Academic Publishers See Google Library Project As Threat

Slashdot | Publishers Protest Google Library Project
A group of academic publishers is challenging Google Inc.’s plan to scan millions of library books into its Internet search engine index, highlighting fears that the ambitious project will violate copyrights and stifle future sales. In a letter scheduled to be delivered to Google Monday, the Association of American University Presses described the online search engine’s library project as a troubling financial threat to its membership — 125 nonprofit publishers of academic journals and scholarly books. The university presses depend on books sales and other licensing agreements for most of their revenue, making copyright protections essential to their survival.

Google’s only response is to license the material, I think. That would be the only thing that would get support from these folks. There will be more of this as Google moves forward with this project.

Track Search Engine Spiders

Track Search Engine Spiders – Free Web Analytics Software for Apache Web Server
Use trackSpiders.cgi to track spiders from major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN). This free web analytics software will examine an Apache web server log and will display visits from Googlebot, Yahoo Slurp, and MSNBot. It takes an optional query string in the format s=ygm where each letter corresponds to the search engine spider for the major search engines. For example, specifying s=g will only display pages crawled by Googlebot.

A Listing of Legal Etnics Sites

Legal Ethics Sites

This list includes the LII materials on legal ethics
. It occurs to me that this is some space that CALI might get further into. We have a handful of Lessons
in this area, but it is an area that is of ongoing concern to all prationers (or should be). A reference library of Lessons linked to the LII materials would be something that would generate interest among attornies.

Fake Microsoft Patch Launches Virus

Fake Microsoft Patch Triggers Virus Attack
In what has become a monthly staple, virus writers are taking advantage of the heightened public interest around Microsoft’s patching cycle to trick users into executing a malicious attachment.

The latest social engineering trick arrives via e-mail with an attachment that purports to be a “cumulative patch” for May 2005.

The claim is that the executable file contains patches for vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, three widely used products with a history of serious security bugs.

The file is actually an executable for a variant of W32.Pinfi, a memory-resident polymorphic virus capable of replicated via mapped drives and network shares.

A Social Aggregator?

Dave Winer pointed to this article, RSS: What is a ‘River of News’ style aggregator?, and it got me to thinking. I’ve been looking at social bookmarking a lot lately, especially Scuttle, for a little project I call the great big law school directory. What about social aggregating of feeds? Let folks add feeds as bookmarks, add tags to the bookmarks, run a serverside aggregator, shake, stir, repeat. Browsing by tags of course, RSS feeds of feeds of course, ‘River of News’ style, of course.

But here’s the bing! Parse the feeds as aggragated looking for category tags in the feed and add those to the folsonomy that is built around the feed. That would be cool.

TechRepublic Launches Member Blogs

Member blogs are live
If you have an existing blog, you can import it into your TechRepublic blog using your external blog’s RSS feed. This eliminates the need to post things twice.

Well, this sounded interesting, so I gave it a shot. Nothing real fancy, but it does have the neat feature of importing the feed from <CONTENT /> as a way to populate the blog. The feeds are updated wevery 4 hours, so the mirror isn’t in real time, but I don’t mind. It also gives me access to all of the tagging going on on the TR member site as well as. Who knows, it may even drive more traffic.

Netscape 8.0 Released

BetaNews | Netscape 8.0 Final Released
The revived browser is based upon FireFox 1.0.3, bundling FireFox’s advanced features with a Netscape interface and many other custom enhancements such as integrated RSS feeds and Netscape portal content, as well as enhanced privacy features and a selection of optional toolbars to install.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer engine is included under the hood to provide better compatibility with Web sites that conform to IE.

The ability to toggle between Firefox and IE is pretty cool.