Wednesday's Wool Gatherer

A good Wednesday mornin' to ya. Tonya Harding is 33.

1. Microsoft says future versions of Internet Explorer will include pop-up blocking. The next IE update is due with XP Service Pack 2 some time next year. How long will it take advertisers to find other, more annoying techniques?
2. It's that time of the month. Microsoft has five patches, three of them critical in this month's Windows Update. Get yours today.
3. The US Patent and Trademark Office is reconsidering Eolas's controversial patent on interactive web media citing "a substantial outcry from a widespread segment of the affected industry." In other words, Microsoft was really ticked off. The PTO has only reassessed an existing patent 151 times since 1981. The process may take as long as a year, and Eolas can continue to enforce it during that time.
4. There are 19,000 people in Boone County, Indiana. Which leads one to wonder how 144,000 people could have voted in Tuesday's election. Turns out it was a bug in the vote counting software. Oops.
5. Sony announced "the world's lightest thinnest notebook" today. Japan only, of course, but it sure is schweet.
6. World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov was forced into a draw yesterday by computer program X3D in the first game of the four game man vs. machine chess championship.
7. The FCC is telling landline phone companies they have to support number portability, too. That means you can transfer your landline number to your cell phone. Some restrictions apply. Should mean some good deals on cell phone access as providers try to woo landline users.

Thursday's Throw Back

Today's top tech tales...

1. Forget Wi-Fi, here comes UWB: ultrawideband, low-power wireless data networks offering as much as 400 megabits per second. The IEEE is meeting this week in Albuquerque to settle on a UWB standard, 802.15.3a. Intel and Motorola are battling over the standard, and that's holding things up. Intel says, "We don’t want to see a standards war, but it's conceivable that it will happen."
2. A new Senate copyright bill would put you in jail for up to three years for sharing pre-released movies. The Artists' Rights and Theft Prevention Act would make it a federal offense to offer any movie for download before its release, even if no copyright violation has occurred. You could also get five years for wielding a camcorder in a movie theater. The bill has the support of Jack Valenti, Dianne Feinstein, and Bo Derek.
3. Sharman Networks, distributors of Kazaa, is planning to sell a movie through its peer-to-peer network. The low-budget Bollywood thriller, Supari, will sell for $2.99. Sharman is also launching its first print ad campaign next week urging users to defend P2P file sharing.
4. MSNBC reports that AmberAlertsOnline.com, a site that claims to offer instant email alerts when a child is kidnapped, is actually run by an email marketing company. The site's privacy policy even states that they may sell your information to "email marketers." But who reads privacy policies? I hope you do.
5. No more anonymous love letters if a presidential commission has its way. The commission is pressuring the US Postal Service to implement a system that would track the identity of everyone who sends mail. The Postmaster General doesn't want to do it citing privacy concerns.
6. Philips has demonstrated 16x DVD burning in the lab. That's 10,000 RPM - very likely the physical limit for the media. An actual consumer product may be years off, though.
7. "Playlistism" is emerging on college campuses thanks to iTunes music sharing. According to Wired, students are shunning those with terrible taste in music. Your music says a lot about you, apparently. Now playing on iTunes: ���れ�よ�� from the album 女��二楽� by 女��二楽�.

Friday's Fish Wrap

It's Friday! Apollo 12 left on the second manned mission to the moon on this day in 1969. The Dow Jones broke 1000 for the first time in 1972. Fall Comdex 2003 opens in Vegas on Sunday. Yawn. At least I know how Lego is made. And now the news...

1. The FCC has approved 255 MHz of additional unlicensed spectrum in the 5 GHz band for use in wireless networking. The move is designed to encourage manufacturers to create new wireless products.
2. Microsoft is fixing the fix. An Internet Explorer fix issued in September 2002 apparently didn't take. Windows 2000 users should run Windows Update or download the patch from Microsoft.
3. A new worm is targeting PayPal accounts. MiMail I arrives in your inbox, advises you not to give out credit card numbers by mail, then directs you to a bogus PayPal "site" (ww.paypal.com.scr) that's really a program running on your computer. The program forwards your credit card and other information to the hacker.
4. I was just looking officer, honest. Shortly after Apple added music sharing to iTunes for the Mac, folks figured out how to capture the shared files and keep them for themselves. Apple patched that hole. Now the same thing has happened with iTunes for Windows. MyTunes cracks the copy protection in iTunes for Windows. The site disingenuously avows, "If you plan on stealing music, do not download this software."
5. I'm not dead yet. A new service lets you send a farewell email after you die. For $10 for three years, LifeTouch will keep track of your vital signs, and send off your last missive shortly after your last breath. Two other services were created to do the same during the dot-com boom, but they're both... dead.

Monday's Persiflage

Good morning! Fall Comdex opens in Las Vegas today to a much reduced crowd of 50,000, down from 200,000 three years ago. The Leonid meteor shower is tonight, but don't expect last year's fireworks. Famous stripper Mobius was born on this day in 1790. President Nixon said "I am not a crook" in 1970.

1. Bill Gates kicked off Comdex with his 20th yearly keynote last night. "Security continues to be a top priority for Microsoft," he says. He demonstrated security improvements that will ship with XP service pack 2 later this year, saying Microsoft plans to "shift the tide" on security and spam. Looking ahead, the goal for Microsoft is seamless computing. "The changes users will see in the technology they use will be gradual, but the difference between the computing experience of today and the experiences that will be possible a few years from now will be like night and day" with Longhorn, the next version of Windows, at the center, of course. He pointed out that Microsoft spend $6.8 billion dollars on R&D this year, and denied that they had ever had acquisition talks with Google. This years Gates/Ballmer video production featured the duo as Morpheus and Neo, with Gates offering Ballmer an "integrated innovation pill."
2. The SEC has charged three former Gateway execs with fraud for cooking the books to meet analysts expectations in 2000. The management team was replaced in 2001 and the company restated the fraudulent results.
3. H&R Block has filed a lawsuit against an unknown "John Doe" for defamatory statements on a Yahoo message board. The company believes the poster is an employee. This isn't the first time Block has subpoenaed Yahoo for the names of its users. In 2000 the company obtained the names of nine posters. In some cases the courts have upheld the free speech rights of anonymous posters on message boards, but in at least one case last year, a California court held that such postings were "commercial speech" and not protected.
4. Both Qwest and Cablevision are launching voice over IP (VoIP) service. Qwest's Minnesota offering will be the first ever from a Baby Bell. Cablevision will be offering the service to its 1 million New York City customers.
5. A Federal judge in Illinois has ruled that the DMCA doesn't protect garage door openers from being reverse engineered. But Best Buy is attempting to use the law to prevent Fat Wallet from posting its Thanksgiving sale prices.
6. Garry Kasparov has evened the score in the man vs. machine chess championship. The fourth and final game is tomorrow.

Tuesday's Badinage

Time once again for The Screen Savers morning briefing. (If this is too much reading for you, try News-Images.com, all the stories, none of the words.) Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre inventor of the daguerreotype, an early form of photography, was born on this day in 1789. Mickey Mouse debuted in Steamboat Willie in 1928.

The news from Comdex...
1. Microsoft has announced it will launch a music service on MSN to compete with iTunes next year.
2. NVidia announced a new notebook chipset, the GO5700. It suppports DirectX 9. Look for it in laptops from Toshiba and Alienware early next year.
3. Sun says it will start using AMD's 64-bit Opteron in two new servers next year.
4. And HP has announced a line of PCs based on the AMD Athlon 64. The Compaq Presario 8000Z starts at $1200. In other news...
5. Microsoft is publishing the XML schemas for Office 2003. Open source advocates are skeptical, particularly since Microsoft is asserting some patent rights to the schema, making it impossible to use in GPL'd products. Office programs still save into a proprietary binary format by default, but releasing the schema could make it easier for developers to create software that can manipulate files saved in Office XML format.
6. A San Jose Federal court judge has agreed to hear the EFF's arguments in the Diebold case. Diebold attorneys have been sending cease and desist letters to web sites posting or linking to allegedly leaked internal documents exposing flaws with Diebold's electronic voting machines. The company is also going after the sites' ISPs claiming DMCA violations. The EFF likens it to the leak of the Pentagon Papers.
7. Australia's first prosecution for music swapping ends in a suspended sentence for the two defendants. Students cried in the court room and engaged in a group hug. "It felt as if my life was being ripped to bits," claimed one defendant. Oh please. Maybe they should have sent the stolen music back
8. C|Net columnist loses free AOL account, proclaims the imminent collapse of the company. Now that's objective journalism.