I had to post another news thread

[walktalker]

(I'm a desesperate case )

New OECD guidelines target spam, fraud
New suggested government guidelines for protecting consumers from cross-border fraud could spell bad news for fraudulent spammers. The guidelines, published by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), do not mention spam by name. But in calling on the organization's 30 member states -- which include the United States, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom -- to cooperate in the fight against international fraud, they clearly allude to the problem of unsolicited commercial e-mail. The guidelines suggest that the medium that has exacerbated the international fraud problem could also help solve it.
http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-1018413.html?tag=fd_top

Chip gear orders drop a notch
Chipmaking gear orders inched down in May as demand for some equipment remained sluggish, according to a trade group. Orders for semiconductor manufacturing and testing equipment from North American chip-equipment makers fell 1 percent in May from April, Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI) said Tuesday. The three-month average of worldwide orders in May was $751 million, down from the revised April figure of $757 million and 32 percent lower than the $1.11 billion in orders in May 2002, according to the industry group.
http://news.com.com/2100-1006_3-1018420.html?tag=fd_top

Lawmaker downplays RIAA job rumors
Rep. Mary Bono, a California Republican, is denying reports that she hopes to become the record industry's next chief lobbyist. Bono, who has taken a keen interest in copyright law, says that she currently has no plans to become the next head of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Its current chief executive, Hilary Rosen, said in January that she would step down after five years in the job. Recent press "accounts are the result of some overly enthusiastic comments attributed to my chief of staff, who felt I was a natural candidate for this role due to my long history as a defender of intellectual property issues," Bono said in a statement sent by an aide to CNET News.com on Tuesday.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-1018373.html?tag=fd_top

Microsoft takes spam fight to court
Intensifying its campaign against spammers, Microsoft announced Tuesday that it has taken legal action in the company's home state of Washington and in the United Kingdom. Microsoft said it filed 13 civil suits against U.S. defendants, accusing them of spamming Microsoft customers with deceptive e-mail. It also filed two suits in the United Kingdom, where the defendants are accused of illegally harvesting Microsoft e-mail addresses for use in building spam mailing lists. Microsoft accused the defendants in the 15 suits of being collectively responsible for sending the company's customers more than 2 billion unsolicited commercial messages.
http://news.com.com/2100-1026_3-1018140.html?tag=fd_top

Macrovision splits into two units
Digital rights management company Macrovision is splitting into two business units that will focus on either entertainment or software-protection products. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company on Tuesday said the Entertainment Technologies Group will include video and music technology and the part of its consumer software division that handles its SafeDisc protection technology. The company's Software Technologies Group will comprise its enterprise software division and SafeCast protection technology. Macrovision, which makes copy-protection software, said it decided to reorganize because entertainment and software companies have different protection needs.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-1018215.html?tag=fd_top

Linux lab lands Torvalds
Linus Torvalds is getting down to the business of Linux. The creator of the freely available Linux operating system will join the Open Source Development Lab, a consortium designed to bring high-end features to the software. Torvalds, who will become an OSDL Fellow, will go to work full-time on future versions of Linux, such as its forthcoming 2.6 kernel, the OSDL said in a statement. "It feels a bit strange to finally officially work on what I've been doing for the last twelve years, but with the upcoming 2.6.x release it makes sense to be able to concentrate fully on Linux," Torvalds said in a statement released by the consortium.
http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-1018057.html?tag=cd_mh

Italian police shut down piracy ring
A huge Internet piracy ring has been shut down in a police operation that resulted in the arrest of 181 people. The sting also resulted in the recovery of pirated software worth about 118 million euros ($139.5 million) -- one of the biggest single hauls ever. The raids were part of "Operation Mouse" and were carried out in Italy by the Guardia di Finanza, Italy's financial police force. The operation was supported by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), an antipiracy organization whose members include Microsoft, Adobe Systems and Cisco Systems.
http://news.com.com/2100-1012_3-1017776.html?tag=cd_mh

Radio ID tags get Microsoft backing
Microsoft is enlisting in a venture designed to help develop standards for radio frequency tags intended for use by retailers and manufacturers to track goods. The software maker said Tuesday that it will work with Auto ID, a joint venture of the Uniform Code Council and EAN International, to develop commercial and technical standards for radio frequency ID (or RFID) tags. The tags, which are extremely small, could one day replace bar codes on product packaging, using special microchips to communicate wirelessly with computers when scanned. The scanning can be automated to track goods as they flow through the supply chain -- from manufacturers to distributors to stores and eventually to customers. The tags currently cost around 50 cents apiece, and will need to come way down in price before their use becomes practical on individual products, analysts say.
http://news.com.com/2100-1020_3-1015058.html?tag=cd_mh

U.S. calls for GSM on Iraq airwaves
The U.S.-led administration ruling Iraq has issued a tender for a nationwide GSM cell phone network, which would give companies access to one of the biggest mobile markets in the Arab world. A senior telecommunications official with the U.S. government told Reuters on Monday that Iraqi airwaves would be divided among 124 bands, opening up big opportunities for many companies to operate in Iraq, according to the tender issued Saturday. A U.S. congressman in March had urged his government to build a wireless network in Iraq based on the rival CMDA (code division multiple access) technology developed by Qualcomm, a California company.
http://news.com.com/2100-1039_3-1017387.html?tag=cd_mh

XML and Unicode: Mix with care
The character set that lets computers write in every language from Czech to Chinese could make Web browsers tongue-tied, two standards groups warned on Friday. Published by the Unicode Consortium, Unicode is a standard character set for computers that aims to assign a number for every character in every written language. XML (Extensible Markup Language), a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation for marking up digital documents and creating new markup languages for specific tasks or industries, relies on Unicode and closely tracks its revisions.
http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-1017789.html?tag=cd_mh

Netscape settles privacy charges
The New York State Attorney General has worked out a settlement with America Online's Netscape Communications subsidiary over alleged privacy violations involving its SmartDownload application. According to a statement posted Friday on the agency's Web site, Netscape will pay the state of New York $100,000, delete data collected through the application and agree to privacy audits. "When companies misrepresent how data is collected or saved, we will hold these companies accountable," New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said in a statement.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-1017275.html?tag=cd_mh

MLB.com sells digital hits
If New York Yankees pitcher Roger Clemens wins his 300th game Friday night, Major League Baseball will be ready to sell a new form of memorabilia beyond its standard pins and plaques. The league's Web division has begun selling complete games for people to download off its site for $3.95 a pop. The video download can be stored on a user's hard drive and watched on a PC, or it can be burned onto a DVD to watch on a TV set. "In theory, over time, when someone subscribes for MLB pay-TV, we can offer three ways to offer a game: live, archived or downloaded," said Bob Bowman, CEO of MLB Advanced Media.
http://news.com.com/2100-1026_3-1017261.html?tag=cd_mh

Sony brightens prospects of OLED
Sony is increasing its commitment to organic light-emitting diode display technology by further investing in a joint venture to produce OLED screens and use them in mobile devices. Tokyo-based Sony announced Thursday that it will invest another $76.6 million (9 billion yen) in a joint venture with Toyota Industries as a way of speeding the production OLED displays. Sony said mass production of OLED panels will begin in the spring of next year. The joint venture, called ST-LCD, currently produces liquid-crystal display screens. The initial OLED panels, which will be about 2 inches diagonal, will be used in mobile devices from Sony.
http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-1016564.html?tag=cd_mh

Music players to get into growth groove
After a fast start, sales of digital music gadgets will keep moving on up, but to a slower beat, according to a new report. The market for electronics gear that can play MP3 files will enjoy strong growth in the next few years, as digital audio playback is included in more and more kinds of devices, according to an IDC report released Thursday. The market researcher says the worldwide market for compressed audio devices will grow to $44 billion by 2007 from $11.8 billion in 2002 -- or an annual growth rate of roughly 30 percent. That growth is healthy, but not quite as strong as the increase seen in the past few years. Such devices accounted for $580 million in worldwide sales in 2000, primarily sales of flash memory-based portable music players.
http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-1016433.html?tag=cd_mh

Support for Nanobots Shrinking
This should be Eric Drexler's moment in the sun. Instead, his colleagues are treating him like the crazy uncle in the attic. Nanotechnology, the field Drexler helped kick start, has become a far-flung, multibillion-dollar discipline, sparking innovations in medicine, consumer products and pure science. But most of today's nanotech specialists say Drexler's vision of molecule-sized robots is science fiction, not science fact. Others predict disaster if Drexler's dream ever comes to pass. At stake is more than just academic bragging rights. Businesses, governments and universities have wagered enormous sums of money on nanotech research and development. But no sizable bet has been placed on Drexler's nanobot notion.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,59268,00.html

Ottawa looks at limits on car guidance devices
The federal government is so worried about drivers being distracted by vehicle information systems that it is preparing to regulate the devices, perhaps even forcing automakers to ensure they won't operate when cars are in gear. The growing use of so-called telematics -- which started with cellphones, but are now extending to computer screens offering navigation help and alarms that warn drivers when they're straying out of their lanes -- threatens road safety, Transport Canada warns in a discussion paper published in the Canada Gazette.
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...ry/Technology/

Nanotube chip could hold 10 gigabits
A computer memory chip based on carbon nanotubes has passed a manufacturing milestone, according to the US company developing the technology. The prototype chip would store information using hundreds of billions of nanotubes with a theoretical capacity of 10 gigabits of data, says Nantero, based in Boston, Massachusetts. Once fully developed, the company says nanoscale random access memory (NRAM) could hold more data that existing types of RAM and would also be non-volatile, meaning data would not be lost when the power is been turned off. Computers using such memory could boot up almost instantly. Nantero also claims that NRAM would be much faster than current non-volatile memory, such as Flash.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993838

Hatch Takes Aim at Illegal Downloading
The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Tuesday he favors developing new technology to remotely destroy the computers of people who illegally download music from the Internet. The surprise remarks by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, during a hearing on copyright abuses represent a dramatic escalation in the frustrating battle by industry executives and lawmakers in Washington against illegal music downloads. During a discussion on methods to frustrate computer users who illegally exchange music and movie files over the Internet, Hatch asked technology executives about ways to damage computers involved in such file trading. Legal experts have said any such attack would violate federal anti-hacking laws.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Jun17.html

So, where's the virtual cookies for my beloved virtual parrot ?

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