Monday's Master Plan

It's just another Macish Monday. The new Mac laptops are here. The new Mac laptops are here. Speed bumps to 1.67Ghz, 8x superdrives, and motion sensors for falls. I'm off to the store, but some news before I go... RCA demonstrated the first music synthesizer on this day in 1955. James van Allen discovered the Van Allen Belt in 1958. 3M introduced Scotch Tape in 1961. Ham the chimpanzee soared into space aboard Mercury-Redstone 2, 1961. It's Jackie Robinson's birthday, he was born in 1910.

1. The Norwegian supreme court has overturned a lower court ruling and fined a teenager 100,000 kroner (around $15,000) for linking to illegal music downloads. The student's site, napster.no, did not host any illegal files, it merely pointed to their location, much as, say Google does. The site was a school project, and the precedent is very scary.
2. If you drive a Ford, Toyota, or Nissan don't count on that its tech key code system to keep it from being stolen. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have found a flaw in the key's RFID chip that makes it easy to spoof.
3. Apple won Brandchannel.com's Reader's Choice award as "the brand with the most impact in 2004," beating out Google for the first time. In this case the Readers are brand professionals in 75 countries, not crazed Mac zealots.

4. Nick Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, is proposing a $100 Linux-based computer, display and all, for developing nations. Negroponte went to the World Economic Forum in Davos with his prototype. He has support from AMD. The key is getting display costs down by using an LED projection system.
5. Virus authors have started using .rar files to bypass automated virus filters. The filters know about zip compression, but are clueless about the lesser known rar format. Not for long, I'd guess.
6. So what does Intel's new VIIV trademark portend? The best guess is that it's supposed to be 64 - VI and IV - for Intel's new 64-bit chips. I'm not sure I really care.
7. It's not all over for us old folks, according to the Nielsen Norman Group, adults are more adept at surfing the web than most teens. So there, now get offa my lawn you punks.
8. According to USA Today, there are some pretty funny gaffes in Amazon's new Yellow Pages. For one, they picture Rockefeller Center's skating rink as a bus.
9. Are you ready for Gigabit Wi-Fi? They've got it in the lab!

Listen in tomorrow at 6:45a Pacific for my weekly news commentary on KGO 810 AM in San Francisco.