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

NewsScan Daily, 16 August 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        OECD Sets Two-Year Deadline to Cut Spam
        The New Meaning of Ownership in the Digital Age
        A PC for the Masses
        USPS Authorizes Individualized Stamps
        Videogames Teach Basic Nutrition
        Technology Keeps U.K. Kids Away from Family Life

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber: Rudolph Valentino
        Mailbag: The World As We Find It

OECD SETS TWO-YEAR DEADLINE TO CUT SPAM
      The OECD said last week it has set up a task force to coordinate the 
fight by government, business and the public against unsolicited email 
messages, or spam. It has given the new group two years to study spam and 
develop a counter strategy. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and 
Development said in a statement the task force would improve the way work 
on key aspects of the problem was focused and would improve coordination 
between various bodies looking at the issue. Key objectives included 
coordinating international policy, encouraging best practice in industry 
and business, promoting new technical defenses, informing consumers, and 
facilitating cross-border law enforcement. (The Age, 13 Aug 2004) rec'd 
from John Lamp, Deakin U.
http://theage.com.au/articles/2004/08/13/1092340434022.html

THE NEW MEANING OF OWNERSHIP IN THE DIGITAL AGE
      When you buy a CD from a store, you "own" that music, and as long as 
you don't bootleg it or charge lots of people money to listen to it, it's 
yours. But if you purchase that same playlist online, in most cases you're 
purchasing the "rights" to the content which is "locked" by some type of 
digital rights management software. Not only that, but those rights may 
change over time, dictated by the whims of the music company you get them 
from. For instance, Apple Computer recently upped the number of computers 
on which its iTunes music files can be concurrently installed from three to 
five, but there's nothing stopping it from making its DRM more restrictive 
in the future -- although the company says that's unlikely. Meanwhile, 
customers of RealNetwork's Rhapsody music service "rent" their songs for a 
monthly fee but can play them only on their PCs, not their MP3 players. All 
these variables mean that consumers will need to be better informed in the 
future about what it is they're actually getting for their money, says Alan 
Davidson, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology: 
"DRM underscores the point that consumers are going to have to become a lot 
more sophisticated about what they're buying." (Wall Street Journal 16 Aug 
2004)
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109260940215891895,00.html (sub req'd)

A PC FOR THE MASSES
      Carnegie Mellon University professor Raj Reddy is working with 
researchers at the Indian Institute of Science, the Indian Institute of 
Information Technology and the University of California Berkeley to develop 
a low-cost wireless PC designed for users in developing countries, 
particularly those with large populations who cannot read. The $250 PCtvt 
is controlled by a simple TV remote control and can function as a 
television, DVD player, telephone and videophone. Reddy sees his project 
not only as a philanthropic effort, but one that may even produce profits. 
"I kept asking myself, 'what would the device have to do for someone on the 
other side of the digital divide to be desirable?'" The result is a simple 
device that offers a seductive combination of connectivity and 
entertainment. "Entertainment is the killer app, and that will smuggle 
something that is a lot more sophisticated into the home," says Tom Kalil, 
special assistant to the chancellor for science and technology at Berkeley. 
(New York Times 16 Aug 2004)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/technology/16combo.html

USPS AUTHORIZES INDIVIDUALIZED STAMPS
      The U.S. Postal Service has put its stamp of approval on Stamps.com's 
plans to test a new service (www.photo.stamps.com) that enables users to 
design their own legally valid stamps using digitized photos of their pets, 
children or almost anything else that strikes their fancy. (Stamps.com says 
it will screen each photo submission to weed out objectionable material 
such as nudity, obscenity, politics, violence and trademark infringements.) 
The personalized stamps don't come cheap -- at $16.99 for a minimum order 
of 20 37-cent stamps they cost 85 cents apiece -- but Stamps.com CEO Ken 
McBride reports that more than 2,000 sheets of personal stamps were ordered 
in the first two days and he anticipates the trial will win approval from 
the USPS and will be extended. (Washington Post 15 Aug 2004)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64460-2004Aug14.html

VIDEOGAMES TEACH BASIC NUTRITION
      The Fantastic Food Challenge, a package of four videogames designed 
at Michigan State University, is being distributed to employees in 
Michigan's extension offices who will use them to teach young adult food 
stamp recipients how to be efficient shoppers. The games impart information 
on how to buy food at the lowest cost, store it properly and prepare 
healthy meals. Included in the package are Store It Safe, which teaches how 
to store different kinds of food; a version of Concentration, which matches 
up ingredients with dishes; the Great Meal Deal, which tests players' 
familiarity with the basic food groups; and the Price Makes Sense, which 
hones players' math skills to get the best deal on food items. 
(AP/Wired.com 15 Aug 20040
http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,64593,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_5

TECHNOLOGY KEEPS U.K. KIDS AWAY FROM FAMILY LIFE
      British children are interacting less and less with their families 
and spending more time in their bedrooms watching television or playing 
computer games, according to a study published on Friday. Three-quarters of 
Britain's 11-14 year-olds have a television in their bedroom, almost 
two-thirds a DVD player or video recorder, and a quarter have a computer in 
their room, market research firm MINTEL said. Two-thirds of those surveyed 
said they played computer games in their rooms, and one in three said they 
only ever played the games alone. "Many of today's children now seem to be 
experiencing greater isolation from family life," MINTEL consumer analyst 
Jenny Catlin said. "Sadly, it does seem that in many cases modern 
technology has now replaced the family unit, so that everyone does whatever 
they want, when they want, even if it means doing it on their own." (The 
Age, 13 Aug 2004) rec'd from John Lamp, Deakin U.
http://theage.com.au/articles/2004/08/13/1092340442906.html

*****

FLASH CARD
      "If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, 
ask a woman." (Margaret Thatcher)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: RUDOLPH VALENTINO
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the Italian-born American film actor 
Rudolph Valentino (1895-1926), the most popular romantic star of American 
silent motion pictures.
      Valentino became a star in 1921 when he appeared in "The Four 
Horsemen of the Apocalypse." He soon gained the image of a handsome, 
passionate lover by starring in such silent films as "The Sheik" and "Blood 
and Sand," in which he portrayed a bullfighter. His other films included 
"Camille," "Monsieur Beaucaire," "Cobra," and "The Eagle."
      Valentino was at the height of his career when he died suddenly in 
1926 at age 31 from a ruptured ulcer. His unexpected death caused worldwide 
hysteria, with some fans actually committing suicide in their sorrow at his 
passing. As his body lay in state at a New York City mortuary, near-riot 
conditions prevailed along the 11-block line of streets filled with 
distraught mourners jostling each other to get to the bier and touch their 
screen idol. Following Valentino's death a small curiosity emerged when it 
was discovered that each year a mysterious "Woman in Black" would appear at 
his tomb.
      Valentino was born Rodolfo d'Antonguolla in Castellaneta, Italy, near 
Taranto.  He came to New York City in 1913 and worked briefly as a gardener 
and laborer. After that he toured the country as a dancer in vaudeville and 
stage musicals. In 1918 Valentino went to Hollywood, where he played small 
parts in films until he was given the role of Julio in "The Four Horsemen 
of the Apocalypse." Easily convinced of his potential star value, Hollywood 
press agents took his career in hand and steered him into the romantic 
dramas that turned him into the screen's "Great Lover" of the 1920s.

[See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000066741/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for "The Sheik" and "Son of the Sheik" on DVD -- or look for it in the 
multimedia section of your favorite library. Note: We donate all revenue 
from our book recommendations to adult literacy programs.]

MAILBAG: THE WORLD AS WE FIND IT

PHYSICS FOR FUN
Re: http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=11141
      May I just ask you to say to Fred Robinson: "Thanks, your link was a 
lot more fun than others I found via Google." May I encourage others to 
visit Fred's link, plus a little poem linked thence at 
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_122.html . Who says physics -- or 
"natural philosophy" as we called it at Edinburgh -- is dull?! (Scott Pollard)

GLEAM IN THE EYE OR MOTE IN THE EYE?
Re: http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=11136
      With regard to the 'Sticky' Web: It's very, very simple.  If a Web 
site simply -- get *this* -- provides a genuine information service, it's a 
done deal.  I don't think it takes an analysis that goes beyond that 
applicable to repeat bricks and mortar business. If you 1) offer something 
people actually want, and 2) work hard to make sure your infrastructure 
delivers those widgets, they will come and you will succeed. An interesting 
compare/contrast: I saw a pre-movie ad for an Inet movie site called 
"ifilm" (I think).  I thought, "Hmm; competition for the iMDB?"  I checked 
it out, and there was no contest.  The iMDB is serious, real, and elegantly 
enough implemented.  Why the ifilm folks had ads out when it was obviously 
only still a gleam in their eye is totally beyond me.  And this is no 
different from other businesses. (Ron Zajac)

THE ENLIGHTENED ONE
Re: http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=11157
      If modern philosophers, psychologists, mathematicians, scientists and 
researchers of all ilk are really serious about examining the nature of 
consciousness, they'd better get acquainted with a fellow who lived about 
2,500 years ago in northern India. He performed exhaustive research on the 
subject and while he did not publish himself, his discoveries and teachings 
on the matter have been thoroughly documented and disseminated in the 
intervening two and a half millennia. He was known, appropriately enough, 
as the Enlightened One. (Martin Manjak)

FILM (INDUSTRY) NOIR
Re: http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=11152
      How do you kill off a company of 400 employees and projected earnings 
of more than $150 million in a few months? Easy, sic the dark forces of the 
entertainment industry and their cohorts on them.
      In just a few months the financial damage caused by fighting the deep 
legal pockets of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in the 
guise of the Paramount and Fox movie studios in collaboration with computer 
games publishers Atari, Electronic Arts and Vivendi Universal Games, and 
aided and abetted by Macrovision, a purveyor of digital rights management 
and software licensing systems, managed to strangle the life out of 321 
Studios, the publisher of a DVD cloning utility.
      In effect, Goliath beat David to a pulp. Why would this have happened?
      The complainants contended that 321's DVD copying software violated 
the ill-conceived 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA 
prohibits attempts to circumvent any anti-piracy systems used to protect 
digital content. To copy a DVD requires copying the encrypted content, so 
gotcha! But 321 argued that to prohibit the sale of its utility would be to 
say, in effect, that consumers had no right of "fair use."
      Fair use is an important concept in this argument. According to the 
Electronic Frontier Foundation <http://www.eff.org/cafe/gross2.html> : "The 
Copyright Act gives copyright holders the exclusive right to reproduce 
works for a limited time period. Fair use is a limitation on this right… 
Fair use allows consumers to make a copy of part or all of a copyrighted 
work, even where the copyright holder has not given permission or objects 
to your use of the work."
      In other words, fair use says you can make back-up and archive copies 
of copyrighted material for your personal use or change the format of the 
contents for personal use. But the DMCA says you can't do any of this if 
the content is locked down by an anti-piracy system.
      While the conflict between the DMCA and the copyright act is 
worrisome, killing off 321 was simply ridiculous. Dozens of publishers 
offer nearly identical tools for both fee and free.
      Mind you, this kind of insane and reckless power wielding by the 
entertainment companies isn't unusual. Hank Barry and John Hummer, general 
partners in Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, are still being personally 
sued by Universal Music and EMI for their investments in Napster in early 
2000! Again, what's the point?
      Fred von Lohmann, senior intellectual property attorney at the 
Electronic Frontier Foundation, agreed there is no apparent point other 
than keeping lawyers employed and suggested there is another objective: 
"These lawsuits are about one thing: keeping innovators intimidated in an 
effort to chill the development of disruptive digital technologies."
      This means the course of our industry can be changed and the 
employment of thousands of people affected not because some great wrong is 
being righted but because some lawyers need employment. Is peer-to-peer 
file sharing still around? Absolutely. Can you still get a DVD cloning 
tool? No problem. But Napster and 321 are history. Well done, all you 
corporate lawyers. (Mark Gibbs)

HOW MANY IT MAJORS THERE REALLY ARE
Re: http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=11135
      It should be noted that the CRA's statistics draw from a very limited 
database: only about 60 schools that have PhD programs in Computer Science. 
There are many more Bachelors' and Masters' level programs in IT that 
produce many qualified graduates each year that are not counted in most 
traditional statistics that study this phenomenon. Note that the 
Association for Information Systems (www.aisnet.org) is in the process of 
attempting to collect and provide a much more comprehensive database that 
should help us to gain a more accurate understanding of how many IT majors 
there really are. (Catherine Beise)

DEFENSE AGAINST SPAM
Re: http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=11156
      I have two more lines of defense against spams. My ISP provides a web 
mail Inbox on its website that I can access with my password after 
connecting through a dialup. If I find a sender name or the subject of a 
message unusual or unwanted, I delete it. (If somebody wants to be sure 
that I do not delete his message, he had better write a meaningful and 
sensible subject!) After deleting the unwanted messages, I click on 
Send/Receive button of Microsoft Outlook. This procedure also denies the 
spammers any way to get delivery confirmation.
      If a spam does escape my scanning, the Outlook junk mail filters it 
into a separate folder and I can review it later. This second line of 
defense also ensures that a message is not deleted if it was filtered as a 
spam but I do want to get it.
      It does take a few minutes to scan and delete the unwanted messages 
from the web mail Inbox (I get 60-70 messages on average.) but then I also 
save time in downloading the remaining ones. I also save time in reading my 
mail. So, on the whole it is not a bad bargain. (M.A. Hameed, Lahore, Pakistan)

FLY, HIPPOPOTTAMUS, FLY
Re: http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=11170
      Wow! We love it. Thanks so much for including in NewsScan Daily 
Daniel's message about two kids' records written, sung and recorded by Ed 
Lipton in the late '60s and mid '70s. He has been getting online requests 
for the LPs left, right, and centre! (Kathie Weiss-Lefebvre on behalf of 
Daniel J. Stern, Toronto, Canada)

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