The Newspaper Shop -- Monday edition

[walktalker]

The tide changes for Microsoft
Throughout its antitrust trial, a favorite Microsoft bogeyman was the "kid in a garage" with a computer, a modem and a good idea. What appeared to be a monopoly, the company insisted, was in fact a fragile market position that could be destroyed in a flash by the kinds of innovation that defined technology industries. The argument was laughable. Just ask Marc Andreessen. If an idea as good as Netscape Communications, backed by enormous financial and technological resources, could grab 80 percent of the market, only to be smashed within months by Microsoft's free Internet Explorer browser, what chance does the next lonely innovator or entrepreneur stand? Yet today, even as Microsoft anticipates victory in its appeal of the antitrust verdict, some very real bogeymen are lining up.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/co...779271,00.html

Judges nix Napster appeal
A federal appeals court has determined that Napster must continue to block the swapping of copyrighted music, marking the latest legal setback for the fading online service. In a terse, two-page order released Friday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied two separate requests from Napster. In one, a three-judge panel said it would not rehear issues it ruled on last February. Responding to another petition, a larger group of judges also declined to review the matter in a so-called en banc appeal.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...093216,00.html

High court rules for online freelancers
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that publishers violated freelance contributors' copyrights by putting their articles in electronic databases, extending the reach of copyright protections in an online age. The high court, by a 7-2 vote, upheld a ruling that the publishers must pay freelance writers, photographers and artists extra for work included in online and CD-ROM databases or must remove the material. The decision was a defeat for The New York Times Co.; The Tribune Co.'s Newsday; AOL Time Warner's Time Magazine Inc.; Lexis/Nexis, a unit of Anglo-Dutch publishing group Reed Elsevier; and ProQust Co.'s University Microfilms International.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...779743,00.html

E-mail ad-ons: 'It's not spam'
The marketing company behind technology that allows ISPs to intercept e-mails and wrap them in advertisements has defended its initiative, following a backlash from Internet users. ZDNet Australia reported Friday that Reva Networks was promoting new e-mail technology that enables ISPs to wrap mail with ads before sending it on to the recipient--a concept that sparked a barrage of criticism from users already fed up with being bombarded with spam. "The minute my ISP tries this I will no longer be their customer," one Internet user said. "There is so much advertising on the Net it's a joke. I am insulted to think that ISPs would make money out a service that is already making them money,"
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...779669,00.html

Open source leaders duke it out
In an interview with ZDNet Germany, Caldera chief Ransom Love hits back at free software founder Richard Stallman, denying that he is a 'greedy capitalist' or a 'parasite.' "I am not a greedy capitalist. I am only a businessman. I just do my job. I'm not quite sure whether you can call this parasitic. I am not a parasite," Caldera chief executive Ransom Love told ZDNet in Munich, Germany over the weekend. Love was defending himself and the open source movement against reproaches by Richard Stallman, the chairman of the Free Software Foundation. Back in May, Stallman was quoted as saying of Love: "He's only a parasite." But according to Love, Richard Stallman's point of view is "very... narrow" and it is wrong to call the business model of companies such as Caldera parasitic.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...779682,00.html

IBM develops fastest silcon transistor
In a move that could pave the way for faster and less power-hungry networking chips, IBM announced Monday that it has developed the world's fastest silicon transistor. IBM has refined its silicon-germanium chip-manufacturing technology to produce transistors that are far thinner than others. As a result, information can travel faster or at the same speed using far less power. The new transistor is capable of operating at 210GHz using just 1 milliamp of electrical current, or about 80 percent faster than current technology while using half as much power. IBM said the technique should pave the way for networking chips that can run at 80GHz, or twice as fast as today's fastest silicon-based chips.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...093187,00.html

Study: How cell phones can cause cancer
Researchers in Australia have reported one of the first scientific hypotheses that normal mobile phone use can lead to cancer. The research group, lead by radiation expert Dr Peter French, principal scientific officer at the Centre for Immunology Research at St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney, said that mobile phone frequencies well below current safety levels could stress cells in a way that has been shown to increased susceptibility to cancer. The paper, published in the June issue of the science journal Differentiation, says that repeated exposure to mobile phone radiation acts as a repetitive stress, leading to continuous manufacture of heat shock proteins within cells.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...779684,00.html

Is Microsoft's .Net ready for prime time?
Despite the anticipation caused by Microsoft's .Net strategy, many developers still are not convinced that the impending Web services platform is stable, reliable or ready for the enterprise. The Redmond, Wash., company presented several new components of .Net to developers at its TechEd conference here last week, including the second beta of Visual Studio .Net, the centerpiece tool set for building .Net applications. But while the pieces are coming together, the vision is not. "Microsoft does not appear to have a uniform platform vision," said Roger Sessions, CEO of ObjectWatch, in Austin, Texas, who attended TechEd.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...779504,00.html

Time to wash dishes... More news later on

[walktalker]

Amazon free shipping may come at a price
As Amazon.com ships books, videos and music for free under a new promotion, the prices of the products themselves have gone up. Amazon is picking up the shipping charges when customers buy two or more books, CDs or videos. The Seattle-based company launched the test last week, telling customers that "you'll no longer need to factor in shipping charges at the end of your order." But the freebie may end up costing some customers more money. Amazon has hiked prices on some of its books, videos and CDs, company spokeswoman Kristin Schaeffer said Monday.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Senator demands report on power-grid hack
A California state lawmaker on Friday asked the agency managing the state's power grid to detail the steps it has taken to prevent its computer network from being hacked again, after an earlier breach that is being investigated by the FBI. Sen. Tom McClintock, a Republican from the Los Angeles suburb of Thousand Oaks, asked the California Independent System Operator (ISO) to deliver to him within a few days a report detailing how and why the recent hack had happened and what the ISO is doing to prevent future attacks. McClintock, who has warned that hacker attacks on the California grid have potential to paralyze the state, met with staff members of the ISO for an hour and a half Friday, at his request.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Hackers hoarding code to exploit server flaw
System administrators who have delayed patching the latest security hole in Microsoft's Web server software should think again, security experts said Friday. While a program to exploit the flaw has yet to be made public, at least one hacker group has already developed such a tool, said Marc Maiffret, chief hacking officer for network-protection company eEye Digital Security. "Because the hole is so huge, they want to keep the exploit (program) to themselves," he said. "There is a small circle of people that do these types of things who like to be able to say they have it so they can break into servers if they want to."
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=ch_mh

Digital music focuses on fight over keys
RealNetworks and Microsoft are once again on a collision course as each seeks to convince the music industry that it has the best technology for thwarting the swapping of copyrighted songs. Already bitter competitors in the market for streaming video and audio, each company desperately wants its anti-piracy and playback technologies to be adopted by the record industry. RealNetworks sought to increase its chances last week by announcing its own open-standards, anti-piracy initiative. The skirmish over the technology, described generically as digital rights management, does not represent a new war between the two companies. Rather, it is considered a key beachhead toward the ultimate goal: controlling the market for playing online audio and video files.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=cd_pr

Iran locks teens out of the Web
Iran's state telecommunications monopoly has ordered tough new restrictions on online use, barring access to the Web for people under 18 and requiring Internet service providers to block some sites, newspapers said. Regulations issued by Iran Telecommunications order ISPs to filter all materials presumed immoral or contrary to state security, including the Web sites of opposition groups, the Hambastegi newspaper said Sunday. The new rules say ISPs that do not strictly comply risk losing their licenses and facing court action.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Napster lifts some song-swapping limits
Napster has released a new version of its software that allows customers to find many songs that recently disappeared from its file-swapping service. Late Friday, the company posted software that can more accurately determine which songs it is supposed to be blocking. That will once again allow people to trade a huge number of songs by independent or other artists that were inadvertantly blocked by the filtering system during the past few weeks.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Sony to boost DVD player production
Japanese electronics and high-tech giant Sony will boost its annual output capacity of DVD players by 60 percent in order to improve price competitiveness, according to a report. Citing company sources, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper said Sunday that Sony, which accounted for 25 percent of the 16 million DVD units sold worldwide last year, will raise its annual output capacity of DVD players to 7 million units. The increase will help enhance Sony's price-competitiveness at a time when DVD players are gaining popularity in Japan, the United States and Europe, the business daily said, adding that prices of DVD players are estimated to fall 30 percent in the 2001-02 business year that began in April.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Jobs Throws Apple at Teachers
Kids can put together creative and thoughtful projects for school when they have the right multimedia tools. Steve Jobs highlighted a number of these projects –- iMovies by K-12 kids on geometry, sweatshops and gravity -- at his keynote address at the National Educational Computing Conference here on Monday morning. Too bad he spent more time on the products than the people. Jobs said that Apple is involved in education "because we give a damn –- just like you guys." Yet for the first half of the speech, it looked like Jobs only came to hype Apple (AAPL) products.
http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,44795,00.html

San Angelo, Texas: Home of Spies
As president of the chamber of commerce, it is Michael Dalby's job to be this city's biggest civic booster, always available to talk glowingly about the tax base, jobs, home prices and good corporate citizenship. But his repertoire of good news and optimism contains a little something extra: "We understand the security business." No doubt. Thanks to neighboring Goodfellow Air Force Base, this isolated West Texas city of 87,000 may harbor more spies, ex-spies and future spies per capita than any place in America, save Washington, D.C.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,44578,00.html

Mini-devices may soon replace combat scouts
The military is close to fielding miniature unmanned aerial vehicles that could eventually render the combat scout as obsolete as the horse cavalry. Pentagon engineers are working on a range of micro aircraft and backpack-sized vehicles for short-range surveillance now conducted by U.S. ground troops. These UAVs, some as tiny as 6 inches in diameter, would let small units look over the next hill or around a city block without putting advance troops in harm's way.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/t...mini-plane.htm

Change your life, not your keyboard
Doubts surround the benefits of ergonomic keyboards in preventing repetitive strain injuries at work. There is no hard evidence that these keyboards help at all for the very simple reason that keyboards are now being seen as only one among many causes of these disorders. So simply changing a keyboard is not going to solve the whole problem.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/in_...00/1402589.stm

State boosts felon's DNA database; Crime-fighting cache becomes largest in U.S
Racing against a July 1 deadline, state forensics experts have compiled the nation's largest convicted felon DNA database, now ready to solve thousands of violent crimes in California. Once faced with a huge backlog, the Department of Justice will announce today that it has amassed 200,000 genetic profiles of convicted felons in its Berkeley DNA lab. "I'm delighted that the backlog has been eliminated and that this tool for law enforcement is available in a robust way," said state Attorney General Bill Lockyer, who made the databank his top priority in 2000.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...5/MN127556.DTL

Smart bomb
Future electronic warfare will be carried out by intelligent software agents rather than computer hackers, according to one CIA intelligence officer. Lawrence Gershwin, a CIA national intelligence officer, told a US Congress Joint Economic Committee that increasing computer power could change the nature of information warfare in coming years. In particular, it could make programs designed to mimic human intelligence a common weapon of enemies of the state. "Either side could apply research in autonomous software 'agents'. [These are] intelligent, mobile and self-replicating software intended to roam a network gathering data or to reconnoitre other computer network operations."
http://www.newscientist.com/dailynew...p?id=ns9999922

Levi's Sites Caught With Pants Down Nice pun
Crackers defaced multiple Web sites belonging to apparel-maker Levi Strauss & Co. on Friday including flagships levi.com and dockers.com. for the company, said the server was immediately shut down shortly after the intrusion happened at about 12:30 p.m. EDT. "The global 'splash' pages of levi.com and dockers.com were affected. Anyone trying to get into our regional sites via our global 'splash' pages was unable to during the two to three hours downtime," he said.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167248.html

Adobe To Protect PDF Files From Viruses
Adobe Systems is working with anti-virus software makers to shield its popular Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files from viruses or other malicious code, the company said Monday. Adobe and anti-virus researchers said they have received no reports from customers of virus-infected PDF files. But the company confirmed that infected documents or malicious programs could be embedded within a PDF file using a Microsoft-developed technology called object linking and embedding (OLE), introduced in Acrobat version 4.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167246.html

'Leave' Worm Targets PCs For Use In Possible DDoS Attack
A new virus that seeks out computers infected with a popular "backdoor" Trojan horse program could be used to download and store other malicious files, including those typically employed in distributed denial-of-service attacks, federal security experts warned Saturday. The security alert - issued by FedCIRC, the FBI’s National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC), and several private anti-virus companies - concerns a virus called "W32-Leave.worm," which scours the Internet for systems infected with the notorious "SubSeven" Trojan.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167244.html

FullAudio's Cache-Download Subscription Service Signs EMI
Online music cache-download subscription service FullAudio has signed a licensing deal with EMI Music Publishing, to go along with the one the company signed with BMG Music Publishing a few weeks ago. Company spokesperson Sandra Rapp said FullAudio will launch in the fourth quarter. She said it differs from streaming-media music services. "A cache download feels like a download to the user but the files are timed," Rapp said. However, she said that "if you don't pay your subscription bill, the files time out and you lose access to the music."
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167239.html

Hollywood Need Not Fear 'Movie Napster'
The potential danger to movie companies and distributors from the illegal exchange of movies on the Internet is far less than the damage music companies have suffered from music-sharing Web operations like Napster, according to a research report by Germany’s DG Bank. In fact, if used correctly, the Internet could prove to be an explosive boon to the film industry, according to the report, which is titled "Digitalization and Internet: Consequences for the Film Sector." Stefan Schaefer, a DG Bank analyst based in Frankfurt who authored the report, told Newbytes, "The digitalization of the film industry holds great potential. In fact, much more potential than risk, especially when compared with the music industry."
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167231.html

MusicNet's Spin On Napster
Netizens who became accustomed to downloading songs from Napster, depositing them on their hard drive and listening to them at will are in for a surprise when MusicNet, the major record labels' answer to Napster, launches in late summer. While it's billed as a music subscription service, company officials, who showed it at an industry convention for the first time last week, liken it more to Blockbuster — a music rental service. Consumers pay $12 to $15 a month (final price isn't set) for access to a certain number of songs. If the user decides to cancel the service later, the songs, although still on the hard drive, will no longer be playable.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167225.html

Web Surfers Can Expect More Pesky Pop-Up Ads
The number of ads that pop up while you're on the Internet or pop under an active Web page is soaring as marketers, burned by banner advertising, seek a profitable way to reach online users. The shakeout in Internet advertising that left many Net ad firms hard up for revenue is spawning more sites willing to place ads like those for the x10 wireless camera that most users encounter. Three sites new to Jupiter Media Metrix's list of top 50 Web and digital properties are pop-up or pop-under ad-driven sites. And those sites join two other pop-up driven sites already on the list. The x10 camera site is No. 5, and so many people have complained about its ads that the site now offers a way to temporarily stop its pop-ups.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167229.html

Even more news later on

[walktalker]

Speech recognition comes to the call center
The choppy cadence of her voice may not seem natural, but the interaction with the operator who answers some of T. Rowe Price's calls should be. That's because even though the operator is actually a computer system designed by IBM, it functions with ordinary spoken queries and can answer or ask questions much like a human operator would. Other companies have gone to market with speech recognition systems that allow users to speak rather than punch phone keys in a menu, but the system the investment firm is using is unique because it uses so-called natural language.
http://www.upside.com/HardwareSoftware/3b337add1.html

Judge denies music industry motion to drop suit brought by Aimster
A federal judge has denied a motion by the Recording Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and 17 companies to dismiss a lawsuit filed against them in an upstate New York court by file-sharing company Aimster, a recording industry lawyer said on Monday. U.S. district judge Lawrence Kahn on Friday refused to throw out a suit by Aimster against the major record companies. He also refused to transfer it to Manhattan, where 36 companies filed two subsequent copyright-infringement suits against Aimster. In the lawsuit filed in U.S. Northern District Court in Albany, New York, Aimster is seeking a declaratory judgment that it does not violate recording copyrights by allowing music files to be shared over the Internet.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/592207.asp?0dm=C14MT

A peek inside HP, IBM labs
Apparently by coincidence, two of computing's giants -- Hewlett- Packard and IBM -- invited the media to visit their Bay Area research labs this month. The briefing at the HP Labs, part of the company's headquarters complex in Palo Alto, came less than a week after chief executive Carly Fiorina told analysts that HP is stepping up its R&D efforts, in part to "make up for underinvestment in the mid- to late 1990s."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl....DTL&type=tech

Web sites! Banish those WinXP, IE6 smart tag blues!
Microsoft's smart tag technology can be shut off by web sites with a simple one line meta tag - which is the good news. The bad news is that it appears the tag will have to be added to everything you've already published, so it's a case of updating templates and crunching through the back catalogue. It's actually published here, way down the page, but as a number of desperate coders mailed us last week raging that they couldn't find instructions for shutting smart tags off, we suspect it may have been added recently.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/19943.html

Open source terror stalks Microsoft's lawyers
When Bill Gates last week urged businesses to have their lawyers read the GPL before using open source software, it turns out he was speaking from a position of knowledge. Knowledge of having lots of lawyers, anyway, because Microsoft's legal team have clearly given themselves the most awful fright by reading the blessed thing. Evidence of their trauma was unearthed late last week by Linuxtoday, which found that the new licence agreement for the beta of Microsoft's Mobile Internet Toolkit has a whole section devoted to Open Source, which it describes as "Potentially Viral Software."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/19953.html

[walktalker]

Yep, BUMP !

[adealaara]

An ever growing newspaper that you gotta love. Way to go! Now, If you excuse me, I'm spending the rest of the afternoon digesting the news. Burp!