Proscenia Newsletter

The following software overviews are from The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2004.) This publication is distributed on line and is a free subscription service.

Son of Weather Grok 4.2.2. As one famous American author said (or is supposed to have said), "Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." Well, Son of Weather Grok 4.2.2 doesn't let users "do" something about the weather, but it certainly makes monitoring weather conditions a bit easier. The application taps into NOAA's data center using various 4 letter codes for airports, and will display the current temperature, sky conditions, humidity, wind speed, and visibility (among other things). Son of Weather Grok 4.2.2 is compatible with all operating systems running Mac OS 8 or higher.

Primedius WebTunnel 5.74 Primedius Web Tunnel allows users free anonymous web surfing, along with a built-in pop up blocker and IP masking. The program also features a number of helpful features, including a cache cleaner, a cookie manager, and the ability to block banner advertisements. While this is just a trial version, visitors will appreciate the helpful elements of this application. This version of Primedius WebTunnel is compatible with all systems running Windows 98 and higher.

IN THE NEWS:

The following news items are selected from NewsScan Daily an online publication distributed Monday through Friday. Readers are encouraged to subscribe to this free news summary.To subscribe or unsubscribe to the TEXT version of NewsScan Daily, send an e-mail message to NewsScan@NewsScan.com with 'subscribe' or 'unsubscribe' in the subject line. To subscribe to the HTML version of NewsScan Daily, send mail to NewsScan-html@NewsScan.com, with the word 'subscribe' as the subject.

INTERNET MUSIC REWRITES INDUSTRY RULES. While the music industry has been focusing on music piracy, another phenomenon is slowly emerging -- the Web as venture capital source. Chart-topping rockers The Darkness have sold enough downloads, T-shirts and other fan-abilia to finance their next album, and British band Marillion has used its site to raise funds for its last two albums -- before they recorded them. "The Internet is our savior. Without it, we wouldn't be what we are today. It's really turned the business around," says Marillion's marketing manager. Meanwhile, Universal Music has begun using the Web as a testing/breeding ground for new acts, signing them to a "digital rights" contract before committing serious money to their promotion. "It acts as an incubation label, if you will," says Universal Music UK new media services director Rob Wells. "It's the Marillion concept." (Reuters/CNet 31 Oct 2004) Read More.

DO-IT-ALL GADGETS DO TOO MUCH. Most Europeans are not impressed by gadgets jam-packed with features that enable users to listen to music, watch videos, play video games and keep track of appointments, all on one machine. In a survey of 5,000 consumers from the U.K., Germany, France, Sweden, Spain and Italy, 27% of respondents were interested in a device that plays music only and 13% were interested in a portable video-only player, while only 5% preferred the idea of a gadget that plays both. Seven percent expressed a preference for a device that plays video games and has a video playback feature. The
problem with the do-it-all devices is they are too bulky, too expensive and there's not enough content to make them desirable, says Ian Fogg, an not bode well for Microsoft and Apple, which are concentrating on adding more bells and whistles to their digital devices. (Reuters/Washington Post 1 Nov 2004) Read More.

TROJAN HORSE AIMED AT NOKIA CELL PHONES. A new attack by Trojan Horse software known as "Skulls" targets Nokia 7610 cell phones, rendering infected handsets almost useless. It replaces most of an infected phone's program icons with images of skulls and crossbones, and disables all of the default programs on the phone (calendar, phonebook, camera, Web browser, SMS applications, etc.) -- i.e., essentially everything except normal phone calls. Symbian, the maker of the Nokia 7610 operating system, says that users will only be affected if they knowingly and deliberately install the file and ignore the warnings that the phone displays at the conclusion of the installation process. Experts don't consider the Skulls malware to be a major threat, but note that it's the third mobile phone bug to appear this year -- and therefore probably means that this kind of problem is here for the foreseeable future. (ENN Electronic News.net 23 Nov 2004) Read More.

CHINA CLOSES INTERNET CAFES. China has shut down 1,600 Internet cafes and fined operators a total of $12 million because they allowed children play violent games or commit other violations of the government's policies to clean up Web sites and video games. Investigators have inspected 1.8 million Internet cafes looking for unlicensed operations, has ordered 18,000 of them to "stop operation for rectification" of violations. The country has the world's second-largest population of Internet users after the United States, with 87 million people online. Culture Ministry official Zhang Xinjian says: "Porn, gambling, violence and similar problems have adversely affected the healthy development of the Internet in China." (AP/Los Angeles Times 1 Nov 2004) Read More.

FIREFOX TAKES A BITE OUT OF IE. The percentage of Web surfers using Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser has fallen below 90%, with many of those users switching over to Mozilla's Firefox. According to a survey by OneStat.com, IE's market share has dropped 5% since May to 88.9%, while Mozilla browsers -- including Firefox -- have garnered an additional 5% in the same time period. Firefox's goal is to capture 10% of the market by the end of 2005. OneStat compiled the statistical comparisons from two million Internet users in 100 countries. (BBC News 24 Nov 2004) Read More.

GOOGLE DEBUTS SCHOLARLY SEARCH SERVICE Google is adding a new search service geared toward the needs of academic and scientific researchers, offering a central starting point for scholarly literature like peer-reviewed papers, books, abstracts and technical reports. The new search tool, accessible at scholar.google.com, is the result of collaboration with a number of scientific and academic publishers, including ACM, Nature, IEEE and OCLC. The new service initially will be advertisement-free, but company executives say that will change. "The commercial reason for doing this is that you can target areas with high-quality, high-payback ads," says John Sack, director of Stanford University's HighWire Press. "An advertisement that goes next to an article on cloning techniques is probably going to be for services that are pretty expensive." SearchEngineWatch editor Danny Sullivan says Google's latest move is "a significant step forward," adding that Google likely will have competition soon from Yahoo and others. "We will continue to see an explosion of vertical search engines like this," he notes, referring to search services that focus on special collections. (New York Times 18 Nov 2004) Read More.

TOPIC MAPS PROVIDE CONTEXT FOR SEARCH RESULTS Databases and search engines can spew out thousands of "results," but how many of them are really on target? And how much time do you want to spend sifting through straw to find the gold? Enter "topic maps" -- smart indices that improve search by categorizing terms based on their relationships with other things. For instance, topic maps can sort out the different results for "Franz Ferdinand," the doomed Austrian archduke, and "Franz Ferdinand," the alternative rock group named after him. "The payoff (of topic maps) from the user standpoint is that you are no longer confronted with everything in the world that is known about the subject," says Patrick Durusau, chairman of a topic maps technical committee at OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards. Topic maps are currently used at the Internal Revenue Service to organize its tax forms and to coordinate with the Social Security Administration, and at several U.S. Department of Defense agencies for intelligence-gathering purposes. According to one expert, the legal and pharmaceutical industries are the next ones likely to adopt the topic map approach to indexing their data. (Wired.com 30 Nov 2004) Read More.

INTUITIVE SEARCH ENGINE KNOWS JUST WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR. Liesl Capper says her Mooter search engine delivers results based on personalized algorithmic search technology that serve up more relevant information than the most popular commercial search engines. Capper says most search engines "obviously had been designed by people who know a lot
about data but don't understand humans and how we are hardwired I have spent the last decade studying cognitive styles, and how who you are as a person affects how you deal with information, so applying those skills to a human interacting with information and their world using technology was a natural progression for me." Most people are simply overwhelmed with the flood of data that they retrieve and therefore tend to make instantaneous decisions about whether to pursue a possible lead or ignore it. "This is the only way we have of surviving the complex world we live in without sitting and thinking about everything for hours at a time," says Capper. The Mooter search engine uses algorithms based on profiles of search "types," developed through observation of 600 users over four years. Recently, "we have started scoring our index psychographically, and we have had a lot of interest from online publishers who want to license it, because when you have no keyword to work from it is hard to guess what a person wants to see out of potentially millions of bits of information." (Red Herring 16 Nov 2004) Read More.

WHAT EVIL LURKS IN BANNER ADS? Versions of the MyDoom virus are showing up on banner ads, spreading their misery via compromised ad servers. The SANS Institute Internet Storm Center reports that a "high profile UK Web site" was among those affected and on Sunday, and The Register confirmed that "early on Saturday morning some banner advertising served for The Register by third-party ad serving company Falk AG became infected with the Bofra/IFrame exploit." Falk AG serves ads to many popular sites, including NBC Universal, ATOM Shockwave, The Golf Channel and A&E Networks. In addition to Bofra/MyDoom, two additional viruses are working their way through compromised networks: the first, called Virtumonde Adware, hijacks a server and directs users to different pages and searches than those they had intended. The other, dubbed Trojan.Agent.EC, can take control of a PC through the back door and direct it to upload and execute whatever code the attacker wishes. (Internet News 22 Nov 2004) Read More.

HEAVY COMPUTER USE LINKED TO GLAUCOMA. Researchers at the Toho University School of Medicine in Tokyo have found that long hours spent in front of a computer screen may increase the risk of glaucoma in near-sighted people. Glaucoma, which is caused by damage to the optic nerve, results in blind spots or visual impairments that can lead to blindness. The research is based on a study of 10,000 workers in Japan who were tested for the disease, with results correlated to data on how many hours were spent on the computer and also pre-existing visual problems, such as myopia. Scientists said they believe the optic nerve in myopic people might be more vulnerable to computer-caused stress than in normal eyes. "Computer stress is reaching higher levels than have ever been experienced before. In the next decade, therefore, it might be important for public health professionals to show more concern about myopia and visual field abnormalities in heavy computer users," says the report published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology. (Reuters/MSNBC 16 Nov 2004) Read More.