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Issue no. 40, 2003 Published: Oct 31, 2003
EU probes Microsoft's licenses to hardware makers
W3C sides with Microsoft against Eolas patent
Digital copyright rules get boost
ICANN sprouts office in Brussels
Scientists report data storage explosion
Nanoparticle barcodes may help fight fraud
New lab will let researchers conduct virtual attacks
Israeli processor computes at speed of light
Full-featured PC fits in pocket
Study finds gaps in digital divide theory
Researcher develop e-paper printer
Textbook queries video
Robots to gain eyes in the back of their heads

EU probes Microsoft's licenses to hardware makers
The European Commission said on Thursday it had asked computer hardware makers for details of their licensing arrangements with Microsoft as part of its probe into anti-competitive practices at the software firm. Computer makers are heavily dependant on Microsoft for software updates which are provided on a weekly or semi-weekly basis. In the past antitrust authorities in the US have said Microsoft was in a position to favour some computer makers over others. The Commission stressed that launching the probe did not imply Microsoft was guilty of any offences. The probe centres on worries that Microsoft's licensing agreements with hardware makers restrict manufacturers' ability to exploit patents. IBM, Hitachi and Toshiba are among the 20 firms that have been contacted.
Reuters / FT Oct 30, 2003	back to top

W3C sides with Microsoft against Eolas patent
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has taken up Microsoft's cause in a patent infringement lawsuit by urging the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to invalidate the related patent 'in order to prevent substantial economic and technical damage to the operation of (the) World Wide Web'. In a letter sent Tuesday by W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee to James Rogan, US Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property, Berners-Lee claims that 'prior art' - a legal term referring to technology in existence at the time a patent is applied for - proves US Patent number 5,838,906 is invalid and that the USPTO should therefore re-examine the case for issuing the patent in the first place. Last August, a jury in Chicago ordered Microsoft to pay $520.6 million in damages to Eolas Technologies and the University of California at San Francisco, the holders of the patent, which covers the technology allowing interactive content to be embedded in a website.
The Industry Standard / IDG Oct 30, 2003	back to top

Digital copyright rules get boost
The US Copyright Office has opted to leave a controversial software protection law largely in place, despite protests that it interferes with consumers' rights to watch movies and listen to music as they wish. The Copyright Office created four narrow exemptions to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Academic researchers and consumer-rights activists had pushed for wider exemptions, saying it is overly protective and inhibits legitimate activities such as security research or making personal copies of digital products. The Copyright Office said the law should not apply to lists of websites blocked by internet filtering software, or software made for obsolete systems. Users can also hack copy-protection systems on digital 'ebooks' in order to have them read aloud by speech-recognition software or converted into Braille, the office said. But hacking for other purposes - such as to fast-forward through advertisements on DVDs or make personal copies of copy-protected music CDs - is still not allowed.
MSNBC / Reuters Oct 29, 2003	back to top

ICANN sprouts office in Brussels
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is going international, opening up its first overseas office in Brussels this week. The company has hired Paul Verhoef, a native of the Netherlands, as its new VP of supporting organisations and committee support to head the new office. Verhoef is a ten-year Brussels veteran who most recently worked for the European Commission's Information Technology Directorate General. He has been involved in EC-ICANN dealings before, notably the move to create a .eu pan-European top-level internet domain. ICANN, based in Marina del Rey, California, is well-known for the exotic locations of its quarterly policy discussion meetings - this week its participants are meeting in Carthage, Tunisia - but most of its activity to date has been located in California and Washington DC.
Yahoo / ComputerWire Oct 30, 2003	back to top

Scientists report data storage explosion
In 2002, people around the globe created enough new information to fill 500,000 US Libraries of Congress, a 30 per cent increase in stored information from 1999, according to a study by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley. The amount of information transmitted electronically in 2002, is estimated to be 18 exabytes. The vast majority of that total - 98 per cent - was sent over telephone networks in the form of data and voice. The study sought to canvas four storage media (print, film, magnetic and optical) and four channels (telephone, radio, television and the internet). Computers won out in the storage category: 92 per cent of newly generated information was recorded on magnetic media. Paper, by contrast, accounted for a hundredth of a per cent of the total. Radio and TV broadcast content added a negligible amount of new information, as most information disseminated through those media is recycled. See: http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/
CNET News Oct 28, 2003	back to top

Nanoparticle barcodes may help fight fraud
Barcodes peppered with magnetic particles millionths of a millimetre across could mark out fake goods and documents, according to Russell Cowburn of the University of Durham, UK. The barcode lines contain atoms of permalloy, a mixture of nickel and iron. They are printed in a similar way to electronic circuits - each printing arranges their constituent magnetic particles in a different pattern. As each pattern is unique, it has a unique magnetic field, which can be measured, recorded and checked. Different magnetic fields interact with light in different ways. So the reflections of polarised laser light from a barcode reveal its magnetic properties. These properties are logged in a database, linked to each barcode's number. Barcodes with specific magnetic fields cannot be created to order. To beat the system, counterfeiters would have to break into the database. A possible means of fraud - the transfer of genuine codes to fake goods - can be avoided by printing the barcodes on materials that ensure that tampering disrupts the magnetic pattern, Cowburn says.
Nature Oct 30, 2003	back to top

New lab will let researchers conduct virtual attacks
With a grant of about $500,000 from the US Department of Justice, Iowa State University will begin building the Internet-Scale Event and Attack Generation Environment, or ISEAGE (pronounced Ice Age), an internet lab where virtual battlefields will be created. Key areas of security exploration will include protecting computer- controlled critical government and private infrastructures such as power grids, transportation, and water systems from large-scale coordinated attacks, such as those launched by attackers working simultaneously from countries around the globe. Researchers can conduct computer attacks just as if they occurred over the internet and test how well security tools work at thwarting those attacks. The lab will also be used to test the effectiveness of new and existing security systems and to develop new crime-tracking forensic tools.
Internet Week Oct 29, 2003	back to top

Israeli processor computes at speed of light
An Israeli start-up has developed a processor that uses optics instead of silicon, enabling it to compute at the speed of light. Lenslet said its processor will enable new capabilities in homeland security and military, multimedia and communications applications. An optical processor is a digital signal processor (DSP) with an optical accelerator attached to it. Lenslet's processor performs 8 trillion operations per second, equivalent to a super-computer and 1,000 times faster than standard processors, with 256 lasers performing computations at light speed. It is geared towards such applications as high resolution radar, electronic warfare, luggage screening at airports, video compression, weather forecasting and cellular base stations. Lenslet said its Enlight processor is the first commercially available optical DSP. The company's prototype is fairly large and bulky but when Lenslet begins to supply the processor in a few months it will be shrunk to 15 x 15 cm with a height of 1.7 cm, roughly the size of a Palm Pilot.
Yahoo / Reuters Oct 29, 2003	back to top

Full-featured PC fits in pocket
A full-featured PC that is small enough to slip into a shirt pocket is being hailed by its makers as the world's first modular computer. The machine can perform as both a PC and a handheld computer. The Modular Computing Core is being launched on 7 November by US start-up Antelope Technologies. The device is a single portable unit into which all the essential computing components are crammed. At 76 by 127 by 19 millimetres, the MCC is not much bigger than a deck of cards. This core unit can then either be slotted into a docking station to be used with a screen and keyboard as a desktop computer, or into small portable 'shell' with a touch-sensitive screen, turning it into a handheld computer. Inside is a 1GHz processor, 256 MB of RAM and a 10 or 15 GB hard drive. It will also run a full version of Window XP, instead of the stripped-down operating systems used by handheld computers.
New Scientist Oct 28, 2003	back to top

Study finds gaps in digital divide theory
Lack of access to the internet and related digital technologies is a problem not only in emerging markets but also in advanced countries, a comparative study of eight markets has shown. The Global Consumer Advisory Board, set up by chipmaker AMD, collated findings from different studies on internet use and access in China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the UK and the US in its report. In the US, the UK and Japan, the 'gender divide' is decreasing as more women are logging on to the net. But in China, Germany, Italy, Korea and Mexico the report finds that women are still laggards. The study notes that there is no global standard for gauging internet usage and growth because the spread of the internet is uneven. Though the number of people online has risen from about a million users in 1993 to more than 600 million in 2002, only about 10 per cent of the world's population is online. Nearly 90 per cent of those users are from industrialised countries, with nearly a third of those users from the US.
CNET News Oct 29, 2003	back to top

Researcher develop e-paper printer
Electronic paper, made of charge-sensitive 'ink' particles embedded in a thin plastic film, promises lightweight, flexible displays that consume minimal battery power. But e-paper has typically required a layer of electronics behind the film to turn the particles on and off, adding bulk and cost. Now researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center, a subsidiary of Xerox, have developed a handheld device that can print information from a computer directly onto e-paper; the device activates the ink particles electrostatically as it is swiped across the paper’s surface. PARC researchers plan to use the device initially to print on large e-paper whiteboards. In the future, the device could also be used to scan information from the whiteboard into a computer. PARC has multiple patents pending on the technology.
Technology Review Oct 31, 2003	back to top

Textbook queries video
Researchers from the University of Tsukuba in Japan, the Japan Science and Technology Corporation (CREST) and the Japanese National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology have found a simple way to improve audio and video searching. The researchers' prototype uses lecture videos and related textbooks, and allows users to browse the textbooks to find information needed to query the system for related information on the videos. The system automatically generates text of the audio tracks using speech recognition software, and uses uncorrected optical character recognition scans of related textbooks as a source for query information. Even though neither technology is 100 per cent accurate, the combination is more than accurate enough to find keywords, the researchers say. The method could be used to search any audio or video information source for which there is also related written material, including television news and newspaper articles, scientific lectures and papers, and TV cooking programs and recipes.
Technology Review / TRN Oct 28, 2003	back to top

Robots to gain eyes in the back of their heads
Researchers in the US are developing robots with 'eyes in the backs of their heads' in the form of nine digital cameras attached to a frame the size of a beach ball. Providing a robot with 'omni-directional' vision could vastly improve its navigational skills, the scientists said. The new 'eye', named the Argus Eye after the all-seeing Greek god, passes the images to a computer which works out the direction in which the robot is pointing and heading. While humans can rely on sensors in their ears to navigate themselves, many robots have to rely solely on their single eye. But as computer scientists at the University of Maryland proved mathematically in 1998, if robots could see in all directions they would not need any other sensors.
CNN / Reuters / New Scientist Oct 30, 2003	back to top