The Newspaper Shop -- Thursday edition

[walktalker]

Watch out: this paper can contain traces of stress
HP merger: Fiorina strikes back
In her harshest attack yet, Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina blamed "lazy reporting" and Wall Street analysts who are too "focused on the short term" for many of the woes facing the computing giant. But Fiorina praised HP workers for "making extraordinary sacrifices," and she handed out a one-time bonus equal to two days of salary, despite a weak financial performance that erased the normal annual performance bonus. Fiorina and HP's top executives opted not to receive the extra money, however.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Microsoft issues patch for IE hole
Microsoft has issued a patch for a serious HTML vulnerability in Internet Explorer (IE), which would allow hackers to gain access to a user's cookies and expose the sensitive information that they contain. The exploit was discovered on November 8, and was reported publicly rather than directly to Microsoft. On the same day, the software giant advised customers to disable Active Scripting, which would protect them from the Web-hosted and mail-bourne variants of the vulnerability. Microsoft is insisting that the patch released on November 14 represents a fast turn-around by its security team.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Gateway to make house calls
Struggling PC maker Gateway said it will begin offering to install PCs, printers and Internet connections for home users on Thursday, a step toward strengthening the company's service offering amid the slump in PC sales. Under Gateway's "House Call" program, the San Diego-based company will use its 296 stores in the United States as service hubs to dispatch technicians to customers' homes. Initially, Gateway will offer free installation to buyers of its high-end 700 Series desktop PCs. The company will charge for other offerings.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Layoffs ahead as Yahoo changes tune
Yahoo offered details of its long-awaited turnaround strategy Thursday, hinging its future on advertising, exclusive paid content and revenue-sharing deals with Internet access providers. Yahoo executives gave some specifics regarding a long-expected corporate restructuring, saying that they will whittle down Yahoo's 44 business units to six: listings, commerce, communications, media, access and enterprise. In addition, the company will lay off 400 employees, or 13 percent of its work force.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

IBM: Demand for IT services still strong
International Business Machines Corp. said on Wednesday that while demand for new technology products may be waning, its industry leading services business has picked up the slack. In a bi-annual meeting with Wall Street analysts, Chief Operating Officer Sam Palmisano said that demand for outsourcing and services for the corporation's information technology is strengthening even as the economy weakens. That message conflicts with what many of Armonk-N.Y.-based IBM's rivals are saying about the current tech spending slump and indicates customers may be cutting costs by contracting out their technical needs to Big Blue amid an economic downturn.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Has Xbox transformed Microsoft?
Microsoft obviously knows how to dominate new markets -- just ask any company that used to sell Web browsers or e-mail programs. But the market the software giant will enter with Thursday's release of the Xbox video game console is different from any arena the company has played in before. After two decades of primarily relying on business customers, Microsoft is spending billions of dollars to break into the ruthless gaming business -- and it's resorted to some un-Microsoft tactics. Instead of using hard-nosed business tactics and savvy product-positioning to maintain captive markets, it must outplay two experienced and sharp competitors to pull discretionary income from finicky entertainment consumers.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-201-7862948-0.html

Trilogy Studios to offer home censor kit
Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather" has a notoriously violent scene involving a bed, a movie mogul and a severed horse's head -- but with just the click of a mouse, parents may soon be able to show a cleaned-up version of the gangster classic to their children. Software maker Trilogy Studios said it plans to release a home "censorware" product that will cut scenes and language from DVDs to create PG versions of R-rated movies.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Game console industry on the rise
With the launch of Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's GameCube on deck, research firm Gartner expects worldwide game console shipments to jump nearly 41 percent next year. In a report published Thursday, Gartner projected console shipments will reach 49 million in 2002, up from 29 million units in 2001. While Sony and its PlayStation 2 system hold the top spot now and will likely be the dominant system for some time, the vast majority of new console sales will come from new systems from Microsoft and Nintendo, Gartner analyst Andrew Johnson said.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Compaq signs "grid" computing partnership
Compaq Computer has advanced its "grid" computing effort, announcing a deal Thursday to use Platform Computing's software to join groups of computers into one collective supercomputer. Compaq will offer its Unix and Linux computers and services in combination with Platform's software, the companies said Wednesday. Previously, Compaq had offered similar services on its own, but now the company will incorporate Platform's commercial version of the open-source grid software from the Globus Project. IBM and Sun Microsystems have been warming to grid computing.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Laid-off techies get the cheap seats
A Silicon Valley conference popular with tech insiders is waiving its $895 fee for unemployed workers, hoping to boost attendance as corporations slash travel and entertainment budgets. Los Gatos, Calif.-based conference producer Stardust.com announced Thursday that laid-off tech professionals would get complimentary passes to the Content Networking Event (CNE) to be held Dec. 4 to 6 at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif. Stardust President Karen Milne said organizers won't attempt to verify pink slips or request copies of unemployment checks, preferring to dole out tickets on an honor system for down-on-their-luck workers.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Net shopping returns to normal levels
Online consumers are beginning to set aside their worries and are heading back to the Web to shop for the holidays, a new survey indicates. Last week marked the first week since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that spending at U.S. Web sites surpassed $1 billion, according to a new study by ComScore Networks, a Reston, Va.-based market research company. During the last month, consumers have stepped up their spending on apparel and toys, and travel sales have nearly returned to the level they were at before the attacks, the survey indicates.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Burger King patrons to ring up eBay credits
In an effort to drive up sales of its Whopper sandwiches and other fast-food items, No. 2 burger chain Burger King is teaming with Internet auctioneer eBay to let customers bid on compact discs, tickets and other items with points they earn at Burger King restaurants. Under the multiyear plan due to launch early next year, customers can earn points when they buy certain items at Burger King's 8,400 U.S. stores. The points can then be deposited and tracked on a joint Burger King and eBay Web site, where bidders will compete for some 1 million prizes that Burger King will auction off through 2002.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200...html?tag=cd_mh

India accepts rules in shift to private telephony
The Indian government has accepted entry rules proposed by the telecommunications industry regulator for allowing private companies into international telephony, a federal minister said Thursday. "The government has decided to accept all the recommendations of the TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) in regard to international long-distance telephony," Pramod Mahajan, minister for communications and information technology, said in a news conference.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Web surfers crowd onto Ellis Island site
An Ellis Island site that lets people dig into their ancestry via the Web has taken root, with the site recording 1.5 billion hits in its first six months. The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation's Web site, EllisIslandRecords.org, provides access to immigration information on the 22 million people who entered the United States through the Port of New York and Ellis Island between 1892 and 1924. People can also sift through the database on computers at the American Family Immigration History Center located on Ellis Island.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=cd_mh

AOL tax break upsets British ISP
Freeserve, Britain's biggest Internet service provider, said Thursday that it is considering taking legal action against the U.K. government unless it resolves a tax issue that favors its rival America Online. The move comes after Freeserve, which was acquired by France's Wanadoo last year, failed to receive a reply after asking the U.K. Customs and Excise department to create a level tax playing field since last summer.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=cd_mh

More news later on

[walktalker]

Mars Society Boldly Goes to Oz
Rock-strewn craters, dry river beds, pancake-flat deserts -- in many ways the Australian Outback looks more like Mars than Earth. With this in mind, a convoy of Mars Society researchers is crisscrossing the Outback, looking for a place to establish a research base to prepare for manned space missions to the Red Planet. "Nowhere on Earth is perfectly analogous to Mars," said James Waldie, an aerospace engineering PhD from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,48176,00.html

The Trouble With Harry Potter
For almost three years, Harry Potter books have topped both best-seller lists and the American Library Association's list of challenged and banned books. Conservative Christians, who charge that the series is a satanic tract designed to lure young readers to the occult by glorifying witchcraft, have campaigned to pull the books from schools in several states. At the same time, Friday's cinematic debut of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is expected to spark a huge turnout at movie theaters nationwide.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,48396,00.html

Brit Judge Opens Up Clone Studies
A judge ruled Thursday that Britain has no laws governing human cloning, despite Parliament's attempt this year to regulate research under an existing law. In a global first, Parliament passed regulations in January under a 1990 act to permit cloning to create embryos for stem cell research. The regulations were attacked in court by anti-abortion campaigners, who fear cloning may be used for human reproduction. But the effect of their victory is to leave scientists free to continue research, unfettered by any regulation.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,48447,00.html

E-Mail Virus Slams Muslim Group
Executives at the American Muslim Council are mad as hell. Last Friday, on the Muslim Sabbath and on the cusp of the holy month of Ramadan, the council's e-mail list was infected with the malicious "Snow White" virus. The council, in a press release, described the infection as a "criminal invasion" by "hackers" in "a deliberate attempt to discredit and to disable e-mail communications to our members."
http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,48412,00.html

Army Intranet: World's Largest
The United States Army has flicked the switch on the world's largest Intranet -- a giant computer network that will connect more than 1 million soldiers, support personnel and veterans all over the globe. It's called the Army Knowledge Online Portal (AKO), because it acts as a portal to hundreds of the Army's internal websites, servers and information sources. The network will have at its disposal 70 terabytes of storage. According to figures compiled by the Internet Archive, that's three times the size of the Library of Congress, the world's largest library.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,48183,00.html

Scalia: Thumbs Down on ID Card
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said that if Americans were asked to vote on creating a national identification card, he would probably cast his ballot against the idea. Scalia offered remarks after a speech at the University of Missouri on Wednesday, expressing skepticism about an ID card and humorously brushing aside a question about whether anthrax jitters had reached the high court after spores were found in its mailroom. "Piece of cake. We're tough. We have to stand up to press criticism," he said, drawing laughter and applause.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,48419,00.html

Setback for Heart Patient
Artificial heart recipient Robert Tools is back on a ventilator and unable to move part of his body after he suffered a stroke, setting back months of progress and apparently dashing his wish to spend Christmas at home. Tools, 59, had the stroke Sunday at Jewish Hospital, said Dr. Laman Gray, one of the surgeons who implanted the world's first self-contained artificial heart on July 2. Dr. Robert Dowling, Tools' other surgeon, on Wednesday characterized the patient's condition as serious.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,48420,00.html

Video Games for Couch Potatoes
Hollywood and the gaming industry have crossed paths many times in the past decade, often with little success. Remember Super Mario Brothers? You can bet Disney wishes it could forget. Or how about Interplay's release of a Waterworld game two years after the movie had come out to a critical lambasting? What about the Wing Commander movie, an awful film and a box office dud? The problem of getting Hollywood and video games to complement each other is that they often come from different developers.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,48338,00.html

ICANN Warned on Web Vulnerability
It would not take much for a malicious hacker to shut down the Internet, researchers at a meeting of the body that oversees Web address allocation warned on Tuesday. An attack designed to flood the Web's master directory servers with traffic "is capable of bringing down the Internet," said Paul Vixie, a speaker at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers annual meeting. After the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, ICANN pushed other agenda items aside to concentrate the discussion on ways to keep the Internet safe.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,48384,00.html

Favored Sites Vanish, But They're Easily Replaced
As the dot-com meltdown continues, many Web users are seeing favorite Web sites disappear. But Netizens are having little trouble finding new sites to browse that are just as good. And what's more, they're not having to pay anything for the luxury. These are the conclusions of a new report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which indicates that an estimated 12 percent, or 13 million adult U.S. Web users, have seen favored sites vanish during the dot-com bust. But most - about 62 percent - have found new sites to take the place of the dot-gones.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/172217.html

Firewall Makers In Patent Infringement Dispute
Zone Labs Wednesday filed a patent infringement lawsuit against security software competitor Sygate Technologies. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that Sygate infringed on a patent awarded to Zone Labs in 1999. The patent, titled "System and methodology for managing Internet access on a per application basis for client computers connected to the Internet," covers technology present in several Zone Labs products, according to president Irfan Salim.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/172210.html

Irish Surfers Plan Protest Over Poor Internet Access
Faced with an ongoing lack of unmetered and broadband Internet access, Irish Internet users say they will stage a "blackout" day of protest this week. The Ireland Offline organization, formed earlier this year in response to a Esat's withdrawal of flat-rate offpeak Internet services to 2,000 users, is organizing the Nov. 16 protest, which will encourage Irish Net users to stay offline for the day.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/172192.html

First '.Museum' Internet Addresses Go Live
A handful of Internet addresses ending in ".museum" went live today, marking the official launch of the world's first "sponsored" global Internet addressing code. For now, the only active addresses ending in .museum belong to the Museum Domain Management Association (MuseDoma) which operates the global .museum registry. Over the next few months, MuseDoma will gradually introduce more .museum addresses, until the organization finally begins selling .museum names early next year, according to the organization.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/172191.html

FTC, DOJ To Hold Hearings On Patent Proliferation
Brian Krebs, Newsbytes. The Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice will hold hearings next month to examine whether a dramatic increase in patents awarded each year has upset the balance between intellectual property and antitrust laws. Corporations and individual inventors have long relied on patent rights to profit from their ideas, and to create new products. Antitrust law, in theory, acts as a counterbalance to ensure such rights are not abused, and that consumers have access to a wide range of goods and services at competitive prices.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/172186.html

EU's Antitrust Chief Hints He Will Continue Case
Microsoft Corp. may have resolved its antitrust troubles with federal authorities in the United States, but it still has to deal with someone who could turn out to be a more formidable foe -- Europe's top trustbuster, Mario Monti. The European Union's commissioner of competition signaled yesterday that the settlement Microsoft reached with the U.S. Department of Justice may not address all the issues raised on the other side of the Atlantic.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/172170.html

Piracy stops Xbox in China
Microsoft's Xbox gaming console will not be sold in Hong Kong or China for the foreseeable future due to the rampant piracy problem in the region. The company is selling the actual hardware at a loss - as much as $125 per box, according to Merrill Lynch - and plans to recoup profits on its software titles, much like the razor blade or printer cartridge industry. As pirated software in many Asian regions is so widespread, it doesn't make much business sense to sell there, a Microsoft source told the South China Morning Post on Thursday.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/22872.html

Nuclear warhead reduction could leave plutonium at risk
The US and Russia may have promised to take 9000 nuclear warheads out of service but they have no idea of how to dispose of the plutonium they contain, experts say. Programmes for locking the plutonium into radioactive waste or burning it in nuclear reactors are being abandoned by the Bush administration because of their high cost. The default option, storage, could leave the plutonium more vulnerable to being stolen and made into bombs by terrorists.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991568

Artists to get Web Royalties Direct
When the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) proposed SoundExchange, a new agency they set up to collect royalty fees for digital broadcasts under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), artists were up in arms. They had good reason, as the original plan had the artist's record label as the conduit to disperse funds. The artist's, through two trade unions, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and the American Federation of Musicians, fought back and an agreement was finally worked out. Musicians and artists will now be paid directly for broadcasts of their work on cable, satellite and Web broadcasts. More important, the two sides also agreed they would share equal control of SoundExchange.
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2...dexchange.html

Abandoned al-Qaida laboratory found
An abandoned compound in the heart of Kabul used by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network appears to have been a makeshift laboratory, complete with foul-smelling liquids in dirty brown jars and scattered papers covered in chemical formulas. The materials found at the compound -- deserted in haste as the Taliban fled the Afghan capital -- suggest al-Qaida may have been trying to develop chemical arms and other unconventional weapons.
http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2001/...ory/index.html

Omar wants "extinction of America"
Defiant in the face of stunning setbacks, Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar said in a radio interview Thursday that he'd rather die than join "an evil government" with Afghanistan's former leaders. "We will not accept a government of wrong-doers. We prefer death than to be a part of an evil government," Mullah Omar told the British Broadcasting Corp., dismissing a U.N. proposal for a multiethnic Afghan government.
http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2001/...mar/index.html

More news later on