Attack Can't Erase Stored Data
A week after a terrorist attack obliterated their offices, tenants of the World Trade Center are slowly piecing their businesses back together again. In addition to the horrific human toll -– thousands of WTC employees are missing and assumed dead –- companies that were housed in the towers are facing computer equipment losses to the tune of $500 million, according to financial services firm Morgan Stanley. But one asset most tenants avoided losing on Sept. 11 was electronic data. They had learned a valuable lesson after the 1993 WTC bombing: Back up information often and completely.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,47004,00.html
Infected DSL Users Get 86ed
Educate yourself about computer security or get the hell off the Internet is the message that some Internet service providers are delivering to their customers. Frustrated with users who can't or won't configure their computers to stop the spread of worms and viruses, some broadband access providers have now decided to cut service to customers whose machines are infected with worms such as Code Red and Nimda. Only computers that run unpatched Windows 2000 and NT operating systems using Microsoft's IIS Web server software are vulnerable to infection by Code Red and Nimda.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,47037,00.html
China Quietly Unblocks U.S. Sites
Chinese Internet censors quietly unblocked several major U.S. media websites this week in a surprise move that one Chinese expert said may have been prompted by a demand for news about the U.S. terrorist attacks. The change grants China's Web-using public access to the previously unviewable sites of The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Boston Globe, which were blocked as recently as Sunday. It was unclear exactly what day the unblocking occurred. Among those still blocked are the sites of CNN, Voice of America, Time magazine and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, as well as a slew of Western human rights groups including Amnesty International.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,47017,00.html
The Little Screensaver That Could
IBM is spending $100 million building the world's fastest supercomputer to do cutting-edge medical research, but a distributed computing effort running on ordinary PCs may have beaten Big Blue to the punch. IBM's proposed Blue Gene, a massively parallel supercomputer, in hopes to help diagnose and treat disease by simulating the ultra-complex process of protein folding. The monster machine will be capable of more than 1 quadrillion operations per second and will be 1,000 times faster than Deep Blue, the computer that defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, IBM said.But Folding@Home, a modest distributed computing project run by Dr. Vijay Pande and a group of graduate students at Stanford University, has already managed to simulate how proteins self-assemble, something that computers, until now, have not been able to do.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,46982,00.html
Devices Unite to Find Drugs
A virtual supercomputer looking for potential cancer medicines is yielding impressive results. A search for potential cancer drugs by chip maker Intel and United Devices, a distributed computing company, is screening candidate medicines at a much faster rate than was previously thought possible. In the five months since its launch in April, the Intel-United Devices Cancer Research Project has identified 60,000 molecules that may inhibit cancer growth. The Intel-UD software, which is a screensaver like SETI@Home and Folding@Home, searches for molecules that bind with cancer cells to prevent them from replicating.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,47013,00.html
Americans want Uncryption
Three in four Americans favour tough anti-encryption laws, in the wake of last week's terrorist atrocities, a survey finds. Seventy-two per cent believe anti-encryption laws will be "somewhat" or "very" helpful in combating terrorism, according to the survey, conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates. The survey found that 54 per cent of those asked "would favour reducing encryption of communications to make it easier for the FBI and CIA to monitor the activities of suspected terrorists - EVEN IF it might infringe on people's privacy and affect business practices".
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/21791.html
Warner Bros. Plans Re-Release of Kubrick's '2001'
Warner Bros. film studio on Thursday said it will release a digitally enhanced version of director Stanley Kubrick's classic meditation on man and machine, "2001: A Space Odyssey'', in movie theaters this October. The science-fiction movie debuted in 1968 and set the world astir with its tale of man's excursions into deep space and his interaction with an evil computer named HAL. When originally released, the film sparked controversy over the future use of computers and whether they would come to control people's lives. This new version of the original 70 mm film has been digitally enhanced, and the soundtrack has been remastered for today's theaters.
http://www.space.com/news/2001_rerelease_010921.html
The World Wide Translator
Despite hundreds of millions of dollars and decades of research, gibberishes typify the results of language translation software. As a result, the translation business hasn't come very far from its days as a cottage industry — an expensive, time-consuming process dependent on highly specialized human translators. Globalization companies hope to break through this barrier with software that employs translation memory — a way to use past translations to speed new ones. But building a useful database of translations is a slow and expensive endeavor, and companies guard their translations jealously.
http://www.techreview.com/web/leo/leo092101.asp
Forestry Companies Take A Cut At Cybersquatters
With forestry and paper-making companies Mead Corp. and Westvaco Corp. on the brink of a merger, it seems that one of their first joint efforts won't be the manufacture of envelopes or cardboard boxes, but a hunt for cybersquatters they say have stolen their names for Internet addresses. Early on Aug. 29, the two companies announced their plans to join in a $3 billion stock-swap transaction. That same day, as investors were learning about the new company, to be called MeadWestvaco, individuals providing Korean addresses were registering Internet domains such as MeadWestvaco.com, Mead-Westvaco.com (with a hyphen), and MeadWestvaco.net.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170383.html
Windows XP Review: Stable But Often Annoying
. Six years ago, Microsoft unveiled a new operating system that it promised would work faster, more reliably and more simply than anything it had ever made before. Now it's about to make the same offer. Windows 95 never quite lived up to that billing, but Windows XP — short for "experience" — just might. Whether it's worthy of today's hype is another question. The best reason to pay XP's $99 upgrade price ($199 for Windows 95 users) is its stability. The three weeks I've tested this system — which starts shipping with new PCs on Monday and arrives in stores Oct. 25 — have been almost free of system crashes and hangs.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170382.html
European Privacy Groups Lobby EU On Privacy Issues
Seven European privacy and civil liberties groups are lobbying European ministers to consider all the issues before rushing through anti- terrorist legislation that could endanger the rights of individual Internet users. In an open letter to the European Council, which has been scheduled to meet this evening in Brussels, Belgium, the privacy and civil liberties groups are requesting European leaders "to refrain from new and extended communications interception and lawful access powers for police forces and intelligences services." The council meeting is being held to discuss several security issues that have arisen in the wake of the Sept. 11, terrorist attacks across the U.S.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170377.html
Governments struggle to second guess terrorists' next move
As the dust starts to settle on the terrorist atrocities in the US, governments around the world are urgently reviewing their counter-terrorist measures. One of their biggest unknowns is whether terrorists are now likely to stick to the low-tech approach of 11 September, or whether they will turn to chemical or biological weapons. The question is urgent, because vast amounts of government money worldwide are soon likely to be channelled towards developing better counter-terrorism approaches. But which? Attacks like those on New York and Washington DC are based on undermining the infrastructure of urban society and the measures needed to guard against these are largely unexplored. Until the attacks on the US, virtually every analysis of the terrorist threat, and much counter-terrorism funding, assumed the enemy would use chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991327
http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2001/...get/index.html
A Saddam connection?
Even as the Bush administration and the national media focus almost exclusively on Osama bin Laden as the seemingly preordained "prime suspect" in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, evidence is beginning to emerge that a more familiar enemy may also have been involved in the devastation: Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The central trail of evidence appears to show bin Laden's unquestionable complicity, but a second, subtler set of footprints may lead to Saddam's door. That trail originates with the first World Trade Center bombing, with evidence that some analysts believe links the 1993 operation to Iraq. That theory has gained currency over the past few years among some intelligence experts, including former CIA director R. James Woolsey.
http://www.salon.com/politics/featur...raq/index.html
U.S. probes bin Laden's finances
Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network raise money through a variety of legitimate and illegal sources, ranging from charities, business enterprises and wealthy supporters to illegal drug and weapons trafficking, the U.S. government believes. Investigators and experts believe members of bin Laden's al-Qaida network make money any way they can to support the cause. There are strong signs al-Qaida has profited handsomely from the opium trade, with fighters used as smugglers and to protect smugglers, said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
http://www.salon.com/tech/wire/2001/...den/index.html
Bush: America "called to defend freedom"
President Bush asked the American people Thursday night to be prepared for a protracted and difficult war against global terrorism, saying America was "a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom." In a momentous 30-minute address to Congress delivered nine days after terrorists carried out the most deadly nonmilitary attacks on the United States in its history, Bush sought to rally public support for a new kind of war. "Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution," Bush said. "Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done." Speaking in a resolute tone in which confidence was tempered by seriousness, Bush threw down the gauntlet to Afghanistan's ruling Taliban party, demanding that it immediately hand over suspected terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and all other terrorists. "These demands are not open to negotiation or discussion," Bush said to one of the loudest of the speech's many interruptions by bipartisan applause.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...ech/index.html
HP told to pay three-and-half years' CD-R drive royalties
Hewlett-Packard has been ordered by a German court to reveal how many CD-R and CD-RW drives it has sold in the country during the last three and a half years. The order is the latest chapter in story going back almost as long. Sued by the music makers and publishers as an exemplar CD-R drive maker, HP was forced in February 1998 to pay a fixed fee to cover past sales of CD burners. The company agreed to a future per-unit levy on drives sold after the first of that month. The case centred on the use of CD recording equipment to duplicate music CDs. Germany levies a per-unit fee on other types of recording equipment, and the music industry wanted computer-based drives to be included too.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/21823.html
More news later on
