The Newspaper Shop -- Monday edition

[walktalker]

What I've brought back from my daily news safari
DSL switch to send video via phone
With a small change to its high-speed DSL network, SBC Communications is laying the groundwork for a much more prominent role in a world of video on demand, music services and online gaming. The company, one of the nation's largest local phone companies, is in the early stages of testing a technology that will change the way its high-speed customers connect to the Internet. Traditionally, a DSL (digital subscriber line) customer has linked directly to an ISP, through which Net content flows. But with new software, which will be installed sometime next year, SBC will allow surfers to access services directly from SBC's network in addition to their own ISPs.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...chkpt=zdnn_tp_

Napster pauses music transfers
Struggling to make new song-blocking software work, Napster on Monday temporarily stopped all file trading on its once-popular service. The hiatus comes shortly after Napster disabled old versions of its software. It pushed its members to a new version that rendered the service all but unusable, blocking even the most obscure, uncopyrighted works from being traded. But people logging on Monday morning were unable to trade even the few songs left. The company posted a message on its Web page Monday, saying that "file transfers have been temporarily suspended while Napster upgrades its databases."
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...093597,00.html

Windows XP enters final testing
Microsoft on Monday started distributing one of the final testing versions of its Windows XP operating system to about 100,000 testers. Since the Redmond, Wash.-based company released Windows XP Beta 2 in March, Microsoft has kept a tight lid on additional testing versions of the operating system. But Microsoft completed Windows XP Release Candidate 1 days ahead of schedule, despite the turmoil by Thursday's appeals court ruling. Release candidates are final testing versions before the software is sent to manufacturing and to PC makers. A second release candidate is expected in late July or early August.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...093544,00.html

Intel plans 2GHz Pentium 4
Intel on Monday announced the release of a pair of high-speed Pentium 4 processors. As previously reported by CNET News.com, the chipmaker is trumpeting the availability of 1.8GHz and 1.6GHz Pentium 4 processors. Intel is also slated to launch a 2GHz Pentium 4 chip in a few months. Analysts have said that PC makers will use the new chips to differentiate their systems from one another or from PCs using Advanced Micro Devices' Athlon chip. Still, some critics have said that the extra speed in the latest chips may not do much to boost Pentium 4 sales, which have been sluggish overall.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...093555,00.html

MS: It's business as usual in Redmond
Thursday's appeals court decision, which spared Microsoft a breakup but said it illegally maintained an operating systems monopoly, seems to have landed with a dull thud on the company's Redmond, Wash., campus. While Microsoft employees contacted over the weekend voiced relief that the appeals court threw out a lower court's decision to split Microsoft in two, most said they are more concerned with the business of building the software giant's new products than the immediate affects of the ruling. So indifferent were some Microsoft employees to the court's decision that few of those contacted said they followed Thursday's news coverage of the court's decision or read the 125-page court ruling.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...093564,00.html

Kodak tangles with Microsoft over Win XP
Shortly after Thanksgiving last year, Philip Gerskovich, who was deep into the design of a new digital camera for Eastman Kodak, discovered his company was headed for a collision with Microsoft. His team was developing new software to manipulate digital photos and needed to make sure it was compatible with Microsoft's latest version of Windows, the basic software that runs most new computers. An early version of Microsoft's newest software, code-named Whistler, had just arrived at Kodak's software labs. When Mr. Gerskovich and his team loaded it onto their computers, they were shocked by what they saw.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...781900,00.html

Watchdog grants pirates a reprieve
A software-industry trade group says that disgruntled or former employees make the best informants in the hunt for companies that are using unlicensed software. Over the weekend, the Business Software Alliance kicked off a campaign centered on what it calls a "software truce" during July for businesses in several U.S. cities, including New York, Atlanta, Portland, Ore., Kansas City, Mo., and Oklahoma City. With the truce, the BSA said it will refrain from imposing penalties on businesses using software they haven't paid for, if they acquire licenses by July 31.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...093557,00.html

Porn outsmarts search filters
Search companies are increasingly turning to censorware to court G-rated customers such as corporations, schools and parents, but they're still showing too much skin. The shortcomings of porn filters were on display last week when Google launched a test version of a search engine for images with an optional filter for what it terms "inappropriate adult content." Even with the filter turned on, Google is serving a healthy dose of pornographic images, often for keywords with primarily nonsexual meanings.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...093523,00.html

Stemming the DoS flood
One the most aggravating Internet security threats today is a distributed denial-of-service attack--a flood of bogus network traffic that can effectively shut down a Web site. Far from going away, the phenomenon is evolving in different permutations. But new tools are emerging to help Internet administrators fight the problem. DoS attacks are the Internet equivalent of someone placing thousands of crank phone calls per second to a switchboard. Whatever the psychology that lies behind them, DoS attacks have succeeded in felling the biggest sites on the Web, including those of Microsoft, Yahoo and, more recently, the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...781055,00.html