When even the world's best search engine can't turn a profit ...

Google is considering creating subscription versions of its popular search engine that could target academic and corporate clients, a source said Thursday.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company is evaluating new "vertical markets" as a means of increasing revenues, according to a source within the company. Among the considerations are new niche searches for periodicals, medical information or technology that Web surfers or companies would pay to use.

Google evaluates subscription options

Anthrax, Afghanistan, al-Qaida, Ashcroft and anti-terrorism legislation. We aren't even through the first letter of the geopolitical alphabet before jumping all the way to "S" as in "screwed" as in what's happening to civil liberties in the online world."

Brock Meeks: First, brand all the children

Sweetcode reports innovative free software. "Innovative" means that the software reported here isn't just a clone of something else or a minor add-on to something else or a port of something else or yet another implementation of a widely recognized concept. (These are all perfectly fine and useful things, they're just not what this site is for.) "Free software" means "as in speech". Software reported on sweetcode should surprise you in some interesting way. "I didn't know you could do that" or "I never thought about that problem that way" or "What a strange way to do things".

sweetcode

Nanobiotic Lifesavers
By Jack Mason

Technology Review on the Web
October 23, 2001

Synthetic peptide rings can self-assemble into antibiotic nanotubes that puncture deadly bacteria.

Nanotubes that construct themselves out of peptide rings may offer an effective new weapon against antibiotic-resistant bacteria and the threat of incurable diseases.

Nanobiotic Lifesavers (MIT Technology Review)

"In this piece, we take up the case of the domain name system as an example of challenges and solutions for realspace sovereigns in cyberspace. First, we analyze the 'in rem' provision of the US Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA), which purports to expand the scope of the ACPA to encompass disputes with little direct connection with the United States. In reality, there exist no cases of foreign cybersquatting as to which the 'in rem' provision will be both applicable and constitutional. Instead the ACPA 'in rem' provision is notable primarily for its aggressive assertion of jurisdiction, leading us to consider the (often overlooked) role of realspace sovereigns in the regulation of the domain names system. By mapping the logical control over the domain names system-the distributed hierarchy that is the basis of the system's design-onto realspace territory, the potential for sovereign regulation of the system becomes apparent. We argue that the regulatory significance of geography, and the essentially arbitrary nature of the present territorial locations of the key components of the domain name system implies the future segmentation of the domain name system, and the resulting dramatic decrease in its value. Accordingly, we argue that realspace sovereigns (and especially the United States) have strong interests in avoiding segmentation, and thus must seek to coordinate the regulation of the system."

Realspace Sovereigns in Cyberspace: The Case of Domain Names

Here's a preprint edition of a new paper submitted to Nature by Seth Lloyd of MIT. 17 pages.

"Merely by existing, all physical systems register information. And by evolving dynamically in time, they transform and process that information. The laws of physics determine the amount of information that a physical system can register (number of bits) and the number of elementary logic operations that a system can perform (number of ops). The universe is a physical system. This paper quantifies the amount of information that the universe can register and the number of elementary operations that it can have performed over its history. The universe can have performed no more than $10^{120}$ ops on $10^{90}$ bits."

Computational capacity of the universe

Is western culture better than any other? Umberto Eco argues that what is important is not superiority but pluralism and toleration.

Published in The (UK) Guardian of Saturday October 13, 2001.

Unmberto Eco on the roots of conflict

Finally! This conference was held back in April, but the proceedings just became available online today. Get 'em while they're hot! (if you can :( )

Authors whose names many may know or recognize include Tonda Benes, Markus G. Kuhn, Adam Back, Ulf Möller, David Goldberg, Roger Dingledine, Michael J. Freedman, and David Molnar.

This conference is typically full of excellent papers, but those of particular interest may include:

The Strong Eternity Service
A Reputation System to Increase MIX-Net Reliability
An Analysis of One of the SDMI Candidates
Traffic Analysis Attacks and Trade-Offs in Anonymity Providing Systems
Real World Patterns of Failure in Anonymity Systems
Intellectual Property Metering
Computational Forensic Techniques for Intellectual Property Protection
Natural Language Watermarking: Design, Analysis, and a Proof-of-Concept Implementation
Robust Covert Communication over a Public Audio Channel Using Spread Spectrum
A Perceptual Audio Hashing Algorithm: A Tool for Robust Audio Identification and Information Hiding

LNCS2137: Information Hiding Workshop 2001

* Explores how privacy and security issues are revolutionizing how we do business both in the United States and globally."

Global Summit on Privacy and Security in the Digital Age

"As the 'war on terrorism' unfolds, some politicians are calling for controls on the availability of encryption software. But many computer scientists claim such moves would play into the terrorists' hands. David Adam reports."

Also in this issue of Nature: be sure to check out the articles on departing NASA chief Daniel Goldin.

Cryptography on the front line | Oct 25 Nature