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Issue no. 38, 2004 Published: Nov 12, 2004
EU urged to reject US-style software patents
Is spam being halted?
Firefox 1.0 makes its debut
Microsoft seeks top search spot
Trojan spammers take aim at mobile phones
Quantum lab fits on a chip
Researchers measure atom flip energy
Moving brain implant seeks out signals

EU urged to reject US-style software patents
Legal costs associated with resolving software patent disputes will double if the EU ratifies proposals to introduce US-style intellectual property laws, according to Open Source Risk Management (OSRM), a vendor-neutral provider of free and open source software, risk mitigation and management services. 'In the US the average cost of patent litigation is about $3m per lawsuit. Under such a system, those to whom a patent legitimately belongs must go to court to claim their benefits and protection, a costly and unfair tax on those who produce beneficial innovations,' said Daniel Egger, OSRM founder and chairman. The OSRM estimates that as much as 50 per cent of the cost of defending against software patents is due to patents that 'never should have been granted in the first place'. OSRM announced the launch of its Patents and Prior Innovations Project, which invites developers in the open source community to help write a history of software, focused on tracing the technical history of patents. The work will be done on the Grokline website with the intention of presenting the resulting report to the European Parliament.
VNUnet UK Nov 08, 2004	back to top

Is spam being halted?
The rate at which spammers are sending junk mail around the internet appears to be stabilising. For the last three months, the amount of spam sent around the world has evened off at 66 per cent of all email, according to statistics from Symantec Brightmail. The statistics indicate that anti-spam technology and laws could be having an effect on the junk mail problem. The proportion of all email that is spam has steadily increased from 48 per cent of email in March 2003 to the two-thirds mark today. Just over 60 per cent of today's spam was generated in North America, with almost a quarter (23 per cent) of junk mail originating in Asia. European spammers followed in third place, accounting for 11 per cent of the email, dwarfing Australasia and South America, which only produced a small amount of spam.
Silicon.com / ZDNet UK Nov 10, 2004	back to top

Firefox 1.0 makes its debut
Microsoft's Internet Explorer has a serious rival in the long-awaited Firefox 1.0 web browser, which has just been released. Few people get excited when some new software is released. But the release of the first full version of Firefox has managed to drum up a respectable amount of pre-launch fervour. Fans of the software have banded together to raise cash to pay for an advert in the New York Times announcing that version 1.0 of the browser is available. The release of Firefox 1.0 might even cause a few heads to turn at Microsoft because the program is steadily winning people away from the software giant's Internet Explorer browser. Firefox has been created by the Mozilla Foundation which was started by former browser maker Netscape back in 1998. Much of the development work done since then has gone into Firefox which made its first appearance under this name in February. Since then the software has been gaining praise and converts, not least because of the large number of security problems that have come to light in Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
BBC News Nov 09, 2004	back to top

Microsoft seeks top search spot
Microsoft has unveiled its new MSN search engine. The company claims the tool indexes more web pages than any rival and it has rolled in lots of the features seen on other search sites. Initially, it has launched just a prototype, but the finished version will be ready by the end of 2004. Microsoft plans to use the search site as a springboard to take a significant share of the advertising market from rivals Google and Yahoo. In July this year, Microsoft updated and tidied up its MSN search page to remove unwanted adverts and to speed up the returning of results. That search engine was based on technology provided by Yahoo and now Microsoft has dropped that in favour of its own home-grown search engine. Microsoft has been testing this own-brand search tool since July and now has launched a test version at http://beta.search.msn.com.
BBC News Nov 11, 2004	back to top

Trojan spammers take aim at mobile phones
A Trojan horse computer program that uses infected computers to churn out mobile phone spam messages is causing concern among antivirus firms. Concealed within another program, the Delf-HA Trojan can burrow into a computer's hard drive. Once installed, it sends a torrent of advertising messages to random Russian mobile phone numbers, using the SMS gateways provided by Russian mobile phone companies. Though only a handful of computers have been infected with the Trojan so far, antivirus experts believe that it could mark the beginning of a new trend. SMS spam is a growing nuisance with around half of all European phone users saying they receive more than two unwanted messages every month. Some SMS spam messages are designed to trick recipients into calling a premium-rate phone number or signing up for an expensive service.
New Scientist Nov 09, 2004	back to top

Quantum lab fits on a chip
A tiny cavity inside a crystal makes an ideal laboratory for quantum experiments, according to two teams of scientists who have entangled light and matter inside a solid for the first time. Their miniature laboratories should make it easier to study quantum entanglement, an important effect that could one day help to build a quantum computer. The two teams both use holes inside the semiconductor material gallium arsenide to house a quantum dot, a ball of just a few million atoms. A laser pulse directed at the dot jolts it into spitting out a particle of light, which is entangled with both the quantum dot and the electric field of the cavity itself. Researchers at the University of Würzburg, Germany, made their laboratory inside a microscopic pillar made from stacked layers of gallium arsenide and aluminium arsenide. The other team from the University of Arizona, Tucson, built a gallium arsenide crystal atom by atom, leaving room for the quantum dots to be added as the crystal grew.
Nature Nov 10, 2004	back to top

Researchers measure atom flip energy
Scientists at IBM have measured the energy required to flip the magnetic orientation, or spin of a single atom trapped on a surface. As magnetic data storage devices become smaller it is becoming more important to understand the interactions between single magnetic atoms and their surrounding environments. This ability is also important in the development of spintronics devices and quantum computing. The researchers found that the minimum energy required to flip a manganese atom oriented in a 1.4-tesla magnetic field is about five ten-thousandths of an electron volt. A single photon of visible light has about two electron volts of energy, which is about 4,000 times the energy required to flip the atom. The researchers used a modified scanning tunnelling microscope to apply and measure the energy needed to flip manganese atoms placed on patches of aluminium oxide on a nickel-aluminium surface in a vacuum at near-absolute zero. The researchers also found that it takes 6.5 per cent more energy to flip an atom at the edge of an aluminium oxide patch then it does to flip one near the centre of the patch.
Technology Review / Technology Research News Nov 10, 2004	back to top

Moving brain implant seeks out signals
A device that automatically moves electrodes through the brain to seek out the strongest signals is taking the idea of neural implants to a new level. Its developers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena say devices like this will be essential if brain implants are ever going to work. Their prototype, which is mounted on the skull, uses piezoelectric motors to move four electrodes independently of each other in 1-micrometre increments. It has successfully been used to decode motor signals in rats and intention signals in monkeys. To stop it damaging neurons, the microdrive has been given a collision avoidance capability. While the animal tests have shown that the microdrive can home in on the strongest neural signals, it is still too bulky to be used for people. The researchers say that within a year they expect to be able to fit a paralysed person with a microdrive implant that will allow them to control a computer cursor and navigate the web.
New Scientist Nov 10, 2004	back to top