NewsScan Daily, 6 December 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 6 December 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Bellsouth Announces Broadband Push
        Artists Love the Web, Hate Music Piracy
        Napster Founder Singing a New Tune
        Watermark Technology Seeks to Stamp Out Film Thievery
        The Internet Generation Grows Up

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber: Ptolemy

BELLSOUTH ANNOUNCES BROADBAND PUSH
      BellSouth announced plans to spend $2 billion over the next two to 
three years to roll out high-speed Internet access to about 80% of its 
households in its nine-state territory. Like its fellow Baby Bells, 
BellSouth sees its DSL services as a major counterweight to cable 
companies' broadband cable services, enabling the telcos to compete on 
multiple communications services, including video and wireless. BellSouth 
says it will pursue the strategy of laying fiber to within 5,000 feet of 
consumers, similar to the strategy that SBC is employing to boost its DSL 
subscriber numbers. Fiber-to-the-curb enables data transmission speeds of 
more than 100 megabits per second; regular dialup Internet access runs at 
about 64 kilobits per second. (Wall Street Journal 6 Dec 2004)
<http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110229167486391558,00.html> (sub req'd)

ARTISTS LOVE THE WEB, HATE MUSIC PIRACY
      In the first large-scale survey of artists (i.e., filmmakers, writers 
and digital artists), musicians and the general public, the Pew Internet 
and American Life Project has found that only about half of the artists 
polled thought that sharing unauthorized copies of music and movies online 
should be illegal. Nearly two-thirds of those said file-sharing services 
such as Kazaa and Grokster should be held responsible for illegal 
file-swapping, while only 15% thought it was a good idea to go after 
individual users. Among musicians, 37% said the file-sharing services and 
users should share the blame for illegal file-swapping, while 17% singled 
out the services as the guilty parties. The survey results indicate that 
while file-swapping is an ongoing irritant to artists and musicians who see 
their work distributed for free on the Net, they also value the wide-scale 
exposure that the Internet makes possible. "The overall picture is that the 
musician-artistic community has a much wider range of views and experiences 
than folks who watch the Washington debate about copyright might imagine," 
says Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet Project. (New York Times 6 
Dec 2004)
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/06/arts/06down.html>

NAPSTER FOUNDER SINGING A NEW TUNE
      Shawn Fanning, of Napster fame, is launching a new venture called 
Snocap that offers technology to identify songs as they are moved around on 
the Net and prompt users for payment before they listen. The idea is to 
transform peer-to-peer music sharing into a profit-making venture for the 
artists and record labels through a comprehensive content registry and 
"fingerprinting" technology. "We're trying to build something that 
facilitates a high-quality service. Respecting rights holders is important, 
but it's all working under the assumption that everyone is trying to make 
as much content available as possible. The business is built on the premise 
that a peer-to-peer service ought to be able to launch a successful 
authorized system and have the breadth of content that they had available 
previously, or close to that," says Fanning, who adds that his technology 
could also be used to police file-sharing of video games, software, movies 
and other P2P network content. "The fingerprint technology is music 
specific, but fingerprinting can apply to video, etc. The rule-sets are 
specific to music, but those are also very easily adaptable. So our system 
in a general sense is very extensible, and we believe that once the music 
space begins to adopt the Snocap system, there will be a demand for this 
kind of architecture to provide content in other forms." (ZDNet 6 Dec 2004)
<http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/software/0,39023769,39172015,00.htm>

WATERMARK TECHNOLOGY SEEKS TO STAMP OUT FILM THIEVERY
      Scientists at Sarnoff Labs have developed a "watermarking" technology 
called iTrace aimed at reducing video piracy perpetrated by moviegoers who 
secretly tape new films with handheld video cameras in the movie theater. 
Sarnoff's Jeffrey Lubin used his background in perceptual psychology to 
devise a watermark that not only would be invisible to the movie viewer, 
but would also survive several generations of crude copying. "The Holy 
Grail example is someone takes a camcorder into a movie theater and pirates 
a movie, and then compresses it on a digital file and puts it on the 
Internet," says Lubin. The iTrace watermark emerges gradually, over a 
5-second interval, to exploit the tendency of human vision to compensate 
and ignore images that change slowly, he says. The watermark is actually a 
sequence of shifting blobs that get either lighter or darker and endure 
throughout the film. Each copy has its own unique watermark that enables 
studios to track the origin of a pirated copy. "The applications for 
watermarking are not just for the final result, but it also gives us 
freedom to move images around during production so that if they get into 
the wrong hands, they can be traced back to the last rightful owner," says 
Larry Birstock, executive VP of postproduction firm Post Logic Studios. 
(AP/USA Today 3 Dec 2004)
<http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2004-12-03-piracy-watermarks_x.htm>

THE INTERNET GENERATION GROWS UP
      The first generation of kids to grow up with the Internet as an 
integral part of their lives is now reaching young adulthood, and their 
notions of community, work, entertainment and personal relationships are 
very different from their predecessors', according to observers. "Students 
are continuously connected to other students and friends and family in ways 
that older generations never would have imagined," says Steve Jones, U. of 
Illinois communications department chair and a senior research fellow at 
the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Students find their research and 
learning activities coordinated around the Internet, and workers use the 
Net to increase their job proficiency and efficiency, or to find another 
position. "Nowadays, a person employed at one company can be coordinating 
interviews via Hotmail during lunch and literally finding a new job without 
even leaving their desk," says a young PR agency employee who landed her 
job on the Net. Meanwhile, young people are also wary of the Net's downside 
-- its potential for fraud, stalking and the everyday threat of 
rumor-mongering. Still, most see the Internet as a powerful force for good, 
says Jones: "There is a real power there, a kind of technological power. 
But also I think there's a kind of intellectual power that can be 
harnessed. They are so curious about using these technologies, And I'd 
really like to be able to regularly marshal that curiosity." 
(AP/SiliconValley.com 5 Dec 2004)
<http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/10340961.htm>

*****

FLASH CARD
      "Writers, let us make no mistake, are swine." (Joseph Epstein)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: PTOLEMY
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the ancient astronomer Ptolemy 
(100-170), whose name has become synonymous with the long-abandoned 
geocentric, or earth-centered, view of the universe.
      Ptolemy's name in Latin was Claudius Ptolemaeus, given to him because 
of his probable birthplace, Ptolemais Hermii, and not because of any 
relationship with the royal family that ruled Egypt earlier in the century 
of his birth. Little beyond that is known about his life, except that he 
received a Greek education, if not in Greece itself, then most likely in 
Alexandria, a city with Hellenic cultural roots. In his astronomical 
activities Ptolemy drew heavily upon the earlier work of the Greek 
astronomer Hipparchus. Although Hipparchus did pioneer work in describing 
the paths followed by the planets and other heavenly bodies as they 
supposedly circled the Earth, the geocentric system became known as the 
Ptolemaic system because the writings of Hipparchus were not preserved.
      The Ptolemaic system was able to track the positions of the heavenly 
bodies visible to the naked eye with sufficient accuracy to have it 
accepted by the scholarly community. It also had the virtue of being in 
tune with the teachings of Aristotle and biblical history. It awaited the 
invention of the telescope fourteen centuries later before the Ptolemaic 
system would be replaced with great intellectual upheaval by the 
heliocentric system of Copernicus.
      Ptolemy incorporated his extensive astronomical observations and 
measurements into a massive book, which became known as The Mathematical 
Collection. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the book was called Megas 
Astronomos, Greek for "The Great Astronomer." Later in the 9th century, 
Arab astronomers gave the book the title Al Megiste, reintroducing the work 
to the West where it became known as the Almagest, the name still used today.
      The Almagest is divided into 13 books, each of which deals with 
astronomical concepts pertaining to stars and to other objects in the solar 
system. The encyclopedic nature of the work presented later astronomers 
with the findings of both Hipparchus and Ptolemy, and the measuring 
instruments they used. Hipparchus had compiled the first star catalog, 
which contained 850 stars, and which Ptolemy expanded to a catalog of 1,022 
stars. Ptolemy also describes the geocentric system and presents arguments 
that the Earth must be immovable in its position at the center of the 
universe, one argument being that since all bodies fall to the center of 
the universe, the Earth must be fixed there at the center, otherwise 
falling objects would not be seen to drop toward the center of the Earth.
      Ptolemy was also an accomplished geometrician and made an early 
attempt to map the known world, listed latitudes and longitudes of 
important locations, with accompanying maps and a description of techniques 
of mapmaking. Despite its understandable inaccuracies, Ptolemy's Geography 
remained popular up to the time of the Renaissance.

[To find a library copy of "Ptolemy's Geographia," visit RLG's 
RedLightGreen.com: 
<http://www.redlightgreen.com/ucwprod/servlet/ucw.servlets.UCWController?ACTION=EDITION&WORKID=21632725&> 
-- or to purchase a copy go to: 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691092591/newsscaqncom/ref=nosim> 
Note: We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy 
programs.]

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