Tuesday Titivation

Good morning!

1. Philadelphia's 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the Copyright Office's Internet radio royalty rate. Unlike broadcast radio, Internet radio pays performer royalties as well as publishing royalties because, according to the music industry, Internet radio has no promotional benefit to the artists. The courts said Congress is silent on this point. The RIAA cheers. Internet radio is silent.
2. Oak Park, Illinois parent group, STOP (Safe Technology for Oak Park), sues school district over Wi-Fi safety concerns. They're worried that long term exposure to 802.11 signals might be causing damage that could result in memory loss or other neurological harm. They better hope their kids stay out of Starbucks.
3. Yahoo Mail beefs up its anti-spam protection, offering dummy addresses for use on web sites, and an improved spam guard for paid users.
4. Regulators are concerned that XP's "Shop for music online" link in the My Music folder may violate the terms of Microsoft's anti-trust settlement.
5. Sanyo has created biodegradable CDs made of corn. They'll be available in December. As opposed to the heavy metal CDs made by KoRn. Those are available today.
6. Slashdot points to a fun article on how not to install computer components.
7. Ottowan one-man-band, Brad Sucks, is offering a compilation disc of songs inspired by spam. The songs, by various indy bands, include such moving titles as "Urgent Business Confidential," "My Parents Are Gone For The Weekend," and "Your Medication." No salesmen will call.

Wednesday's Wingding

Rally round the news, boys. Jacques Garnerin makes the first parachute jump from a balloon in 1797. That's brave. Ferdinand Porsche conceived the Volkswagen on this day in 1934. Hitler called it the "strength through joy" car. Not exactly Fährfugnugen. The first commercial air service from Hawaii to the mainland was inaugurated on this day in 1936, to my knowledge no one jumped out.

1. Ballmer tells ITXpo that Windows is more secure than Linux. "In the first 150 days after the release of Windows 2000, there were 17 critical vulnerabilities. For Windows Server 2003 there were four. For Red Hat 6, they were five to ten times higher."
2. A Maryland middle school boy is rousted by the FBI for email questions to the Maryland Transportation Authority about the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. "In today's environment," says Baltimore FBI spokesman Barry Maddox, "we take all leads very seriously. We had to make sure this was a legitimate school project. The kinds of questions he was asking about the bridge, we have to have a sense of caution."
3. End of line. Apple sneaks the G4 into the iBook, eliminating the G3 from its entire line.
4. According to Slashdot, AT&T corporate is planning to block all incoming email unless you're on their whitelist. This must be the most extreme response to spam problems ever attempted by a corporation.
5. California cell phone activists filed two law suits yesterday. The first accuses Nextel of dropping itemized billing then sending all California customers four text messages at 15¢ a pop. "They're nickeling and diming consumers out of what could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars in overcharges and they're making it impossible for people to discover they've been ripped off," said Harvey Rosenfield, president of The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights. The group also filed suit against Cingular for providing inadequate service for new customers.
6. Amazon made money last quarter! Its first non-holiday quarter profit.

Thursday's Topical Treatise

Stand by for news. Michael Crichton is 61. Weird Al is 44. The first video recording on magnetic tape was televised coast-to-coast on this day in 1956.

1. Here comes the Do Not Spam registry. The US Senate has unanimously passed an anti-spam bill that outlaws deceptive spam and creates a registry for people who don't want junk email. Law enforcement and ISPs, but not individuals, could go after spammers. Only fraudulent or deceptive spam would be illegal, not all unsolicited commercial email. The House is stalled on its version of the bill.
2. Watch your mouth. Gator is going after web sites that call its program "spyware." Gator says it's not spyware because users are notified before the download and the program provides a service. Gator has already successfully sued PC Pitstop. "If we find anyone publicly calling us spyware, we correct it and take action if necessary," said Scott Eagle, Gator's senior vice president of marketing. Call us "adware" instead. I prefer to call it "crappy software you should under no circumstances install." Use Roboform AI instead. It's free of charge and spyware free.
3. At the Office 2003 launch Bill Gates tells Australian IT that governments that choose open source are choosing an inferior product. "Our position is that organizations should simply buy the best software for their situation," he said. "Do you want your Government to be efficient?"
4. X10 files for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after the $4.3 million judgment in the pop-under case.
5. It may make you look like you're talking into a taco, but Nokia claims its new N-Gage gaming cell phone has sold 400,000 units in just two weeks. Sell through might be just a teeny bit lower. Arcadia research says 5,000 have been sold in the US.
6. From Darwin to Adelaide in 30 hours, 54 minutes. The Dutch Nuon Solar Team has broken its own record for solar powered vehicles, averaging 97 km/hr in the Seventh World Solar Challenge. MIT came in 3rd.

Friday Fricassee

Good morning. Re-runs today on Call for Help and The Screen Savers. We're taking the day off for an all day planning meeting with The Screen Savers staff. If you need me I'll be asleep in the back. It's Leeuwenhoek's birthday. The Dutch naturalist was the first to observe blood cells. He was born in 1632. Gene Roddenberry passed away on this day in 1991. The match is patented on this day in 1836. Annie Edson Taylor becomes the first person to go over Niagra Falls in a barrel on this day in 1901. The stock market crash begins in 1929. The UN is established in 1945. The Concorde took its last flight today. It began service as the only supersonic commercial airplane in January 1976. Only 16 were built. For $9000 you could fly from JFK to Heathrow in 3.5 hours, arriving before you left.

1. Expect spotty cell phone reception today. The sun spewed a massive CME, coronal mass ejection, at 3a Wednesday. The magnetic storm should reach earth around 3p Eastern today. Delay any planned spacewalks until evening.
2. Panther, aka Mac OS X 10.3, ships at 8p tonight. Apple claims 150 new features including automatic home directory encryption, fast user switching, Exposé desktop management, a new look Finder that supposedly much faster at finding, built-in faxing and zipping, and more. The new shell is bash not tcsh. Linux lovers will appreciate that. Read David Pogue's review at the New York Times (free registration required). Panther Server is shipping at the same time.
3. Amazon is unveiling full text searches of the books it sells. It's not perfect. I searched for "Patrick Norton Wears a Kilt" and got a link to "The Outlandish Companion" by Diana Gabaldon. On second thought...
4. Drums are beating over a Google IPO early next year. The company is rumored to be considering an online auction of shares.
5. Stephen Brill, media watchdog and commentator, is starting a private identity card business. He's partnering with TransCore, operators of E-ZPass, and ChoicePoint, a provider of background screening services. Brill says a government identity card is "unworkable" and a threat to civil liberties, but would you trust a private company with your personal information?
6. InfoWorld says Centrino sales are lagging. Centrino based laptops represented only 5% of notebook sales in August. Centrino is a Pentium-M, Intel 855 chipset, and Intel Wi-Fi. InfoWorld speculates that the lower clockspeeds of the Pentium-M scared people off.
7. One of the world's five fastest supercomputers is built of 1100 Macintosh dual G5s. The $5 million machine delivered 8.1 teraflops in early tests but has a theoretical peak of 16.8 TFlops but cost much less than the competition.
8. The eight 2002 National Medal of Science winners have been named.
9. The right wing credo that global warming is "bad science" took a blow today when NASA reported that satellite data shows the Arctic temperature has been rising 800% more rapidly over the past two decades than previously thought. The ice caps are, in fact, melting.
10. It's not tech news, but I couldn't help notice that the actor playing Jesus in Mel Gibson's new movie, The Passion of Christ, has been struck by lightning. Twice.

Monday Meanderings

Good morning! Put down that bagel, Ramadan begins today. The US Navy was established on this day in 1775. New York's IRT subway opened in 1904. DuPont names its new synthetic fiber "nylon" in 1938. IBM introduces EGA in 1982. There officially launches today.

1. AOL is disabling the Windows Messenger service on customer's computers without warning. The company says it's taking this action due to spam and an MSBlast-like worm that uses Messenger. When you launch AOL it changes the settings on your PC, permanently. You can re-enable if you know what you're doing. I agree this service is worthless for home users and poses a huge problem, that's why we alerted people to it over a year ago, but should AOL be taking it upon itself to change people's Windows settings without asking them? Seems a bit intrusive. Microsoft is reported to be considering disabling Messenger in SP-1.
2. California wins its first anti-spam judgement. $2 million against PW Marketing of LA for sending out spamming how-to guides.
3. Dell will be back at Comdex for the first time in six years. IBM and Intel will also have a presence. The conference which begins November 16 in Las Vegas will be much smaller than in years past, though. 50,000 are expected to attend, down from 200,000 at its peak, and there will be 500 exhibitors in just one hall at the LVCC.
4. Dell has alsoannounced its own iPod clone, the Dell DJ. $249 for 15GB (great price!), $329 for 20 GB, it syncs with MusicMatch. No listing on the Dell site, yet.
5. Two MIT students have created an online music library any student can listen to over the university's cable TV network for free. The Library Access to Music Project, LAMP, is in effect a 12 channel campus radio station with 3,500 CDs, and is apparently legal. The students say they'll release the software to any other school that wants it.
6. 60% of email users say they've curtailed their use of the medium in "a big way" due to the flood of spam. However, 7% of e-mail users said they had ordered a product or service that was offered in an unsolicited e-mail, and 33 percent had clicked on a link to get more information. Doh!
7. Yoshi's next mod: hack traffic lights so you never see red again.