The Newspaper Shop -- Tuesday edition

[walktalker]

FBI targets Net phoning
Internet telephone calls are fast becoming a national security threat that must be countered with new police wiretap rules, according to an FBI proposal presented quietly to regulators this month. Representatives of the FBI's Electronic Surveillance Technology Section in Chantilly, Va., have met at least twice in the past three weeks with senior officials of the Federal Communications Commission to lobby for proposed new Internet eavesdropping rules. The FBI-drafted plan seeks to force broadband providers to provide more efficient, standardized surveillance facilities and could substantially change the way that cable modem and DSL (digital subscriber line) companies operate. The new rules are necessary, because terrorists could otherwise frustrate legitimate wiretaps by placing phone calls over the Internet, warns a summary of a July 10 meeting with the FCC that the FBI prepared.
http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-5056...g=fd_lede1_hed

Spam foes wary of do-not-call suits
Even as the idea of a national do-not-spam registry gains traction among e-mail users and on Capitol Hill, a lawsuit against the proposed federal do-not-call list could nip the idea in the bud, legal experts warn. The National Do Not Call Registry was a hit with the public when it launched last month, and the site that takes phone numbers for the plan staggered under heavy demand. As of Monday, 28.7 million numbers were registered with the list. The do-not-call plan's popularity has fueled demand for a similar registry for unsolicited commercial e-mail. Perhaps the most consequential proposal has surfaced on Capitol Hill, in the form of New York Democrat Sen. Charles Schumer's antispam bill. A recent survey conducted by a company that sells antispam software appeared to confirm the popularity of the idea, showing that about three-fourths of Americans support the creation of such a list.
http://news.com.com/2100-1024_3-5057313.html?tag=fd_top

McDonald's beefs up Wi-Fi trials
McDonald's is super-sizing its Wi-Fi trial with wireless networking start-up Cometa Networks. The Oak Brook, Ill.-based company announced late Tuesday that 75 of its fast-food restaurants in the New York Tri-State area will be covered by a high-speed wireless network with access to the Internet. The trial, a partnership with Cometa, extends an earlier, smaller pilot in the New York area with the wholesale network operator. The second trial is part of the restaurant chain's increasing efforts to make 802.11-based wireless networking technology available to its customers. "At McDonald's, we are all about being the most relevant, convenient and easy-to-use option for our busy customers," Bill Lowery, a senior vice president at the company, said in a statement.
http://news.com.com/2100-1039_3-5057426.html?tag=fd_top

Life! Give My PC Life!
The theme for this issue is power. So, with Lord Acton's words as our mantra and Dr. Frankenstein as our mentor, it's time for our annual ritual of building an absolutely corrupt PC. You are a powerful person, after all, and don't want your underlings or your children snickering every time you boot up. No, you want a powerful computer, with a capital POW! Sure, you can buy a high-end PC at a store, but off-the-shelf systems always contain compromises. Building your own (or paying your personal techie to do it) lets you boast only best-of-breed components. Even if you're happy with your current PC, the components we have chosen could give your system a boost. Here we go.
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/peter...466480,00.html

Solaris gets open-source update
Sun Microsystems has released an update to its Solaris operating system that incorporates, for the first time, the Gnome open-source graphical interface. The overhaul of Sun's version of Unix, announced Tuesday, now allows people to choose Gnome instead of the interface that has been part of the software for years, the Common Desktop Environment (CDE). The open-source Gnome project was founded to bypass CDE, which relies on technology with proprietary restrictions to build graphical elements such as windows with buttons and menus. Though the controller of the CDE technology, the Open Group, is now embracing open-source principles, Sun decided to move to Gnome. Gnome grew up for use with Linux, but Sun and others embraced the technology in 2000 for use with Unix. It competes with another interface called KDE. CDE still is the default for Solaris, but users may elect to use Gnome, a Sun representative said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-5057535.html?tag=cd_mh

MSNBC taps start-up for ad technology
MSNBC.com, Microsoft's online news venture with NBC, has inked a deal with a little-known start-up to place keyword-related advertisements on article pages, a sign that the software giant may plan to rely less on commercial-search partner Overture Services. The Redmond, Wash.-based company said Tuesday that it is joining forces with WebRelevance, an 11-month-old company from Seattle, on ads for the news site. The start-up has developed technology that analyzes the content of a Web page, down to a handful of terms, in order to deliver an ad related to those keywords. The deal will allow the news site to target promos at certain audiences. For example, an MSNBC.com news article on Lance Armstrong could trigger an ad for bike equipment, using the relevance technology.
http://news.com.com/2100-1024_3-5057236.html?tag=cd_mh

Spam foes wary of do-not-call suits
Even as the idea of a national do-not-spam registry gains traction among e-mail users and on Capitol Hill, a lawsuit against the proposed federal do-not-call list could nip the idea in the bud, legal experts warn. The National Do Not Call Registry was a hit with the public when it launched last month, and the site that takes phone numbers for the plan staggered under heavy demand. As of Monday, 28.7 million numbers were registered with the list. The do-not-call plan's popularity has fueled demand for a similar registry for unsolicited commercial e-mail. Perhaps the most consequential proposal has surfaced on Capitol Hill, in the form of New York Democrat Sen. Charles Schumer's antispam bill. A recent survey conducted by a company that sells antispam software appeared to confirm the popularity of the idea, showing that about three-fourths of Americans support the creation of such a list.
http://news.com.com/2100-1024_3-5057313.html?tag=cd_mh

Lawmaker wants limits to spyware
Rep. Mary Bono introduced a bill Monday that would take the "spy" out of spyware. The Safeguard Against Privacy Invasions Act would require companies using spyware to get permission from computer users before installing the software on their machines. Spyware is the much-maligned software that companies secretly install to monitor people's Internet habits and gather information about them. The software itself is not illegal, and many companies disclose their use of spyware in licensing agreements. However, few people read the fine print of those agreements, meaning the software often is installed unknowingly on a person's computer. Bono, R-Calif., said her bill is designed to prevent invasions of privacy. "Companies that utilize spyware can sometimes view everything from passwords to credit card numbers of unknowing consumers," Bono said in a statement.
http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-5057094.html?tag=cd_mh

Lindows unveils DVD application
Lindows.com, which makes a consumer-oriented version of the Linux operating system, introduced on Tuesday an application that allows computers running the Lindows OS to play commercial DVDs. The San Diego-based company said LindowsOS 4.0 can automatically detect and launch the DVD player application. In addition to DVDs, the application can play CDs, video CDs and multimedia files including MP3, WMV and AVI, the company said. Lindows OS is based on Linux, an open-source variation of the Unix operating system. Although Linux has won widespread support on servers, many consider it to be too complex for consumer desktop PCs. Lindows, one of the best-known companies working to bring Linux to consumers, is trying to change that.
http://news.com.com/2100-1045_3-5056969.html?tag=cd_mh

RIAA Chief's Republican Pedigree
The recording industry has turned to a well-connected Republican to lead it through the upcoming legal fights it has picked with consumers. On Sept. 1, Mitch Bainwol, former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), will replace Hilary Rosen as chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America. Bainwol takes the helm as the music industry is embroiled in a battle with music lovers over illegal downloads on the Internet. Over the past few weeks, the trade group has sent out hundreds of subpoenas to Internet service providers and universities to obtain the identities of suspected file traders. The RIAA has said it will begin to file lawsuits against those music swappers at the end of August. "Mitch's strong background and experience will be a real asset to the RIAA. We welcome him to the RIAA and look forward to working with him on the important issues facing our industry at this crucial time," Cary Sherman, RIAA president, said in a statement.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59803,00.html

AI Depends on Your Point of View
Even the dumbest people can look at a situation from several different angles. But that's still a problem for the smartest of computer systems. The Real-World Reasoning project, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program, is designed to get computers to start examining situations in more than one way. It's part of a larger effort, spearheaded by the Agency's Information Processing Technology Office, or IPTO, to move toward machines that can think for themselves. Software has gotten a lot smarter in recent years -- computers are now much better at recommending books, guessing your chances for getting appendicitis, and even piloting a spaceship. But each of these efforts requires a different type of reasoning. And programs still stink at switching from one mode to another.
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,59799,00.html

Appeasing the Control Freaks
A young man crouches, staring intently into a small camera about 10 feet in front of him, hands balled into fists hovering at chest level. Overhead, his image flickers on a television screen as cartoon characters leap from a series of footbridges. He swings his hands in a circular motion, waxing on and waxing off, sending the animated avatars flying. The sight of a man knocking digital characters askew stopped more than a few people at San Diego's Comic-Con last week. The blend of real and computer images smashed together on a game screen was too much for most to pass up. The furor was fueled by a new game peripheral from Sony called the EyeToy, a Universal Serial Bus camera with motion-tracking technology that places gamers' images on the screen and allows players to control action with their body movements in one of 12 custom PlayStation 2 games.
http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,59808,00.html

Sony Gaming Handheld to Boast LAN
Sony said Tuesday its new handheld PlayStation console would be equipped with a wireless network system which allows users within a close area to play games together and download game characters. Sony Computer Entertainment, Sony's game unit, mapped out technical details of the upcoming "PSP" handheld platform, which will compete head-to-head with Nintendo's dominant Game Boy Advance handheld console. "We will be using some challenging technologies including wireless LAN," Sony Computer Entertainment President Ken Kutaragi said at a meeting of gaming software makers and retailers. "The PSP is a product with huge potential, following PlayStation and PlayStation 2. The video game market may change in a big way," he said.
http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,59819,00.html

Secret networks protect music swappers
They are the country clubs of the file-sharing world, exclusive Internet networks that require knowing the right people and having a wealth of content on your hard disk to get into the clique. These private file-swapping networks have surfaced just as the music industry has been granted dozens of subpoenas seeking the names of those who trade copyrighted material on popular services such as Kazaa, Imesh, and Gnutella. The private networks are open to smaller groups of perhaps 20 to 30 people who liberally share music, television shows, movies and computer programs. Members of such networks believe they can avoid legal consequences because their identities and actions are masked with the same technology used to protect online credit card transactions.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/interne...are/index.html

RIAA will take 2191.78 years to sue everyone
Reader Michaela Stephens says that if the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is right and that 60 million US folk are file sharing, it's going to take the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) a mighty long time to get round to them all. She said: "I pulled out my calculator to see just how long it would take the RIAA to sue all 60 million P2P music file traders at a rate of 75 a day. 60,000,000/75 = 800,000 days to subpoena each person or 800,000 days/365 days in a year = 2191.78 years to subpoena each person". Michaela points out that it's unrealistic to suppose that the RIAA will have any money left in 2191 years, and she even wonders whether the trade association will exist then. Plus, she points out, given the rate of tech advancement, it's likely that we'll have moved on to many different types of music media in even a hundred years.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10733

Internet song swappers say legal threats won't stop them
Online song swappers say the fear of getting hammered with a hefty lawsuit has had little effect on their habits — at least for now. Just 17% of swappers ages 18 and over say they have cut back on file sharing because of the potential legal consequences, according to a survey released by Jupiter Research at the company's annual Plug.IN digital music conference Monday. And 43% see nothing wrong with online file trading; only 15% say it's wrong. The survey was completed after the recording industry began issuing a flood of subpoenas in an attempt to discover the identities of illicit song traders. Measurements have since shown traffic slowing on some of the most popular file-swap services on the Net.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/20...r-survey_x.htm

Sidebar: The Dark Side of Blacklisting
When Chris Brown was working at Tivoli Software several years ago, the company took advantage of a black-hole list called the Open Relay Blocking System (ORBS) to fight spam. The list was eventually shut down, but not before Brown became disillusioned with the dark side of blacklists. The reason for the disillusionment, he says, is that companies whose IP addresses were put on the list but were innocent of wrongdoing found it extremely difficult to get off the list. IP addresses typically get on the list when a blacklist's owners test and discover open-relay mail servers -- servers that are configured to relay mail on behalf of any sender -- or when mail administrators submit the addresses of mail servers they deem to be spam sources.
http://www.computerworld.com/softwar...,83384,00.html

Loss of e-mail 'worse than divorce'
A week without e-mail is more traumatic than moving house or getting divorced, say techies. The findings come in a survey of information technology managers for the software storage firm Veritas which looked at how businesses have become dependent on e-mail. Electronic mail is playing such a key role in companies that most people start to get annoyed after just 30 minutes without e-mail access, the study found. But spare a thought for the techies in computer support. About a fifth feared for their jobs if they did not get the e-mail system back up and running within a day. More than 800 techies in Europe and the Middle East were quizzed about the role of e-mail for the survey.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3104889.stm

Volcanic pool enzyme kills prions
A new disinfectant, based on enzymes collected from a volcanic pool, is showing promise in destroying the mutated prion proteins that cause vCJD, the human form of BSE. These prions are notoriously difficult to break down, and because an unknown number of people in the UK have vCJD, there is a theoretical risk that surgical instruments could transmit the disease. The disinfectant could also be effective against the prions that cause sporadic CJD, which occurs spontaneously and has been spread surgically. Standard decontamination procedures, such as detergents, UV inactivation and high-pressure boiling at 137 °C, have proven unsuccessful at destroying all the prions on contaminated equipment. But now researchers at the UK's Centre for Applied Microbiology and Research (CAMR) in Porton Down and biotechnology company Genencor believe they have developed a prion eradication agent.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993999

World's biggest election goes electronic
India, the world's largest democracy, has announced that every vote in its 2004 national election will be registered and counted using electronic ballot machines. With more than 600 million registered voters, India's parliamentary election is the biggest on Earth. Electronic voting machines have already been used successfully in Indian state elections. But on Monday, Indian election commissioner T S Krishnamurthy announced that the 2004 parliamentary election would be entirely electronic for the first time. This will require an increase in the number of electronic voting machines from 600,000 to 800,000. The exact date for the next national election has not yet been set. But localised state elections, planned for later in 2003, will also depend completely on electronic voting machines.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993998

Labels charged with price-fixing - again
A pair of major music labels have been hit with another round of price-fixing charges courtesy of the FTC - a decision which raises the question as to who exactly is to blame for falling music revenue. In a unanimous decision, members of the U.S. FTC (Federal Trade Comission) chastised Vivendi Universal and Warner Communications for restricting competition in the sale of "The Three Tenors" - Jose Carreras, Placido Domingo, and Luciano Pavarotti - audio and video products. It seems that PolyGram (a company later bought by Vivendi) conspired with Warner "to curb discounting and advertising to boost sales of recordings that the two companies jointly had distributed based on the tenors' concert in Paris during the 1998 soccer World Cup." Based on these practices, the FTC has arrived at a stunning ruling.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/32048.html

Ozone layer shows first signs of recovery
After two decades of declining ozone levels, NASA on Tuesday reported the first signs that the Earth's atmosphere may be on the mend. "Ozone is still decreasing, but just not as fast," said Mike Newchurch, of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, in announcing what researchers say could be the first stage of an ozone layer recovery. Newchurch, who headed the study, said the rate of ozone loss in the upper stratosphere appears to have begun slowing in 1998, about a decade after industrial nations agreed to halt production of most ozone-destroying chemicals. Until then, ozone, a molecular form of oxygen that shields the Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation, had been decreasing steadily by about 8 percent a decade -- a trend that has stirred scientific concern about future increases in skin cancer rates and damage to fragile marine ecosystems.
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news...3/30ozone.html

Glory days over for illegal file sharing: analyst
Free file-sharing services, where computer users pull songs off the Internet over the objections of the recording industry, will eventually be shut down, industry observers said yesterday, despite pioneer Napster's plans to relaunch this year. "Nothing so frightens the hard working respectable citizens as the threat of a lawyer," says Raymond James analyst Phil Leigh. "[File-sharing services] are going to be hard to eradicate but the illegal file-sharing services have seen their glory days." The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has already warned it would file thousands of lawsuits against individual computer users in the United States who share "substantial amounts" of copyrighted digital materials.
http://www.canada.com/technology/sto...F-CD35E6819D32

Subpoenas Sent to File-Sharers Prompt Anger and Remorse
A blizzard of subpoenas from the recording industry seeking the identities of people suspected of illegally swapping music is provoking fear, anger and professions of remorse as the targets of the antipiracy dragnet learn that they may soon be sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. The Recording Industry Association of America has obtained close to 1,000 such subpoenas over the last four weeks to more than a dozen Internet service providers, including Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, and several universities, including Boston College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, demanding the names of file swappers. Most Internet providers are notifying the unlucky subscribers by mail that they are legally required to turn over their contact information. Those on alert include several college students, the parents of a 14-year-old boy in the Southwest, a 41-year-old Colorado health care worker and a Brooklyn woman who works in the fashion industry.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/28/te...partner=GOOGLE

Exploit Code For Windows Vulnerability Posted
Several hacking groups have posted code to the Internet that could be used to exploit a vulnerability in Microsoft's Windows operating system, the same vulnerability that drove the Department of Homeland Security last Friday to issue an alert urging all IT administrators to patch the flaw as soon as possible. Rated by Microsoft as "critical," the highest in its four-level alert system, when it first was disclosed on July 16, the vulnerability could allow attackers entry into a system through a hole in Windows' Remote Procedure Call protocol. A hacker-crafted request could cause a buffer overflow on a Windows machine, allowing the attacker entry, where he could run code of his choosing or even delete files. At least three different exploits have been posted to various security mailing lists, such as BugTraq and Full-Disclosure, said Dan Ingevaldson, the engineering manager of Internet Security Systems' X-Force research and development team.
http://www.informationweek.com/story...cleID=12803542

Legal commentators weigh SCO's chances... And find them slim to none
The SCO war might go down as the first Open Source lawsuit, in a couple of senses. First, because the GNU General Public License, or GPL, might be legally tested for the first time. Secondly, SCO has probably sealed its defeat by ticking off many intelligent Open Source users. It's quite probable that the GPL will be tested in court. If not in the SCO vs IBM case, then in other litigation, either by or against SCO. IBM recently issued a memo, as reported by C|Net here. The IBM memo explicitly refers to SCO's prior distribution of Linux under the GPL as invalidating its claims of Linux copyright infringement. Whether or not this implies that IBM will employ the GPL as an element of its defense is uncertain, but it's possible.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10743

New Theory: Catastrophe Created Mars' Moons
The two moons of Mars Phobos and Deimos could be the byproducts of a breakup of a huge moon that once circled the red planet, according to a new theory. The capture of a large Martian satellite may have taken place during or shortly after the formation of the planet, with Phobos and Deimos now the surviving remnants. Origin of the two moons presents a longstanding puzzle to which one researcher proposed the new solution at the 6th International Conference on Mars, held here last week. "Nobody has been able to explain the origin of Phobos and Deimos," said S. Fred Singer of the University of Virginias Science & Environmental Policy Project in Arlington, Virginia.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...eatedmarsmoons

More news later on