October 2002 Archived Article Abstracts

---

IR News Updated Daily (IR News page)

---

Search engines aren't just black boxes -- they are programs continually updated to improve indexing, search responsiveness and relevance ranking. Here's an insider's look at Google.

"It's just another happy-go-lucky day at KidFu, a Web site for children 8 to 14 that could easily qualify as the Pleasantville of cyberspace. Within KidFu, as tight a virtual community as you are likely to find these days, there are no suggestive instant messages, no suspicious requests for e-mail addresses. In fact, one of the many rules adopted with safety in mind is a prohibition against sharing e-mail addresses in general."

"FAST crawls in two ways: batch crawling starts from scratch, with an empty "local store", but it never fetches the same page twice in the indexing cycle. Incremental crawling starts from the existing local store, and tries to discover new documents. It looks at certain sites with frequent changes by tracking average freshness for pages and revisiting accordingly, then updates the local store periodically." -[searchenginewatch.com]-

"The United States' Federal Trade Commission has forced a British entrepreneur who sold domain names that did not work to repay his proceeds to his victims."

"The fact that the FTC have now forced Goolnick to refund his customers shows that the USA is way ahead of Britain when it comes to closing down deceptive domain scams and protecting consumers. The UK investigation conspicuously failed to take any action over Goolnick's activities beyond seeking an undertaking against the continuation of the campaign."-[Demys Domain News Service]-

"After months of speculation, Yahoo announced today that it has renewed its relationship to use Google's results as part of its search listings. In addition, Yahoo made a substantial change to end its historic barrier between human-powered and crawler-based search results."

"...In addition to Google, both Inktomi and FAST were also seeking the contract. However, Google has made history by being the first provider to win the Yahoo deal twice in a row." -[Danny Sullivan, Editor, The Search Engine Report]-

The Library of Congress

The Ohio River Valley, 1750-1820. There are approx. 15,000 pages here covering the travels of the first Europeans into the trans-Appalachian West. Materials include books, periodicals, newspapers, pamphlets, ledgers, maps, and physical artifacts.

For Diaries and Letters from 1846-1869. It includes 49 diaries of pioneers moving across American to Utah, Montana, and the Pacific between 1847 and 1869. The collection also includes 43 maps and 82 photographs.

South Florida's Natural History, 1884-1934. This site has personal correspondence, essays, typescripts, photographs, maps, and postcards from individuals and the government. Topics covered include the establishment of the Everglades National Park and several other topics relating to natural resources and the conservation movement.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- "Music companies tried to persuade a judge Friday to let them obtain the names of people suspected of trading music files online without going to court first, a move that could dictate how copyright holders deal with Internet piracy in the future."

Internet service provider Verizon is resisting the music industry's subpoena, saying that it could turn Internet providers into a turnstile for piracy suits and put innocent customers at risk.

U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, who heard the case, lamented ambiguities in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which was enacted to uphold copyright laws on the Internet while shielding technology companies from direct liability.

Bates stated that "Congress could have made this statute clearer. This statute is not organized as being consistent with the argument for either side."

Bates said he would try to rule quickly, but lawyers for both sides had no guess of when a decision might arrive.

The music industry views the subponea hearing as a test case and plans to send cease-and-desist letters to scare file-swappers into taking their collections off-line.

At the present, requests are sent to Internet Service Providers (ISP's) to take action against suspected pirates by copyright holders. Most ISP's forbid sharing copyrighted material without permission.

To enforce the law, movie publishers prefer individual letters from the maker itself, because ISP's do not always respond as well or as quickly as music and movie publishers and ISP's can take a lot of time.

Cary Sherman, RIAA's general counsel asked, "Wouldn't that be a lot easier way to let people know that they are in fact not anonymous and there could be consequences?"

"Verizon said that since the hundreds of songs up for trade by the anonymous Verizon customer at the center of the case sit on the person's computer rather than Verizon's network, it is not required to automatically give up the subscriber's name."

"Eric Holder, a former Justice Department prosecutor who represents Verizon said "Verizon was a passive conduit at most". Holder said the music industry's strategy could create a contentious relationship between Verizon and its customers and put the Internet provider in the position of handing over names to the music companies without a judicial determination of piracy."

"We also don't want to be the policeman in this process," Holder said.

Lawyers for the recording industry rejected Verizon's arguments that it had little obligations in the process were rejected by lawyers for the recording industry. Industry lawyer Donald Verrilli said "no type of service provider is exempt from having to identify a potential music pirate, no matter where the songs sit".

Verrilli also dismissed Verizon's position that the Internet provider's customers have a right to privacy.

Verrilli said, "You don't have a first amendment right to steal copyright works".

Judge Bates disagreed with Verrilli's assumption that the works were stolen by saying "Here, there's only an allegation of infringement".

Bates gave few hints as to how he might rule. He asked many, detailed questions of both sides. He called some Verizon positions vague, but showed little patience with other arguments advanced by the music industry and movie studios, which also argued on behalf of music publishers.

Through programs like Kazaa, Morpheus and Gnutella, a person can find virtually any song or movie -- sometimes even before it's released in stores -- and download it for free. On a typical afternoon, about 3 million people were connected on the Kazaa network and sharing more than 500 million files.

---

Search this Directory or just a Section (Category) of the Directory

DirectoryKidsMapsNewsResearchSearchWeb
FreeFind

---