Welcome to Weekend Update where you’ll get all the latest news stories that I care enough to report from the past week in tech.

A Gmail By Any Other Name…

As reported by this article on InternetNews, when news about Google’s IPO broke on March 31, 2004, some companies (Cencourse, Precision Research and ProNet Analytics) made a beeline for the USPTO to get Gmail trademarked in their name, as Google’s IPO prospectus said that its unregistered trademarks included Gmail. Google itself was fourth in line, and it was followed by the Gospel Music Association. This might be a very sticky issue because USPTO Trademark Administrator Sharon Marsh says ‘The application process is first come, first served. Applications are processed as they’re received, and the person second in line will get a refusal of registration from our examiner.’ All of which means that between Google’s delay in applying for the trademark, the other organizations’ attempt at what can only be called cybersquatting, and the USPTO’s bureaucracy, Google could well be denied the use of Gmail as a trademark. I personally thing that these people are just jealous that they don’t get a gazillion hits a day. Losers.

The Light Side To P2P?!

A whitepaper has just been released detailing a secure (OpenSSL/digital signatures), copyright-aware P2P network. The paper claims that this system enables legal file trades, something that isn’t guaranteed by Kazaa, Morpheus or eDonkey. The whitepaper goes on to state that the long-term goal of this system is to catalog every human creation in existence that can be expressed by a digital medium. Project stats: a super-computing cluster that will scale to more than 900TB of storage, 300M transactions per day and trade music, television, movies and books. Doesn’t this constitute a “responsible and legitimate use” of P2P?

Show Me The Money!

The news out this week that eBay bought a minority stake in Craigslist. Here’s Craig’s take on the whole issue. For those unaware of Craigslist, it was launched by Craig Newmark in 1995 in San Francisco, and is an online network of classified ads and forums aimed at people looking to find an apartment rental, meet friends or trade goods. For those unaware of eBay, get out from under that rock! Google news stories for your convenience here. So will Craigslist now become more corporate/evil? I just hope that evil Ebay doesn’t start taking over like the big bad ‘M’.

Geeks, Uncensored

It was unvieled this week that an interview with the creators of Google is appearing in the latest Playboy Magazine. That in and of itself is of little note, until one realizes that the issue of Playboy in question is already en route to subscribers and hits newsstands the same day that their IPO auction begins. News.com.com speculates that the SEC may be interested, since this could be a breach of the “quiet period” companies must endure before going public. It may also be nothing but a mistake in scheduling, but it has cast some doubts on Google’s IPO.

I Knew It Wouldn’t Be Long…

Our good friend DVD Jon has just announced that he cracked the encryption in Apple’s AirPort Express. ‘I’ve released JustePort, a tool which lets you stream MPEG4 Apple Lossless files to your AirPort Express. The stream is encrypted with AES and the AES key is encrypted with RSA.’ No real details of the process employed in cracking the unit but newsworthy none the less.

Alright well that will about do it for this weeks news, (at least what I viewed as important enough to report on). I’d like to say thanks for being with us and have a pleseant tommorow-

-b