The Newspaper Shop -- Friday edition

[walktalker]

Knowledge is power !

Hurdles ahead for Microsoft
Microsoft's antitrust triumph may be short-lived. Although the Redmond, Wash.-based software company claimed victory after Thursday's appeals court decision, legal experts characterized it as a loss for the software giant that could complicate its plans for future products. Microsoft dodged the breakup order issued by U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, but the court upheld the core monopoly claims against the company. "Microsoft may have ducked the murder-one conviction and the death penalty, but they sure look like they've been hit with a murder two," said Rich Gray, a Silicon Valley antitrust attorney who closely followed the trial. "They have been found by the full panel of the D.C. Court of Appeals to have illegally maintained their monopoly in violation of the Sherman Act. That's devastating."
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...093499,00.html

Is that a Linux device in your pocket?
Some Linux device makers may be thinking big, but Intrinsyc Software is going in the opposite direction: it has come up with a Linux-based computer that is only 3 inches on a side. The CerfCube sells for $533 (£379), and comes with a Linux kernel and the Apache Web server. It can also come with Windows CE pre-installed. The device is so small that it comes with a wrist strap for carrying it around. Intrinsyc's device is a reference platform for developers looking to bring Linux into so-called "embedded" devices, basically anything but a PC: peripherals, television set-top boxes, telephones, refrigerators and the like. It can, however, be set up as a complete networked Linux system.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...781416,00.html

Techs: You WILL take vacation
Employees at several major tech companies will celebrate Independence Day with a mandatory vacation week. Compaq Computer is among the tech giants adopting the cost-cutting measure, confirming Thursday that 30,000 of Compaq's 33,000 U.S. employees will be off next week as part of a mandatory shutdown of all nonessential operations, such as customer service. Compaq's 3,000 employees in California will have the option of working because of questions over whether state laws mean forced vacations could subject companies to paying workers overtime. However, Compaq expects most of its workers in California to take time off as well.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...093461,00.html

MP3 hoax sings a sorry tune
Virus experts and members of online message boards are decrying a purported MP3 virus as a hoax. A document dated June 27 and posted to several Internet newsgroups warns of an "imbedded hybrid computer code" named MusicPanel that has been secretly buried in the MP3 files of 500 popular songs distributed over the past eight months among users of popular music file-trading networks Napster and Gnutella. The warning says that this virus will strike downloaded MP3 music files on July 4. Rob Rosenberger, operator of Vmyths.com, a Web site devoted to debunking computer virus myths and hoaxes, posted an alert on his site calling the document a prank.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...093486,00.html

Computer passwords reveal workers' secrets
Family-types, fans, and the self-obsessed all give themselves away with easily guessable passwords. Only the cryptics are safe... Millions of Britons reveal their innermost secrets through their computer passwords, making their office PCs incredibly vulnerable to attack according to a recent study. Choosing a PC password has largely become a psychology test, with most office workers choosing a word that they believe to sum up their personality.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...pt=zdnn_nbs_hl

HP snaps up digital photo technology license
Hewlett-Packard licensed digital photo technology from PictureIQ and will collaborate with the company on related products for the home. HP licensed PictureIQ's PhotoBoard design, a collection of hardware and software that allows consumer gadgets to edit, organize and view digital photos. Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP will use the design in future products, the company said this week. Iomega already uses the design in a product called FotoShow that plugs into a television to display images. The move bolsters HP's push into consumer electronics, a market long dominated by Sony.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Napster upgrade clips some clones
The record industry may hit two birds with one stone as Napster upgrades to new software aimed at filtering copyrighted works from its network. The upgrade is causing a ripple effect on the popular OpenNap shadow network, which now faces technical problems that could incite many of its members switch to alternative services. Kelly Truelove, chief executive of Clip2.com, a company that tracks and supports peer-to-peer file-swapping services, said Napster's new software makes it harder to use OpenNap servers. "Napster with its new client has not only blocked access to Napster from its cloned client, it's also made it impossible to utilize the Napster client to connect to the clone server," Truelove said. "This break-in compatibility does have for the moment a profound effect on how easy it is to get connected to those clone servers."
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Microsoft: Structural change unacceptable
Freed at least temporarily from a court-ordered breakup, Microsoft declared Friday it would not accept any settlement with the government that made changes to the company's structure. "We don't believe that structural relief is appropriate, especially in light of the Court of Appeals decision to drastically narrow this case," Microsoft spokesman Jim Cullinan said in an interview with The Associated Press. The declaration -- one day after a federal appeals court voided the ordered breakup of Microsoft -- puts the company on a collision course with attorneys general from the 19 states that brought the antitrust suit against the software maker.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Usenet co-creator Jim Ellis dies
Jim Ellis, who helped create the information-sharing electronic bulletin boards that predated the World Wide Web, has died. He was 45. Ellis, who had been battling non-Hodgkins lymphoma for two years, died at home in Beaver County early Thursday, said his wife, Carolyn. Most recently an Internet security consultant with Sun Microsystems, Ellis was one of the creators of Usenet, which linked computers and allowed people to share information and reply to messages. Usenet began in 1979 when Ellis and another Duke graduate student, Tom Truscott, thought of hooking together computers to share information.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=cd_mh

IBM prods Linux toward bigger servers
In a move that shows the increasing corporate involvement in Linux, IBM released several software components Thursday to improve the open-source operating system's performance on high-end computer setups. The company released version 1.0 of the JFS software, a project to improve the Linux file system. JFS has been a public development effort since January 2000. A file system is the set of rules that governs how files such as programs or word-processing documents are stored on a hard disk or other storage device. JFS is one of four "journaling file systems" that keep track of changes to files so that it's easier to recover from a crash.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=ch_mh

Caldera now charging for each Linux system
Bucking a trend in the Linux business, Caldera International has begun charging for each copy of Linux customers use. Red Hat, SuSE and other companies that sell the Linux operating system typically allow users to install a copy of the software on as many computers as they want. Caldera, though, now requires users to pay for a "certificate of license authority" for each copy, said John Harker, vice president of server product management. "Among the people we sell to and expect to get money from, I don't think it will cause any ill will," Harker said, adding that there still is a free version for noncommercial use. But some Linux fans disagreed.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=ch_mh

Microsoft to host official Olympics site
Microsoft said Wednesday that it has secured the rights to produce and host the official Web site for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games -- its first foray into producing sports coverage and an arrangement that may give it a competitive edge over rivals. The Redmond, Wash.-based software company entered an agreement with the Salt Lake Organizing Committee (SLOC) for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games and NBC to produce the Olympic Web sites through its MSNBC.com property. Under the agreement, the MSN Network will sell advertising and sponsorships for the Olympics site in partnership with NBC.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=ch_mh

Real MS Verdict: Jackson Blew It
Thomas Penfield Jackson is not merely a federal judge with a soft spot for government prosecutors and an undisguised contempt for Microsoft executives. He's also a media blabbermouth, whose private chats with reporters wound up costing the Justice Department its biggest victory in a generation. On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that Jackson's bad habit of trash-talking Microsoft honchos -- likening them to gangland killers and stubborn mules who should be walloped with a 2-by-4 -- was ample reason to overturn his breakup order and return the case to a different judge.
http://www.wired.com/news/antitrust/...,44902,00.html

Deep Thinking on the 'Inter-Fada'
It's not enough any more to think of information warfare as a subset of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The whole struggle has, in effect, become one giant information war. That was the rough consensus reached Friday during a conference on "Cyberwar between Israel and Palestine" that cast conventional ideas of cyberwar such as denial-of-service attacks on enemy websites as a relatively unimportant problem when considered in a larger context. The ever-greater importance of the media and the world public opinion it helps shape make the battle over information the key to present-day warfare, panelists agreed.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,44919,00.html

Music Was Easier When It Was Free
The first online subscription service that offers major label music will launch near the end of the summer. Then a few months later another subscription service will roll out. Then another. And another. By the end of the year, no fewer than 11 companies are expected to offer subscription services. None will offer music from all five major labels. None will offer unlimited listening. Many won't allow consumers to burn their music onto a CD.
http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,44858,00.html

Post-Tasini: Pity the Librarians
For publishers reeling from a recent Supreme Court loss, it's time to pay freelancers whose work has been republished in electronic databases without their permission. But rather than pay up or face billions in liabilities, publishers are deleting tens of thousands of freelance articles spanning decades. So who will bear the brunt of that extra work? The librarians, of course," said Tim Rozgonyi, assistant technology systems editor for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "The librarians will save the publishers' bacon by cleaning up the data."
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,44905,00.html

PC Gamers Can Now Rent a Stream
Here's another reason gamers never have to leave their computers: For the first time, retailers have begun to rent streaming versions of PC games online. Through websites set up by game store chains Electronics Boutique and Microplay, players with a broadband connection can pay $4.95 for 72 hours of games like the bloody Unreal Tournament, the anime-inspired Oni, and the Caribbean dictator simulation Tropico. The rental fee is then credited toward the purchase of the boxed version of the game -- around $40 or $50 -- at the company's online or offline store.
http://www.wired.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,44819,00.html

More news later on

[mike4947]

another good read, but then you always supply good stuff.

[walktalker]

Dedicated to my devoted readers
Another Hate Site Trial in France
A potentially landmark Internet content trial opens Friday in the same courtroom where Judge Jean-Jacques Gomez made worldwide headlines last November by ordering Yahoo to prevent people in France from accessing sites that sell Nazi memorabilia. This time, a French group is suing a group of French Internet service providers for denying a request to block access to a portal called Front14.org that proudly bills itself, at the top of its homepage, as "Online hate at its best."
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,44908,00.html

This Jail Looks for Sunny Days
Inmates at Dublin, California's Santa Rita Jail will soon get a boost to protect them from the energy crisis hitting California. The jail will be home to the nation's largest roof-mounted solar array. "The bills have started to go through the roof," said Matt Muniz, energy program manager at the Alameda County General Services Agency. "We were paying $1 million per year for electricity. With the June 1 increases this would go up by at least 50 percent. ...With the solar array we will be saving about $300,000 per year," Muniz said.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,44558,00.html

Ignore This Letter, Please
Everyone has been getting them lately, and if you're the average American household, you've already received 15. The "them" here is the often misleadingly titled "privacy policies" from banks, credit cards, insurance companies, mortgage providers and other financial companies. Buried beneath a host of confusing legalese is the bottom line: We reserve the right to sell and/or share information we have about you to telemarketers, credit card companies, spammers and others unless you tell us not to.
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,44893,00.html

What He Said, She Said, They Said
Everyone who knew anything about the Microsoft antitrust case was talking about it on Thursday afternoon, and both the company and the Justice Department claimed victory. Read on to hear what everyone's been saying about what was supposed to be the antitrust case of the century -- until the appeals court short-circuited it this week.
http://www.wired.com/news/antitrust/...,44899,00.html

Mass ICQ hack has security seething
AOL's ICQ servers were hacked on Monday for the second time this year, it was revealed Thursday night. The ICQ homepage was defaced by the hacking group Innocent Boys, while a separate server ICQgroup01.icq.com was simultaneously attacked by the notorious Men in Hack (MiH) crackers who added a defaced page to the community page. The free peer-to-peer ICQ software uses the Microsoft IIS Web server. "This has more holes than Swiss cheese," said Mark Read, systems security analyst for computer security company MIS Corporate Defence Solutions. "It seems that Microsoft doesn't understand the terms of bounds checking -- I strongly suspect that within the next couple of weeks another hack of this system will be found."
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...781338,00.html

Hackers delay censorship-busting software
A group of hackers has delayed introducing its planned Web software that is meant to allow users to evade government censorship of the Internet. The delayed project, code-named "Peekabooty," was originally scheduled for launch next month at the hackers' convention Def Con, the group Cult of the Dead Cow (CDC) said in an e-mail message to journalists. Peekabooty still needs to be fine-tuned in order to ensure user safety, wrote the hacker known as Oxblood Ruffian, who is identified as CDC's "Foreign Minister." It would be irresponsible to release the program in its current state, he continued.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/interne...idg/index.html

The price you pay for free Net access
When you sign up for this “free” Internet service, your computer becomes hostage to cloaked Juno programmers doing the bidding of cackling account execs. For starters, Juno subscribers must agree to turn over control of their computers to “one or more pieces of software” that the company says it will install automatically. Subscribers have no “opt out” provision for this except ditching the service altogether. This mystery software is dubbed “computation software,” which Juno describes as “designed to perform computations, which may be unrelated to the operation of the service.” Yeah, that’s real comforting.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/593347.asp

3G phones to become ultimate crime-busting tool
The next generation of mobile phones may prove to be the ultimate eye-witness thanks to modern technology and the RIP Act. Under the much-criticised legislation, the police and security services will be able to request all communications data on someone they believe has committed a crime or is going to commit a crime. This includes an individual's mobile phone data. With next generation 3G phones, however, this data will include the ability to pinpoint people anywhere in the UK within 10m.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/5/20067.html

Patients to get health advice via digital TV
People with digital televisions in the west Midlands will be able to get free on-screen consultations with an NHS nurse under an experiment announced yesterday. The service will be aimed initially at 50,000 homes in Birmingham. Patients will be able to link up to NHS Direct, a service that handles about 100,000 telephone calls a week from people wanting advice on health problems. Hazel Blears, the health minister, said patients would see and speak to a nurse, who could then show them pictures of symptoms and videos of medical procedures.
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/i...514264,00.html

Quest for Universe's oldest light
An unmanned spacecraft is due to take off on Saturday to look for clues about how the Universe will end. The Microwave Anisotropy Probe (Map) will journey into deep space on a voyage to explore some of the mysteries of the Cosmos. With it astronomers hope to determine the content, shape, history, and the ultimate fate of the Universe. The American space agency Nasa's $145m (£103m) spaceprobe will construct a full-sky picture of the oldest light in the Universe. It is designed to capture the afterglow of the Big Bang, which comes to us from all directions in space and from a time when the Universe was a very different place.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci...00/1413707.stm

What 'Smart Dust' Could Do for You
In the high-tech industry, less has always been valued as more. That is, the smaller the computational device, the better. And nowhere is the emphasis on miniaturization better illustrated than in the lab of Kris Pister, an associate professor of electrical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. He's busy shrinking sensors - tiny, bottle-cap-shaped micro-machines fitted with wireless communication devices - that measure light and temperature. When clustered together, they automatically create highly flexible, low-power networks with applications ranging from climate-control systems to entertainment devices that interact with handheld computers.
http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,27573,00.html

The ultimate optical fibre could carry two billion phone calls at once
All our telephone calls, Internet traffic and electronic data travel as a stream of laser light pulses down glass optical fibres. The ultimate optical fibre could carry an order of magnitude more information than do today's, US researchers have calculated. Knowing the theoretical upper limit for the amount of information that a single fibre can carry should help those trying to meet the world's growing hunger for bandwidth.
http://www.nature.com/nsu/010628/010628-13.html

The Measure of Power
California's winter of rolling blackouts left its citizens outraged, its utilities in crisis and its politicians pointing fingers. Enter Steven Leeb and Les Norford, two MIT professors with a plan to help electricity suppliers and consumers figure out where power is going and how to conserve it. Leeb, a professor of electrical engineering, and Norford, a professor of architecture, are working together to test a system called non-intrusive load monitoring, or NILM (rhymes with "film"), which uses a wallet-sized blue box, a PC and some very advanced software to measure fluctuations in voltage and current hundreds of times each second.
http://www.techreview.com/web/leo/leo062801.asp

More news later on

[walktalker]

Still reading ?
Parents Don't Know Where Kids Are Surfing
Canadian parents say they have a pretty good idea what their kids are doing online, but a recent survey of nearly 6,000 children and teens suggests that parents don't know the half of it. The Media Awareness Network, a non-profit clearing house for family-oriented media education, says its "Young Canadians In A Wired World" survey found a wide gap between what parents say they know about their children's online activities and what the kids say is really going on. The survey, conducted for the Media Awareness Network by Environics Research Group and funded by the federal government, questioned 5,682 students between the ages of nine and 17 in schools across Canada. Eighty-four percent of them said they are by themselves at least some of the time while online, and 70 percent said their parents talk to them "very little or not at all" about what they do online.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167483.html

Hotel Reopens With Free Net Access In Each Room
When Abraham Rosenthal decided a few months ago to renovate his Hotel Gates in Berlin, he did something that until now only a few hotels in Europe have done: He equipped each room with a computer, monitor and a broadband Internet connection. Of course, almost all business-class hotels nowadays have Internet access in some form, whether though a business center or a modem hook-up for guests bearing notebook computers. A handful of hotels have computers in rooms, but they usually charge high per-minute rates. What makes the Hotel Gates different is that the computer and Internet usage is included in the standard room rates; guests can surf and write e-mails all night long and not pay a penny extra at check-out time.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167473.html

Report: Bluetooth Will Take Off - Eventually
A report due to be published next week says that the Bluetooth short- range wireless network will take off into the mass market, but it will take a few years. The conclusion contrasts with some of the hype surrounding the wireless personal area network, which was first "unveiled" by Ericsson, Intel and other information technology (IT) companies in the late 1990s. The Frost & Sullivan (F&S) Bluetooth report, which took in responses from more than 120 IT managers and senior executives in companies in the U.S., Europe and Asia, says that Bluetooth will have to overcome some of the "teething troubles" that have affected its early development.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167468.html

Three Horses in Mid-Streaming
Radio and TV on the Internet have very little in common with real radio and TV. For one thing, the selection is a whole lot better. For another, the quality can be a whole lot worse. And in your living room, you don't need three different receivers to watch the full spectrum of programming. On the Internet, you do. Most "streaming media" — so called for the way it flows down to your computer in real time, instead of being transferred as a download that must complete before you can see or hear anything — comes in a handful of incompatible flavors: RealNetworks' RealAudio and RealVideo, Microsoft's Windows Media, and Apple's QuickTime.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167458.html

Computer Co. Must Pay German Fees
A German court has ordered computer giant Hewlett-Packard Corp. to pay fees on all compact disc burners sold in the country over the last three years, upholding a new law meant to take a bite out of music piracy. The fee, adopted last year by Germany's powerful copyright society GEMA, is intended to compensate musicians whose latest hits are being illegally lifted off the Internet using the technology. Under a ruling handed down last week by a state court in Stuttgart, Hewlett-Packard must now report how many CD burners it has sold in the past three years. The court also ruled the company will have to pay fines for every device sold over that period and for devices sold in the future. The court has yet to rule on how high the fee will be.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/2001..._piracy_1.html

Navigation-system sales soar, but will the experts get lost?
Attention, summer drivers: After years of promising a lot and delivering a little, car-navigation systems may finally be worth taking on the road. Certainly, more and more people are picking them up. Retailers estimate sales this year alone have doubled from a year ago, with one of the biggest vendors, Rand McNally, saying its StreetFinder system now has one million users. And it’s easy to see what is drawing so many drivers: Once pricey, the systems now go for as little as $150 to $250 — and are portable to boot. But as drivers like Mr. Gordon can tell you, at least some of the makers haven’t worked out all the bugs in their systems, which pinpoint locations using satellite technology.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/594190.asp?0dm=C12OT

Study Suggests Life After Death
A British scientist studying heart attack patients says he is finding evidence that suggests that consciousness may continue after the brain has stopped functioning and a patient is clinically dead. The research, presented to scientists last week at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), resurrects the debate over whether there is life after death and whether there is such a thing as the human soul. "The studies are very significant in that we have a group of people with no brain function … who have well-structured, lucid thought processes with reasoning and memory formation at a time when their brains are shown not to function," Sam Parnia, one of two doctors from Southampton General Hospital in England who have been studying so-called near-death experiences (NDEs), told Reuters in an interview.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scite...ead010629.html

Water That Won't Wet
By stirring in a special powder with sloshing water, scientists created buckets of water beads that won't leak. Unlike regular water droplets that slide down a surface and leave a wet trail, these droplets can roll around and don't spill a thing. "On a surface the coated drop rolls like a marble," says Pascale Aussillous, a physicist at the College of France in Paris and co-author with her thesis adviser, David Quere, of a recent study about the beaded, dry water in the journal Nature. These "marbles" of water actually take on the properties of a spongy solid and reveal how water moves when it does not cling to surfaces. The beads' rolling motions resemble the behavior of water droplets suspended in space and, the scientists say, can lend clues about the stability and behavior of celestial bodies.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scite...ter010627.html

UK Govt's stand on spam provokes angry backlash
The British Government's decision to defend spam has caused outrage among El Reg readers. Yesterday they reported how the UK forged an alliance with France to defend the right for Net users to have to pay for the displeasure of receiving porn, scams, hoaxes, and other dubious "business" propositions via their in-box. The feeling among readers - with one exception who backed the Government's stand - is that if e-minister Douglas Alexander is so keen on spam, he won't mind receiving it.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/20064.html

Done ! You did it ! You did read everything !!
Wow, I'm impressed Have a beer on me, you have deserved it

[walktalker]

BUMP !