The Newspaper Shop -- late Thursday edition

[walktalker]

Yep I'm back at work !!

Flaw causes credit card chaos
In April, a devastating bug was found in shopping cart software called "PDG" that exposed all customer records on about 4,000 Web sites. The FBI issued a public warning directed at the software's customers, but a small e-commerce Web site named SawyerDesign.com didn't notice.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...761859,00.html

Police want to monitor all Net traffic
European Home Office officials are supporting demands from law enforcement authorities for logs of all Internet traffic to be stored for up to seven years, a move that would increase police powers to intercept communications data.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...761777,00.html

Linux takes Hollywood by storm
An ugly green ogre named Shrek may make an impression when he arrives in theaters nationwide Friday. He might also spook some people in the computer industry. The ornery, mud-loving creature morphs into a romantic hero through some of the richest digital animation yet created. Producer DreamWorks SKG gives considerable credit for the performance to another transformation -- animators' use of the free Linux operating system instead of software from the likes of Microsoft Corp. and Silicon Graphics Inc.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...761566,00.html

Napster seeks testers for paid service
Music-swapping service Napster is calling for people to test its forthcoming subscription service, tentatively scheduled to launch this summer. The company posted an appeal for beta testers on its Web site Wednesday, saying it is looking for people to be "the first to preview the new membership service." No further details were available.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...083035,00.html

Take that! Linux beats MS in benchmark test
Linux has finally made it onto the business map in the area of database benchmarks, helping take the wind out of Microsoft's continued contention that open-source operating systems don't make good business sense. While benchmark wars are commonplace in the database space, until the latest TPC-H numbers were released Microsoft had come to largely dominate the TPC numbers with a combination of SQL Server 2000 running on Windows 2000 across a variety of hardware platforms.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...760874,00.html

Breaking free from Microsoft's hold
With Office and Windows XP looming on the horizon, and all the forthcoming "XP" branded programs soon to follow, I have heard many people complaining about the course Microsoft is taking with their products. While some of these complaints are FUD, I do respect those messages that make valid points, and I have heard a lot of people talking about making the "big switch" from a Windows operating system to a Linux distribution.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/co...760920,00.html

SoundExchange freezes Webcast royalties
SoundExchange, a record industry group that collects Webcasting royalties, said Thursday that it will not distribute money to labels and artists this year. The group, which was scheduled to distribute the money in July, said it is still working with its 25 Webcasters to get reports needed to accurately distribute the money. The group said it has collected Webcasting royalties "in the low millions" of dollars.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=mn_hd

RealNetworks unveils Napster-like service
RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser gave a first public look Thursday at the MusicNet subscription service his company is building, describing features that resemble Napster's file-swapping service. MusicNet, a joint venture with major record labels from AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann and EMI Group, plans to let music fans search for and download or stream a broad range of music owned by those three labels, Glaser said. These songs could be downloaded from other MusicNet subscribers, as people would on Napster, as well as from central servers.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Technology uses one number to find you on any device
Imagine being able to reach a person anywhere simply by typing in a single telephone number on the Internet. The message could be sent to any possible point of contact: cell phone, e-mail, instant messenger, voice mail or any other form of electronic communication. This kind of white pages on steroids is one goal of a new technology being tested by some major Internet and telephone companies.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-201...html?tag=mn_hd

Sony tunes its PCs for TV
Sony Electronics unveiled a new Vaio PC on Thursday that can receive and record television. The new Vaio Digital Studio PCV-RX490TV includes digital video recorder technology and a DVD-rewritable drive. These features will allow people to watch shows on a PC monitor or a TV set and record them to a hard drive or DVD-RW disc as if they were recording to a VCR tape.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Brainstorming a Net-powered supercomputer
World experts are meeting here to brainstorm the next step in the evolution of the Internet--linking computers via the Net to provide supercomputer capacity. "Scientists are creating computer systems that will provide large-scale resource sharing via the Internet by having otherwise unrelated computer systems cooperate with one another," Queensland University of Technology computing science associate professor George Mohay said.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=ch_mh

Open-source advocates answer Microsoft
Calling Microsoft's way of doing business a "deliberately incompatible strategy," 10 luminaries from the open-source movement lashed back at the software giant on Tuesday for its recent criticism of the centerpiece of the free-software movement: the general public license, or GPL.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=ch_mh

New MP3 format faces Microsoft challenge
Smaller and better is the mantra of the technology industry, but when it comes to the upgrade for the MP3 audio compression format that simple formula is not a guarantee of success. Over the last several weeks, a few people have taken a first listen to the new version of MP3, the audio format that has kept the Net music world in a state of flux for a half-decade. As an upgrade to an aging technology, there's no question that the MP3Pro format is overdue, but whether it catches on is in doubt.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=cd_pr

Copy-protected CD's wounded Pride
Free copies of songs from country music singer Charley Pride's latest album appeared on the Internet this week, just shortly before a version of the CD incorporating new anti-copying technology was released in U.S. stores Tuesday. The CD, released by Nashville, Tenn.-based Music City Records, features Pride's new album, "A Tribute to Jim Reeves." Eight of the 15 songs on the CD were posted Monday on a private Web page hosted by Yahoo.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=ch_mh

More news later on

[lezzbeefriends]

HeyWalkTalker sweetie!!

Thanks so much for my evening news. I come home from a hectic day at the job, fighting traffic on the expressways. I prop my feet up, have a little libation and my news in hand from my favorite newsman! Great to have you back at it again hon!

Sorry that you got caught in the forum limbo land of waiting for email verification. If I could spank the forum control center I would- locking out our sweet newsman like that.

[walktalker]

Bill Takes On Ads at School
A proposed amendment to the omnibus education bill now before the Senate would require schools to get parental consent before allowing marketers to collect any information from kids at school. If approved, the measure could seriously affect the way students use the Internet.
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,43847,00.html

Music Execs Find New Target
Digital music executives told Congress Thursday that online music systems could not thrive without an overhaul of the nation's copyright laws, drawing protests from songwriters and music publishers who depend on royalty payments for income. The hearing marked the third time in a year that Congress took a look at the rapidly evolving world of digital music.
http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,43898,00.html

Quantum-light processor may thrash supercomputers
Combining quantum mechanics and laser technology, scientists have constructed a lightning-fast computer that could render conventional supercomputers obsolete. The new processor is said to be capable of conducting myriad computations simultaneously, unlike traditional electron-powered ones that must trudge through number-crunching tasks in sequence.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/science...ter/index.html

Boy, You Fight Like a Girl
In her flowing crimson cape, thigh-high leather boots and metal-studded red leather bustier, Cardinal is a bow-and-arrow-toting femme fatale. But not only is Cardinal not real--she's a character in the popular computer game "Ultima Online"--she's not really female. Cardinal is the alter-ego of Kenn Gold, a 33-year-old former Army sergeant with thorny green-and-black tattoos covering both of his muscular arms.
http://www.latimes.com/business/2001...000041409.html

Night and Day, Computers Collect Information
From morning until night, the mundane details of life are being tracked, recorded and analyzed. Cheaper computing power and a vastly expanding Internet have enabled businesses, government agencies and many others to watch what was once unwatchable and glean meaning and profit from the ephemera of daily activity. Data giants have created dossiers containing names, addresses, incomes, purchases and other details about 200 million American adults – and then flashed them to customers on demand. Profile specialists make models of what consumers are likely to do or buy.
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/was...2001May14.html

Napster and the Middleman
This whole file sharing idea with all of its copyright and ownership laden rhetoric is nothing new. If you were any kind of astute user of bulletin boards before the world wide web or have been a user of the commercial Internet since the early days then its likely you remember pirating Doom, waiting hours for an early copy of Adobe’s Photoshop and even downloading .wav files that took just as long wishing someone would make it all easier. Luckily they did.
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/news.php3?id=05152001a

Record Labels and Songwriters' Duet Turns Into a One-on-One
While record labels and songwriters have joined forces to fight Napster, they stood on opposite sides of the room Thursday on the question of how much in royalties should be paid to composers and publishers when music is legally distributed over the Internet. At a three-hour congressional hearing on digital music, both the recording industry and songwriters, including country musician Lyle Lovett, aired their growing dispute over the complicated web of music licenses needed to make music available online via legal alternatives to Napster by this summer.
http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,24573,00.html

Life after Eazel
Eazel, the open-source start-up that promised to do for Linux-based operating systems what many of its founding engineers had done for the original Macintosh -- make it fun and easy to use -- is dead. Another victim of the dot-com downturn, Eazel never even had a chance to test whether its fee-based service plans would work before it ran out of money. But before we shed any tears over yet another high-profile new economy flameout, let's get right to the most important question: Forget about the company -- what's going to happen to the code?
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/leon/2...one/index.html

Studios discuss plan to spur the spread of digital cinema
It seems like a simple and compelling idea: use digital technology instead of old-fashioned celluloid to project movies in theaters. But making it happen is proving more complicated than the story line of a “Mission: Impossible” film.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/574550.asp?0nm=T1BR

The Garfield comic strip of the day !
The Dilbert strip of the day !
The Boondocks strip of the day !

phew... Done !

[TankGirl]

Excellent news package. Thanks a lot WT!

The story on Real's MusicNet subscription service is a must read. It gives a good idea of what happenes in the parallel reality where the RIAA keeps ripping itself apart and fighting against the songwriters in the hope of imagined online revenues...

- tg

[adealaara]

Originally posted by TankGirl
Excellent news package. Thanks a lot WT!

The story on Real's MusicNet subscription service is a must read. It gives a good idea of what happenes in the parallel reality where the RIAA keeps ripping itself apart and fighting against the songwriters in the hope of imagined online revenues...

- tg

Someone in the record industry must be smoking very bad weed, indeed! To think a scheme like that will ever fly is beyond ridiculous, but then again, some 500 years ago there were those who thought the earth was flat. Seems every century has its share of freaks.