"Broadband Innovations" is a four-part series that highlights groundbreaking broadband uses, and the people who employ the technology to preserve the past, reshape the future, and fulfill their dreams. This final story in the series focuses onward residents of Washington State who receive medical and psychiatric care via video over the Internet.

Timothy Moon's 48 years have been colored by violence. At 16, he was shot. In 1989 he received his first prison sentence. Diagnosed as a manic depressive, Moon finally made a decision about a year ago to get help in dealing with all the anger inside him.

Typically, obtaining medical care would mean transporting Moon, accompanied by two guards, from his cell at Coyote Ridge Corrections Center in Connell, Washington, to a caregiver in Spokane, 100 miles away. A second option would have existence to have a psychiatrist drive all the way from Spokane to the penitentiary for every consultation.

However, thanks to the Northwest Telehealth network, which uses broadband to provide health care to remote locations, Moon undergoes videoconferencing sessions with his psychiatrist without ever leaving the penitentiary. And he likes it better than meeting in person.

"When I'm in a room by myself, there is not so much pressure. It's like talking to the camera, which works against me since I find it more difficult to talk about my problems in person," he says.

Moon initially tried confiding in his member inmates, but set that it did more harm than good. "You can't good express yourself to anyone. They'll interpret it as weakness and take advantage of it." Having been in a couple of fights, he now tries to stick to himself.

"But it's important to have someone to talk to," he says.

The Benefits of Telehealth

About 50 of the 620 inmates at Coyote Ridge use the network for their health-care of necessity. Aside from saving tax dollars and improving safety by minimizing the transport of prisoners, the system also discourages prisoners from feigning symptoms to break the monotony of prison's daily routine.

"In my experience, 50 percent of the inmates that arrive to the ER don't need to be to this place," says Gram McGregor, emergency department manager at Deaconess Medical Center in Spokane.

His ER department is another one of 65 sites throughout eastern Washington and northern Idaho that are united to the Northwest Telehealth network by broadband speeds of up to 100 megabits per inferior. Besides penitentiaries, his ER provides rural hospitals and other sites with remote consultations.

McGregor maintains that the remote service is not just about saving money–it's likewise all over improving the quality of care. "Many rural clinics are understaffed. Whether they need an expert consult, a second opinion, or emergency recommendation, they need to be skilful to access it remotely," he says.

The Rest of the Series

• Part 1: "The 21st Century Athlete" Meet gamer Patrick O'Day, doing his best to represent the U.S. in Digital Games 2008.
• Part 2: "Fiber Optics Reaches the Tipi" A Canadian aboriginal community uses broadband to save its native language and culture from extinction.
• Part 3: "The Film Editor's Dream" A well-known Swedish film editor fulfills his dream of working remotely while living in a rural area, thanks to a superfast fiber-optic broadband connection.

Prison Saved My Life

Jorge Martinez had lost 145 pounds for no reason that he could pinpoint. He was always tired, but didn't suspect that affair was seriously wrong. It was not until Martinez was incarcerated at Coyote Ridge for a narcotics crime that he found out that he was a diabetic.

"Prison saved my life. The way I was eating and drinking, I wouldn't have lasted long," says Martinez, who besides says he has been able to turn his hale condition around through hard work and guidance from regular consultations via the telehealth network.

By exercising, Martinez has been able to decrease his insulin dependency by more than half. from one side diabetes education in a group over the network, he has also learned how to care for his body and skin. Next he hopes to have a teleconsult with a dietician to work out a meal plan.

Diane Benfield, the dietician at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, saves 3 hours of travel per visit due to remote consultations with the inmates at Coyote Ridge. She says this setup allows her to schedule many more appointments with prisoners.

"The inmates are positive and slip on't seem to mind not meeting in person," she says. "I'd love to see the whole statewide system connected."

How Telehealth Works

In 2003, the TelePharmacy service also became available on the network. It enables nurses in 12 remote hospital sites to access approved prescription medicine through a secure vending machine.

Medication orders transmit by way of the network from rural hospitals to a pharmacist at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane. The pharmacist reviews the prescription and confirms it on the computer. After swiping an identification card and typing in a password, the nurse at the remote site can take out the drug from the dispenser.

"Many rural communities may have a pharmacist who comes by twice a week, but they can't afford or aren't able to recruit someone full-time," says Fred W. Hoefler, manager of the TelePharmacy program at Sacred Heart.

Ronda Golladay has worked as a nurse for 30 years. Her current employer, the Othello Community Hospital, participates in the TelePharmacy program to provide pharmacy service 24/7. Under its guidelines, nursing staff must be monitored via videoconferencing when performing activities such as restocking the medicine dispenser.

"People are always apprehensive about letting other people watch them in a Big Brother way. We've tried to overcome that by educating them well in how to use the equipment," says Brian G. Hoots, telehealth analyst at Northwest TeleHealth.

In 2007, nearly 300,000 prescription orders went through the system, a number expected to increase as the TelePharmacy program adds two more sites.

(Series author Kajsa Linnarsson is a visiting reporter covering global developments in broadband for PC World. A graduate of Stanford University's Innovation Journalism program, she lives in Hudiksvall, Sweden, in a region known to the degree that Fiber Optic Valley for its concentration of cutting-edge communication technology companies.)

because the period of the OSCON open source conference, a key Symbian executive elaborated on the reasoning for turning the mobile operating system into an disclose platform.

John Forsyth, Symbian's VP of strategy, said Symbian is the most widely used operating system for smartphones, and more than 200 million Symbian-based devices have been shipped. But despite its success, the proprietary nature was still holding the platform back, Forsyth said.

"If you want to get through this glass ceiling and convince people that you aren't a single point of failure, in that case you have to be taking no part with either side," Forsyth said during the presentation Thursday. "What it required to lessen the force of through to the next level of platform success is something that is free and truly bold and neutral. There is no platform like that today, so what we are setting out to translate is make one."

Additionally, Forsyth said handset manufacturers are growing wary of depending on a single source for software, and the move toward open source will increase adoption potential in many areas.

Last month, Nokia said it would purchase the remaining portion of Symbian that it didn't before that time own and turn it over to a new Symbian Foundation with the goal of creating an open source operating system for handsets.

The foundation will get a framework in place for providing royalty-free licenses to wholly members by next year, Forsyth said. The entire source digest eventually will be when exposed to the Eclipse Public License, but legal and technical issues need to be sorted out.

Forsyth said Symbian's previous proprietary cultivation may pose some challenges during the transition, and the foundation is constantly seeking advice from the common on how to proceed.

Forsyth's presentation comes as an analyst report suggests that Symbian will combine with Google's Android operating system. Analyst firm J. Gold Associates said it expects a merger within six months because of the similar candid source strategies of the respective companies involved.

Google, Symbian, and Nokia have declined to comment upon the matter.

A software industry trade group said Friday it could sue eBay with regard to failing to do enough to prevent the sale of pirated software on the online auction site.

The Software & Information Industry Association said eBay has refused to take several steps recommended by the group to help reduce sales of unlawful software. Despite a few years of discussions, eBay refuses to execute more than just take down auctions of software that the SIIA has identified as pirated.

"Once notified, they will do something," Keith Kuperschmid, senior VP of intellectual property policy and enforcement for SIIA, told InformationWeek. "What they won't do is what we consider pre-emptory, proactive measures."

Those measures include placing a notification in the buyer feedback section that the seller has had pirated items removed from the site; penalize sellers of illegal software, even if it's their first offense; and develop technology to try to find make again offenders who use multiple identities on eBay.

The reason the SIIA wants eBay to do more is because so much pirated software is sold on the site that the group can't identify all the offenders, Kuperschmid said. The SIIA estimates that 75% of the software sold on eBay is illegal.

EBay's refusal to take these steps has led to SIIA discussions of taking eBay to court. The latest talks among members were in May. SIIA members include many big names in software, such as IBM and Oracle.

"It continues to be steady the table," Kuperschmid said of suing eBay. "Does that mean we will be suing anytime soon? No. But it's definitely being discussed by SIIA and its members."

EBay uttered it is doing what it can to keep pirated software off the site, but is willing to continue talking with the SIIA and consider its proposals. "We feel that we're doing enough and that it's a global issue that isn't going away overnight," an eBay spokeswoman said.

The auction site is not new to such allegations. Jewelry company Tiffany sued eBay to force it to become greater amount of proactive in removing counterfeit goods. This month, a federal judge ruled the site is not responsible beneficial to fake goods sold on its site. That decision is expected to be appealed.

Kuperschmid said the Tiffany case is variant, in that the jeweler claimed the counterfeits threatened to sully its reproach., since buyers believed the inferior items were from Tiffany. The SIIA allegations involve laws related to copyright protection, not trademarks.

Nevertheless, the liability of Web sites that act as conduits to goods and services from consumers or businesses remains murky, because courts have yet to fully address the consummation. One high-profile case till now pending is entertainment conglomerate Viacom's lawsuit against YouTube. Viacom has filed a $1 billion copyright-infringement suit against the popular online video service and its parent, Google.

Meanwhile, the SIIA has been aggressively pursuing clan it identifies at the same time that pirates. The group said it initiated the prosecution of Jeremiah Mondello of Oregon, who the SIIA identified as a major vender of illegal software. Montello was convicted of copyright infringement, mail fraud, and aggravated identity theft. A federal judge Wednesday sentenced him to four years in jail.

In addition, the group said it had filed six new lawsuits against sellers of illegal software on cant sites. The SIIA has filed a total of 32 such lawsuits this year.

Microsoft researchers have published a written instrument describing a new method for determining which Web pages are the most apt for a given keyword search query.

Google relies in part on its PageRank algorithm to determine what's relevant. Microsoft's answer to PageRank is BrowseRank.

The academic paper, "BrowseRank: Letting Web Users Vote for Page Importance," was co-authored by Microsoft researchers Bin Gao, Tie-Yan Liu, and Hang Li; Zhiming Ma of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Yuting Liu from Beijing Jiaotong University; Shuyuan He from Peking University; and Nankai University's Ying Zhang.

PageRank treats Web links as votes for relevance. The paper's authors say PageRank can generate inaccurate results "because links can be easily added and deleted by Web content creators."

BrowseRank, Microsoft claims, can deliver more fit search results by measuring user behavior: the Web pages Internet users call upon and the amount of time they remain at those pages.

"The more visits of the page made by the users and the longer time periods spent by the users on the page, the more likely the page is important," the paper states. "With this graph, we can leverage hundreds of millions of users' implicit voting on page importance."

The paper mentions that the data set used to test BrowseRank was cleansed to protect user privacy. "All possible privacy information was rigorously filtered out and the data was sampled and cleaned to remove bias as plenteous as possible," it says.

And that's the only mention of privacy in the document.

But privacy almost certainly would be any issue for Microsoft, suppose that it tried to implement this technique free from some means of anonymization. Keeping records of every Web site that every Internet user visits, as a way to determine relevant search results, would have huge privacy implications.

The company that owns Scrabble has sued Scrabulous, the online word game that resembles Hasbro's board game.

The toy and game company filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York, claiming that Scrabulous creators Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla and RJ Softwares, an offshore software and Web services provider, infringed on its intellectual property. The lawsuit calls the online word game Scrabulous a "clear and blatant" infringement of Scrabble's intellectual property.

"We are pursuing this legal action in accordance with the interests of our shareholders, and the integrity of the Scrabble brand," Hasbro general counsel Barry Nagler said in a statement.

Hasbro also tried to remove the game from Facebook before launching its original game on the social networking site in the beginning of July. The company has sent a letter demanding that Facebook remove Scrabulous from the reach of users in the United States and Canada. Mattel owns the rights to the game outside of those two countries.

Scrabble is available in 121 countries and 29 languages. The game, featuring letter tiles and point values for each letter, was invented in 1938. Scrabulous, created by two brothers in India, launched in 2006 and became popular on the Web, specifically on social networking sites, before the traditional Scrabble game was available online.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday, states Scrabulous uses "essential and original elements" of the famous board game. It also points out that the names "Scrabulous" and "Scrabble" are "confusingly similar." Finally, it states that the defendants said: "It's not really different." Hasbro said the statements amounts to a concession that they copied the board game.

The company is seeking damages, legalized costs, and the elimination of the online game.

Yahoo on Friday said it would reimburse customers who bought music that can no longer be easily played as a result of the Web portal shutting down its online score store.

Yahoo recently notified customers by e-mail that it would shut down the servers that manage the copyright-protection technology embedded in the music files on Sept. 30, the tech news site Ars Technica reported. As a result, those files would no longer play grant that the user moves them to another computer or to a portable minstrelsy player, or makes changes to the operating system in the original computer.

Carrie Davis, spokeswoman for Yahoo Music, confirmed that the digital rights dealing servers would be taken down, severely limiting the use of the files. However, Yahoo did not intend to abandon its customers.

"You'll be compensated for whatever you paid for the music," Davis told InformationWeek. "We haven't said exactly what we will do, but we will take care of our customers."

The company planned to reimburse customers on a case-by-case basis, and has posted an FAQ page that includes a "contact customer care" button at the bottom for former Yahoo Music Store customers. Davis said customers could be reimbursed in several ways, including getting back the money they paid for the music or receiving MP3 versions without DRM technology, that means they can be imported into any music playing software.

Yahoo said in April that it would come to terms its store and music subscription service and migrate the operations to RealNetworks, which operates the Rhapsody music service. Only people who bought music from Yahoo would be eligible for reimbursement. Customers of its music subscription service would exist transferred to Rhapsody, which offers the same service at a similar price, Davis said.

Yahoo has not said how much music it sold from its store, but it was a subordinate player in comparison to market leader iTunes from Apple. The portal's subscription service had only about 400,000 customers when Yahoo announced that it was closing the service, market research firm Inside Digital Media told USA Today.

Yahoo's experience with shutting down its music store highlights the problem DRM technology can have on consumers. While Apple still uses the technology to ensure music can only be played easily on its iPod player, others have switched to selling DRM-free music, including Amazon.com, RealNetworks, and Napster.

A Microsoft official said Friday that the company has agreed to provide monetary and technical support to the Apache Software Foundation, an open source effort that promotes community-built tools and services.

"This sponsorship will enable the ASF to pay administrators and other support staff so that ASF developers can focus on writing great software," said Sam Ramji, senior director of Microsoft's platform strategy, in a blog post from the OSCON open source conference in Portland, Ore. Ramji did not unfold financial details, but the arrangement makes Microsoft a Platinum godfather of Apache.

Apache officials welcomed the move, despite the group's sometimes rocky relationship with the world's biggest relating to traffic software developer.

"We thank Microsoft for their generous sponsorship that goes towards supporting The Apache Software Foundation and the over 60 top of the same rank projects in use and development within the ASF," ASF chairman Jim Jagielski said in a statement.

Microsoft also pledged to make more of its own code available to open source developers.

"Microsoft is putting a wide range of protocols that were anciently in the Communications Protocol Program under the Open Specification Promise (OSP). This guarantees their freedom from any patent claims from Microsoft now or in the future, and includes both Microsoft-developed and industry-developed protocols," wrote Ramji.

In his blog mail-carrier, Ramji added that the company is donating collection of laws to the open source community. "Microsoft is contributing a patch to ADOdb, a popular data onset layer for PHP used by many applications," said Ramji. "The patch enables support for SQL Server through the new 'mother driver for PHP' built by the SQL Server team. ADOdb is licensed below the LGPL and BSD. This is our first code contribution to PHP community projects but give by will not be the last."

By cooperating with open source developers, Microsoft may be hoping to ease pressure from U.S. and European regulators, who have charged the society with using monopolistic practices to protect its software franchise.

The European Commission, which already has imposed more than $1 billion in fines on Microsoft, earlier this year said it's eyeing the possibility that the company is still violating monopoly laws by failing to make its products interoperable with competitors' offerings and by illegally bundling its Internet Explorer Web browser with the Windows operating system.

Researchers have discovered that explosions of magnetic energy a third of the way to the moon power substorms that create the Northern Lights.

Five NASA satellites helped researchers pinpoint how abrupt brightening and rapid movements of the aurora borealis take place. NASA said this week that researchers believe stressed magnetic field lines suddenly snap to a new shape, like a rubber band that's been stretched too far, during a process called magnetic reconnection.

"We discovered that which makes the Northern Lights dance," Vassilis Angelopoulos, a principal investigator for the Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms mission (Themis) at the University of California, Los Angeles, said.

Substorms change the auroral displays at the North and South poles, causing the lights to flutter. The substorms also frequently occur by space storms that disrupt radio communications and GPS signals and cause power outages, NASA reported. Scientists hope the new information helps them improve substorm models and forecasts.

"As they capture and store energy from the solar wind, the Earth's magnetic realm lines stretch far out into short time," said David Sibeck, Themis project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Magnetic reconnection releases the energy stored within these stretched magnetic field lines, flinging charged particles back toward the Earth's atmosphere. They create halos of shimmering aurora circling the northern and southern poles."

The satellites, launched in February 2007, and a network of 20 ground observatories in Canada and Alaska allow scientists to observe the beginning of substorms. Every four days, the satellites line up with the Earth's equator to gather and record data showing where, when, and how substorms advance to maturity.

Synchronized ground stations also point a magnetometer and camera skyward to determine where and when an auroral substorm will set about. NASA explained that research instruments measure auroral light through particles that flow along Earth's magnetic field and the electrical currents they generate.

Recently, the satellites observed an isolated substorm beginning in space, as the observatories recorded the lights and currents over North America. That lent support to the theory that magnetic reconnection causes substorms, NASA said. The theory is that whereas a substorm begins, it follows a pattern that includes reconnection, quick auroral brightening, and rapid expansion toward the Earth's poles. That, in turn, redistributes electrical currents flowing in space and around the Earth.

NextWave Wireless announced this week it sold 63% of its Advanced Wireless Services spectrum for about $150 million.

Pending FCC approval, the company will sell 599 million MHz-pops of its AWS spectrum to T-Mobile USA, MetroPCS, ACS Wireless, and Atlantic Wireless. NextWave originally acquired all of its AWS licenses for about $115 the masses at the FCC auction in 2006.

The AWS spectrum is coveted by wireless operators because it can have existence used to take measures mobile voice and data services, as well as video and messaging.

"The sale of our AWS spectrum is honorable the first step in maximizing the value of our spectrum portfolio," said Allen Salmasi, CEO and president of NextWave Wireless, in a statement. "We will continue to monetize our remaining spectrum assets in the United States and are working with Deutsche Bank and UBS Investment Bank to achieve our spectrum sale objective."

The sale still leaves NextWave with a significant whole of spectrum in the United States, particularly in California, Florida, and New England. The company also owns spectrum in Europe, Canada, and South America.

In April, the company announced it planned to sell its 154 AWS licenses, 30 Wireless Communication Service licenses, and additional Educational Broadband Service and Broadband Radio Service licenses. Taken together, the company's spectrum could create a network that covers most of the United States.

For T-Mobile, the move gives the fourth-largest U.S. wireless carrier more options to potentially expand its 3G network. The company had previously spent more than $4 billion to acquire AWS spectrum during the 2006 auction and began rolling out its high-speed sensitive network earlier this year.

NextWave's stock has jumped up more than 35% in the last few days because of news of the sale and other developments.

"Gmalware" may be coming soon to your iGoogle page.

In two weeks, at the Black Hat Conference forward Wednesday, Aug. 6, Cenzic senior safety analyst Tom Stracener and security researcher Robert Hansen, better known as "RSnake," plan to demonstrate a zero-day vulnerability that affects Google Gadgets.

"At the inner part of the talk is the concept of Gmalware, which is basically a malicious gadget," said Stracener. "The idea is that gadgets are supported by the gmodule domain and security architecture. And with the popular security architecture, it doesn't protect individuals from malicious gadgets self-same well. Nor does it protect gadgets from one another."

Google Gadgets, said Stracener, are vulnerable to information theft, deceptive practices, content spoofing, and authentication issues.

A Google Gadget, for example, can log you into an account without your notice and monitor your Google Search queries, Stracener explained. It can also be made to attack another Google Gadget and steal information.

No evil-minded Google Gadgets take been spotted in the wild yet. Once details about the vulnerabilities emerge, however, that may change.

Google has been alerted to the researchers' findings but hasn't yet publicly acknowledged whether or not it sees a problem. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

"We alerted them to that and what they came back with was this is the expected behavior of this domain," said Hansen. "Both Tom and I found that to be a fairly contentious attitude. We alerted them to it and they decided not to fix it and now we're just demonstrating what we found."

Hansen related that the underlying problem is that Google's security architecture allows an attacker to put pretty much whatever he or she wants inside Google Gadgets. Likening the issue to a SQL injection vulnerability, he said that an attacker could put malicious Flash, HTML, or scripts into a Google Gadget.

Google has some measures at the perimeter to prevent bad gadgets from being introduced. "But there are some tricks that we've come up by to get the Google Gadget subversively added to somebody's iGoogle page," said Hansen.

Google also tries to sandbox the gmodules domain, where Google Gadgets operate, from Google.com. "The problem is that protects you from two or three very specific attacks but it foliage you open to a huge number of other attacks," said Hansen. "What we're outlining is everything else that's wrong with this model."

Google tries "to separate that into a different domain, the gmodules domain," said Hansen. "That protects you from two or three very specific attacks, but it leaves you open to a huge number of other attacks. What we're outlining is everything else that's wrong with this model."