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Issue no. 29, 2003 Published: Jul 25, 2003
Europe to push for open source
SCO gains copyrights to license Linux
French police smash key piracy ring
US colleges fight 'pirate' subpoenas
US passports to carry digitally signed images
Scientists developing mind-controlled wheelchair
Laser bursts pierce fog
Researchers develop transparent, durable magnets
Amazon working on book search database
Computer program detects author gender
Deutsche Telekom applies to trademark 'hotspot'
Poetry website goes from bad to verse
E-mail? The French beg to differ

Europe to push for open source
The European Commission is placing open standards and open-source software at the centre of its efforts to promote interoperable e-government services with a new working paper introduced this month. The Commission argues in the report that open standards, and to an extent open source, are crucial to making new e-government services work with each other and with enterprise systems. The paper, which will be used as a reference point for policy and decision-makers around Europe, is the latest document pushing forward the far-reaching eEurope initiative on e-government services. The document calls for 'open interfaces and specifications' for components of e-government services including 'open and non-proprietary document formats' and 'the means of communicating with supporting back-office processes'. It also notes that the eTEN program, which promotes trans-European e-services deployment, will ask for 'the use of open standards and where applicable, the use of open source' when funding projects.
ZDNet Jul 21, 2003	back to top

SCO gains copyrights to license Linux
SCO Group, the company that says Linux infringes on its Unix intellectual property, announced on Monday that it has been granted key Unix copyrights and will start a program to let companies that run Linux avoid litigation by paying licensing fees. The company said it plans to offer licenses that will support run-time, binary use of Linux to all companies that use Linux kernel versions 2.4 and later. SCO sparked a major controversy in the Linux world in March, when it sued IBM, saying the company had incorporated SCO's Unix code into Linux and seeking $1 billion in damages. SCO then updated its demands in June, saying IBM owed it $3 billion. In the meantime, it sent out letters to about 1,500 Linux customers, warning them that their use of Linux could infringe on SCO's intellectual property. SCO said prices for licensing its Unix System V source code would be announced in coming weeks. Pricing will be based on the cost of UnixWare 7.13, the company's current Unix product. SCO said, at least initially, it is not directly targeting home users of Linux.
ZDNet Jul 21, 2003	back to top

French police smash key piracy ring
The French police have smashed a significant network selling and exchanging pirated films over the internet. More than 36,000 films were seized and 110 individuals were taken in for questioning. The police identified a total of 156 web users who had put online a list of the pirated films they wanted to swap. A small percentage of users were also offering material for sale. In order to identify the culprits, the police questioned ISPs about the email addresses the pirates had left on the site. As a result, 110 of them have been arrested in France. The site owner has been arrested and the site is no longer live. Those site users who have been charged are facing up to two years in prison and a fine of €150,000 for piracy. The total value of the pirated films seized is around €1m, according to police estimates.
Silcion.com / ZDNet France Jul 22, 2003	back to top

US colleges fight 'pirate' subpoenas
Two colleges in the US are challenging legal requests to hand over the names of students who have been accused of illegally downloading music. But Boston College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) say they are not trying to protect students. They are trying to quash the subpoenas - which mean they must hand over information by law - because they say the requests were not properly filed. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) issued the subpoenas. The RIAA has already filed a total of 871 subpoenas, with more than 75 subpoenas granted every day, US courts said on Friday. The association has said it would go after the most active downloaders, but some subpoenas related to users who had accessed as few as five songs. Users charged with piracy could face lawsuits for damages from $750 to $150,000 under US copyright law. Music fans are reacting with a new generation of file-sharing software to prevent monitoring. A version of 'Kazaa-lite' says it can stop outside parties scanning email addresses and listing songs on individuals' hard drives.
BBC News Jul 23, 2003	back to top

US passports to carry digitally signed images
US citizens will be issued with 'smart' passports carrying a digitally signed photograph by late 2004. The new passports will include an embedded microchip that stores a compressed image of its owner's face. These microchips will be designed to prevent tampering and each digital image will be cryptographically signed to guarantee its authenticity. European travellers may also soon be required to carry passports containing biometric information. In June 2003 the European Union agreed to spend €140m on the development of an interoperable biometric system. European passports are expected to carry both fingerprint and iris scan biometric data. Fingerprints and iris scans are much easier to cross-reference on computer than photographs, for which varying hairstyles and facial hair add complications. Cross-referencing could determine if someone were using multiple passports, for example. No date has been set for the introduction of biometric European passports but European countries are likely to be under pressure to comply with US standards.
New Scientist Jul 23, 2003	back to top

Scientists developing mind-controlled wheelchair
Swiss and Spanish scientists are developing a mind-controlled wheelchair that could one day give severely paralysed patients new independence. The system will use electrodes embedded in a skullcap worn by the patient to transmit messages from the brain to a computer which passes them on to the chair through a wireless link. The system has been designed by researchers at the Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence in Martigny, Switzerland, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and the Centre for Biomedical Engineering Research in Barcelona. Early trials using a robot indicate that with just two days' training it is as easy to control the robot with the human mind as it is manually. The scientists are testing the system with a simple, wheeled robot using commands to turn left, right or go forward. It also includes in-built intelligence to ensure the robot does not collide with anything.
Yahoo / Reuters / New Scientist Jul 23, 2003	back to top

Laser bursts pierce fog
Researchers from Claude Bernard Lyon University in France have shown that it is possible to fire laser beams through otherwise impenetrable clouds, haze and fog. This means it could be possible to transmit data through these opaque media and remotely sense objects or chemicals within clouds, haze or fog. The findings could lead to more reliable free-space laser communications and new ways to monitor pollution. Water droplets usually scatter laser signals. The researchers used intense, very short laser pulses to form light filaments that were only 150 microns wide and hundreds of metres long, and showed that the filaments could cut through water droplets as large as 95 microns without losing much energy. When the filament strikes a water droplet, much of the filament's energy is transferred to surrounding photons. However, this energy is transferred back to the filament on the other side of the droplet. The researchers' next step is to check the phenomenon in the field using a mobile femtosecond laser system.
Technology Review / TRN Jul 23, 2003	back to top

Researchers develop transparent, durable magnets
Researchers from the Independent University of Barcelona (UAB) and the University of Zaragoza in Spain have found a way to form transparent, durable, lightweight magnets that maintain their magnetism in magnetic fields and high temperatures. The combination of magnetism and transparency makes it possible to use the material to control light, making it potentially useful for modulating lasers and controlling holograms. The material is also an electrical insulator and could eventually be used in sensors, actuators and for recording, according to the researchers. To produce the material, the researchers dispersed magnetic neodymium-iron-boron particles in silica aerogel, aligned the particles using a magnetic field, then dried the gel. Aerogels are highly porous, which makes them lightweight. The magnetic particles were less than five microns in diameter. The material differs from existing magnetic aerogels because it does not lose its magnetic orientation in the presence of a magnetic field.
Technology Review / TRN Jul 21, 2003	back to top

Amazon working on book search database
Amazon.com executives are working with several large book publishers to develop an expansive online archive that would let users search the texts of tens of thousands of books, The New York Times has reported. The plan, being negotiated by Amazon and the publishers, would build a program called Look Inside the Book II, through which browsers could pull up a list of books mentioning certain search words or terms. Users who register could then see several pages around the result of the search, but the total amount anyone could view from a single book would be limited, the report said. The plan could help Amazon counter competition from Google and Yahoo, which pull potential shoppers away from its site, and broaden Amazon's appeal as an authoritative information source, the report said.
Yahoo / Reuters Jul 21, 2003	back to top

Computer program detects author gender
A new computer program can tell whether a book was written by a man or a woman. The simple scan of key words and syntax is around 80 per cent accurate on both fiction and non-fiction. Female writers use more pronouns (I, you, she, their, myself), say the program's developers from Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. Males prefer words that identify or determine nouns (a, the, that) and words that quantify them (one, two, more). The researchers trained their algorithm on a few test cases to identify the most prevalent fingerprints of gender and of fiction and non-fiction. They then set it searching for these fingerprints in 566 English-language works. Strikingly, the distinctions between male and female writers are much the same as those that differentiate non-fiction and fiction. The programme can tell these two genres apart with 98 per cent accuracy. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that non-fiction is more informational and fiction more involved.
Nature Jul 18, 2003	back to top

Deutsche Telekom applies to trademark 'hotspot'
Deutsche Telekom has applied to trademark the word 'hotspot', the popular way to describe public wireless connectivity points. Spanish telco Telefonica has also joined in the fiesta by putting in a rival claim for the two-word alternative, 'hot spot'. Both claims will come as a shock to the wireless industry, which has always struggled to translate what it does into user-friendly English. The applications have been made through the World Intellectual Property Organisation, which deals with international trademark applications, and the European Community system, the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market. The UK Patent Office will make the final ruling.
VNUNet UK Jul 24, 2003	back to top

Poetry website goes from bad to verse
Vogons, fans of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy will recall, wrote poetry so bad it could kill. Now an experiment to create poems on the web looks likely to automate the awfulness of Vogon verse. David Rea of Greenwich, Connecticut, has written a program that allows a poem to evolve, to see if people with diverse tastes in poetry can work together to create attractive verse. Rea's program starts off with 1,000 'poems', each comprising four lines of five randomly chosen words. People visiting the website choose between two randomly selected verses from the population. The bad ones are killed off and the fittest - those with the most positive votes - undergo further evolution. Each word within a verse is thought of as a poetic gene. There are a possible 30,000 words, and as people vote, some genomes will prove more popular than others as they form semi-meaningful phrases. So the fittest verses are 'mated' to form new verses, and the offspring again put to the public vote. See: http://www.codeasart.com/poetry/darwin.html
New Scientist Jul 23, 2003	back to top

E-mail? The French beg to differ
The latest Anglicism to fall out of favour in France is the word 'e-mail', now banned from use by government employees. The word 'e-mail' can now no longer be used in French official communication, including documents, memos, the internet and even e-mails themselves. The General Commission on Terminology and Neology, part of the French Culture Ministry and affiliated to the Academie Francaise - which outlawed the word 'Walkman' in favour of 'baladeur' some years ago - prefers the French alternative 'courriel'. The edict on 'courriel', a shortened version of the phrase 'courrier electronique', or electronic mail, is not expected to make a lot of difference to the common parlance of French technophiles. 'E-mail' has been in use in Europe for years, and the commission's decision will be largely arbitrary to French speakers. The word 'courriel' is French Canadian in origin, a French dialect considered a bastardisation of the language by traditionalists in France.
ZDNet Jul 18, 2003	back to top