A jury has found eBay guilty on two of three counts of patent infringement (the third count was thrown out by the judge by invalidating the patent in question). The patents' owner MercExchange of Great Falls, VA stand to bring in about $35M for the patents that cover the "Buy …

BBC News reports that SkyLinc is planning on providing high-speed internet access to the UK using balloons. 18 of them, to be exact. The plan is to use a set of balloons in 18 stationary positions around the UK to bring wireless internet to the whole country, form the inner …

The Toronto Star is reporting that Telos (a Canadian telephone company) is moving their long distance traffic to voice- over-IP (or VoIP). This will allow them to run data and voice over the exact same infrastructure without using two separate overlay networks.

A dubious article from Reuters and carried on ZDNET claims that P2P services consume "up to 60 percent of data traffic zipping around their networks is in the form of large music, movies and software files." I'm not sure that I agree, and I'm certainly not sure that it is …

I was following a link about keeping MacOS X keychains on external USB devices (flash drives, mostly) and found a pointer to the BioSlimDisk, a fingerprint-based encrypted USB storage device. It's not cheap ($150 at DevDepot), but it is an interesting approach, since the fingerprint is used to encrypt/decrypt …

An article from Forrester Research, carried on CNET theorizes that Linux is still a safe platform for most folks and that IBM (and HP and Dell) will work to make sure the SCO threat either disappears in court or is taken care of through licensing or an outright purchase of …

For those having nostalgic feelings for the 1970's (or in my case, the 1980's), here's a site about Plato called PlatoPeople. Some describe PLATO as a predecessor of the internet, others as a large time sharing system. However, either way, the more you know about the history of some of …

I'm now in the process of downloading it for Symbian, OS X, and Windows, but it is available today at the download page on Adobe's site..

An article from CNET describes a couple of new protocols for fast file sharing, including BitTorrent. At the very end of the article is a comment from the MPAA in which they describe the technologies as "a continuing threat". I don't understand what is next for them. Perhaps they would …

CNET is carrying an interesting article this morning about the down side of Challenge-Response anti-spam utilities. Although it is mainly precautionary, it does make some good points that anyone using (or designing an implementation of ) the technology should be aware of. It also contained a pointer to a page by …

BBC News is carrying a good overview article on filtering using Bayesian filters to attempt to figure out what messages in your inbox are indeed spam. If you are interested in trying it out (only for the technically savvy), you can take a look at CRM114, a SourceForge project for …

According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, a manufacturer of dive computers has been hiding a dangerous secret for seven years. A secret that likely was the cause of significant injury for at least four people and a potential safety hazard for others. The article claims that Uwatec …

If you have been privy to disclosure of actual UNIX source code (System 7 and before don't count) without an NDA, Eric Raymond wants to know about it. The theory is that if there were enough people who had access to the Unix code, it wasn't a secret and therefore …

I'm not so much interested by the music as I am by the way that the catalog has been done, but Pearl Jam is now offering a huge number of "albums" (75), many that are actually concert recordings, by date, of their 2000 tour. Each individual song is available for …

An interesting article in the Economist about Sun, Microsoft, and Linux and their collective (and separate) futures.

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald once again trudges through the area of information overload. But, instead of focusing on how you can filter, this one focuses on how you can reduce the load for everyone else. Amusingly enough, that's how this web site started. In my zeal to …

Taking its cue from the Creative Commons folks (dedicated to a strong open source model), the folks at OpSound have created a library of open source sound and music, free for use and modification as long as it is attributed and the eventual software/movie/music is released under the …

My old cohorts at NCSA have decided to play around with the Sony PlayStation/2 in a manner the inventors never intended: using them as a Linux cluster for scientific computing. The home page for the project gives more details.

An article on CNET reports that Microsoft is preparing to enhance their existing DRM capabilities in Windows Media Player in order to compete better against Apple's new service. The enhancements will allow restricted-rights tunes to be downloaded to music players compatible with Microsoft's DRM capabilities (in other words, the industry-leading …

An article from CNET reports that some hospitals are turning to WiFi phones as an alternative to hard-line telephones so that nurses (and presumedly doctors) can carry around a telephone instead of having to run to the nearest desk when paged.