UCB is using the Plagiarism.org website to check term papers for plagiarism. The site was the idea of a Berkeley doctoral student, with help from eight other graduate students. Only phrases of eight or more words are checked. A preliminary test on neurobiology class papers found suspect material in one out of eight papers. [Washington Times, 19Dec99. Edupage.]

Plagiarism.org has uploaded papers from free sites. Text from fee-based sites may be caught if it also appears in any of the free papers. Other plagiarism-flagging services include Essay Verification Engine and Integriguard. The free schoolsucks.com term paper site earns six-digit ad revenue, doubling every year. "We've been profitable from Day 1." Cheater.com serves 60K page views per day. The Evil House of Cheat has 4K visitors per day, browsing 9,500 term papers for sale. The Essay Depot warns students not to hand in the "research material" as their own work. Boston U. filed a lawsuit against eight Internet term-paper companies in seven states, but it was thrown out of Federal court. [Kendra Mayfield, Wired Digital. wwwedu, 13Dec99. net-hap.]

Warren Sarle says that software patent law is settling down, after a decade of rapid change. "You cannot patent a neural network or statistical method or computational algorithm per se, but you can patent any non-obvious and marginally innovative _application_ of any such method. Anybody can patent applications of your new technique without even providing working software." If a general-purpose software package is used to infringe a patented application, the courts sometimes hold the software supplier liable for licensing fees. (!) Such software companies are filing as many application patents as possible, to build portfolios they can cross-license in case they are sued. (Patent lawyers are getting rich from this.) For more information, see Gregory Stobbs' "Software Patents" book. [, comp.ai.neural-nets, 25May00.]

(Carl Cook notes that there is a patent on combing your hair to hide baldness: US Patent #4,022,227, approved 1977. [comp.ai.neural-nets, 25May00.] Issuance of the patent is not a guarantee of validity, nor is the protection necessarily as broad as all of the claims.)

Check before you invest. Gridiron.com has been denied the use of names and images of NFL players for its football search-engine website, unless it pays royalties to the NFL's Player Association. [AP. SJM, 11Jul00. NewsScan.]

DARPA's Information Systems Office (ISO) is seeking research proposals for "Ultra Log" high-security distributed agent architectures for chaotic wartime environments. BAA 00-46; 20Sep00; Todd Carrico, (703) 522-8916 fax. . [CBD, 18Jul00.]

Kirk Bailey invited fellow security experts to find out as much as they legally could about him. They sifted his garbage and checked his records on the Web. "We could cut and paste his signature from his marriage license or divorce degree and put his signature on anything. We could've closed his bank account that day. We could've turned off his lights, we could've refinanced his house, and we could've gone out and purchased a Mercedes Benz." [NY Times, 13Dec99. NewsScan.] (Fortunately, Congress is now considering legislation that would increase penalties and reduce the impact of identity theft.)

----- "Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." -- William Pitt. -----