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19 December 2002 |
 SJ MERCURY NEWS -- At a time when copyright news seems to be so consistently sour, new technology and a positive court ruling give us light. First, a nod of appreciation to The Creative Commons who have created a 1.5MB Flash presentation that outlines the essentials of the Creative Commons project. "It can be that easy," says the presentation, "when you skip the intermediaries."
The second piece of good news for the creative community comes from the dutiful ElcomSoft jury. In a case that may have enormous implications, a federal jury in San Jose brought back a not guilty verdict against a Russian software company charged with violating copyright law. The company, ElcomSoft, had sold a tool that gave purchasers of electronic-book software more flexibility in how they could use e- books but which also broke the e-books' copy protection.
Adobe brought the case on the claim that ElcomSoft was selling products designed to hack Adobe's eBook Reader. When ElcomSoft programmer Dmitry Sklyarov spoke at a conference in Las Vegas, he was handcuffed and tossed in jail. Adobe deserves the wrath of the technical community for its actions. Fortunately, the jury returned sanity to the situation in its decision to acquit.
[ Dan Gillmor and Tomalak's Realm]
Photo inside Garringreen Upper by Bernie Goldbach using Concord EyeQ IrTranP camera and Nokia 9210i Communicator.
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GUARDIAN co uk -- US military radar is shutting down vehicles that use special frequencies in their key fobs. The radar emissions are globally approved, but their strength is deadly. You don't want to drive a new BMWs or 4WD SUV around the perimeter of a UK air base anymore. The anti-missile radar will shut them down. I wouldn't mind Dublin Corporation using that capability whenever a vehicle stopped on a yellow box in city centre.
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 GARRINGREEN HOTSPOT -- Even in small town Kilkenny, my local SuperQuinn provides me with news shorts, weather forecasts and advertisements while I stand in the checkout queue. But how effective are these placements in the "outernet"? Has anybody done an eyeball audit to measure the effectiveness of flat screen digital advertising? According to New Century Media Inc., flat screen plasma placements dramatically outperform static backlit advertising campaigns.
Sign Web
"Signs of the Times" by Sean O'Leary, April 2002.
"Coolsigns Coming to a Theater Near You," by Ken Liebeskind, MediaPost, May 23, 2002.
"Signs Going Up in New Venues," by Greg Johnson in the Los Angeles Times, March 22, 2002.
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COOLSIGN -- AdSpace Networks Inc. is the developer of CoolSign, dynamic digital signage for public spaces. The AdSpace NOC in Las Vegas controls a national network of Coolsigns, using Cisco IP technology running over LANs near each installation. This is an advertising-driven piece of technology that meets prospective customers in high footfall areas, targeting people with digital messages. The back-end system allows advertisers a method to examine their campaigns, downloading proof-of-play statistics.
[Photo by Brian Greene using Sony Ericsson T68 cameraphone in Chicago.]
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WASHINGTON POST -- "Te same law that relates to publishing in the offline world, generally speaking, applies to material posted publicly on a Web log, legal and human resources experts said. Posting information or opinions on the Internet is not much different from publishing in a newspaper, and if the information is defamatory, compromises trade secrets, or violates copyright or trademark regulations, the publisher could face legal claims and monetary damages."
"You never know who is lurking."
[Jennifer Balderama and Dave Winer]
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Mark Pilgrim -- If you need to know about RSS, you should "dive into Mark." He explains that RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news- oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs.
It's not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the "recent changes" page of a wiki, a changelog of CVS checkins, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way.
[XML.com and Dave Winer]
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Irish Times -- Mike Fagan, has settled his legal action against the Irish Domain Registry. Fagan had sought an injunction to prevent the company from considering a report prepared by KPMG, on the basis that doing so would be in breach of the rules of natural justice. The report makes 18 allegations against Fagan, including overpayment of salary and incorrect treatment of expenses. Fagan has now agreed that IE Domain Registry can use the report in disciplinary proceedings against him.
[ENN and Open]
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John Cradden -- "There is a persistent reluctance among Irish businesses to embrace e-working, despite the potential benefits, according to experts in the sector." From my vantage point at a Kilkenny Information Seminar, it's good news that e-working percentages have not declined as employment numbers slip during an economic downturn.
[ENN]
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Martyn Williams -- Apple's QuickTime 6 is becoming standard on some 44 million Japanese mobile phones. Apple and many other companies are pressuring hard to make MPEG-4 the industry standard for video-on-demand services in 3G cellular networks, and to keep Microsoft and its proprietary Windows Media out of the mobile phones market.
[IDG News and Slashdot]
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OREILLY -- A new O'Reilly release,"Designing Embedded Hardware" (Catsoulis, US $39.95) is the most in-depth, practical, and up-to-date guide to building your own embedded computer systems. Whether you're working on cell phones, cars, handheld organizers, or refrigerators, this book provides software and hardware engineers with the necessary conceptual and design building blocks to understand the architectures of embedded systems. Steering between the practical and the philosophical, the book enables you to both create your own devices and gadgets and customize and extend off-the-shelf systems.
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Leander Kahney -- Lycos Most Wanted lists the top 100 search terms for 2002 and many are the same as in Google's Zeitgeist and Yahoo Buzz. All these results are suspect, because the search engines often filter porn results before they aggregate. Great News! Boy bands are down this year, while female singer/ songwriters are up. You could predict the rise of Avril Levine to stardom because people started searching for her name early last summer. Although Kahney didn't mention this metric, I think it would be useful to add the Top 100 weblogs to the list, using Blogstreet's blogrolling tracker.
[Wired]
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NEWSFACTOR -- Money from a fund set up by Intel will go to support two companies--STSN, a Wi-Fi network access company, and TeleSym, an IP telephony software company--involved in Wi-Fi broadband technology. Of the Intel Communications Fund's $500 million, $150 million is intended for companies working with Wi-Fi technology. Intel's upcoming Banias chip set targets the wireless market, and, according to Intel spokesman Daniel Francisco, the work of these two companies will complement Intel's efforts to "support mobility and offer anytime, anywhere high-speed access to the Internet."
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INFOWORLD -- Phonetic indexing and search technology from Fast-Talk brings full-text search to audio recordings and video soundtracks. This doesn't involve speech-to-text translation along with text indexing. It directly indexes audio via the 39 phonemes in English. For example, "phonetically" is indexed as "F AH N EH T IH K L IY." Fast-talk time-stamps the occurrence of each phoneme, so you can also do proximity searches.
[SIGIA-L]
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TRACTION SOFTWARE -- There's enterprise weblog software available now, coming from Traction's Competitive Intelligence and Market Research solution to its TeamPage™ Enterprise Weblog. Traction solves the problem of collecting, organizing, sharing, linking and retrieving strategic competitive intelligence information from many sources. Targeted at strategic planning, competitive intelligence, market research and marketing professionals, Traction C.I. is the first, enterprise weblog technology to address a specific business process. Enterprise Weblog looks a lot like any blog tool, but Traction has added some features to help them make the case to corporations.
[Network Fusion and eWeek]
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INSTANT MESSAGING PLANET -- Ten years after its inaugaration, texting is well-accepted in Europe and growing in the States. But
texting faces new challenges.
[Internet.com]
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iHOLLYWORD FORUM -- Web-based marketing strategies for movie studios and record labels have only just begun to penetrate one of the fastest growing consumer hubs in the world, say marketing gurus.
[iHollywood Forum and Internet News]
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©2003 Bernie Goldbach, Tech Journo, Irish Examiner.
Weblog powered by Radio Userland running on IBM TransNote.
Some content from Nokia 9210i Communicator as mail-to-blog.
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