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Issue no. 47, 2003 Published: Dec 19, 2003
Bush signs first US anti-spam law
Internet spam operators facing jail
Euro file-swappers face legal action
Linux gets heart transplant with 2.6.0
Microsoft wins Scandinavian Lindows block
Police to trap online paedophiles with fake websites
Adobe surprises with e-book store
CD-burning software prompts patent suit
Naked nanofibres stretch optical properties
Researchers develop HIV monitor
World's smallest hard disk unveiled
Philips preps open digital-media system
Software shares out spare processing power
Cellphone allows users to swipe and go

Bush signs first US anti-spam law
President George W Bush has signed the first US legislation to outlaw spam. The Can-Spam Act of 2003 will allow Americans to opt out of receiving unsolicited computer messages. But critics of the measure say it will do little to stop spam and may even encourage some businesses to start sending unwanted e-mail messages. Under the new legislation, law-breaking spammers can face multi-million dollar fines and jail sentences of up to five years. The bill requires pornographic e-mails to be clearly labelled and says businesses must avoid fake return addresses and misleading subject lines. It also asks that spam e-mail include a mechanism that lets people tell the sender that they do not want to receive any more messages. But instead of banning all unsolicited messages, the law means that businesses are free to send e-mail until people say they do not want it. Critics of the bill would have preferred an opt-in scheme in which people who want spam are the only ones who get it.
BBC News Dec 16, 2003	back to top

Internet spam operators facing jail
Two American men face up to 20 years in prison for allegedly operating one of the most prolific internet spamming operations in the world. Jeremy Jaynes and Richard Rutowski each face four felony counts of transmission of unsolicited bulk e-mails. The indictments were based on an anti-spam law which took effect on July 1 in Virginia. Between July 11 and August 11, more than 100,000 complaints on spam messages linked to the two men were reported. On at least three days, more than 10,000 messages were transmitted. Meanwhile, also Microsoft and New York's attorney general have filed lawsuits against what they called a spam ring responsible for sending billions of illegal email messages. The lawsuits target Scott Richter, who, it is alleged, is one of the world's most prolific senders of spam, or junk email. Richter and 'accomplices' are accused of sending illegal spam in 35 countries and disguising their work to prevent irritated consumers from tracing the messages.
Ananova Dec 12, 2003	back to top

Euro file-swappers face legal action
Europe has become the file-swapping hub of the world as US users ease off in the face of aggressive litigation by copyright holders - forcing the music industry to begin litigation in Europe next year. Nielsen/NetRatings reports that 9.35 million Europeans used the Kazaa peer-to-peer file-swapping network in October while 8.24 million Americans did the same. Between March and October 2003 the number of US Kazaa file sharers halved, once the RIAA began litigation against individuals. The chairman of international recording industry group, the IFPI, warns that similar legal action against consumers in Europe has become 'an inevitability'. He suggests it may begin next year. The IFPI's campaign against illegal sharing of copyright material 'will only intensify in 2004', the report says.
Yahoo / Macworld / the Guardian Dec 16, 2003	back to top

Linux gets heart transplant with 2.6.0
Top programmers on Wednesday released a major update to Linux, version 2.6.0, a change that is expected to help carry the open-source operating system into new markets. The new version of the core, or kernel, of Linux has several changes that make Linux better suited to powerful computers with numerous processors, a market dominated today by servers running versions of the Unix operating system on which Linux is based. It will be the first major change since 2.4.0 was released in January 2001. From its lowly roots as a student project Linus Torvalds began 12 years ago, the software has matured to become a major competitor to Microsoft and a key part of most computing companies' plans. Using the 2.6 kernel computers will be less susceptible to 'thrashing', which forces consumers have to wait as the computer labours under heavy hard-disk traffic loads. Another storage improvement in 2.6 is a better volume manager - software that lets a program read and write information on hard drives more flexibly. Linux will also be able to use much larger file systems. The 2-terabyte limit of 2.4 is removed in 2.6.
MSNBC / CNET News Dec 18, 2003	back to top

Microsoft wins Scandinavian Lindows block
A Swedish court has temporarily blocked the distribution of Lindows software in the country, pending a ruling on Microsoft's claim that the company's name violates its Windows trademark. The Court said in the ruling that Microsoft has shown probable cause for trademark infringement and therefore may suffer further damage if products with the Lindows name continue to be sold in Sweden. The court set a fine of $3m if Lindows fails to comply with the injunction. Lindows sells a version of the open source Linux operating system with an interface that resembles Microsoft's Windows. Microsoft sued the company for alleged infringement of its US trademark shortly after Lindows opened for business, with a trial set for March.
Silicon.com / CNET News Dec 12, 2003	back to top

Police to trap online paedophiles with fake websites
An international police operation is being launched to catch paedophiles who search online for images of children. Police forces in several countries, including Britain, North America, and Australia are setting up websites appearing to offer internet porn. But users coming to the sites are told that they are breaking the law and that the police have their details which may be circulated to 180 countries. Operation Pin is the first such attempt to alert offenders to their crime. Police want to deter paedophiles from going online in a bid to disrupt the lucrative market in pornographic images of children. Anyone caught out by these new sites is liable to have their details circulated via the international police agency, Interpol, to 180 countries.
BBC News Dec 18, 2003	back to top

Adobe surprises with e-book store
Software publisher Adobe Systems made a surprise move Wednesday to revive the faltering e-book market, opening its own online store. The Adobe Digital Media Store offers books from major publishers, plus links to electronic versions of publications such as Popular Science and The New York Times. All are published in Adobe's PDF format. Once touted as the future of publishing, e-books - digitised books that can viewed on PCs, handheld computers and specialised reading devices - have yet to gain a significant share of the market. The format suffered a major blow in September, when book seller Barnes & Noble announced that it was dropping sales of e-books from its online store. Adobe is operating the new store in conjunction with Content Reserve, an electronic publishing specialist whose OverDrive service handles storage, delivery and transaction processing for electronic documents. Besides working with major publishers, Adobe is encouraging independent submissions of content ranging from technical reports to maps.
ZDNet / CNET Dec 17, 2003	back to top

CD-burning software prompts patent suit
A small California storage company filed a patent suit last Friday against software maker Roxio and said the dispute will likely expand to cover other hardware and software companies involved with CD-ROMs. Optima Technology claims that several Roxio products infringe on Optima's patent for a 'recordable CD-ROM accessing system'. The patent covers software that allows disparate computing systems to access data stored on a recordable CD. Optima's patent was infringed in several standards adopted by the Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA), which have been incorporated in a number of CD-ROM hardware and software products, Optima said. Roxio's Easy CD Creator software has been one of the most widely used applications for burning music and data to recordable discs, although the popularity of the software has waned since such functions were incorporated in the latest versions of the Windows and Macintosh operating systems. Roxio's most recent project has been to revive file-swapping service Napster as a legal music download service.
MSNBC / CNET News Dec 16, 2003	back to top

Naked nanofibres stretch optical properties
Optical fibres transmit light through an inner core surrounded by cladding. But a new type of fibre has an ultra-thin silica core, with the atmosphere acting as the cladding. These fibres are so fine that they are thinner than the wavelengths of light they carry. The core material must be very smooth to create a consistent boundary between silica and the atmosphere, as rough edges scatter a light wave. To ensure a regular surface, Eric Mazur of Harvard University stretched glass through a sapphire cone heated to melt the silica without exposing it to flame turbulence. He has made fibres as thin as 50 nanometres, more than 2000 times as fine as standard fibres. The thinner the fibre, the greater the portion of the wave that travels along its surface. For instance, the fraction of light guided outside the silica increases from 50 per cent for a 300-nanometre fibre to 90 per cent for a 50-nanometre fibre. This characteristic could make them ideal connectors in the photonic circuits of future light-based computers.
New Scientist / Nature Dec 18, 2003	back to top

Researchers develop HIV monitor
The vast majority of the 42 million people infected with HIV worldwide live in the developing world, with little access to sophisticated labs that can monitor their immune cell levels measurements critical to determining their need for and response to drugs. Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin and Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital are developing a portable immune-cell reader to fill this gap. At the heart of the device is a microchip that filters white blood cells out of a few drops of blood and stains the key ones red, green, and yellow. A digital camera then takes a picture of the cells, which software analyses to determine the counts of each cell type, indicating how well the immune system is holding up. Though the current prototype is the size of a desktop computer, the researchers aim to produce a handheld version within the year. Ultimately, they hope each test will cost less than $3, compared to the $35-$60 charged by conventional labs.
Technology Review / TRN Dec 18, 2003	back to top

World's smallest hard disk unveiled
Toshiba says it has developed a tiny hard disk drive that can be used to store music and video in mobile phones and other portable gadgets. The 2.1 centimetre diameter disk can store about 2 or 3 gigabytes worth of information, Toshiba said. Toshiba plans to start taking orders by the summer of next year to start mass production as early as 2005. Pricing has not been decided. Demand is growing for smaller hard disk drives for network gadgets. Previously, the world's smallest HDD is believed to be a 1 inch model from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Hitachi's US unit.
CNN / AP Dec 16, 2003	back to top

Philips preps open digital-media system
Philips Electronics says that it is six months away from launching a system against illegal copying that will allow consumers to play digital video and music on any digital-media player. Philips hopes that the so-called digital rights management (DRM) system being developed by InterTrust Technologies, which it jointly owns with Sony, will replace a confusing array of proprietary systems. Digital music stores use different DRM methods to protect songs against unlimited copying. But consumers can then only play the music on PCs, CD players and MP3 players that support the same DRM system. Microsoft, for instance, has opened online music stores that sell music encoded in such a way that they can only be played back with a Windows Media Player. Philips and Sony bought InterTrust early this year to ensure that key DRM patents would be available to everyone in the electronics industry, and also because they saw that DRM technology would become a crucial part of digital media. They have said they would make them available on reasonable terms.
Reuters Dec 16, 2003	back to top

Software shares out spare processing power
Software to be launched in January will let PC users run as many 'distributed computing' projects as they like. The program will let PC users search for aliens, help predict climate change and perform advanced biological research - all at the same time. Distributed computing projects use a computer's spare processing power to help run vast computations, using a screen-saver-like program. Until now, it has only been possible to subscribe to one of these services at a time. So David Anderson, author of SETI@home, has created a new system that will make it possible to run several distributed computing projects on a single computer, and even let you specify what proportion of the computer's resources is donated to each project. It is called the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). BOINC acts like a software platform that can run a number of screen-saver style applications on top of the PC's own operating system.
New Scientist Dec 17, 2003	back to top

Cellphone allows users to swipe and go
A trial that started on Wednesday allows thousands of Japanese mobile phone owners to use their phones as a swipe card to pay for purchases, as travel passes, and as concert and movie tickets. The trial is the first to embed smart cards within the phones, and has been set up by phone company NTT DoCoMo and electronics giant Sony. Like other 'contactless' smartcards, the user simply has to place their phone near a reader to exchange information. This does away with the need to have printed tickets or passes. So, for example, a cinema ticket could be bought using the phone's online features, with a swipe of the phone giving entry to the screening. The cards in the trial are capable of storing about two kilobytes of information, enough for it to perform multiple functions. For example it can serve as an ID card, travel pass, or login for a corporate computer network, all at the same time. The Japanese trial will run until summer 2004. Services will include being able to buy tickets and check-in at airports using their phone.
New Scientist Dec 16, 2003	back to top