The Newspaper Shop -- Tuesday edition

[walktalker]

I'm back at school... wish me much better luck !!

German judge puts SuSE Linux on hold
Linux company SuSE will have to temporarily stop distributing copies of its software in Germany, following legal action on Tuesday. German lawyer Günter Freiherr von Gravenreuth was awarded a temporary injunction by a court in Munich (Landgericht I) against the company on Tuesday. The identity of the plaintiff is not yet known. Christian Egle, a spokesman for Nuremberg-based SuSE Linux, told ZDNet Germany that the injunction specifically prevents the company from distributing new copies of its SuSE Linux software. CDs already in the shops of dealers may be sold to customers, however.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Motorola cranks out phone power
Cell phone maker Motorola, searching for high-tech ways to extend battery life, will soon offer a method that smacks of kids' toys and Model T cars: windup. As previously reported, Freecharge, the new power source for wireless phones created by Motorola and Freeplay Energy Group, incorporates a generator, which will allow phone users to extend their talk time by up to five minutes for every 45 seconds to one minute of cranking. Cranking the generator produces electricity, which can be used to charge the phone's battery or can be stored in a battery inside Freecharge itself, which can also be used to power the phone. Freecharge connects to a cell phone via a plug-in adapter and wire. The device also includes a small flashlight.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Ralph Nader: MS is a huge tax dodge
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader has called for Microsoft to start paying dividends to investors, saying the software giant's $36 billion cash pile amounts to an illegal tax shelter for wealthy shareholders such as Chairman Bill Gates. Nader, through his Consumer Project on Technology (CPT) office, wrote Gates a letter last Friday saying Microsoft should change its practice of not giving dividends -- cash payments usually paid each quarter to shareholders.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Researchers squeeze storage breakthrough
A Florida research start-up working with a team of renowned mathematicians said on Monday it had achieved a breakthrough that overcomes the previously known limits of compression used to store and transmit data. If proven and successfully commercialized, the discovery asserted by ZeoSync of West Palm Beach, Florida could overturn half a century of thinking in the field of lossless data compression and undermine business assumptions on which the telecommunications and other digital industries are based. Lossless compression is the process by which computer data can be compacted, stored and then restored with complete fidelity, or zero loss of data. Existing compression techniques typically shed redundant data in order to conserve space.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Thomson focuses on cheap memory cards
European electronics giant will begin to incorporate 3D memory chips from Matrix Semiconductor in portable storage cards, a strong endorsement for the chip start-up. In the second half of this year, Thomson Multimedia will incorporate Matrix's 3-D Memory in memory cards that can be used to store digital photos or music. Though the cards will plug into cameras, Thomson is also working on card readers that will allow consumers to view digital photos on a television, said David Geise, Thomson's vice president of accessories products.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Real music turns to TV
RealNetworks is seeking to push its digital music technology past the personal computer in a bid to get closer to the way ordinary people listen to music. On Tuesday the company is expected to announce back-to-back partnerships with personal video recorder maker TiVo and Moxi Digital, a new set-top box company started by WebTV founder Steve Pearlman. Such deals will give the streaming media company a place in the heart of consumer entertainment devices, with offer a potentially more fertile ground for music than the PC. Real will see its software built into both TiVo and Moxi's new home entertainment systems, each due out later this year.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Microsoft shakes hands with CDMA
Microsoft is trying to let mobile device owners access nearly all of the faster telephone networks so they can have more reliable wireless Internet access. The software giant on Tuesday teamed with wireless modem and software maker Sierra Wireless to create a way for owners of PocketPC 2002 devices to use telephone networks based on Code Division Multiple Access, or CDMA. About 15 percent to 20 percent of the world's telephone networks use CDMA technology. Microsoft is just now catching up to the makers of other operating systems for handheld and mobile devices, including Palm.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200...html?tag=mn_hd

E-mail via cell phone, without the fuss
Wireless carrier Sprint PCS Group on Tuesday unveiled a new service that it said will allow customers to more easily download and read their e-mail on cell phones and other handheld computers. Sprint PCS said the service, Sprint PCS Business Connection Personal Edition, will use software from privately held wireless software provider Seven Networks. Seven's software will let customers remotely access e-mail, calendar, personal contacts and corporate contacts from their desktop computers with no synchronization required. The software is compatible with Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Anthrax dangerous for gadgets too?
Digital dream gadgets are being irreparably zapped by an irradiation process the U.S. Postal Service has used since October to sanitize mail against anthrax threats, an electronics trade group said Tuesday. Compact flash memory cards used to store data on many name-brand digital cameras and handheld computers not only lose data, they become entirely inoperable when subjected to electron beam irradiation, the CompactFlash Association said. The trade group -- comprising scores of Asian, American and European electronics makers -- made the announcement from the Consumer Electronics Show under way here this week. CES is the largest annual U.S. trade show devoted to showcasing electronic gadgets.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Philips fills airtime on Net radio device
Philips Electronics said Tuesday that three online music services have agreed to provide programming for its new Net radio device. Online radio programming from MusicMatch, Radio Free Virgin and iM Networks' iM Tuning service will be available through the Philips' new broadband audio system, Streamium MC-I 200, the companies said. The device, scheduled for release to consumers this summer, is a Hi-Fi system that looks similar to a boom box but is capable of receiving multiple online music services.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=mn_hd

DoubleClick turns away from ad profiles
Online advertising company DoubleClick has phased out its Internet ad profiling service as part of its shift from media services, proving consumer tracking doesn't always pay. The New York-based company jettisoned its "intelligent" targeting service effective Dec. 31, a company representative confirmed Tuesday. Launched in 2000, the product allowed marketers to target ads based on a database of some 100 million profiles. The technology tracked people online anonymously and then served ads based on personal tastes. The company simply decided not to continue the product in 2002, according to the representative.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=mn_hd

We can win the information war
Since Sept. 11, seven misconceptions have confused the national dialogue about the role of intelligence and information technology in homeland security. But upon examination, the truth reveals that none of these seven are barriers to winning this new information-based war. First, there is the notion that the technology we need doesn't exist today. Some pundits seem to think that the reservoir of intelligence data is so vast and so complex that today's technology can't handle it.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1277-210...html?tag=bt_bh

Groups seek extension in EU Microsoft probe
Two parties involved in the European Union's investigation of Microsoft secured a few extra days to draft comments. The parties are expected to deliver those comments by Wednesday, after missing a Monday deadline. The late comments are not expected to affect the outcome of the proceeding. A representative for the European Competition Commission declined to comment on the delay requests.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=cd_mh

IT productivity and the U.S. economy
As companies attempt to cope with an economic downturn and the United States fights a war on terrorism, many wonder whether the long-term health of the U.S. economy will be undermined. The answer depends on what happens to the productivity growth rate -- the main determinant of how fast the economy can grow. At issue is whether the near doubling of U.S. productivity growth rates during the late 1990s, from 1.4 percent (1972 to 1995) to 2.5 percent (1995 to 2000), can continue.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-201...html?tag=cd_mh

U.K. grocer closing e-commerce warehouses
U.K. supermarket chain Asda is planning to follow Tesco's lead by fulfilling all its Internet orders through its existing stores, rather than by operating separate warehouses for its online shoppers. According to The Independent, Asda is to close two storage facilities in southeast England that are used just to meet orders placed online. It then plans to use its existing supermarkets to satisfy all its online orders -- a model that has already been successful for rival Tesco.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Regulators may probe AT&T rate increase
A U.S. lawmaker called on federal communications regulators to investigate whether a recent rate hike by long-distance telephone giant AT&T is gouging customers, according to a letter released on Tuesday. On Jan. 1, U.S. long-distance carrier AT&T raised a fee it charges its more than 50 million customers to fund the company's contribution to the universal service fund (USF) by 16 percent. Long-distance carriers are required to contribute about 6.8 percent of their quarterly revenues from interstate service to the $5.5 billion USF which helps cover the costs of Internet in schools and libraries as well as subsidizes telephone service for low-income and hard-to-reach customers.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Court restricts employee's disability claims
In a decision that may affect millions of Americans, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that a landmark 1990 federal law protecting the disabled from discrimination only covered physical impairments that prevented them from carrying out tasks important to daily life. In a unanimous ruling narrowing the reach of the law that requires reasonable accommodations for disabled workers, the justices said a U.S. appeals court used the wrong standard by looking at whether an impairment prevented an employee from doing a specific, job-related manual task.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=cd_mh

U.S. Rep. positions against copy controls
A U.S. congressman said Monday that he intended to change a controversial copyright law to allow consumers to override technologies that prevent them from making digital copies of music, movies and software. Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., said he plans to introduce a bill that would eliminate the "anti-circumvention" clause of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a 1998 law that updated copyright laws for the digital era. Intended to discourage piracy, the clause has come under increasing fire over the past year by people who say it imposes severe limits on the rights of consumers to make personal backup copies or otherwise control music they have purchased.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=ch_mh

Napster CEO seeks Congress' help
The head of Internet music service Napster asked the U.S. government on Monday to force recording companies to share their catalogs with independent digital music sites. Napster Chief Executive Konrad Hilbers told musicians, lawyers and music-industry officials at a music conference that Congress should consider establishing a mandatory per-song rate that Web sites such as Napster could pay recording companies if they cannot forge deals on their own.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Listen.com taps big labels for music service
Listen.com has signed music distribution deals with two major record labels, giving it a long-awaited power boost in the race to create the perfect online jukebox. The San Francisco-based company said it has signed deals with Bertelsmann's BMG Entertainment and EMI Recorded Music, which together represent just under a third of U.S. music sales. Like many other online companies, Listen.com has been seeking distribution rights from the five major labels for more than a year as it refocused its business on digital music subscriptions. Its product, dubbed Rhapsody, launched in December, offering access to streams of independent-label music for a small monthly fee. The new major-label catalogs will be added to several existing options.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=cd_mh

More news later on

[walktalker]

Charities Say No to Obsolete Crap
Tucked into corners and collecting dust in the closets of nonprofits worldwide, you'll find them: stacks of ancient computers, cracked monitors, tangled cords and drives without floppies. The hardware comes from well-meaning donors who hope their castoffs can do others some good. But while secondhand technology is indeed a blessing for some struggling agencies, for most it's quickly becoming a costly curse.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,49537,00.html

D.C. Plays a Little Lobby Music
The future of music, it seems, is right here in the nation's capital. When about 200 music executives, artists and lawyers gathered at Georgetown University, the topics on the conference agenda were lofty enough: What new business models may emerge? How are other countries handling things? Should unions be involved? The one common note, however, at the second Future of Music conference was that everyone from record labels to Napster will be lobbying Congress more furiously than ever.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,49520,00.html

Lawmakers Deaf to Music Reform
Legislation to force music industry reforms ranging from limits on artists' contracts to bolstering consumer access to digital music is unlikely to pass Congress this year, a top Democrat said Tuesday. Michigan Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said he supported some reforms but did not expect Congress to take action as long as the House remained under Republican control.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,49577,00.html

U.S. Cyber Security Weakening
U.S. computer systems are increasingly vulnerable to cyber attacks, partly because companies are not implementing security measures already available, according to a new report released Tuesday. "From an operational standpoint, cyber security today is far worse that what known best practices can provide," said the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, part of the National Research Council.
http://www.wired.com/news/infostruct...,49570,00.html

Net Gives Paper New Dimension
Making models out of paper is a hobby with a long, long history. But thanks to computers and the Internet, it is becoming as popular today as during its heyday in Victorian times. Paper was invented in China more than 2,000 years ago as a cheap alternative to silk, the primary writing medium of the time. But paper sculpting didn't appear until 1,500 years later.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,49507,00.html

U.S. considers encoding data on driver's licenses
The government is taking its first steps with the states to develop driver's licenses that can electronically store information — such as fingerprints — for the 184 million Americans who carry the cards. Privacy experts fear the effort may lead to de facto national identification cards that would allow authorities to track citizens electronically, circumventing the intense debate over federal ID cards.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/t...s-licenses.htm

Telescope Technology May Yield Images of Extra-Solar Planets
Ground-based telescopes equipped with computer-controlled, flexible mirrors to counteract the blurring turbulence of Earth's atmosphere are on the verge of being able to photograph large planets orbiting nearby sun-like stars, astronomers reported yesterday. While about 80 extra-solar planets have been discovered using indirect techniques -- measuring the effects of an unseen planet's gravity on the parent star, for example -- no one has directly made an image of a planet orbiting another sun.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2002Jan7.html

In Dark Matter, New Hints of a Universal Glue
Sometimes, defying its wont, science makes the cosmos look a little simpler. Recently it seems as if astronomers have been sprung from a long cosmological nightmare. Last month a consortium of astronomers announced that an analysis of some 130,000 galaxies showed that the the universe, at least on large scales, is structured pretty much the way it looks. That might sound unremarkable, but it didn't have to come out that way.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/08/science/08DARK.html

Japan scientists 'grow artificial eyeball'
Japanese scientists have succeeded in growing artificial eyeballs for the first time in the world, Kyodo news agency said on Saturday. A group of researchers led by Makoto Asashima, biology professor at Tokyo University, succeeded in growing eyeballs in tadpoles using cells taken from frog embryos, Kyodo said. "Since the basics of body-making is common to that of human beings, I think this might help enable people to regain vision in the future," Asashima was quoted as saying.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapc...eut/index.html

"Alien" message tests human decoders
A message that will be broadcast into space later in 2002 has been released to scientists worldwide, to test that it can be decoded easily. The researchers who devised the message eventually hope to design a system that could automatically decode an alien reply. Unlike previous interstellar broadcasts, the new message is designed to withstand significant interference and interruption during transmission.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991757

Prof Renews Free Speech Fight Against US Encryption Law
A computer science professor is renewing a constitutional challenge to U.S. encryption laws, arguing that the government's policy on restricting the export of domestic cryptographic research violates the First Amendment. Daniel Bernstein, the University of Illinois computer science professor who resurrected the lawsuit in a San Francisco district court on Monday, said he is only trying to help protect computer systems against terrorists and other criminals.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173483.html

Go Hack Thyself, Urges NRC
To defend themselves against a rising tide of electronic attacks, companies, agencies and other organizations should routinely try to crack their own secure systems, according to a report released today. To ensure cybersecurity, individual organizations should "conduct frequent, unannounced red-team penetration testing of deployed systems and report the results to responsible management," wrote the authors of "Cybersecurity Today and Tomorrow," a report issued today by the National Research Council (NRC).
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173481.html

U.K. Mobile-Phone Theft Rate Rises Rapidly
The rate of mobile phone thefts in the U.K. is much higher than numbers officially recorded by the police, a British government report says. Today's study from the British Home Office, says 710,000 handsets were stolen during 2001, more than double the 330,000 stolen mobiles recorded by the police. And, while mobile phone theft has soared 500 percent in recent years, the report says young people are also five times more likely to have their mobile phones stolen than their older peers.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173476.html

Virus Threatens Shockwave Flash Files
The first virus that infects files in the popular Macromedia Flash format has been discovered, raising concerns that malicious code writers will gain a new method for infecting Internet users. Anti-virus software vendor Sophos said it received a copy of the virus, which it has named SWF/LFM-926, in a Flash "movie" file attached to an e-mail from an anonymous sender. According to Sophos's Graham Cluley, the virus appears to be a "proof of concept" and contains a "relatively harmless" payload.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173474.html

Bush OK's Education Act With Privacy Clause, Tech Grants
President Bush today signed into law a massive education reform bill that aims to strengthen children's Internet privacy rights in public schools, and makes more than $7 billion in school technology grants. The $7 billion in technology grants will be made available to states over a seven-year period, along with $450 million in math and science partnerships. It also makes available $250 million over five years for school libraries to buy technology for literacy improvement.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173469.html

Teen Was Million-Dollar Scammer Online, SEC Says
A 17-year-old high school student who lives at his parents' California home defrauded unwitting investors of more than $1 million in an online scam, according to the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission (SEC). The securities regulator said Monday that it had already recovered some $900,000 from Cole A. Bartiromo of Mission Viejo, who the SEC claims ran a business called Invest Better 2001 online and stockpiled some of his gains in an account at a Costa Rica-based casino.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/173466.html

More news later on

[TankGirl]

Originally posted by walktalker
I'm back at school... wish me much better luck !!

Much better luck!

Originally posted by walktalker
Researchers squeeze storage breakthrough
A Florida research start-up working with a team of renowned mathematicians said on Monday it had achieved a breakthrough that overcomes the previously known limits of compression used to store and transmit data. If proven and successfully commercialized, the discovery asserted by ZeoSync of West Palm Beach, Florida could overturn half a century of thinking in the field of lossless data compression and undermine business assumptions on which the telecommunications and other digital industries are based. Lossless compression is the process by which computer data can be compacted, stored and then restored with complete fidelity, or zero loss of data. Existing compression techniques typically shed redundant data in order to conserve space.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

An interesting news package, the above item being perhaps the most interesting one although it could be just hype... time will tell...

Thanks again, WT!

- tg