Hackers Hit Again With Hitler Mustache, Music
A cyber-battle has broken out between Austria's right-wing Freedom Party (FPOE) and Web site hackers. The hackers have struck the FPOE's Web site a second time; this time, it was not only a defacement, as occurred over the weekend, but an audio-visual attack: defacement plus an audio feed added to the Web site. As reported Monday by Newsbytes, hackers gained access Saturday to the home page of the Salzburg branch of the party posting a photo of the party's former leader – Joerg Haider – bearing a Hitler-like mustache drawn on his face. Robert Bammer, a spokesman for the FPOE in Salzburg, told Newsbytes Monday that technicians were having trouble removing the page.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/168290.html
Stolen Program Cracks BSD Servers
A free operating system used by thousands of Web sites has a serious new security hole that is being exploited by hackers, according to the developers of FreeBSD. An advisory released Monday by FreeBSD.org says that a bug in the Telnet program included with FreeBSD and related operating systems can allow remote attackers to gain complete control of the Web server. A listing at the FreeBSD site reveals that the operating system is used by high-profile companies including Yahoo, Sony and Microsoft's Hotmail. The Telnet daemon is enabled by default on all FreeBSD installations, "and is being actively exploited in the wild," according to the advisory. Telnet is an Internet protocol that allows a computer user to log onto another computer terminal remotely. The program commonly is used by administrators to remotely control Web servers.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/168280.html
Napster Still No. 1, Other Sites Gain In Popularity 
Embattled file-swapping service Napster has managed to retain its title as the most popular file-sharing site, but according to a new study, competitors are gaining ground - especially with Napster's recent legal troubles. The study was released today by Nielsen//NetRatings, an Internet audience measurement service from Nielsen Media Research, ACNielsen eRatings.com and NetRatings Inc. For the seven-day period ending July 15, Napster had just over 2.6 million unique visitors to its site, Nielsen//NetRatings said. The number of visitors was down 36 percent from the measurement period eight weeks earlier, May 21 to 27, when Napster drew over 4 million surfers. Of course, Napster's legal status has been a major factor in the drop in visitors. The file-swapping service has been the target of numerous lawsuits alleging copyright infringement.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/168243.html
http://iwsun4.infoworld.com/articles...nnaprivals.xml
Morissette Equates Artists' Rights With 'Woman's Right To Choose'
Alanis Morissette stopped publicly unleashing her fury at ex-boyfriends after Jagged Little Pill, but the singer/songwriter has found a new target for her ire: the music industry. In a speech delivered Monday morning at the online music conference Plug.In, Morissette called for artists to band together and fight what she described as the increasingly profit-driven atmosphere at record companies. "Many of the most widely respected artists of the last 30 years would be dropped from their record labels in today's current climate," Morissette said. She argued that labels' bottom-line focus is depriving artists of the chance to experience "natural ebbs and flows" in their careers. More importantly, she said, the music industry is making it increasingly hard for unknown artists to reach the public and make a living.
http://www.sonicnet.com/news/digital...445351&index=2
Payola City 
As a recent series of articles in Salon has made clear, payola is alive and well in the music business. But urban radio remains a world apart, the Wild Wild West of the music industry. In the world of white pop and rock radio, virtually everything on the air is bought and paid for, but in an increasingly corporatized way, with the money going to the station's budget. In urban radio, by contrast, the cash still goes into the personal bank accounts of powerful programmers and consultants, sources say. Crucial airplay "reports" to the industry's trade magazines, sources say, are up for sale. Some stations are paid for songs that are never even played on the air. And as for the money, these same sources say the business is rife with overnighted packages stuffed with cash and shipped off to recipients with phony names, or money orders made out to programmers and sent to home addresses.
http://www.salon.com/ent/music/featu...dio/index.html
Save Java!
Clay Shirky didn't fret when Microsoft announced last week that it would no longer include the Java Virtual Machine in its upcoming Windows XP operating system. The Hunter College professor and Net pundit understood that the move could hurt competition and diversity on the desktop. He also knew that the company's abandonment of the JVM, which lets computers run applications written in the Java computer language, threatened to make it harder for Java programs to proliferate. How many users would bother with Java programs if they had to download the JVM to use them? How many programmers, given the additional hurdle, would write Java programs when they couldn't be sure of who would access them? Would Microsoft successfully cut off Java's air supply as it had done to so many other competitors? While others pondered the fate of Java, Shirky saw an opportunity: He figured that PC manufacturers could trump the software giant.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/20...ava/index.html
Fireball rattles the East Coast
James Mennig’s story of what he saw Monday evening was so incredible his own mother didn’t believe him. To him, the bright lights in the skies above Pennsylvania looked like a plane engulfed in flames. But authorities said it was likely a meteor shower or phenomenon known as a fireball or “bolide.” People from Virginia to Canada said they saw the lights and heard loud noises. This is a natural event, which is called a bolide or a fireball. It is similar to the shooting stars you see sporadically at night in its appearance, but as far as the physical nature of this object is concerned it’s quite different from the periodic meteor showers we get,” U.S. Naval Observatory spokesman Geoff Chester said.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/586894.asp?0dm=C17PT
DVD Forum to stamp out region-crackable players
The DVD Forum, the movie and consumer electronics business-backed consortium that controls the DVD standard, has begun taking steps to eliminate Chinese-made players and drives that play fast and loose with DVD region encoding. Its tactic: to threaten Taiwanese DVD player makers with legal action to enforce a ban on all unofficial DVD products, the prohibition to take effect on 1 October. To beat the ban, consumer electronics companies must have their DVD machines certified by that date. After that, if they haven't been certified by the DVD Forum, they will have to cease using the 'DVD' logo on their products.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/20589.html
Infamous porn site gets a hacker makeover
The Stile Project, a gross-out comedy-cum-sex site that has grown infamous on the Net, claims to have been defaced. The home page of the site, which won a Webby award in the weird category last year and has a cult following, was replaced by a profane message from hacker Fluffy Bunny, which featured a toy pink rabbit sticking its arse in the air. Charming, especially when you consider its bottom clearly needed wiping, and the people behind the Stile Project (which some describe as postmodern pornography) aren't amused. A rant from the site's administrator, Stile, threatens dire (and depraved) retribution against Fluffy Bunny, who is best known as the hacker who caused chaos by breaking into the servers of SourceForge and the Apache Project earlier this year.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/20615.html
Well, it's all for today... enjoy your reading!
