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walktalker · 13-08-01, 05:18 PM

Artist Wants to Paint Moon, But Physics May Foil Plan
An artist hoping to recruit millions of laser-pointer owners to "paint the Moon" may instead be disappointed by physics. James T. Downey, the artist behind the project, is intent on creating a "collaborative work of celestial art" by illuminating a fleeting red spot on our only natural satellite. The event, an effort to help people "find the excitement of space," is scheduled for two nights, one in October and another in November. Downey has chosen a target location for the beams on the dark portion of the Moon while it's in its first-quarter. Each attempt would last five minutes. A web site, called "Paint the Moon," has been set up with instructions for where and how to point your laser and why you should participate.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronom..._010810-1.html

As Ethicists, They Don't Hack It
Wandering around the great tent city known as Hackers at Large 2001 feels a lot like stumbling on the Land That Social Skills Forgot. It's a study in awkwardness when hackers congregate en masse, as 3,000 of them did Saturday and Sunday in the eastern Netherlands. Snorts of laughter seem to punctuate every social encounter. Jokes are told just a little too loudly, and usually fall flat. People squint at each other from inches away, as if they were peering into a computer monitor instead of into the eyes of another human being. Social skills are irrelevant to hackers, which is fine when you're alone in a dark room building and breaking code. However, when it comes to assuming leadership of a frequently maligned and misunderstood subculture, chewing with your mouth closed has its upside.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,46033,00.html

Hackers: Wake Up and Be Useful
It's a tough question: Just what does a hacker do to follow through on the urge to take socially responsible, socially meaningful action? Dave Del Torto, founder of the CyrptoRights Foundation, offered a suggestion during his talk Sunday afternoon at HAL2001, and it went over like gangbusters. Del Torto's message was that human-rights groups need help in learning about cryptography and computers, and that smart, knowledgeable people need to get involved. "Time to pay the world back," he said to loud cheers.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,46035,00.html

Image Woes Haunt MS Launch
As Microsoft prepares to introduce Windows XP, one of the most important products in the company's storied history, it continues to suffer from one insurmountable problem. It's not the Microsoft engineer's programming error that permitted the Code Red worm to crawl into servers across the Internet. Nor is it the company's other embarrassing security snafus, which invite other electronic vermin like Sircam to infest Windows inboxes. Microsoft is still struggling to overcome the same public perception of an arrogant, industry-straddling bully that first landed it in legal trouble with the Feds over a decade ago.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,46026,00.html

Stem Cells: Now for the Hard Part
President Bush will allow the government to fund research on stem cell lines that already exist. Although that's not as good a deal as many researchers hoped for, they're not going to sit around and mope. They'll take what they can get and they're eager the take the next step. Research on embryonic stem cells using federal funds could begin before the end of this year under Bush's new guidelines. Writing grant proposals will be daunting enough with patents and potential lawsuits complicating the process. But the science ahead is even more challenging.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,46017,00.html

Pirates on Game Boy's Bow
It's tough for technology companies to keep up with software pirates these days. Even before Nintendo started selling its new Game Boy Advance console, the hardware and software to crack it was already on the market. The Game Boy Advance, the pumped-up successor to the wildly popular Game Boy Color, launched in the U.S. in the middle of June. But two week's earlier, an online retailer in Hong Kong started selling hardware that makes cracking it a cinch.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,45906,00.html

Feeling the virtual force in LA
In the virtual world you can look but not really touch, at least not yet. As 6,800 multimedia experts from 75 countries gather in Los Angeles for the annual Siggraph Convention, it is becoming clear virtual reality is becoming chillingly real. Imagine being able to smell the disgusting breath of dinosaurs in a future version of Jurassic Park and feel the ground shake as they approach. This does not seem so far fetched given new research being presented at the international conference.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci...00/1484517.stm

Old code defeats new CD anti-ripping technologies
Macrovision's SafeAudio and Midbar's Cactus - both new technologies designed to prevent CDs from being copied successfully - may have been defeated by software released over two years ago. CloneCD, from German developer Elaborate Bytes, was written to duplicate discs bit by bit. The code requires a CD-R or CD-RW drive that supports RAW mode, which, according to EB, almost all currently available models do. Essentially, RAW mode allows data to be read and written as pure binary data rather than files (as a CD drive does) or music tracks (the way a CD player works). CloneCD generates a perfect copy of the data on the source CD - including all the noise and other modifications to music and control data made by the likes of Cactus and SafeAudio.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/20947.html

Napster Dies As Record Sales Dip: A Coincidence?

In the second quarter of 2001, online music-swapping service Napster essentially died. At the same time, according to the SoundScan sales-tracking firm, overall record sales dipped 5.4 percent compared to 2000's healthier second quarter. Coincidentally or not, Napster's star was on the rise in that second quarter of 2000, at a time when record sales were on the rise. The recording industry, of course, sued Napster saying that the rogue music-exchange was stealing bread from its mouth by allowing consumers to get for free what record labels were selling at fairly premium prices. The industry now appears to have gotten the upper hand in court. The free version of Napster is out of service and it might remain that way until it reemerges as a subscription service.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/168974.html

Hackers Break Into Court Records Site
A Web site that allows online access to federal court records suffered a security compromise today. Attackers replaced the home page of the RACER site operated by the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Nevada with a message entitled, "Why do we hack?" The defaced site was inaccessible this afternoon. The main site of the Nevada bankruptcy court, which is at a different Internet protocol address, was still reachable and appeared unaffected by the intrusion. RACER stands for Remote Access to Court Electronic Records. According to the message left by the hackers, "no file has been deleted or looked at."
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/168971.html

Groups Rally To Defend Yahoo Against French Court Ruling
A clutch of high-profile industry groups this week filed a brief supporting Yahoo's challenge of a French court's ruling that restricts what products Yahoo can offer to its U.S. customers. "The Internet is important to all our members and not just those - like Yahoo - who are in the Internet business," U.S. Chamber of Commerce General Counsel Stephen Bokat said, explaining the Chamber's decision to weigh in on the case. If the French ruling is enforced, "the strictest law of any country would be applicable to all American Web sites," Bokat said. Last November, a French court demanded that Yahoo prevent French users from viewing or participating in any auctions of Nazi-related memorabilia. The ruling further demanded that Yahoo shield French eyes from "any other site or service that may be construed as an apology for Nazism."
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/168967.html

Processing Intelligence
Dave Glock admitted defeat. Earlier this year he determined that his startup company, developing a Web-based secure transaction technology with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, had been beaten to the marketplace. Rather than wallow in that setback he quickly retooled. Glock and his company looked to enhance its technology to tackle new content management challenges and what's known as "electronic data interchange" with two emerging and potentially powerful high-tech innovations: Extensible Markup Language, or XML, and artificial intelligence. The result is Sphere Software, a 16-month-old company in Howard County's NeoTech incubator since April. Its first product is an information management framework marrying XML and artificial intelligence called XITE. It was launched in late June.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/168961.html

MPEG-4 Standard Trying To Find Its Niche
The limitations of the MPEG-4 video standard make it unlikely to be widely adopted on PCs as a streaming video player, but according to a new study, it has bright potential on handheld devices and in interactive advertising. The study by the Yankee Group, a technology research and strategic consulting firm, defined MPEG-4 as an "open specification for encoding and decoding video that enables interactive applications." According to the Yankee Group, the Motion Picture Experts Group Consortium, which developed two previous standards known as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, designed MPEG-4 to use less bandwidth while allowing more interactivity. However, the firm describes some aspects of the technology are "cumbersome," and said it is unlikely to unseat Microsoft's Windows Media Player or RealNetworks' RealPlayer streaming video players.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/168969.html

More news later on

13-08-01, 05:18 PM	#3
walktalker The local newspaper man Join Date: Aug 2000 Location: Montreal Posts: 2,036	Artist Wants to Paint Moon, But Physics May Foil Plan An artist hoping to recruit millions of laser-pointer owners to "paint the Moon" may instead be disappointed by physics. James T. Downey, the artist behind the project, is intent on creating a "collaborative work of celestial art" by illuminating a fleeting red spot on our only natural satellite. The event, an effort to help people "find the excitement of space," is scheduled for two nights, one in October and another in November. Downey has chosen a target location for the beams on the dark portion of the Moon while it's in its first-quarter. Each attempt would last five minutes. A web site, called "Paint the Moon," has been set up with instructions for where and how to point your laser and why you should participate. http://www.space.com/scienceastronom..._010810-1.html As Ethicists, They Don't Hack It Wandering around the great tent city known as Hackers at Large 2001 feels a lot like stumbling on the Land That Social Skills Forgot. It's a study in awkwardness when hackers congregate en masse, as 3,000 of them did Saturday and Sunday in the eastern Netherlands. Snorts of laughter seem to punctuate every social encounter. Jokes are told just a little too loudly, and usually fall flat. People squint at each other from inches away, as if they were peering into a computer monitor instead of into the eyes of another human being. Social skills are irrelevant to hackers, which is fine when you're alone in a dark room building and breaking code. However, when it comes to assuming leadership of a frequently maligned and misunderstood subculture, chewing with your mouth closed has its upside. http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,46033,00.html Hackers: Wake Up and Be Useful It's a tough question: Just what does a hacker do to follow through on the urge to take socially responsible, socially meaningful action? Dave Del Torto, founder of the CyrptoRights Foundation, offered a suggestion during his talk Sunday afternoon at HAL2001, and it went over like gangbusters. Del Torto's message was that human-rights groups need help in learning about cryptography and computers, and that smart, knowledgeable people need to get involved. "Time to pay the world back," he said to loud cheers. http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,46035,00.html Image Woes Haunt MS Launch As Microsoft prepares to introduce Windows XP, one of the most important products in the company's storied history, it continues to suffer from one insurmountable problem. It's not the Microsoft engineer's programming error that permitted the Code Red worm to crawl into servers across the Internet. Nor is it the company's other embarrassing security snafus, which invite other electronic vermin like Sircam to infest Windows inboxes. Microsoft is still struggling to overcome the same public perception of an arrogant, industry-straddling bully that first landed it in legal trouble with the Feds over a decade ago. http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,46026,00.html Stem Cells: Now for the Hard Part President Bush will allow the government to fund research on stem cell lines that already exist. Although that's not as good a deal as many researchers hoped for, they're not going to sit around and mope. They'll take what they can get and they're eager the take the next step. Research on embryonic stem cells using federal funds could begin before the end of this year under Bush's new guidelines. Writing grant proposals will be daunting enough with patents and potential lawsuits complicating the process. But the science ahead is even more challenging. http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,46017,00.html Pirates on Game Boy's Bow It's tough for technology companies to keep up with software pirates these days. Even before Nintendo started selling its new Game Boy Advance console, the hardware and software to crack it was already on the market. The Game Boy Advance, the pumped-up successor to the wildly popular Game Boy Color, launched in the U.S. in the middle of June. But two week's earlier, an online retailer in Hong Kong started selling hardware that makes cracking it a cinch. http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,45906,00.html Feeling the virtual force in LA In the virtual world you can look but not really touch, at least not yet. As 6,800 multimedia experts from 75 countries gather in Los Angeles for the annual Siggraph Convention, it is becoming clear virtual reality is becoming chillingly real. Imagine being able to smell the disgusting breath of dinosaurs in a future version of Jurassic Park and feel the ground shake as they approach. This does not seem so far fetched given new research being presented at the international conference. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci...00/1484517.stm Old code defeats new CD anti-ripping technologies Macrovision's SafeAudio and Midbar's Cactus - both new technologies designed to prevent CDs from being copied successfully - may have been defeated by software released over two years ago. CloneCD, from German developer Elaborate Bytes, was written to duplicate discs bit by bit. The code requires a CD-R or CD-RW drive that supports RAW mode, which, according to EB, almost all currently available models do. Essentially, RAW mode allows data to be read and written as pure binary data rather than files (as a CD drive does) or music tracks (the way a CD player works). CloneCD generates a perfect copy of the data on the source CD - including all the noise and other modifications to music and control data made by the likes of Cactus and SafeAudio. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/20947.html Napster Dies As Record Sales Dip: A Coincidence? In the second quarter of 2001, online music-swapping service Napster essentially died. At the same time, according to the SoundScan sales-tracking firm, overall record sales dipped 5.4 percent compared to 2000's healthier second quarter. Coincidentally or not, Napster's star was on the rise in that second quarter of 2000, at a time when record sales were on the rise. The recording industry, of course, sued Napster saying that the rogue music-exchange was stealing bread from its mouth by allowing consumers to get for free what record labels were selling at fairly premium prices. The industry now appears to have gotten the upper hand in court. The free version of Napster is out of service and it might remain that way until it reemerges as a subscription service. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/168974.html Hackers Break Into Court Records Site A Web site that allows online access to federal court records suffered a security compromise today. Attackers replaced the home page of the RACER site operated by the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Nevada with a message entitled, "Why do we hack?" The defaced site was inaccessible this afternoon. The main site of the Nevada bankruptcy court, which is at a different Internet protocol address, was still reachable and appeared unaffected by the intrusion. RACER stands for Remote Access to Court Electronic Records. According to the message left by the hackers, "no file has been deleted or looked at." http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/168971.html Groups Rally To Defend Yahoo Against French Court Ruling A clutch of high-profile industry groups this week filed a brief supporting Yahoo's challenge of a French court's ruling that restricts what products Yahoo can offer to its U.S. customers. "The Internet is important to all our members and not just those - like Yahoo - who are in the Internet business," U.S. Chamber of Commerce General Counsel Stephen Bokat said, explaining the Chamber's decision to weigh in on the case. If the French ruling is enforced, "the strictest law of any country would be applicable to all American Web sites," Bokat said. Last November, a French court demanded that Yahoo prevent French users from viewing or participating in any auctions of Nazi-related memorabilia. The ruling further demanded that Yahoo shield French eyes from "any other site or service that may be construed as an apology for Nazism." http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/168967.html Processing Intelligence Dave Glock admitted defeat. Earlier this year he determined that his startup company, developing a Web-based secure transaction technology with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, had been beaten to the marketplace. Rather than wallow in that setback he quickly retooled. Glock and his company looked to enhance its technology to tackle new content management challenges and what's known as "electronic data interchange" with two emerging and potentially powerful high-tech innovations: Extensible Markup Language, or XML, and artificial intelligence. The result is Sphere Software, a 16-month-old company in Howard County's NeoTech incubator since April. Its first product is an information management framework marrying XML and artificial intelligence called XITE. It was launched in late June. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/168961.html MPEG-4 Standard Trying To Find Its Niche The limitations of the MPEG-4 video standard make it unlikely to be widely adopted on PCs as a streaming video player, but according to a new study, it has bright potential on handheld devices and in interactive advertising. The study by the Yankee Group, a technology research and strategic consulting firm, defined MPEG-4 as an "open specification for encoding and decoding video that enables interactive applications." According to the Yankee Group, the Motion Picture Experts Group Consortium, which developed two previous standards known as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, designed MPEG-4 to use less bandwidth while allowing more interactivity. However, the firm describes some aspects of the technology are "cumbersome," and said it is unlikely to unseat Microsoft's Windows Media Player or RealNetworks' RealPlayer streaming video players. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/168969.html More news later on __________________ This post was sponsored by Netcoco, who wants cookies, cookies, cookies and, you guessed it, more cookies