Rick Boucher’s Fair Use bill unveiled

‘Boucher raised the spectre of pay-per-use libraries in the future if the copyright holders were not checked.

“Under the 1998 law, copyright owners now have the power virtually to extinguish the Fair Use doctrine with respect to material delivered in digital format. Even a simple technological protection measure, such as a password, can be placed in front of copyrighted material and a small payment then exacted for every use of the material. Inevitably, more and more copyright owners will use this broad legal power,” he said in a press statement.

The DMCA also penalized the disabled, academics and Linux users, he said.’ [More.]

The Economist: What does the Internet look like? Any effort to map the Internet is necessarily incomplete and out of date the moment it appears. Instead, Albert-Laslo Barabasi and his colleagues at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana, treat the net as though it were a natural phenomenon. [Tomalak’s Realm]

Essential information for today’s CEO

Forbes magazine is running a “best places to go to Prison” page for the US business community.

If the pants fit…

Land’s End is making money from custom-made trousers commissioned over the Net.

Bushmen sussed

Lovely correspondence in the London Review of Books about the Bush family’s claim to be real Texans. “All hat, no cattle” was the terse commentary of Governor John Connolly. Spot on.

Bob Wallace, inventor of shareware, dies at 53
“NYT” obituary.

What I hadn’t realised was that he was one of the first Microsoft employees, with 400 of the original shares. He was also the first person to leave Microsoft with stock. John Markoff’s obit hints at Bob’s counter-culture side. He was, er, very interested in mind-altering substances, and once broke into a building site with Bill Gates in order to engage in some unauthorised driving of bulldozers. Whether Billg was likewise anaesthesised is not recorded. Wonder what he died of. His wife mentions an autopsy.

Well, well, well. Open source OS now a serious competitor, says Ballmer

At the Microsoft Most Valued Professionals conference held in London this week, chief executive Steve Ballmer acknowledged the growing threat of Linux.

“We got beaten by Linux in the very high-end systems, but we have a whole development team despatched on that now,” he is reported as saying in the Financial Times: “Linux isn’t going to go away. Our job is to provide a better product in the marketplace.”

He added that Microsoft needed to better explain how its products added value compared with free software.

Pitching the Most Valued Professionals initiative against the open source movement, Ballmer recognised that the appeal of Linux is not just low costs, but the sense of belonging to a development community.

“Linux is not about free software, it’s about community,” he said. “It’s not like Novell: it isn’t going to run out of money. It started off bankrupt, in a way.” [More.]

Google goes into the news aggregation business

And very good it is at it too.
“NYT” story.

‘Google, the rapidly growing online search engine, introduced a service yesterday that uses its search algorithms [~] but no human editors [~] to create a news page that looks not much different from those of many news Web sites.

“We are trying to leverage the experience of all the editors out there,” said Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and president for products. The site brings together headlines, and makes its automated news judgments, from information appearing on 4,000 sites.’ [
12:33:22 AM    

This cannot be true department
Register story.

“Woman falls for Nigerian scam, steals $2.1m from law firm” is the headline on the report by Lester Haines. “A bookkeeper for Michigan law firm Olsman Mueller & James has been taken for $2.1m by Nigerian 419 fraudsters, the Detroit Free Press reports. ” There are links to other fraud stories in the piece. And more here, including the wonderful Scamorama site. Apparently the number ‘419’ refers to the section of the Nigerian Penal Code which specifically outlaws internet scams.

At last — a really light keyboard!

Yes, literally. The keyboard is projected onto a flat surface and one types on the reflection.