000 subscribers 60 commercial-free channels and 44 news, 
talk and sports channels with some ads. The satellite radios are now sold 
even in WalMarts, with prices as low as $70. XM radios will be optional in 
at least 70 new car models coming this fall from GM and Honda; Sirius 
radios will be optional in at least 65 new car models coming from BMW, 
DaimlerChrysler, and Ford. (AP/San Jose Mercury News 2 Jun 2003)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/5995770.htm

A MOMENT OF SILENCE FOR THE MOB
[Rather than include a story on the intersection of Mob and Internet 
activities, we'll pass over the topic in silence. Why? Because writing the 
story would require us to use words which, though perfectly harmless and 
ordinary, would get us tangled up in Internet software filters. (On this 
topic, see our News Alert, below). You know, it's really a tedious 
business, all this spam-fighting, because it seems to harm the good guys 
(for example, us) more than it stops the bad guys. Filters don't trouble 
mainstream newspapers, which can report (or, in the case of the New York 
Times, make up) anything they want. And they certainly don't trouble the 
Mob. Just us. Anyway, you might have some interest in linking to the 
following AP story on the Mob's use of the Web.] (AP/USA Today 2 Jun 2003)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-06-01-mob-net-scam_x.htm

*****

FLASH CARD
      "In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a 
form of exploration." (Ansel Adams)

NEWS ALERT: THE INTERNET WORLD HAS GONE MAD
      The English have a nice phrase, "too clever by half," that perfectly 
describes the half-baked logic used by the software filter that blocked one 
of our issues last week. NewsScan friend and subscriber Ari Rapkin wrote 
from Carnegie Mellon to tell us:
      "Thought you might find this of some interest... I use a spam 
filtering program called SpamAssassin (www.spamassassin.org). It decided 
that the May 30th issue of NewsScan was spam, because it happened to 
contain quite a few of the key patterns & phrases that SpamAssassin looks 
for. I have it set up to stash probable-spam messages in a separate folder, 
so I caught the false positive when I did my daily check of that 
folder.  Users who set SpamAssassin to automatically delete spam may have 
missed today's issue of NewsScan.
      "In case you're not familiar with SpamAssassin: it runs a large 
number of tests on the message.  For each test that comes out positive, 
there is a pre-determined point value.  If the total point value of the 
positive tests is greater than a pre-determined spam threshold, the message 
is marked as spam. If the user has set up the system to store the message, 
it gets a header added which indicates how SpamAssassin came to the 
conclusion that it was spam.  I've included that header here. In this case, 
the combination of a quote about adult entertainment, an article about 
drives which can store "hundreds of digital photos" and cost "only $100", 
and key phrases in the Cobbs' column ("risk-free", "shopping spree") added 
up to a point score over the threshold.
      "I believe SpamAssassin is in fairly wide use, so it may be 
worthwhile to mention this in the next issue of NewsScan.
NewsScan writes:
 > SPAM: Content analysis details:   (6 points, 5 required)
 > SPAM: Hit! (1.0 point) BODY: Possible porn - Adult Web Sites
 > SPAM: Hit! (1.0 point) BODY: Only $$$
 > SPAM: Hit! (1.0 point) BODY: Possible porn - Large Number of movies, pics
 > SPAM: Hit! (1.0 point) BODY: Shopping Spree
 > SPAM: Hit! (1.0 point) BODY: Risk free.  Suuurreeee...."
                             ***
[Don't you just love that know-it-all "Suuurreeee," as though the filter 
knew anything at all, when in fact IT DOESN'T WORK -- i.e., it doesn't 
successfully do what it is supposed to do, which is to filter spam and ONLY 
spam. To revisit the issue of NewsScan Daily that was blocked by the 
too-clever-by-half perpetrators of the filter, see our issue of Friday, May 
30th:
http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&dateissued=20030530 
]

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: EXPERIENCE
      In his short biography of Leonardo da Vinci, physician and popular 
author Sherwin B. Nuland writes:
      "Leonardo's was a modern mind, the first of its kind that posterity 
can look back on. Like every true scientist of every era, he was taught by 
nature, and determined never consciously to allow himself to be slave to 
the thinking of the past. That the past sometimes entered unknowingly into 
his interpretations of what he saw should not blind us to the detachment 
with which he attempted to make his observations. His writings refer only 
infrequently to the great men of antiquity. He fought powerfully against 
the unseen temptations of his intellectual heritage, and won far more often 
than he lost. 'Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses not his 
understanding but his memory,' he wrote. In the last analysis, he trusted 
only what he could see in his own studies. Those misinterpretations that 
inevitably crept into his writings were the result of an inherited 
tradition so pervasive that even the thinking of a genius of such magnitude 
could not entirely escape them.
      "Though he has often been called the ultimate Renaissance man, there 
is much to be said for the argument that Leonardo was only in part a man of 
the Renaissance. While he epitomized the zest for life and nature that was 
the guiding theme of humanism, he did at the same time eschew the 
dependence on ancient sources and the worshipful repetition of its 
principles that equally characterized its scholarship. 'Those who study the 
ancients and not the works of Nature,' he wrote, 'are stepsons and not sons 
of Nature, the mother of all good authors.' He was the first to approach 
the pronouncements of the Aristotles, Ptolemys, and Galens as teachings to 
be tested and challenged rather than as teachings to be necessarily 
accepted and verified. That his basic frame of reference originated in 
their writings meant only that he was, indeed, a fallible man of his time; 
some of his greatest errors and missed opportunities resulted from that 
background of classical thought which he could not escape. His astronomy 
was largely Ptolemaic and his physiology Galenic. But when the objectivity 
of his eye showed him otherwise as he came to 'abundantly appreciate the 
infinite works of nature,' he did not hesitate to say so. And this is why 
we find in one of his notebooks such jots as a statement astonishing for 
its time: 'The sun does not move.' As his ultimate direction was to 
question the heritage of earlier ages and seek only the truth of his own 
experience, he was able to blaze new paths through territories that his 
contemporaries believed to have been correctly charted long before their time."
                                   ***
See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0670893919/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for Sherwin B. Nuland's "Leonardo da Vinci" -- or look for it in your 
favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to 
adult literacy programs.)

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