The Newspaper Shop -- Thursday morning edition

[walktalker]

Yesterday's paper renamed
Win XP under fire from privacy groups
Several privacy groups are set to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday regarding Microsoft's imminent release of Windows XP, alleging unfair and deceptive trade practices. The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based public-interest organization, and privacy group Junkbusters, as well as at least five other groups will ask the FTC to prevent the launch of Windows XP based on potential privacy threats arising from the operating system and Passport software, according to Marc Rotenberg, executive director for EPIC. The groups will ask that the FTC open an investigation into Microsoft's data-collection practices with regard to Passport and Windows XP, which is scheduled for release in October. The complaint will ask for relief under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which is a legal standard evaluating whether a practice is unfair and deceptive.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp01

Open-source brouhaha: Missing the point
Something strange is happening in San Diego this week. In a rare move, Microsoft will attend the O'Reilly Open Source Software Convention--the largest annual gathering of open-source businesses, developers and enthusiasts--to discuss its "shared source" initiative and its differences with some of the leading thinkers in the open-source movement. Thursday's panel debate brings together months of scathing remarks and heated retorts from all sides of the issue, and its outcome will be anybody's guess. But in the midst of the drama, we've lost sight of several important ideas that lie somewhere in the middle. Let's start with a few assumptions. First, all software needs a critical mass of developers to build it, maintain it, and make it usable for others. Second, developers will not always magically appear around an open-source project once it's launched; "if you build it, they will come" is not always true, and there are plenty of stillborn open-source projects that provide evidence for that.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/co...798014,00.html

Microsoft backs down to kids charity
Microsoft Australia has given some ground in its spat with a non-profit organization which uses its operating system on recycled computers donated to kids. In recent weeks, PC's for Kids has stood firm against Microsoft's determination to stop the charity using its obsolete software, which it installs on recycled computers which are donated to disadvantaged children in Australia and East Timor. The charity has donated 1000 computers over a two-year period to under-privileged children. PC's for Kids director Colin Bayes has released a statement, saying a meeting held with Microsoft Australia had been "constructive." "This meeting was a step in the right direction and Microsoft will inform the charity of their application outcome for assistance, hopefully by the end of the month," Bayes said.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

SirCam hits FBI cyber-protection unit
A researcher in the Federal Bureau of Investigation's cyber-protection unit unleashed a fast-spreading Internet virus that e-mailed private FBI documents to outsiders -- all on the eve of a Senate hearing into troubles at the unit. Although the Sircam virus didn't spread to other computers at the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center, it did send at least eight documents to a number of outsiders. One, about the investigation into an unrelated virus, was marked "official use only." The Sircam virus has infected thousands of computers since its discovery last week. FBI spokeswoman Deb Weierman said that no sensitive or classified information about continuing investigations was disclosed Tuesday. The "official use" designation protects documents from disclosure under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

MS, AOL want your e-wallet
AOL Time Warner's $100 million investment in e-tailer Amazon.com this week highlights an emerging, high-stakes battle between the media giant and Microsoft. Longtime foes in areas such as instant messaging and online access, AOL and Microsoft are facing off in the e-commerce arena -- specifically over technology that makes it easier to navigate the Web and make purchases online. So-called e-wallets -- which store commonly requested information such as a login name, shipping address and credit card number -- are shaping up as a key leverage point for controlling how consumers and businesses use the Internet.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

File-trading pressure mounts on ISPs
Record companies have joined the movie industry in trying to root out post-Napster file trading, putting new pressure on ISPs to clamp down on subscribers' actions. ISPs say the last few weeks have seen a sharp uptick in the number of requests they're getting to pull the plug on subscribers who are using file-trading software such as Gnutella or iMesh. Driven by a combination of high-profile summer movie releases and a growth in the business of independent piracy hunters, these requests are putting service providers in an awkward position. Even as they avoid facing media-industry lawyers, these ISPs risk losing their customers to competing Internet access companies that may be less aggressive about curtailing the use of file-trading software.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200...html?tag=tp_pr

The Battle Over Internet Ads
Earlier this month, a power struggle broke out in the Internet advertising business. The tussle is over whether websites should give their advertisers data on the number of Web users who click on banner ads. In one corner sit online advertisers that want the numbers. In the other, CBS MarketWatch and a few renegade Web publishers that, like kids with bad report cards, want to withhold the statistics, claiming they aren't really a worthy measure of an ad's success. Scott McLernon, CBS MarketWatch's vice president for sales, calls them an overrated and inaccurate barometer. With clickthrough rates for online banner ads averaging 0.3 percent, it's easy to see why McLernon and other executives on the content side of the business would want to downplay their importance. But they've got an uphill battle to convince many advertisers.
http://www.ecompany.com/articles/web...,16546,00.html

Russian developer's allies aim at Mueller
Supporters of a Russian programmer arrested on charges of violating a controversial U.S. copyright law took aim Tuesday at the California prosecutor in the case -- who is President Bush's nominee to be the next director of the FBI. However, the activists conceded it was unlikely that Robert Mueller, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California, would back down as easily as software giant Adobe Systems did Monday after protests outside its headquarters and in 19 other cities. Mueller's California office filed a criminal complaint against Dmitry Sklyarov after Adobe complained that a program he wrote violated the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits the creation of technology that circumvents copyright protection. Critics claim the law impinges on the free-speech protections of the U.S. Constitution.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=ch_mh

Web surfers gawk but don't gamble
While surfing of online gambling sites is gaining momentum, the comfort level is still at low tide, according to a new study released Wednesday. Research firm Greenfield Online found that even though a third of the 1,000 respondents in its study had visited an online gambling site, only 13 percent had actually opened an account and wagered. The reason, according to Greenfield, is that more than 50 percent said they were concerned about the safety of their money and whether they could actually claim any winnings. The Wilton, Conn.-based company said the comfort level with online gambling would grow if well-known, established casinos handled the sites. Close to half of the 1,000 participants in the survey said they would prefer an online gambling site headed by a traditional casino. The reality, however, is that overseas owners run a majority of the estimated 1,400 online gambling sites, and online gamblers have no way to identify whether the sites are legitimate.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=cd_mh

More news later on

[walktalker]

Why Tax Dollars, Stem Cells Mix
When researchers at Johns Hopkins University this spring restored mobility in paralyzed rodents by implanting human embryonic stem cells into their spinal cords, it was a provocative achievement. It was the first time researchers restored mobility in a mammal using human embryonic stem cells. At a conference on Tuesday at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, scientists showed a dramatic video of mice that progressed from dragging their hind limbs limply behind them to gaining limited movement in those legs. The study was done without federal funding, a potential source of money for embryonic stem cell research that many researchers have lobbied for vigorously. But if studies like this was can be done without federal funding, who needs it? It turns out federal funding is not just about money. It's also about oversight, public opinion, quality science and gaining the respect of colleagues.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,45555,00.html

Open Sourcers Shy From Criticism
One of the difficulties of holding a conference devoted to a certain ethic -- for example, the open-source ethic -- is that after a little while it begins to feel like every speaker is preaching to the choir. The people attending the O'Reilly Open Source Convention going on here this week think that open software is the way to engineer the future. For the most part, the speakers are telling them they're right. What's the point of all this manufactured glee, one wonders? And yet if you see the smiles on these people's faces when some tech bigwig says his big company also uses open software, and that they're switching over to it at an increasing rate, it's easy to see why coders like to come to these things: Glee, even if it's pre-fab, lets you know you're on the right track in life.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,45554,00.html

Race Like the Wind on Sun's Power
A team from the University of Michigan won the world's longest solar car race Wednesday, overcoming scorching heat, summer squalls and a disaster that forced them to rebuild their vehicle a month before the event. Twenty-seven teams completed the American Solar Challenge, a 10-day, 2,300-mile marathon across the United States along historical Route 66. The Wolverines' M-Pulse completed the route in 56 hours, 10 minutes and 46 seconds, more than an hour ahead of second place University of Missouri at Rolla's Solar Miner III. Michigan reclaimed the title it first nabbed in the country's first solar car race in 1990. This year's race began on July 15 at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and ended near Los Angeles.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,45550,00.html

Spies Who Love Farm Animals
In Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons, farm animals such as cows have secret lives when people aren't watching. Now, government scientists are about to discover whether cows really do drink and smoke when no one's around. For the first time, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has hired two undercover ethologists to spy on barnyard animals. No flick of a cow's tail or blink of a pig's eye will go unnoticed in their surreptitious study of farm animals' behavior patterns. Ethologists have been studying animals in the wild for years, but farmyard ethology is a new scientific discipline. Morrow-Tesch, a research leader at the Livestock Issues Research Unit, said barnyard ethologists want to determine what puts farm animals under stress and develop ways to alleviate it.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,45398,00.html

Writers' Song Sung Blue
Chuck Cannon moved to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1984 with dreams of becoming a star. He was sure that once the label executives saw him rock, he'd be on his way. Six years passed, but eventually he found himself nearing that goal -- as a songwriter. Over the past 11 years, Cannon penned a plethora of country music hits. His 1993 song "I Love The Way You Love Me" was voted Song of the Year by the Academy of Country Music, and last year he wrote "How Do You Like Me Now?" the title song of Toby Keith's Country Music Album of the Year. He's more than just pretty good at what he does. But just like other songwriters, Conner, 41, depends on the quarterly royalty checks that come from the record labels and performance rights organizations like ASCAP to support his family. For Conner and the 150,000 songwriters that the National Music Publishers Association represents, those checks could soon be much smaller.
http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,45510,00.html

Spreading the Search for ET
The search for intelligent aliens is ramping up. Scientists in California have just begun the most sensitive search yet, in search of laser signals from extraterrestrial sources. Other endeavors that are underway include an ambitious survey of the sky for laser signals to begin next year in Boston; the completion of construction of the Allen Telescope Array, the largest instrument dedicated to the search for ET, in Northern California; and NASA's possible launch of the Kepler Mission, a space-based telescope designed to hunt for Earth-like planets. To date, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, commonly known as SETI, has focused on sifting through radio or microwave transmissions that stream toward Earth from all quarters of the universe. By crunching the data, scientists hoped to detect signals generated by alien civilizations.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,45559,00.html

Rep: Give Fair Use a Fair Shake
Rep. Rick Boucher wants to spring a Russian programmer from jail. Boucher, a maverick Virginia Democrat, is hoping to rewrite a federal law that led FBI agents to arrest Dmitry Sklyarov in Las Vegas, Nevada, last week on copyright felony charges. "It's a broad overreach to have a person arrested under the federal criminal laws simply because they made software that circumvents a technological measure," Boucher said. Boucher said his office will draft a bill to be introduced later this year. The criminal law in question is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which was obscure enough when Congress enacted it in 1998, but has emerged as one of the most important and far-reaching technology regulations. Sklyarov is charged with trafficking in a program to bypass Adobe's copy protection for e-books, a federal felony under the DMCA.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,45548,00.html

Rhyming Suicide Notes
The writings of poets who wound up committing suicide contain words and language patterns that serve as precursors to their eventual fate, researchers say. Using a computer program that examines word usage in written texts, the researchers analyzed 156 poems written by nine poets who committed suicide and 135 poems written by nine poets who did not. They found that the suicidal poets gravitated toward words indicating their detachment from other people and preoccupation with themselves.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,45537,00.html

Huge identity theft uncovered
Key personal data belonging to hundreds of individuals have been shared in an Internet chat room, in what one expert says could become one of the largest identity theft cases ever. The data include Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, date of birth and credit card information — everything a criminal would need to open an online bank account, apply for a credit card, even create the paperwork necessary to smuggle illegal immigrants. It is still unclear how the data ended up in the chat room, but an MSNBC.com investigation has revealed common threads among the victims — including the purchase of a cell phone online from VerizonWireless.com or an AT&T Wireless reseller.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/604496.asp

Why Jim Clark Likes Microsoft
"Buy Microsoft" was the message, and it was coming from a surprising source: Jim Clark, the Silicon Valley wunderkind who sparked the antitrust case against the monopolistic software giant. Clark startled the crowd at the second annual four-day Internet Summit by predicting that Microsoft would surpass America Online (dossier) as the dominant Internet network and volunteered that he holds 1 million shares of the Redmond, Wash.-based company. The event, which ended Tuesday, was held at the ocean-side Ritz Carlton Hotel in Dana Point. Call it the new pragmatism of the Internet economy, and it was widespread at this glitzy gathering of more than 700 executives, venture capitalists and Internet celebrities.
http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,16927,00.html

Cold War Foes Find Harmony in Satellite Launch Partnership
In the Port of Long Beach, in the belly of a gleaming 667-foot vessel bristling with radar dishes and transmission towers, American and Russian scientists are building a powerful Ukrainian rocket. Sometime in the next month or so, the rocket and its payload, a communications satellite, will be hoisted onto a massive floating launch platform. Then, with seasoned Norwegian sea captains at the helm, the ship and the platform will each cruise across the Pacific Ocean for a launch from the equator about 1,400 miles southeast of Hawaii. If all goes as planned, the scientists who honed their skills amid the imperial anxieties of the Cold War will mark their seventh such feat with vodka toasts and a Mexican version of borscht whipped up by the ship's Norwegian chef.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/co...ogy%5Fcolum n

Transplanted Marrow Cells Change
Scientists said on Wednesday they had discovered that adult stem cells found in the bone marrow are capable of turning into kidney cells after a bone marrow transplant. The discovery, made in mice and human transplant patients, suggests that bone marrow-derived cells could be used to treat kidney failure, although more research is needed to determine if this is true. The stem cells found in bone marrow are immature cells that can give rise to all cells of the blood and immune system. Past studies have shown they also have the potential to transform into liver cells and researchers in London said their work proves for the first time that these remarkably plastic cells can also transform themselves into kidney cells.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,45543,00.html

RSA poses $200,000 crypto challenge
RSA Security is running a factoring challenge that offers would-be code breakers a prize of up to $200,000 for finding the two numbers of the kind used to create ultra-secure 2048-bit encryption key. The idea of the RSA Factoring Challenge, which has been set before with lower-strength ciphers, is to encourage research into computational number theory and the practical difficulty of factoring large integers. Based on the challenge, RSA and others in the encryption community can chose the kinds of key lengths needed for secure cryptographic systems. There is a trade off between speed and security in choosing key lengths so this kind of research is useful.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/20638.html

Metallica wants 'to share music'
It's official - Metallica supports music sharing and always has. What other conclusion can be drawn from once anti-Napster band's latest missive to its fans? Says the posting, on the Metallica Web site, "we look forward to continuing to share music with you in the future". A reference, perhaps, to Metallica's recent rapprochement with the controversial MP3 sharing service? Possibly, but why then does the band say it's continuing to share music? Have Hetfield, Ulrich and Hammet been secretly downloading the latest Hear'Say singles, we wonder?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/20641.html

New shirt or cloth keyboard?
U.K. startup ElectroTextiles has demonstrated a keyboard made out of a soft, water-resistant cloth--something the company claims could be a breakthrough for mobile computing and text messaging. The fabric, called ElekTex, can receive and transmit electronic impulses without wiring or circuitry, and it can be folded and put into a pocket. The cloth construction also means that it is lightweight -- 28g -- and damage-resistant. "People's first impressions are, 'Whoa, it's fabric, it must be a little flimsy.' But it's very durable," ElectroTextiles co-founder Chris Chapman told journalists. The keyboard, initially for handheld computers, had its preview at the New York Museum of Modern Art and the IT Expo in France this week, and will be on sale by the end of the year. ElectroTextiles is planning a mobile phone handset that can be squashed and dropped, and a car seat that automatically adjusts to fit its occupant. The company is based at Pinewood Studios, outside of London.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Printable battery rolls off the presses
A new type of low-power battery that does not require a case and is thin enough to be printed on paper will soon be making its debut in shops. The power source relies on an undisclosed mixture of chemicals to produce 20 milliamp-hours at a terminal voltage of 1.5 volts for every square centimetre that is printed. The battery material is roughly 0.5 millimetres thick and would, if mass-produced, cost just a few cents per square inch, according to Israeli-based company Power Paper. Paper Power claims the material is non-toxic and non-corrosive, making the battery safe to use without casing.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991069

More news later on

[ab-NORM-al]

Holy Hell!! That's what I call a Morning Paper!

at least for me

thanks once again Walk!

[ab-NORM-al]

U.S. Tax Dollars Hard at Work ....WT?

Spies Who Love Farm Animals
In Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons, farm animals such as cows have secret lives when people aren't watching. Now, government scientists are about to discover whether cows really do drink and smoke when no one's around. For the first time, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has hired two undercover ethologists to spy on barnyard animals. No flick of a cow's tail or blink of a pig's eye will go unnoticed in their surreptitious study of farm animals' behavior patterns. Ethologists have been studying animals in the wild for years, but farmyard ethology is a new scientific discipline. Morrow-Tesch, a research leader at the Livestock Issues Research Unit, said barnyard ethologists want to determine what puts farm animals under stress and develop ways to alleviate it.


Damn! kill it, cook it, eat it .......animals under stress, they're stressing ME out with this crap!!