The Newspaper Shop -- Friday edition

[walktalker]

Boing

Just how safe is Outlook 2002?
Internet privacy researcher Richard Smith released on Thursday a list of four issues that continue to undermine the security of Microsoft's Outlook 2002 and could leave the major mail program open to attack by virus writers. Although Smith called only one of the issues "critical," he said he released the list to bring the potential security hazards out into the open.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-866329.html

Sax-playing Clinton worm stages attack
There's something to be said about persistence, except when it comes to virus writing. MyLife.b (w32.mylife.b@mm, also known as Caric.a) fixes bugs that plagued the original worm, MyLife.a (w32.mylife.a@mm). Besides e-mailing copies of itself to everyone included in the Windows address book, the new version includes a caricature of Bill Clinton playing a saxophone with a bra hanging out. It also executes its file-destroying payload whenever an infected computer is rebooted in an hour divisible by 8, such as 8:00 or 16:00.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-866811.html

Images may replace your lousy passwords
Researchers at Microsoft are working on new types of passwords that will be easier for people to remember but harder for hackers to crack. The key -- images, which tend to make more of an impression on people than strings of text characters. Darko Kirovski, a cryptography and anti-piracy researcher at Microsoft, demonstrated a prototype password system at Microsoft offices in Mountain View, California, on Wednesday.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-866544.html

IBM beefs up office networks chip
IBM is jockeying for control of your office's network traffic with a new chip. Big Blue's Semiconductor Division on Monday will announce a new, lower-cost version of its PowerNP network processor, the PowerNP NP2G, that it says will bring new capabilities to networking equipment for such settings as local offices. The new chip, like IBM's current network processors, acts as a network traffic cop inside network hardware such as a switch by inspecting and then determining where to route data packets, bundles of data that are the basic element of communication between networked computers.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-866901.html

Half scientist, half robot?
A controversial British robotics scientist has had his nervous system wired up to a computer in an experiment he hopes will eventually give paralyzed people more control over their own bodies. Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics at Reading University, southern England, has had minute sensors implanted into the main nerve in his left arm and hooked up to a radio transceiver that will send and receive messages from a computer.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-866872.html

Mandrake Linux policy angers members
Days after MandrakeSoft launched a controversial "club" to boost its bottom line, the Linux distributor has angered many in its user community by changing the rules of the Mandrake Club program. MandrakeSoft finalized version 8.2 of Mandrake Linux on Monday, and became the first Linux distributor to announce that it would include StarOffice 6.0, an office suite from Sun Microsystems that recently instituted fees after several years as a free download. Because of the fees from Sun, MandrakeSoft decided to allow only some Mandrake Club members to download the office software -- those paying higher fees.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-866870.html

Google restores Scientology links
Google restored a Web site critical of the Church of Scientology on its Internet search engine on Thursday while free speech advocates slammed the company for removing the site in the first place. Google said the company had only removed certain pages from the site because of a copyright dispute. "Certain pages of the Xenu.net Web site were removed from our search engine earlier this week in response to a copyright infringement notification under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)," Google spokesman David Krane said in an e-mail.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-866574.html

Red Hat: Microsoft scares off sales reps
Computer makers are still intimidated by Microsoft, and the Justice Department's proposed antitrust settlement would do little to change that, two computer industry executives told a federal judge Thursday. A former executive at Gateway and another from Red Hat testified that computer makers are still fearful of offering an alternative to Microsoft's Windows operating system, and that Microsoft still dictates how they configure the machines they sell.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-866735.html

AOL employees free to roam e-mail world
America Online, the world's most popular Internet service, seems to be losing its home-field advantage. Executives at AOL Time Warner, the parent company of AOL, are no longer requiring its many high-profile divisions to exclusively use an e-mail service developed by AOL's Netscape subsidiary. This flies in the face of a directive established last May that required all AOL Time Warner employees to use AOL technology as their corporate e-mail service.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-866781.html

PlayStation 3 takes to the grid
If distributed computing can unravel the building blocks of life, it can probably help make a better version of "Crash Bandicoot." That appears to be Sony's thinking as the electronics giant moves ahead with development of the next version of its PlayStation video game console. Speaking at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), an annual trade show for the creative and technological sides of the game industry, Shin'ichi Okamoto, chief technical officer for Sony Computer Entertainment, said research efforts for the PlayStation 3 are focusing on distributed computing, a method for spreading computational tasks across myriad networked computers.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-866388.html

DVDs send users on an Easter egg hunt
Two weekends from now, people will search for hidden Easter eggs on the lawn -- but they don't have to wait to find them inside the DVD version of "X-Men." Easter eggs in the world of technology are not trinkets covered in hard, colored shells. Those found in software applications contain a different kind of goodie, usually consisting of a hidden message or command that developers tuck away as an inside joke or tip. They range from anything as tame as a list of the often-unnamed developers who wrote the application to something more substantial, such as extra scenes in a video game.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-866541.html

Google takes on supercomputing
Google has begun an experiment that could turn its modest toolbar software into a supercomputer to tackle scientific problems such as untangling genetic codes. The Mountain View, Calif.-based Internet search company invited 500 people to try out a new version of its toolbar that lets Windows users donate their computers' otherwise unused processing power to the Folding@home project at Stanford University. The project seeks to figure out how genetic information is converted into proteins, complex molecules whose three-dimensional structure is key to everything from fighting off a cold to transporting oxygen around the body.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-867034.html

Highest bid gets a...yellow submarine?
The Beatles sang about one, but an Arizona-based company has two of them for sale. Two yellow submarines worth $3.8 million apiece have been put on the online auction block for sale to the highest bidders. Sealed bids must be received by March 27. "We're getting a lot of interest worldwide," said Hunter Hoffmann, spokesman for Government Liquidation in the desert city of Scottsdale, Ariz. "It makes a good connection to pop culture," he said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1017-866879.html

Man faces jail for Web sales of CDs
An Austin, Texas, man could face up to $100,000 in fines and a year in jail after pleading guilty to distributing live concert recordings of actor Russell Crowe's band over the Web, U.S. attorneys said. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California said Thursday that Billy Joe Acosta pleaded guilty to one count of criminal copyright infringement in connection with selling at least 10 copies of a live performance of the band Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts on eBay and Yahoo. He will be sentenced June 11 in federal court in San Jose, Calif.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-866809.html

The Oscars get Napsterised
AS HOLLYWOOD puts on its glad rags for the Academy Awards on Sunday March 24th, it will not be just the actors and creative types who will be indulging in an orgy of self-congratulation. The bean-counters and businessmen who really run the movie industry will be slapping each other on the back as well. The average cost of making and marketing a film fell by about 4% to $79m last year, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, which represents the major studios. And this happened while box-office takings in America were growing to $8.4 billion, as Americans made almost 1.5 billion trips to the movies — the highest number since 1959. Everything seems wonderful, darling. And yet a shadow stalks Tinseltown. Beneath the bonhomie the industry's leaders are increasingly nervous that Hollywood is about to be “Napsterised”.
http://www.economist.com/agenda/disp...ory_ID=1049624

Airlines bristle at sale of vouchers
eBay is at odds with the nation's airlines as they try to halt the long-standing practice of selling travel credits, just as the busy summer travel season gets under way. For years, airlines have tried to discourage passengers from selling frequent-flier miles and other incentives. The airlines have made headway in curbing the practice, but the vast reach and popularity of eBay has reinvigorated sales. An Internet marketplace such as eBay allows buyers and sellers to barter more easily than ever before.
http://news.com.com/2100-1017-866398.html

Filmgoers bombard Net for sneak peek
Aliens, superheroes and space adventure trailers grabbed the attention of Internet surfers who flocked to movie sites to view exclusive Web trailers of movies that will debut this spring, audience measurement service Nielsen/NetRatings said Friday. Traffic to StarWars.com from people logging on at home jumped 97 percent to 315,000 during the week ending March 17, NetRatings said. The online trailer that features "Episode II, Attack of the Clones," which opens in theaters on May 16, was one of the top pages visited, attracting 31 percent of the site's audience. SonyPictures.com drew 286,000 Web surfers, rising 75 percent from the week prior, according to NetRatings.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-866633.html?tag=cd_mh

Anti-piracy bill finally sees Senate
A controversial bill that would ultimately require computer and consumer-electronics companies to build copyright-protection technology into their products was finally introduced in the U.S. Senate on Thursday. The so-called Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Act -- once known as the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA) -- first saw daylight late last year, when a draft of the proposed legislation began making Capital Hill rounds. As one of the most far-reaching proposals yet seen for protecting movies, music and software against digital piracy, it immediately drew a firestorm of debate.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-866337.html?tag=cd_mh

More news later on