The Newspaper Shop -- Friday edition

[walktalker]

Ohh lalalala, hots hots are the news

Radiohead creeps onto Yahoo
Radiohead fans thwarted by the record industry's legal hold on Napster have another place to hear the British rock band's upcoming album before its official release. Web giant Yahoo said Friday that it will let people listen to Radiohead's upcoming album, "Amnesiac," in its entirety before it's due for release June 5. Yahoo will devote a portion of its Yahoo Music site to promoting Radiohead and the album. Fans can preorder the CD, watch the band's music videos and concert footage, download pictures and one track from the album, and bid on front-row seats for Radiohead's upcoming tour.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Webcasters fight for Net music
A group of online radio companies has filed suit in federal court asking for a shield against lawsuits by record companies. Several members of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed a suit against one of the largest online radio stations, Launch Media, last week. In that suit, the organization contended that Launch had violated broadcast licensing laws by giving listeners too great an ability to choose the songs they listen to over the service.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=mn_hd

The music revolution will not be digitized
Five years after it all started, the revolution is nowhere to be seen. The record labels, once railed against by those impertinent start-ups, now own their former enemies. Fiercely independent Internet companies have been picked off one by one by the same media conglomerates they once saw themselves as alternatives to. Through a brutal combination of business savvy, legal warfare and simple cartel power, the Big Five record labels have maneuvered the digital distribution industry into their control.
http://salon.com/tech/feature/2001/0...sic/index.html

AMD to roll out two new revved-up chips
Advanced Micro Devices will rev up Athlon again with the introduction of its fastest desktop chip late next week. The chipmaker, as expected, will announce its 1.4GHz desktop Athlon processor and a new 950MHz Duron chip next week at the Computex trade show in Taiwan, sources familiar with AMD's plans said. AMD declined to comment.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...091997,00.html

DoS attacks: No remedy in sight
Denial-of-service attacks are becoming more common and, in many cases, more serious, security experts said in the wake of an attack on the Internet's main warning system for security threats. An unknown attacker last week hit the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) Coordination Center, an important agency for passing information on the latest vulnerabilities in computer systems among security experts.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...092020,00.html

Enter Runix: Linux for the PlayStation
Following high demand for Sony's Japanese release of Linux for the PlayStation2 game console, another company has leapt into the fray: the Czech firm Blokman Trading, which has released an alpha version of the Linux 2.4 kernel for the original PlayStation console. Sony has strictly controlled its release of PlayStation2 Linux, building only 1,000 of the kits, which are to go on sale next month and will only work on the Japanese version of the console. The PlayStation2 LinuxKit includes a DVD with software, 40GB hard drive, keyboard and mouse.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...767608,00.html

Broadband hits 9 million-home mark
Despite a recent decline in the number of U.S. homes with Internet access, 119,000 North Americans are signing up for high-speed Internet access to their homes per week, according to a study released Friday. A survey conducted by Kinetic Strategies found there are 9.3 million residential customers of broadband Internet services in North America, which includes 8.2 percent household penetration.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...092009,00.html

Colleges serve as hacker training grounds
University computer break-ins are becoming more prevalent, where novice hackers hone their skills amid a higher education culture known for lax security and the free exchange of ideas. "They're good practice grounds because their vulnerabilities are usually pervasive and their monitoring is usually woefully inaccurate," said Richard Power, editorial director at the Computer Security Institute. "It's kind of like hacking with training wheels."
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Online storage firm shutters file depot
Online storage company Myspace.com has ceased its free storage service, prompting many of its customers to scramble to retrieve their digital files before they are deleted. San Francisco-based Myspace says on its Web site that people can obtain their files until Friday at 5 p.m. PDT. Myspace previously let people store, organize, share and distribute digital files--including music, photos and documents--for free through a password-protected account.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=ch_mh

MSN markets through file-swapping service
File-swapping company Aimster has struck a marketing deal with Microsoft Network that will co-brand the controversial service with the software giant's online site. The marketing arrangement, although small in the scheme of technology partnerships, comes at a potentially awkward time for Microsoft, which is trying to win major record company support for its MSN Music service. The major record labels sued Aimster last week, alleging that like Napster, the service allows people to violate copyrights by trading music online.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=ch_mh

Record industry pushes Aimster case
Record industry lawyers argued in an upstate New York court that a copyright infringement suit against file-sharing company Aimster should be allowed to proceed. The hearing in Albany was held to determine whether a stay should remain in effect -- issued last week by Judge Lawrence Kahn of the U.S. Northern District Court in Albany -- that temporarily bars the industry's lawsuit against Aimster from proceeding.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=ch_mh

Napster hit with another copyright charge
MediaBay, a seller of old-time radio shows over the Internet and in retail stores, on Thursday said it filed a complaint against Napster, the popular song-swap service, charging copyright infringement and unfair competition. The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco. Cedar Knolls, N.J.-based MediaBay said in a statement it wanted Napster to filter out its radio programs from Napster's file-sharing system and stop them from being traded.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=ch_mh

Video game resurrects Seattle riots
If you missed out on the tear gas, rubber-pellet fire and window-smashing fun of Seattle's 1999 anti-World Trade Organization riots, cheer up. You can now play the video game. Rockstar Games, a unit of New York-based Take-Two Interactive Software, has created a title for would-be hooligans who want to vent their anti-corporate venom by punching out riot cops and looting storefronts from the comfort of their own sofas.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200...html?tag=ch_mh

Toshiba advances display technology
Toshiba is applying its experience with liquid-crystal displays to create the next generation of screen technology known as organic light-emitting diode displays. One of the world's major manufacturers of LCDs, Toshiba announced on Wednesday its first prototype of a polymer OLED display that supports 260,000 colors. The 2.85-inch display is targeted for production in portable devices, such as cell phones and handheld computers, in April 2002. Earlier this year, the company unveiled a monochrome display of the same size.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200...html?tag=ch_mh

MS Monopolizes U.K. Gov't Site
Britain's first step in the country's grand plan to move all government-related services onto the Internet has resulted in a virtual lockout for users who do not run Microsoft software. The British Government Gateway site, developed by Microsoft, will eventually be the main access point to 200 central government and nearly 500 local government institutions. But only those who are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.1 can access all of the site's services at the present time, a situation that some said is proof that Microsoft cannot play well with others.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,44186,00.html

They Stream Films, Don't They?
Video streaming and download companies have learned a valuable lesson from their music brethren -- stay out of court, make friends with the studios, and by all means, get bought. "We've got to be able to run both pay-pay-view and subscription models, and we need to figure out how to syndicate content out."
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,44206,00.html

No escape to e-mail snooping
European citizens are being warned that encryption is no panacea against the tapping of electronic communications. This week the European parliament recommended that citizens and companies adopt encryption to protect their messages from the Echelon electronic eavesdropping system. But experts say citizens should not get complacent if all they do is use encryption to protect the messages they send because the technology has vulnerabilities that can be tricky to close.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci...00/1363841.stm

Computers Will Save Us
when James Martin makes a forecast, people listen -- and his prophecies today are even more astounding. In a new book, After the Internet: Alien Intelligence, Martin insists that we are on the cusp of a discontinuous leap in what computers can do and that the changes coming, properly guided, will lead us all to a land of milk and honey. "It's not just a question of computers becoming more powerful but rather of their developing a different kind of intelligence," says Martin.
http://www.discover.com/june_01/gthe...=featsave.html

[KevC]

Woo Hoo! Good Show!

[walktalker]

Hot on the Trail of Credit Crooks
This probably won't shock anyone who's ever made a credit card transaction online, but there's a lot of fraud going on out there. Fraud costs American companies a whopping $400 billion a year, according to the U.S. Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. In Britain, the Telecoms UK Fraud Forum believes $1.575 billion is lost annually to telecom fraud, while the British Bankers Association says 200 million pounds disappear annually in credit card scams. Yet despite such figures -- and perhaps due to a wariness of CRM software that is often complex and costly -- many companies are doing little about it.
http://www.wired.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,44203,00.html

SETI At Home Servers Invaded, Users Spammed
Web servers that harness the distributed power of thousands of volunteers' screen savers to search for signs of extra-terrestrial life were duped into giving spammers thousands of e-mail addresses over Memorial Day weekend, Newsbytes has learned. SETI at Home Director David Anderson said the perpetrators didn't actually hack into SETI servers, but instead tricked them into sending back e-mail addresses for roughly 50,000 out of SETI's 3 million users.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/166384.html

Microsoft Aims To Conquer The Net
Microsoft's brain trust was in full evangelizing mode this week. The company's top executives were dispatched to London, New York, Chicago and other cities to trumpet the store-shelf arrival of Office XP, the latest version of its word-processing, spreadsheet and slide-presentation software. Microsoft has fashioned XP into its weapon of choice for subjugating the Internet, just as it conquered desktop PCs. Gates and his cohorts aim to use XP to begin herding computer users and software developers toward Microsoft's notion of what life on the Internet ought to be. XP makes it easier than ever for Microsoft to steer consumers to goods and services supplied by Microsoft and its allies on the Internet — eventually putting Microsoft in the center of a vast array of Internet transactions.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/166365.html

Launch Media Returns Fire
Suit, countersuit. When it comes to digital music licensing, the major record labels prefer to let the legal briefs do the talking. Last week, four of the five major labels – Sony, Universal, BMG and EMI – filed suit against digital music service Launch Media for failing to get proper licenses for its personalized LaunchCast service, which allows listeners to rate songs so that they hear some songs more frequently and some not at all. The company files a countersuit against 4 of the Big Five record labels, asking a judge to rule that its personalized music service is legal.
http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,26849,00.html

With Purchase of Myplay, Bertelsmann Reasserts Claim to Online Music Dominance
The last few months have seen the major labels play a game of one-upsmanship when it comes to staking a claim to online dominance. On Wednesday, Bertelsmann again made the case that it's the one to watch in music distribution on the Web. The German-based giant announced its purchase of myplay, a pioneer in the development of so-called online music ''lockers,'' saying the acquisition, which was thought to cost $30 million, represented the final piece of its technology strategy.
http://www.inside.com/jcs/Story?arti...1920&pod_id=13