The Newspaper Shop -- Thursday edition

[walktalker]

A longer one
Microsoft's new licensing driving users crazy
What's the cost of little or no competition? For some Microsoft customers, it's paying as much as 107 percent more for the software they buy in volume. As previously reported by CNET News.com, Microsoft on Oct. 1 will dramatically change how it licenses software to its largest customers. That change will drive up what they pay for products such as Office XP or Windows 2000 between 33 percent and 107 percent, according to market researcher Gartner. Many customers also are finding they have to buy new versions of Office even to qualify for the new licensing program. With market share of more than 90 percent in both desktop productivity applications and operating systems, Microsoft is able to charge more in a way it couldn't in a more competitive market, say analysts and the company's customers.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp01

Yahoo News hacked, content altered
Online news took a hit this week with Yahoo's acknowledgment that a hacker substantially altered a news story that appeared on its site. The changes, which have since been removed, were made to an Aug. 23 Reuters story about the Russian software programmer Dmitry Sklyarov, who stands accused of violating U.S. copyright law. According to Yahoo, news of the hack was first reported and brought to the company's attention by SecurityFocus.com this week. A Yahoo representative said the Web portal had taken "appropriate steps to block unauthorized access" to its production tools.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Nimda rampage starts to slow
Companies infected with the Nimda worm worked at cleaning the malicious program out of their computer systems Thursday, as the worm's spread continued to slow. "From within six hours after it got going, we saw it retreat," said David Moore, senior researcher with the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, a supercomputing center at the University of California at San Diego. The spread of the virus peaked around noon Tuesday and has slowly decreased since then, according to CAIDA's analysis. "The response (to Nimda) was faster and more effective than the response to Code Red," Moore said. On Tuesday, the day the worm started to spread, the number of infected computer systems detected by CAIDA quickly climbed to a peak of 150,000. By Thursday, that number had dropped to almost 50,000.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Microsoft, DOJ still miles apart
Government trustbusters and Microsoft failed to reach a consensus on how the landmark antitrust case should proceed before a new judge. The Justice Department, 18 states and Microsoft on Thursday filed a joint status report with U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly at her request. In some ways, the legal filing demonstrates just how far apart the two sides remain. While Microsoft and trustbusters agreed on some issues, most related to legal or filing procedures and not to substantive scheduling or discovery. The two sides could not come to an agreement on a proposed schedule.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Via sues to halt Pentium 4
Taiwanese chip maker Via Technologies stepped up its legal battle with Intel Thursday, filing a lawsuit that seeks to halt sales of Intel's flagship Pentium 4 processor. Via and its subsidiary Centaur Technology filed suit against Intel in the Federal District Court for the Western Division of Texas (Austin Division), where Centaur is based, alleging that the Pentium 4 violates a Centaur patent. The lawsuit seeks to stop sales of the Pentium 4 and requests that monetary damages be paid to Via and Centaur. The action follows a barrage of suits filed in Taiwan earlier this month, in which Via alleged that Intel illegally pressured motherboard makers not to buy Via's Pentium 4 chipset, and that Intel employees destroyed promotional materials--such as balloons -- advertising the chipset.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Cable snag slows Asian access to a crawl
Internet traffic from Asia to the United States has slowed to a snail's pace due to two impaired undersea cables. "There appears to be a damage to some circuits on the China-US and SEA-ME-WE3 cables, about 30 km off Shantou in China," said telecommunications service provider Reach Communications spokesperson Martin Ratia. SEA-ME-WE3, which runs 38,000 km from Germany to Japan, is owned by telcos including Reach, Singapre Telecommunications, KDD Japan, France Telecom, Telekom Malaysia, PT Indosat and Deutsche Telecom. The 27,000 km China-US cable is owned by a consortium including Reach, SingTel, Concert, China Telecom, Japan Telecom, Korea Telecom, KDD Japan, Sprint and Telekom Malaysia.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Disney puts emphasis on gaming
Walt Disney has created a business unit focused on the interactive gaming market as it rewrites its corporate blueprint for working with technology. With its Buena Vista Game Entertainment Studio, Disney is aiming to change the way people play online and video games. Instead of just sitting at a single PC or game station, it wants to let people run games on televisions, telephones, wireless phones, PCs, digital set-top boxes and other technologies. The media and entertainment company tapped Jan Smith, who has worked with Disney for 14 years, as president of the unit. Smith also will continue to serve as president of Disney Interactive.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Is StarOffice for everyone?
With the rising cost of office-productivity software, many small businesses are asking themselves whether investing in yet another upgrade is really necessary. And tight budgets are causing school districts to wonder whether there's an alternative to the pricey software they thought was so essential. With the start of the beta review process for StarOffice 6.0 right around the corner and general availability expected early in the new year, these customers could find their alternative in an office suite from Sun Microsystems. StarOffice is aimed at cost-constrained customers who want a full-featured office productivity suite while retaining compatibility with Microsoft Office files or, more importantly, who want to put their money into revenue-generating projects rather than office software. That's why small businesses, home offices, educational and government organizations, and consumers are receptive to the value of StarOffice.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1276-210...html?tag=bt_bh

Asian companies neglect of Nimda “criminal” says Aussie expert
An Australian security company has called three major Asian organisations “criminals” and the main culprits propagating hundreds of thousands attacks from the Nimda worm. Janteknology claimed to have had 30,000 probes from the malicious worm up to midnight last night and 17,000 so far today, the majority of them propagated from eight IP addresses hosted in the Asia-Pacific region. The Korean Network Information Centre has six attacking servers and both Hutchison Corporate Access Hong Kong Limited and the Ministry of Education in Thailand have one attacking server, according to Janteknology’s Glenn Miller.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/sec...0260586,00.htm

Driving the Info Highway
Just as microprocessors colonized motor vehicles during the past decade, a similarly steady transition to telematics will occur as the necessary equipment is installed in new cars and trucks over the next few years, auto industry analysts say. A wireless transmitter and receiver, an antenna, elementary voice-recognition and text-to-speech capabilities, and typically a GPS unit are all that's needed on board to support what the industry calls the "thin-client" telematics service -- the most fundamental set of mobile communications features. Although the basic service package is relatively simple and the changeover seems inevitable, the industry will soon have to address the complex potential safety and privacy issues that the technology raises.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/20...001ashley.html

Another worm, more patches
With the emergence of the Nimda worm -- the latest in a long series to attack Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) and other software -- Gartner believes it's time for businesses with Web applications to start investigating less vulnerable Web server products. The Nimda worm can spread through e-mail, file sharing and Web site downloads. As a "rollup worm," Nimda bundles several known exploits against Microsoft's IIS, Internet Explorer browser and operating systems such as Windows 2000 and Windows XP, which have IIS and IE embedded in their code. To protect against Nimda, Microsoft recommends installing numerous patches and service packs on virtually every PC and server running IE, IIS Web servers or the Outlook Express e-mail client. As the earlier Code Red worm showed, many servers and PCs running IIS Web server processes may not be obvious because they may be run as personal Web servers on the intranet but are still be exposed to the Internet.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-201...html?tag=cd_mh

Market retreat: Not as bad as it seems?
The Standard & Poor's 500 index and Dow Jones industrial average lost 7 percent and 8.8 percent, respectively, in the three trading sessions since U.S. stock markets reopened after last week's terror strikes. Although that market sell-off has rattled investors and their portfolios, things have been relatively orderly and predictable with the stocks most directly affected by the terrorist attacks taking most of the declines, analysts said. So far, the stock markets are following historical patterns after a catastrophe. Indeed, some analysts are holding out hope that the recent market declines will form a bottom and indicate better times ahead. "Many of the conditions that coincide with a market bottom are developing," said Jeff DeGraaf, a technical analyst.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200...html?tag=cd_mh

As Bush speech nears, officials set tone
President Bush sought to reassure an anxious nation Thursday as the Pentagon disclosed deployment orders for elite Army troops to help avenge last week's terrorism on American soil. At the same time, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said "much economic activity ground to a halt" after the attacks. The administration bluntly pressed its demand for the extradition of Osama bin Laden in the run-up to the commander in chief's speech to a joint session of Congress. "We want action, not just statements. He should not be given haven," said Secretary of State Colin Powell after Afghanistan issued a statement politely encouraging the suspected terrorist mastermind to leave the country.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-7228996.html

Clerics urge bin Laden to leave Afghanistan
As America gears up for war, Islamic clerics Thursday urged Osama bin Laden to voluntarily leave Afghanistan, where he and his followers have had sanctuary for five years, the Taliban news agency said. The statement came at the end of a two-day meeting by hundreds of Islamic clerics, or Ulema, asked by the Taliban government to decide about U.S. demands to hand over bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. The clerics' statement set no deadline for bin Laden to accept or reject the call, and it was unclear whether this would be enough to dissuade President Bush from launching military strikes against the impoverished Central Asian nation of Afghanistan.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=cd_mh

More news later on

[walktalker]

Bush Submits His Laws for War
President Bush sent his anti-terrorism bill to Congress late Wednesday, launching an emotional debate that will force U.S. politicians to choose between continued freedom for Americans or greater security. Created in response to last week's bloody attacks, the draft "Mobilization Against Terrorism Act" (MATA) rewrites laws dealing with wiretapping, eavesdropping and immigration. The draft, intended to increase prosecutors' courtroom authority, also unleashes the government's Echelon and Carnivore spy systems. "We will call upon the Congress of the United States to enact these important anti-terrorism measures," Attorney General John Ashcroft said this week. "We need these tools to fight the terrorism threat which exists in the United States, and we must meet that growing threat."
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,47006,00.html

Terrorists Leave Paperless Trail
Federal agents retracing the steps of the 19 hijackers suspected in last week's attacks are finding a digital trail that leads from one Internet connection to another. According to various media reports, at least some of them went online to plan the attacks, purchase airplane tickets, and coordinate their moves. Computer forensic experts warn, however, that the path only appears hot in hindsight. It's a leap, they say, to conclude that the attacks might have been prevented had laws been in place to make Internet surveillance easier.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,46991,00.html

E911 Wouldn't Help at WTC
Shortly after last week's terrorist attacks in New York, a man trapped where a courtyard previously existed between the twin World Trade Center towers was rescued after he called for help on his mobile phone. To locate more victims in the WTC, Lucent Technologies and Verizon Wireless used directional antennas to pinpoint the location of cell phones in the crumbled buildings. This activity coincides with a federal mandate that carriers begin implementing technology that allows emergency dispatchers to locate cell phone callers by Oct. 1. However, nine major cell phone carriers, including Verizon, have filed petitions with the Federal Communications Commission to waive that deadline on the premise that the technology doesn't exist.
http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,46850,00.html

State of Bio Defense: Not Good
Terrorists likely have considered biological weapons and may be working on ways to deploy them, biological warfare experts say. Certainly after the Sept. 11 attacks, anything seems possible. But the experts also say it will take a level of scientific know-how to execute a biological attack that terrorists most likely don't have. "The expertise of the terrorists is more along the lines of a traditional attack using high explosives, but that doesn't mean they're not trying," said Jim Lewis, the director of the technology and public policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,46924,00.html

Submarines: Not Just for the Navy
There's a growing number of would-be Captain Nemos visiting the octopus' garden in their own yellow submarines. Building your own personal sub is a new hobby that is taking off like a torpedo. A rarity a few years ago, there are now scores of people designing, building and diving their own submarines. It's definitely growing in popularity," said Ray Keefer, who runs the PSubs (Personal Submersibles), website. "When we started (five years ago) there were four members. Now we have around 160." These days, small submarines are relatively easy and cheap to build; although at around $15,000 a pop they're not everyone's idea of a stocking stuffer.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,46612,00.html

Dow Jones Appeals Net Ruling
Dow Jones has appealed a court ruling giving an Australian mining magnate the right to sue for defamation over an article published in the United States and posted on the Internet. The landmark ruling could have wide-ranging implications for publishers and Internet sites that post articles in the 190 nations that allow defamation cases, media analysts said. Dow Jones & Co. of New York -- publisher of The Wall Street Journal, Barron's and other financial publications -- filed an appeal Tuesday. Last month, the Supreme Court in the southwestern Australian state of Victoria ruled that businessman Joe Gutnick could sue Dow Jones under Australia's tough defamation laws.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,46986,00.html

NIPC warns of possible DDoS attacks
The National Infrastructure Protection Center, the FBI's cybersecurity agency, issued an advisory Tuesday warning against the possibility of increased distributed denial-of-service attacks coming as a result of the last week's terrorist attacks against targets in New York and near Washington, D.C. Denial-of-service attacks are attacks in which target computers are flooded with so many requests for information that they are overloaded and are unable to respond to legitimate requests for service. A distributed denial-of-service attack is one in which multiple computers worldwide are taken over and used to floor target systems from multiple locations. Such an attack knocked major Web sites such as Yahoo.com and Amazon.com offline for as long as a week in February 2000.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/interne...idg/index.html

Spectrum off-limits after attack
Wireless-industry analysts say last week's terrorist attacks will make it hard for wireless companies to gain the right to use a larger portion of potential airwaves, and that could spark a wave of consolidation. Wireless companies such as Verizon Wireless , Sprint PCS, Cingular Wireless, AT&T Wireless and Nextel Communications have long sought to gain licenses from the Federal Communications Commission for more wireless spectrum that would allow them to support so-called 3G, or third-generation, wireless services. But the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center has made that scenario very unlikely, since the additional spectrum would most likely come from the U.S. military.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-7228872.html

Attacks delay .info launch
Internet addresses under the new .info domain will appear online later than planned as a result of last week’s terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The 52,245 registered domain names ending in .info were scheduled to begin showing up as live sites Wednesday but will now appear Saturday, according to Afilias, the registry operating that top-level domain.Afilias, a consortium of 18 domain-name registrars, said some of its registrars were located in the World Trade Center and in New York’s financial district. Last week’s events also caused disruptions in the financial system, making it difficult for the company to transfer funds, according to LaPlante.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/631256.asp?0si=-&cp1=1

Magic Bullets Fly Again
The unbridled optimism that surrounded monoclonal antibodies in the 1980s was infectious. You had to be the world's toughest cynic not to be dazzled. Got cancer? No problem. Like heat-seeking missiles, monoclonal antibodies tipped with poisons or radioactive isotopes would home in on malignant cells and deliver their deadly payloads, wiping out cancer while leaving normal cells intact. How about an infectious disease? All would be well. Monoclonals would surround marauding viruses and bacteria like goombahs from Tony Soprano's crew, muscling them into secluded byways where killer cells of the immune system would make them an offer they couldn't refuse. If only things had been so simple.
http://www.sciam.com/2001/1001issue/1001ezzell.html

Court: Let Napster Judge Work - And Stop Bugging Us
Appeals court judges have rebuffed Napster's bid to freeze copyright infringement litigation in a lower court while it disputes a pre-trial injunction that was supposed to have clamped down on music swapping. A three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to continue its temporary stay of a District Court order issued July 11 that demanded "100 percent" compliance with an earlier copyright infringement prohibition. In addition, the panel refused to take a wide-ranging look at those prohibitions themselves, which date back more than a year, but which were most recently defined in a preliminary injunction issued March 5.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170337.html

Civil Liberties Groups Rally Against Anti-Terrorism Law
A broad and politically diverse coalition of public interest groups today urged Congress not to blindly approve a sweeping new anti-terrorism law proposed by the Justice Department in the wake of last Tuesday's terrorist attacks. Members of the coalition are asking lawmakers to pledge that "at a minimum, they will not vote for something that they have not actually read," Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist said today. Americans for Tax Reform - a generally conservative-leaning lobbying group - has joined the American Civil Liberties Union, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and roughly 150 other organizations of every political stripe to form In Defense of Freedom.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170335.html

WinZip Security May Spare Popular Utility From New Worm
The Nimda worm's habit of voraciously infecting executables files on the Windows servers it attacks, yet sparing a popular program known as WinZip, may have a simple explanation, according to anti-virus researchers. Mikko Hypponen, part of a team at Finland-based F-Secure Corp., which dissected the fast-spreading worm this week, told Newsbytes that Nimda's author probably knew better than to allow his creation to tamper with the WinZip program. Hypponen said WinZip - a file-compression and archiving tool - is known to check its own code on start-up to guard against unauthorized modification. Had Nimda's author allowed the worm to infect the WINZIP32.EXE executable file, the program's refusal to run might have been a tell-tale sign of infection, he speculated.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170333.html

'Nimda' - Norwegian For 'Nasty'
Network Associates called it "Minda." Central Command originally called it "ConceptV5." But blame the ungainly name that stuck – "Nimda" - on one of the first virus researchers to capture a copy of the malicious code. Righard Zwienenberg, a senior research engineer with Norway's Norman Data Defense, said the firm received several infected e-mails, including nine in a one-minute period, early Tuesday. Zwienenberg, co-founder of an invitation-only group named the AntiVirus Emergency Discussion Network (AVED), said he immediately prepared to ship off a sample of the new worm via e-mail to AVED's approximately 50 members for their own dissection.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170324.html

Key politicians in harmony over Net music bill
Key Capitol Hill politicos on Wednesday sent a letter urging colleagues to reject legislation that would force recording labels to offer the same price and terms when cutting licensing deals with Internet ventures. The measure in question was introduced this summer by Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), who's concerned that the major labels will control the flow of songs on the Internet by giving special permission to those online services they back. But some of Boucher's colleagues on the House Internet Subcommittee say it's far too early in the game to regulate the Internet. Those signing the letter opposing Boucher's bill included Reps. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), John Conyers (D-Mich.), Elton Gallegly (R-Calif.), Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Robert Wexler (D-Fla.).
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/2001...nternet_1.html

Music City: We Can't Stop Child Porn
Responding to complaints that the service has become a haven for child pornographers, operators of Music City, a leading alternative to Napster, said they are unable to stop the trading of illegal photos and videos. "Personally we are very against this type of content in any forum, but we can't control what our users do. We are not censors of the group," said Steve Griffin, chairman of Music City, which has seen its growth rocket since Napster's legal troubles last spring and now claims seven million users. Music City initially gained fame as a source for unfiltered access to MP3 music files. But users of the service's message boards say Music City's versatile file swapping software, Morpheus, has lately become a favorite tool for traders of pornography, including illegal images involving children.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170261.html

How the U.S. will fight
The United States inched closer to retaliating for last week's brutal terrorist attacks Thursday, moving U.S. warships and dozens of fighter planes to the Middle East and "possibly points east," according to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Neither President Bush nor Rumsfeld offered details on the movements, which are part of the campaign the Pentagon has dubbed "Operation Infinite Justice." The dramatic designation falls rhetorically in line with President Bush's call for a "crusade" against terrorism and the states that support it, but how exactly will we implement it? How will the Bush administration fight what it has repeatedly called a "different kind of war?"
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...ons/index.html
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...ons/index.html
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...lan/index.html
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...den/index.html

Lessons on how to fight terror
Britain has been fighting wars against terrorism for most of the years since the end of World War II. The longest war has been in Ireland; but British troops have also fought Jewish and Arab terrorists in Palestine, from 1945-47; Greek terrorists in Greece and Cyprus, Arabs in Aden, Yemen, Oman and Dhofar; Chinese communists in the Malaysian jungles in the 1950s, and so, almost endlessly, on. We've lost some, we've won some. In Ireland -- our most publicized grapple with terror -- I think we've fought a draw, despite being incomparably richer, more numerous and better armed than our opponents. Here are some of the lessons we have learned.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...ror/index.html

A song for Africa -- and the terror victims
AIDS in Africa is not a cause known to be of much concern to the Backstreet Boys, 'N Sync, the artist formerly known as Puff Daddy, Ja Rule or Li'l Kim. And yet, just a few long weeks ago, when the burning question of the music business was how few clothes Britney Spears would wear at the MTV Video Music Awards, those artists and a dozen others quietly drifted away from the pre- and post-show festivities to a nearby recording studio. There, they recorded a new version of Marvin Gaye's 1971 classic "What's Going On." The idea was to release the song around World AIDS Day (Dec. 1) and have everyone in America singing it in the weeks before Christmas. Instead, the single is being rushed out now, with the proceeds going equally to buy medicine for Africans and to help the victims of terrorism in America.
http://www.salon.com/ent/music/featu...ono/index.html

How not to understand the enemy
Since television in the United States often doubles as public education, many Americans have been glued to their TV sets in search of answers to the myriad of questions posed by last week's terrorist attacks. On Wednesday night, the Discovery Channel, trumpeting a prime-time special with full-page newspaper ads nationwide, pledged to furnish some much-needed explanations. "Behind the Terror: Understanding the Enemy," a two-hour commercial-free joint production with the BBC hosted by Forrest Sawyer, promised to "provide an in-depth profile of terrorism and the people behind it." But the show did not deliver.
http://www.salon.com/ent/tv/review/2...ery/index.html

More news later on

[TankGirl]

Thanks.... great work again WT!

- tg

[walktalker]

Ah, the joy of bumping