Newsgroups Report Interactive Web Patent Fails In Court | Thundernews Blog

There was a battle taking place in the city of Tyler, Texas that had Yahoo, Amazon, Google, YouTube and even the internet’s father himself, Tim Berners-Lee, involved in a legal dispute over the future of the World Wide Web.

According to reports on USENET newsgroups, Chicago biologist and plaintiff Michael Doyle claimed that during their employment by the University of California in 1993, he and two co-inventors — now called Eolas Technologies — created and patented the “interactive web” before anyone else. He referred to a program he created at the San Francisco campus which allowed doctors to view embryos over the Internet. He claims that this was the first program that allowed users to interact with images within a browser window.

In a US federal court ruling in Texas an eight-man jury rejected Eolas’ claimed ownership of the technology ruling that the company’s patents were invalid, according to USENET reports. Eolas’ opponents had claimed the company’s patents were falsely based on existing inventions”.

Many of the companies Eolas had sued had settled the dispute out of court, including Apple and eBay, whilst the technology firm had previously won $565 million in settling a patent dispute with Microsoft.

After the settlement, the W3C contacted the patent office directly with a letter signed by Berners-Lee, stating that unless the disputed patent was invalidated, it would cause the “disruption of global web standards” and cause “substantial economic and technical damage to the operation of the World Wide Web.”

The defence teams presented the jury with evidence from web pioneers. These included Dave Raggett, creator of the tag, and Pei-Yuan Wei, who created the Viola browser and who, with Scott Silvey, in 1993 demonstrated a program called V-Plot which rotated an image of a plane within Wei’s browser. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, also testified at trial on the importance of Wei’s work with the Viola browser and discussions in 1991 about embedding Viola objects in HTML files. Berners-Lee told the court “It was ahead of its time. The things Pei was doing would later be done in Java”. Eolas filed their patent in 1994. It appears that the testimony of the pioneers of the web was influential in the jury’s decision.

From: http://ping.fm/8KdS5

Website Blackouts In Protest of SOPA

Many leading internet companies chose Jan. 18 to register their opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, known as SOPA in the House of Representatives and PIPA in the Senate. Both pieces of legislation are widely supported by the entertainment industry.

Until this week, entertainment industry executives thought they had the votes for new federal legislation cracking down on foreign websites that traffic in pirated movies and music and cost them billions.

They lined up support from the powerful pharmaceutical industry and labor unions, and organized an impressive bipartisan coalition in Congress.

Then Silicon Valley struck back and appears to have outflanked Hollywood.

The companies oppose bills designed to curb access and payments to overseas websites that traffic in stolen content or counterfeit goods on the grounds that it could put them in legal peril.

Internet companies have furiously opposed the legislation and have stepped up lobbying efforts in recent months, arguing it would undermine innovation and free speech rights, compromise the functioning of the Internet, and would be ineffective in stopping piracy.

Sites made their views clear without cutting off surfers. Google blacked out the logo on its home page, directing surfers to a page where they could add their names to a petition against the bills.

Opponents of SOPA read like a who’s who of the Internet. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist, eBay, Mozilla, Yahoo, AOL, and LinkedIn wrote a letter to key members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, saying SOPA poses “a serious risk to our industry’s continued track record of innovation and job creation, as well as to our nation’s cybersecurity.”

The swelling online opposition persuaded the White House to call over the weekend for lawmakers to remove the legislation’s most controversial provision, which would have required U.S. search engines and payment networks to block access to websites focused on pirated materials. Supporters of the legislation say it would target foreign websites trading in stolen intellectual property, including movies and music. Critics say it would unfairly penalize legitimate websites too, such as Google, Craigslist and even other online services including USENET newsgroups.

In short, The proposed infrastructure would damage the security of the Internet and allow the government extensive censorship abilities.
If you would like to join the protest, visit AmericanCensorship.org for instructions on contacting your Senator. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has more information on this and other issues central to your freedom online.

From: http://ping.fm/VZfpb

Users Trust USENET More Than Other Online Sources

Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed the rise of USENET newsgroups, social networks and mobile technology that’s put the online world at an arm’s reach, day and night – yet a new study has found that people are even more distrustful of the information they find online.
Three-quarters of online users find the Web an important source of information, but most people still don’t deem the content they see online reliable versus those found on USENET newsgroups, according to a report out this week from the University of Southern California.
In 2010, 15 percent of online users said they find only a small portion of web information reliable. That’s greater than the 7 percent who were likewise skeptical of the vast majority of information they come across on the Internet.
Trust grows when it comes to established media outlets and government websites. In 2010, 79 percent of Internet users said they found content posted on government websites reliable, about the same as in 2003, the first year the center looked at that question.
The center has surveyed more than 2,000 U.S. households each year since 1999. The latest report is a look back at the past decade of Americans’ Internet use

From: http://ping.fm/l7VmC

Some Tips for Choosing a Usenet Provider

For more than 30 years Usenet has been a resource for people all over the globe to share ideas, debates, and files. It preceded the Internet, and some even consider it a precursor to social media.
Premium providers such as ThunderNews.com offers completely uncensored access to Usenet, control over which belongs to no one entity. Make sure that you do your homework when selecting a premium provider so you choose what’s right for you. First, though, the following are some helpful tips when searching for your provider.
You need a Newsreader. A newsreader is a software program that allows you to browse and search through the thousands of newsgroups available on Usenet. A newsgroup is a group dedicated to a specific topic. NewsRover is an example of a feature-rich, easy to use newsreader.
Newsreaders that offer a search feature can make finding newsgroups you’re looking to subscribe to on Usenet much easier. Providers such as ThunderNews provides all-in-one access allow for easy searching and discovering, making the Usenet experience a more pleasant one.
Choose a premium provider with uncapped speeds. Make sure that you choose a premium provider that does not cap your speed. Providers should allow you to download at high speeds. ThunderNews does not throttle accounts.
The data on Usenet is stored on a network of servers around the world. The provider allows you to access the servers. Data is transferred from the server to your computer when you access it. With other services, you might be forced to share connection speeds with others, or the service might restrict download speed. Usenet, on the other hand, allows you to download at whatever speed is allowable by your ISP.
Look at providers’ retention. Don’t overlook the retention rate offered by the premium provider, either. This is the length of time that files are kept on the server. Higher retention rates mean a higher storage time. ThunderNews , for instance, offers retention of over 1,145 days for binary files. It offers over 720 days of text retention.
With technology improving every day, greater amounts of data may be stored on the server. The retention rates of premium providers increase constantly, but make sure you check them out when searching for a provider. If you have any other questions, you can contact our 24/7 support department at ThunderNews.com USENET.

From: http://ping.fm/ObAzp

On USENET: Now Serving Seven Billion People

The U.N. says the world’s population will reach a milestone this Monday — 7 billion people. Since 1927, our population has soared from 2 billion to 4 billion in 1974, and 6 billion in 1999.
As stated on USENET newsgroups, officials in India predicted the baby bringing the population to 7 billion would be born Monday in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, with an estimated 200 million people. The U.N. Population Division says Monday’s date is symbolic, acknowledging it is impossible to know for sure the specific time or day when the 7 billionth person is born.
The world is adding more people in less time while the annual growth rate is slowing down — from 2.1% in the late 1960s to 1.2% today — reflecting lower birth rates. There are over two babies born every second, so the global population is forecast to hit 8 billion in about 14 years and 10 billion by the end of the century.
Can Earth support seven billion or nine billion or 10 billion people in a good life for a long time?
Thats the question that’s burning up many newsgroup discussions today. With both more people and longer lifetimes, humanity’s absolute numbers continue to rise, even though the number of children per women has halved since 1950. In fact, the absolute growth rate in human population peaked at 2.1 percent between 1965 and 1970.
The world’s richest 500 million people produce half the world’s carbon dioxide emissions—the primary greenhouse gas responsible for climate change—whereas the poorest three billion emit just seven percent. The average American—one of 312.5 million—uses up some 88 kilograms of stuff daily: food, water, plastics, metals and other material goods. Americans consume a full 25 percent of the world’s energy despite representing just 5 percent of global population, and the band of industrialized nations combine to waste 222 million metric tons of food per year, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
Ultimately, the limiting factor may come down to what the late economist Julian Simon called the “master resource”: energy. Simply put, is there enough energy that can be harnessed to provide a rewarding lifestyle to however many billion of us inhabit the planet? Those limits are already being pushed, as can be seen in the large increases in the price of everything from oil to food over the last decade.
As for how many people the planet can sustain, the first such estimate came from microbiologist Anton van Leeuwenhoek who calculated roughly 13.4 billion people back in 1679, based on the population density of his native Holland and its size relative to the rest of the globe. More modern guesses are hardly more scientific, ranging from one billion to one trillion.
As it is, the world produces enough food to feed everyone alive today—and more. Globally, farms produce enough calories to support a population of roughly 11 billion people fed 2,000 calories per day. That’s because human ingenuity—such as the modern breeding of staple crops, such as wheat, for higher yields, known as the Green Revolution—has outpaced, so far, environmental limits.
As it stands, the people of the planet seem to be leaning toward a peak in population followed by a gradual decline—a 21st-century world of the aged, which can be seen today in Japan or parts of Europe—but there is still a good chance of continued growth in our numbers. The U.N. had more recently predicted a leveling off at nine billion but now says we will reach the 10.1 billion figure in 2100—and potentially keep climbing as birth rates have not fallen as far or as fast as previously anticipated. If the choices we make are a little different, there could be as many as 16 billion of us by the end of this century—and that number may prove more than the planet can bear if our lifestyles don’t keep pace with our numbers.

From: http://www.thundernews.com/blog/on-usenet-now-serving-seven-billion-people/

Tech Pioneer and Newsgroup Subscriber John McCarthy Passes Away | Thundernews Blog

Computer scientist John McCarthy, who is one of the fathers of artificial intelligence and even coined the term, died Sunday at the age of 84.
A pioneer and thought leader in areas such as artificial intelligence and ‘utility computing’, which in many ways maps to the ever popular ‘cloud computing’ offerings of today, John McCarthy’s work has had a significant impact on many aspects of the day to day activities of computer programmers and IT professionals alike, especially those regarding USENET newsgroups.
McCarthy designed the LISP programming language in 1958 while a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lisp, one of the oldest high-level programming languages second only to Fortran, is still in use today.
Tributes to McCarthy poured in Tuesday, some from posters on Usenet, where McCarthy had an active presence.
McCarthy received the Turing Award in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of AI.
He was born in Boston on September 4, 1927 to an Irish immigrant father and a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant mother.
McCarthy showed an early aptitude for mathematics and he taught himself mathematics by studying the textbooks used at the nearby California Institute of Technology
McCarthy, who retired from Stanford in 2000, was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences.

From: http://ping.fm/PhWfS

Police Field-Testing New Software Stopping Crimes Before They Happen

The new software doesn’t predict who is going to commit the crime, as was the case in the movie Minority Report, but it attempts to predict where the crime will be committed. USENET newsgroup subscribers are currently discussing George Mohler, a mathematician at Santa Clara University, who developed a program that uses the locations of crimes previously committed to determine potential crime areas.
Newsgroup subscribers state that the idea is that if a burglary occurs at one residence, it could occur over the next few days at a nearby residence, too. Equations that are used to predict aftershocks for earthquakes were used as a basis for the program. Dates and times of crimes are now used to predict future crimes.
The new program flags about 10 potential crime areas for three types of crime: residential burglary, auto burglary and auto theft. New data is inputted every night to calculate the likelihood of crimes the next day.
Later this year the software will be tested with the Los Angeles police department in a controlled experiment. The software will be used as it’s being used in Santa Cruz, but only half of the locations flagged will be patrolled.
You can follow this story and many more on the over 107,000 active newsgroups that ThunderNews currently supports. Join now or join the discussion on a variety technology newsgroups.

From: http://ping.fm/Y2NHF

Fight Over Net Neutrality Continues

The on-going fight over the new net neutrality rules continue as it was announced that the Washington DC Circuit Court will hear the challenges to the rules. The net neutrality rules prevent internet providers from slowing or interfering with their customers’ traffic. Basically, it punishes providers that allow bigger websites better traffic than smaller sites.
Verizon tried to file suit before the net neutrality rules were published, but the lawsuit was thrown out for being filed too early. Verizon recently refilled the suit after the new rules were published. Meanwhile, the FCC has filed a motion to try to stop Verizon from appealing the new rules.
Verizon’s complaint was consolidated with six others, who filed suit in other cities around the country from New York to San Francisco.
Last year the same court will hear the case ruled against the FCC when it attempted to punish Comcast for allegedly slowing traffic of certain networks a couple of years earlier. The ruling said that the FCC did not have the authority to do so.
As the battle over net neutrality continues, Usenet continues as an open community of users who share ideas, debates, files, etc. with others around the country. With most premium providers such as ThunderNews, connection speeds with Usenet are determined by speeds allowed by internet service providers. Faster speeds generally means faster downloads and a more enjoyable experience sharing in the over 100,000 newsgroups available on Usenet.

From: http://ping.fm/L6XWu

Verizon Looking to Stop Net Neutrality Rule

Verizon announced USENET Newsgroups plans to file an appeal to overturn the FCC’s net neutrality rules, noting they believe the laws to be illegal because they change Verizon’s spectrum licenses without their approval. The company filed suit in January, but the case was thrown out a few months later.
According to certain newsgroups, Free Press and the nonprofit ISP Mountain Area Informational Network (MAIN) filed their own suits not long ago, arguing that laws governing mobile broadband providers should be stronger to keep up with laws that govern providers of wire line service. Basically, they are arguing that the FCC’s new rules are not as far-reaching as they should be, while Verizon argues the opposite.
Senior vice president and deputy general counsel Michael Glover notes, “Verizon is fully committed to an open Internet. We are deeply concerned by the FCC’s assertion of broad authority to impose potentially sweeping and unneeded regulations on broadband networks and services and on the Internet itself. We believe this assertion of authority is inconsistent with the statute and will create uncertainty for the communications industry, innovators, investors and consumers.”
For its part, the FCC argues that the new net neutrality rules provide providers with certainty as to what they can and cannot do. The new rules will prevent broadband providers from blocking consumers’ access to Web content deemed to be legal. That means that providers are not allowed to prevent customers from viewing online channels, including USENET.
Usenet, which precedes the Internet, has always been based on an open and free network of communication and sharing. Through various newsgroups, users may share ideas, debates, and files with other users from around the world. There is no supreme authority of Usenet, as each provider dictates to which newsgroups they provide access, and also may come up with its own policies for service. Usenet survives because it continues to serve as a vibrant community of users who believe in the openness of communication and the sharing of ideas.

From: http://ping.fm/pVUuT

Windows 8 Offers a Developer Preview For USENET Subscribers | Thundernews Blog

If you’re curious what Windows 8 will be all about, Microsoft has announced on USENET newsgroups that it is now offering a Developer Preview of the operating system at its current stage of development. It’s a pre-beta version and while it is designed for developers, it’s available for anybody to download without registering.
It’s available in three packages. Choose from a 64-bit version with developer tools, a 64-bit version of only the OS, and a 32-bit version of the OS. They come as ISO files, and as each package is a few gigabytes, you’ll want to use a DVD if you’re looking to burn them to a disc.
As for the OS itself, it’s said to re-imagine what Windows is. “Things are a lot different than they were three years ago in computing,” said Steven Sinofsky, who heads Windows and Windows Live. “And they’re a lot, lot different than they were in, say, 1995, the last time Windows went through a pretty significant and bold overhaul.”
Windows 8 was designed as a touch-first system and Sinofsky expects that touch screen PCs will become more popular when the new OS is released and grows more popular. “I promise you,” Sinofsky said, “the minute you use a touch device with Windows 8, the moment you go back to your laptop or desktop, you’ll have fingerprints all over your screen.”
Other key features of the new Windows OS include the use of less memory than Windows 7, but the continued support of Windows 7. It also features full USB 3.0 support. The user interface will use hardware-accelerated graphics, too.
As Windows goes through another overhaul and is ‘re-imagined’ in the latest release, Usenet continues to be a useful tool for those wishing to share information, ideas and announce new innovations and projects among the tech savvy. Providers like Thundernews, who offer fast connections, high rates of retention and a large number of connections, continue to provide excellent, premium service as Usenet stays strong through waves and waves of technological advances. Usenet preceded the internet and has seen operating systems come and go, and remains a useful tool for discussing different topics in the vast array of newsgroups.

From: http://ping.fm/w5j6a