Tech News (page 4)

• For instance, a good percentage of our readers are not seeing the homepage; they are coming in because of search engines or RSS feeds, any number of avenues ? our own e-mails, other links.
• They're coming in to an article page. Once they get to an article page, we need to redesign how else you engage the site and travel through it." Across the country, at the San Francisco Chronicle's SFGate.com, "We're trying to get people beyond homepage/ click to story/click back to homepage/click back to story/ go somewhere else," says Vlae Kershner, the site's news director. "We're trying to improve the site navigation in a way that will keep users around longer." At The Wall Street Journal Online, Bill Grueskin, the managing editor says "How do you make the Web site even more compelling for people, so it's a must-read rather than a can-read? And then, once you get them there, how do you sink your claws into them so they don't want to go away?"
• Starting soon, Grueskin plans to target bloggers more specifically, "engaging" them, as he puts, in a variety of areas ? technology, business and finance, media, and others ? with appropriate content. In other words you want people to invest their time, attention, discussions, stories, questions and answers so that your space on the internet also becomes a shared space with them.
• Grueskin is looking at "things in terms of the design of the site, the design of the story pages" to help move readers more effectively and efficiently through his site, and to better capitalize on those readers directed to them from blogs and elsewhere.

• national news,
• metro,
• sports,
• business,
• and the like,

  each with its own front page.

• (text,
• audio,
• video,
• images, etc.)

  to

• discover,
• organize, and
• deliver

  relevant knowledge
  to the user.

1. UIMA is an architecture in which basic building blocks called Analysis Engines (AEs) are composed in order to analyze a document. At the heart of AEs are the analysis algorithms that do all the work to analyze documents and record analysis results (for example, detecting person names).
2. These algorithms are packaged within components that are called Annotators. AEs are the stackable containers for annotators and other analysis engines. How Annotators represent and share their results is an important part of the UIMA architecture.
3. To enable composition and reuse, UIMA defines a Common Analysis Structure (CAS) precisely for these purposes. The CAS is an object-based container that manages and stores typed objects having properties and values.

   Object types may be related to each other in a single-inheritance hierarchy.

4. The CAS serves as a common data object, shared among the annotators that are assembled for an application.

You have had junk mail from people who are not who they say they are. Get ready for SMS from people who are not who they say they are, and nor is the displayed number the one that is actually sending it.

It is now possible for people to send SMS and hide the true number from which they are sending it, or even display another number from which is was not really sent. The internet's capability to allow people to send SMS' has made this even easier. "SMS spoofing became possible after many cellular operators integrated their network communications with the Internet," according to Denis Pankratov and Dmitri Kramarenko of the Ukraine-based Computer Crime Research Centre (CCRC).

SMSes are only as trustworthy as e-mails. But unlike the latter, where the header holds clinching evidence about the source computer, it's impossible to trace the genesis of an SMS that carries only numbers. To boot, SMS is highly suited to bulk application like e-mail. Spoofers either set up personal SMS servers or use others' for a fee. These messaging centres can't be pinned down either. "SMS technology inherently supports spoofing," reveals Nayak. "All one needs is an application designed for that." So it's only a matter of time before tricksters latch on to the web-based, third-party SMS spoofing software products like

• Clickatell,
• Lotus Domino or
• SMSspoof, readily available on the net.

  "Any person can purchase or download evaluation copy to commit a crime," say the CCRC experts.

The panel noted that the software firms simply provided software for individual users to share information over the Internet, regardless of whether that shared information was copyrighted. "The technology has numerous other uses, significantly reducing the distribution costs of public domain and permissively shared art and speech, as well as reducing the centralized control of that distribution," Thomas wrote. (The case is Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer v. Grokster, 03-55894.)

Napster was shut down after the 9th Circuit ruled that its centralized servers, which contained and index of thousands of copyrighted songs, made it legally liable for contributing to copyright infringement. Thursday's ruling could influence the entertainment companies' case against Sharman Networks Ltd., makers of the Kazaa program, which averages more users than any other file-sharing software.