The Newspaper Shop -- Tuesday edition

[walktalker]

OK, one little joke before starting...
A little kid tell his teacher: "I've no pencils".
The teacher replied: "You must say: "I have no pencils." See ? "You have no pencils", "He has no pencils", "She has no pencils", "We have no pencils", "You all have no pencils", "They have no pencils." Understood ?"
The kid: "Yes, understood. But then, where have all the pencils gone ?"


I'll let you laugh on this one... while I finalize my paper.

[walktalker]

Linux's losing desktop war
The good-news, bad-news story by Peter Galli was bound to ruffle a few feathers in the open-source community. Regardless of how well we positioned the news that a Linux DB2 configuration beat Microsoft SQL Server in TPC benchmarks, the accompanying news of Linux's continuing struggles on the desktop will be what Linux fans will focus on. That will be true especially in the wake of the firestorm created this month by Microsoft executive Craig Mundie's anti-GPL comments and the open-source community's angry — and completely justified, in my opinion — response.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/co...763999,00.html

Stallman strikes back at Microsoft
To Microsoft Corp., software is about making money. To Richard Stallman, head of the Free Software Foundation, it's about freedom, equality and liberty. Stallman took his philosophical message to an audience of students, professors and press at New York University's Stern School of Business here Tuesday morning. He held forth for more than 2 hours, in a talk that was billed as the FSF's response to Microsoft executive Craig Mundie's May 3 speech, in which Mundie dissed the GNU General Public License (or GPL) and open-source software.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...766341,00.html

Librarians battle Net porn access
In a new twist in the fight against mandatory Web filtering, a federal agency has issued a preliminary finding that library visitors may create a hostile environment for library employees by downloading Internet porn. The narrow, preliminary ruling by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was issued last week after 12 public librarians in Minneapolis filed a complaint saying that library visitors were downloading porn, including bestiality and child molestation, and leaving it for librarians and patrons to see. The finding said that the library "did subject the charging party to (a) sexually hostile work environment."
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...083622,00.html

Gnutella keeps growing -- and growing We told them !
The Gnutella file-sharing system is growing faster than was believed technically possible, thanks to work by programmers, suggesting the software may become a permanent part of the Internet landscape as well as a continuing headache for copyright holders. The year-old Gnutella network connects personal computers on the Internet directly to each other; users can then search for files on other machines. Unlike the Napster music-downloading service, Gnutella is a peer to peer network with no central computer or company coordinating activities.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...766234,00.html

Insurer: Windows NT a high risk
Microsoft's server software is easy to install, loaded with features and fairly reliable. It may also be more costly to insure against hack attacks. J.S. Wurzler Underwriting Managers, one of the first companies to offer hacker insurance, has begun charging its clients 5 percent to 15 percent more if they use Microsoft's Windows NT software in their Internet operations. Although several larger insurers said they won't increase their NT-related premiums, Wurzler's announcement indicates growing frustration with the ongoing discoveries of vulnerabilities in Microsoft's products.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...766045,00.html

Military vets battle online security
During another presentation to a different set of clients, Digital Defense flashed each manager's supposedly secure computer password on the wall of the conference room. The two demonstrations are among the company's most memorable events. Created just 18 months ago by a group of former Air Force information warfare veterans and a talented group of young hackers, Digital Defense, in San Antonio, is finding a ready market for its security services.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...765371,00.html

HP exec: Linux will be desktop champ
Dell Computer and other industry giants may be pessimistic about Linux's chances on the desktop, but HP executive and Linux veteran Bruce Perens believes the open source OS will still triumph in the end. Financiers may be increasingly reluctant to fund companies to come up with a consumer-friendly Linux interface, but that is just a temporary setback, in Perens' view. "[The Linux] desktop is not dead, and will perform in the market as Linux has in the server market--going from a toy to a curiosity to a contender to having a big piece of the market," he told ZDNet UK.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...765377,00.html

Intel slices Pentium III, Celeron prices
Intel trimmed the prices of several Pentium III and Celeron chips. The chipmaker lopped as much as 38 percent from the price of its desktop Celeron and Pentium chips this week. It made smaller cuts, up to 24 percent, on its mobile Pentium III processor. The cuts, scheduled in advance by Intel, are designed to help Intel keep pace with the markets served by the chips, an Intel representative said.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=mn_hd

BMG: Artists to receive MP3.com money
BMG Entertainment on Tuesday said it would share damages--estimated by industry sources to be $20 million--from a lawsuit against MP3.com with all of its artists whose copyrights were infringed by the company. "BMG plans to share its MP3.com settlement with all of our infringed-upon artists, even if not stipulated by their agreements," said Bob Jamieson, chief executive of BMG North America.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Employee privacy under siege
Employee privacy in the United States is under siege as old rules for what employers can and cannot monitor give way to a regime of everyday observation, patchy legal protections and conflicting business priorities. Software that pores over intimate e-mail correspondences, tracks worker performance or thwarts employee theft has narrowed the realm of privacy for employees in offices, factories, on the road or telecommuting from home.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Driven by licensing changes
Microsoft's recent maneuvers to strengthen its software revenue show how in many ways it is a victim of its own success. With market share higher than 90 percent, Office revenues are tied directly to new PC sales or product upgrades. With flattening PC sales, Microsoft is forced to focus even more attention on driving upgrade revenue. However, consumers have been suffering from feature overload with Microsoft Office for at least the past three versions.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-201...html?tag=cd_mh

Bottleneck on the high-speed highway
A few days from now, letters will go out to more than 50,000 people across 16 states -- along with a few thousand dollars in cash--asking them to become owners of a new fiber-optic network. This isn't some new dot-com promotion. It's one of the first major settlements in a controversial string of class-action suits that have targeted nearly every big telecommunications company in the United States, potentially putting AT&T, Sprint, Qwest Communications International, Level 3 Communications and others collectively at risk of billions of dollars in legal judgments.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200...html?tag=cd_mh

"Quake" for kitties
For close to a decade, video game designer Matt Wolf tried to home in on the instincts of 13- to 24-year-old males, the key demographic for most games. Now the 32-year-old former game producer in Los Angeles is courting a much more finicky and inscrutable audience: cats. Wolf's software company, Double Twenty Productions, released its first product last month. CyberPounce is a collection of online toys and games intended to amuse felines and their owners.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Faint Voices Rise From Cuba
They call themselves ciberdisidentes -- cyber dissidents. They are Cuban journalists who risk harassment and prison to publish independent news accounts on the Internet -- a medium that few of them have even seen. More than 100 independent reporters defy Castro's regime by filing their articles on overseas websites, giving the world a glimpse into the harsh reality of the communist island.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,44045,00.html

Music Industry's Red Scare
Despite the recording industry's well-publicized efforts to stop online music trading, it doesn't appear the practice will end anytime soon. Now, with the appearance of a software program known as Comuna, Brazilians have a leg up on their foreign music-trading counterparts. Comuna, taken from "communism," is supported by Central MP3, one of the most popular music and MP3 related sites in Brazil.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,43862,00.html

A Worm Writer's Worst Friend
Sarah Gordon knows how virus writers think. Gordon is a profiler, like detectives who specialize in studying and psychoanalyzing serial killers and other dangerous criminals. She analyzes the minds and motivations of virus writers and malicious hackers in an effort to figure out what makes them do what they do. But there's one huge difference between Gordon and the average FBI profiler -- she doesn't think the people she studies are evil.
http://www.wired.com/news/women/0,1540,43839,00.html

More news later on

[Dawn]

Thanks once again newsman for your work in bringing us the news.

[TankGirl]

Excellent news digest, WT! Keep them coming!

- tg

[walktalker]

Ring Ring: 'How 'Bout a Date?'
To find that perfect someone, you might consider taking out an ad, checking the personals or joining some romance-oriented Internet chat group. But you almost certainly wouldn't turn to your cellular phone. Two Nordic companies are out to change that. Finland's Small Planet and Sweden's Blue Factory have turned the European obsession with sending text messages into services that allow thousands of mostly young people in Europe to flirt and set up a romantic rendezvous wirelessly and anonymously.
http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,43900,00.html

Dust Keeping the Lights Off
Here in California, things are bad, energy-wise. You know this, of course -- even if you've never set foot in the Golden State, you've likely heard about how California could suffer a month of rolling blackouts this summer. But don't count out Cally. On Friday, scientists at the University of California at Berkeley showed off a new technology they're calling "smart dust," which -- if it works -- might be the silver lining of California's electricity cloud.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,44101,00.html

Fears of a Website Inquisition
Proposed legislation in Spain to regulate Internet activity has enraged libertarians who say the measure would squelch free speech. The "Law of Information Society Services and Electronic Commerce" (known by its Spanish acronym LSSI) would force websites to register with the government and require Web hosting companies to police content by reporting suspected illicit activity. Failure to obey the rules would generate fines of up to 175,000 Euros ($150,000).
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,44110,00.html

E-mail users warned over spy network
Computer users across Europe should encrypt all their e-mails, to avoid being spied on by a UK-US eavesdropping network, say Euro-MPs. The tentacles of the Echelon network stretch so far that the UK's involvement could constitute a breach of human rights, they say. The Euro-MPs have been studying Echelon for almost a year, after allegations that it has been used by the US to commit industrial espionage against European firms.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/wor...00/1357264.stm

Internet 'numbers racket'
Many recent incidents have been the work of cyberjackers based in Eastern Europe, China and former Soviet republics. Former communist countries have long been a hotbed of hackers, and have been the source of a number of major computer viruses. Some of the most disruptive "denial of service" attacks of the past were committed by hackers in former Soviet-bloc nations.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...9/MN164349.DTL

Living logic
Genetically engineered bugs that do the same job as the components of a microchip have been created by a US team. These smart bugs will crunch on chemical inputs rather than digital bits. They could one day be sent into waste-water plants to hunt out toxic chemicals. Or they could tell doctors what proteins are present in body fluids.
http://www.newscientist.com/dailynew...p?id=ns9999778

It's Siege Week For Litigation-Embattled Aimster
Aimster, whose software turns America Online's instant-messaging application into a file-swapping platform, is fighting legal battles on multiple fronts this week, countering lawsuits - and perhaps launching new ones - in a bid to stave off attacks from some of the world's largest media companies. The file-sharing service, hosted by AbovePeer LLC of Albany, N.Y., is juggling a pair of lawsuits involving the recording industry - one it began itself in April and one filed Thursday by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/166231.html

SourceForge Server Compromised In Attack
Open-source software development site SourceForge.net is warning many of its users to change their passwords following an attack early last week in which intruders compromised one of the site's servers. SourceForge.net Site Director Patrick McGovern said today that SourceForge sent e-mail warnings to site users who accessed the system during the time that the system was exposed to the snooping intruders.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/166227.html

Canadian Copyright Law Review Threatens JumpTV Plans
The federal government appears poised to re-examine Canadian copyright law in light of ongoing dust-ups between television broadcasters and Internet Webcasters. Broadcasters cheered the move, saying Monday that they received notice of the copyright law re-think in a letter from the government ministries of Industry and Heritage. But Montreal-based JumpTV, which is poised to launch a cable-TV-like service to retransmit broadcast television via the Internet, says it sounds like legislators are getting one-sided advice on the issue.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/166224.html

Mystic simulacrum
The truly great games, the ones like Myst and Riven, invoke a potent sense of place -- which to my mind is the imaginal thing that the digital medium is best at creating. Although we sit at our computers alone, we really are communicating with others and building relationships when we send e-mail and participate in lists and discussion boards; digitized social life is real, not virtual. That illusion reaches its most sophisticated form in the nonexistent "spaces" we "move" through in computer games. So while action game fans will no doubt scoff to hear it, I'll go out on a limb and assert that Riven is the greatest computer game of all time because it creates the most persuasive, immersive, alluring sense of place. But Exile, the sequel to Myst and Riven, is beautiful eye candy, but not quite art.
http://www.salon.com/tech/review/200...st3/index.html

$1 billion lawsuit for world's first Jail-cam
The world's first Jail Web cams - installed and hyped by the living embodiment of James Bond sheriff J.W. Pepper, Joe Arpaio - is at the end of a $1.38 billion lawsuit. It was filed on Friday at Maricopa County Superior Court and concerns the various Web cams installed in the local jail available on the Crime.com site. The cams have been a great success - millions have viewed people being booked and locked up and pictures from them have even been used in adverts. Ole Joe reckons the cameras stop people behaving badly. Although, if it did have that effect, Joe would make far less money.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/19262.html

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

[walktalker]

BUMP !!!