The Newspaper Shop -- Wednesday edition

[walktalker]

Patent issues could cloud SOAP standard
A Web standards body is close to approving a key Web services specification, but concerns about patent rights may hold up the process. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a standards body that oversees some Internet protocols, is nearing completion on the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.2, one of the four key Web services specifications. SOAP essentially allows programs running on different computers to communicate with one another. A W3C working group has been working on the SOAP specification for about two years. Part of that time has been spent addressing 393 issues brought to its attention by members and industry professionals. That number is now down to just 11, said Janet Daly, a W3C spokeswoman.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-957783.html

IBM unveils "pixie dust" hard drives
IBM is using an extra dash of pixie dust to add gigabytes of storage to its notebook hard drives. New Travelstar hard drives for notebooks announced Wednesday boost maximum capacity from 60GB to 80GB, thanks to the company's more liberal use of the element ruthenium, dubbed "pixie dust" by IBM researchers. Big Blue's pixie dust manufacturing technique, officially called antiferromagnetically coupled (AFC) media, adds a thin layer of ruthenium to the platters inside a drive. This layer allows more data to be packed onto each platter. The newest Travelstar drives add an extra layer of ruthenium to further boost data storage capacity. AFC was first announced in May 2001.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-964711.html

Tech to gain influence after 2002 election
Republicans captured control of the U.S. Congress late Tuesday, an unexpected victory that is likely to help technology companies, but could thwart controversial digital copyright legislation next year. The near-final election results suggest that a single party will control the executive and legislative branches, which will reshuffle the Senate leadership and make it easier for President Bush to advance Republican proposals. When the new session of Congress starts in January, Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., will no longer head the Senate Commerce committee. Hollings drew the ire of the technology community after introducing a bill that would implant copy-protection technology into all PCs and consumer electronics devices.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-964725.html

Mozilla group launches bug challenge
In a tech industry equivalent to guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar, the development group behind the Mozilla browser is challenging geeks to guess the exact date and time when the project's 200,000th bug will be reported.
In a posting to three newsgroups devoted to the Netscape-hatched open-source browser, including "netscape.public.mozilla.general," Mozilla staff member Gervase Markham invited developers to e-mail a guess. The prize? A "limited-edition Mozilla 1.0 commemorative CD, with large red lizard on the front." The name Mozilla is a combination of Netscape's original moniker, Mosaic Communications, and the name of the giant lizard/dinosaur of Japanese monster movie fame. Markham announced the contest this week. The entry deadline is Nov. 14, at noon PST.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-964663.html

Nokia appliance attacks spam, viruses
Nokia and Trend Micro are to launch an e-mail scanning system to defend networks against viruses and spam attacks. Nokia Internet Communications, a unit of the world's largest mobile phone maker, will provide network hardware that uses technology from Trend Micro, Japan's biggest software security firm, that scans e-mail and automatically updates itself to recognize the latest virus threats. "Up to now, people took different pieces of software and installed them onto their e-mail servers, which was difficult to maintain," said Dan MacDonald, vice president of product management and marketing at Mountain View, California-based Nokia Internet Communications.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-964691.html

Does Mozilla do it better?
A list making the rounds on the Internet's newsgroups and discussion boards says you can do more things with the Mozilla browser than you can with Microsoft's Internet Explorer -- 101 things, to be precise. The list, which has been making its way through newsgroups and discussion forums frequented by programmers, enumerates 101 of Mozilla's capabilities that author Neil Deakin says Microsoft's market-leading IE browser lacks, including the ability to navigate numerous browser windows through tabs and the ability to block pop-up advertisements. Deakin, a 28-year-old Toronto resident, contributes occasionally to the Mozilla open-source project and maintains a tutorial on Extensible User Interface Language (XUL), a Mozilla technology for creating the browser interface with common Web development languages rather than native computer code.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-964792.html?tag=fd_top

Notre Dame math guru cracks
And you thought you had tough math homework? Consider the work that went into cracking a secret code developed by Toronto-based Certicom, which makes wireless encryption software. It took the power of 10,000 computers running around the clock for 549 days, coupled with the brainpower of a mathematician at Indiana's University of Notre Dame, to complete one of the world's largest single math computations. Certicom had challenged scientists, mathematicians, cryptographers and hackers to try to break one of the encryption codes the company uses to protect digital data.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-964798.html?tag=fd_top

Doom III for free?
Yarr! Beware mateys. For while there be gaming plunder here, there surely be Doom as well. Internet pirates are getting a taste of 2003's hottest game these days, but if the developer and publisher had anything to say about it, things would be quite different. A very early and limited build of "Doom III" has leaked onto the Internet and it's spreading like wildfire. There's nothing new about net piracy. But it's rare to see something with such a high profile – and such high security - slip out so early. Word's spreading fast, too. On Friday, when rumors about the leak started appearing, the game was hard to find. By Monday, it was hard not to stumble across it. It's not the entire game that is being pirated - rather a three-level demo that was shown at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo, the trade show of the video gaming industry – but it's enough to outrage developers and confuse publishers.
http://money.cnn.com/2002/11/05/comm...ming/index.htm

What happens when a gambling town falls hard for the computer network?
What made Budz rich, and what has made casinos even richer in recent years, are new digital networks that connect virtually every slot machine in every casino in the country. Wheel of Fortune, for instance, is part of the MegaJackpots system, a network within 18 states and one Native American reservation that encompasses more than 8,000 machines, about half of them in Nevada. Because all these slots are wired together, every coin and bill inserted is monitored and tallied by banks of central computers, often hundreds of miles away. The maximum jackpot, advertised in flashing digits above each cluster of machines, mounts identically and simultaneously with each spin.
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/compute...385529,00.html

Russian firm warns of Roron virus
Russian antivirus company Kaspersky Labs on Wednesday warned home PC users of a new virus that could help hackers gain control of a victim's computer. Other security companies, however, downplayed the threat. Called Roron by Kaspersky Labs -- and known as Oror.B by several other companies -- the new computer virus, or worm, can spread through e-mail messages, shared hard drives and the Kazaa file-sharing network, said Denis Zemkin, a spokesman for Kaspersky Labs. "We see that this worm is particularly dangerous for home users," Zemkin said. "Corporate customers are already aware of the danger of attachments," and are unlikely to open the file containing the program.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-964809.html?tag=cd_mh

Microchips weigh heavily on environment
The production of a microchip requires a hefty amount of materials, energy and water, and has an environmental impact that far outweighs its miniature size, according to a study. Researchers estimate that producing a single 2-gram chip used for memory in personal computers requires at least 3.7 pounds of fuel and chemicals. The study, funded in part by the Fulbright Foundation, will appear in the December print edition of Environmental Science & Technology, a journal of the American Chemical Society. The researchers, who included Eric Williams from the United Nations University in Tokyo and Miriam Heller of the National Science Foundation, followed a 32MB dynamic RAM chip through every level of its production. What they found was that producing a chip required 3.5 pounds of fossil fuels, nearly a quarter pound of chemicals, about 70 pounds of water and 1.5 pounds of gases such as nitrogen.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-964721.html?tag=cd_mh

Bank error exposes e-mail addresses
Bank of the West exposed the e-mail addresses of thousands of its online banking customers Monday, in a mistake it blamed on "human error." In an e-mail message sent Monday to alert customers that its banking system would be out of service for maintenance this weekend, Bank of the West included the e-mail addresses of more than 3,300 of its customers in the "To" field, company spokesman John Stafford confirmed Tuesday. Stafford said the company mistakenly placed the e-mail addresses in the "To" field instead of masking them by placing them in the blind carbon copy (BCC) field. "It was an inadvertent mistake," Stafford said. Bank of the West e-mailed affected customers Tuesday to apologize for the error.
http://news.com.com/2100-1017-964611.html

Study finds fault with advice sites
An international study released this week found gaps in the credibility and privacy policies of many Web sites that dispense health and financial advice. Consumers International, a coalition of more than 250 consumer advocacy organizations, and Consumer WebWatch, a U.S.-based project of the nonprofit Consumers Union, conducted the study through an evaluation of 460 Web sites between April and July. Among their findings was that nearly half of the health and financial sites in the study failed to warn consumers to consult a professional before acting on their online advice. Just as many sites neglected to inform consumers about the credentials of the advisors, while just over 40 percent failed to indicate the source of their advice at all.
http://news.com.com/2100-1017-964620.html?tag=cd_mh

WorldCom expects $9 billion restatement
WorldCom on Tuesday said it expects to restate more than $9 billion in earnings, as it faced additional charges of fraud filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission for misleading investors about its financial health since at least 1999. WorldCom said it is in talks with the SEC to settle charges it committed securities fraud by manipulating its financial records. A settlement deal could be announced within a week or two, sources familiar with the situation said. A settlement would impose a nominal fine on WorldCom and require the company to agree not to violate securities laws in the future, the sources said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1033-964630.html?tag=cd_mh

More news later on

[multi]

another good roundup of the news...
TY agin WT