NewsScan Daily, 30 September 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 30 September 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        ISPs Score 'Stunning Victory' Over Patriot Act
        'It's All About Standards,' Says Berners-Lee
        Competing Standards Are Bad for the Music Business, Too
        New Search Engine Clusters Results for Clarity
        Anonymous Web Sites Surge in Number

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Worth Thinking About: Lost Art

ISPs SCORE 'STUNNING VICTORY' OVER PATRIOT ACT
      A New York federal judge struck down a controversial provision of the 
USA Patriot Act, ruling that the FBI cannot require Internet service 
providers to divulge subscriber information and then force them to keep mum 
about it. The case had been brought by the ACLU on behalf of an ISP that 
had received what is known as a national security letter demanding 
confidential subscriber information. Unlike grand jury subpoenas, national 
security letters may not be contested before a judge and require only that 
the FBI describe the information it seeks as "relevant" to terrorism or 
intelligence probes. Recipients of the letters are prohibited from telling 
anyone -- including their customers and their lawyers -- about the FBI 
requests. In the past 14 months since the Patriot Act's passage, "hundreds" 
of such letters have been issued, according to U.S. District Judge Victor 
Morrero, who says he appreciates the government's terrorism concerns but 
feels freedoms must be carefully preserved in times of crisis: "Sometimes a 
right, once extinguished, may be gone for good." ACLU executive director 
Anthony Romero called the decision "a stunning victory against John 
Ashcroft's Department of Justice." The Justice Department now has 90 days 
to fix the law or appeal the ruling. (USA Today 30 Sep 2004)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2004-09-29-patriotact_x.htm

'IT'S ALL ABOUT STANDARDS,' SAYS BERNERS-LEE
      Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, is hard at work on 
his vision for the Semantic Web -- a next-generation iteration in which 
information would be coded in such a way that the computer could 
"understand" search result data and seamlessly link it to applications or 
other information that a particular user would find relevant. "These 
different applications will link through the common concepts they share, 
such as location and time," says Berners-Lee. But to achieve this next 
level of Web intelligence, all the players must agree on a uniform way of 
tagging data. "It's all about standards. Standards are the basis for any 
emergent technology," says Berners-Lee. (AP 30 Sep 2004)
<http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040930/D85DVJB00.html>

COMPETING STANDARDS ARE BAD FOR THE MUSIC BUSINESS, TOO
      Karlheinz Brandenburg, one of the lead creators of MP3 playback 
technology, says the confusion caused by rival digital music technologies 
will do more to drive companies out of business than head-to-head 
competition. "It has slowed the download business for sure, and it's doing 
the same for the gadget makers," says Brandenburg, director of electronic 
media technologies at the Fraunhofer Institut in Germany. Apple, Real 
Networks and Sony each has developed its own proprietary playback and DRM 
anti-piracy technology, and Brandenburg says he's warned manufacturers and 
music labels that they risk alienating fans and driving them to 
unsanctioned P2P networks, where songs are free and available in the 
unprotected MP3 format. "They didn't listen. Maybe they thought it made 
commercial sense not to have a standard. It's very strange… Blank MP3 is 
the only standard. It is supported by all." (Reuters 29 Sep 2004)
<http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=technologyNews&storyID=6368196>

NEW SEARCH ENGINE CLUSTERS RESULTS FOR CLARITY
      Vivisimo, founded by three former Carnegie-Mellon computer 
scientists, is hoping to challenge Google's dominance in the search field 
with a new search service that clusters results into categories to make 
them easier to sort through. The Clusty service is targeted at consumers 
frustrated by the massive results lists often returned by Google and wary 
of its reliance on its PageRank system for highlighting relevant sources. 
Instead, Clusty results are organized by context. For instance, a search on 
"swift boat" would generate results clustered under headings such as "Swift 
Boat Veterans," "John Kerry" and "Patrol Craft Fast." Users can click 
through tabs to access each grouping, or can go through the results one by 
one. "As databases get larger, trying to pull the proverbial needle out of 
the haystack gets tougher and tougher," says Gary Price, a librarian who is 
also news editor at SearchEngineWatch. "Here, you're getting a bit of extra 
help." The launch of Clusty comes on the heels of Amazon's introduction of 
its A9 search service, which also organizes information as it retrieves it. 
"Search will look more like the magazine business than the soda market," 
predicts Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist at the University of Washington 
who sits on the Vivisimo board. "The competition has shifted from crawling 
the Web and returning an answer quickly to adding value to the information 
that has been retrieved." (New York Times 30 Sep 2004)
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/30/technology/30search.html>

ANONYMOUS WEB SITES SURGE IN NUMBER
      The Web is becoming less transparent, as an increasing percentage of 
new domain registrants seek to shield their names and contact information 
from the surfing public. Registrants must provide this information when 
they register for a domain, but a host of new services has sprung up 
offering to conceal that information from the "whois" list for a small fee 
-- around $9 or $10 a year. The legality of such services is still in 
question, but critics say the anonymity services are making the Internet 
harder to regulate, and create opportunities for mischief or worse. 
"They're like a pawn shop that doesn't keep good records," says one 
antispam activist. But privacy advocates say that the public information 
available on whois is a ripe target for spammers and identity thieves. 
"People should have the option to hide their personal data from a casual 
observer, particularly when it comes to issues of free speech," says an 
analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Meanwhile, some of the 
anonymous sites have figured into several election-year controversies. For 
instance, one political Web log that uses privacy shields was an early 
critic of the disputed CBS News report on President Bush's National Guard 
service records. (Wall Street Journal 30 Sep 2004)
<http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109649696257431793,00.html> (sub req'd)

*****

FLASH CARD
      "In everything that can be called art there is a quality of 
redemption." (Raymond Chandler)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: LOST ART
      Peter Steinhart -- a naturalist and former columnist for Audubon 
magazine, with a talent and passion for drawing -- complains about the 
absence of that artistic skill in modern art.
      "Since the middle of the twentieth century, abstraction and 
expressionism have been the lodestones of fine art, and drawing has been 
diminished and disparaged. Commercial design and illustration these days is 
largely done on computers. When you ask the marketing director at 
Strathmore -- a producer of artist papers for more than a century -- what's 
new, he talks about a surge in sales of papers made for use with inkjet 
printers. At many art schools across the country, students may go through a 
four-year program without taking drawing or painting courses. More and more 
of the curriculum in art schools and more and more of the content in 
galleries and museums is video art, conceptual art and installation art. 
Less and less is actually based on drawing. And if you do get training in 
drawing, you're not all that likely to use it professionally. A local art 
instructor says he guesses that fewer than 2 percent of art school 
graduates go on to make a living as painters or sculptors or portrait 
artists or muralists. An apocryphal estimate passed on by artists in these 
drawing groups says only 4 percent of art school graduates go on to make a 
living as artists, and fewer than 20 percent go on to make art at all.
      "But today a kind of renaissance of figure drawing is occurring. It 
is not something you'd note in the galleries or museums, for it is 
practiced, more often than not, by amateurs.
      "Drawing from live nude models used to be something one had to enroll 
in an art school to do. Today, one does it in community art and recreation 
centers, in fine-art museums, in privately operated ateliers and in home 
studios and living rooms.
      "If you judged by what hangs in the galleries around San Francisco's 
Union Square or New York's Madison Avenue, you would have no idea that any 
of this was taking place. If there is a renaissance of drawing taking 
place, it is not driven by the art market, but by something inside the 
artists themselves. It is driven, I suspect, by something innate and human, 
by a constellation of long-standing behaviors and impulses shaped as much 
by human nature as by culture."
                              ***
[See 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400041848/newsscancom/ref=nosim> 
for Peter Steinhart's "The Undressed Art: Why We Draw" -- or look for it in 
your favorite library. Note: We donate all revenue from our book and media 
recommendations to adult literacy programs.]

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