The Newspaper Shop -- Thursday edition

[walktalker]

Government preps Net security system
A centralized early warning system for Internet security alerts should be working by this fall, an official from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said Thursday afternoon. Marcus Sachs, the department's cyber program director, said the system will provide an Internet counterpart to the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC) that President Bush announced in his State of the Union address in January. The TTIC, a mammoth data-collection project intended to fuse information collected domestically by police and internationally by spy agencies, has a broad mandate but has focused on physical threats to national security. "We don't have today a way to do early warning detection broadly," Sachs said in an interview after a speech at the Black Hat Briefings security conference here. Defense contractor SRI International is expected to deliver a preliminary version of a working system -- called the Global Early Warning Information System (GEWIS) -- by October 2003 and a final version by March 2004, Sachs said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1009-5058578.html?tag=nl

Hackers look to hide communications
Hackers intent on anonymously sending data across the Internet have a new tool. A program called NCovert uses spoofing techniques to hide the source of communications and the data that travels over the network--a potential boon to both privacy advocates and hackers, said Mark Lovelace, senior security researcher for network protection firm BindView, who unveiled the program Thursday at the Black Hat Briefings security conference here. "I am not going to beat around the bush," Lovelace said. "If you have something to hide, you would use this -- so it could help black hats (criminal hackers)." The technique essentially creates a covert channel for communications by hiding four characters of data in the header's initial sequence number (ISN) field. The header is the part of data packets that tells network hardware and servers how to handle the information. The header also includes source and destination Internet protocol (IP) addresses. Those addresses are used to add anonymity to the communications.
http://news.com.com/2100-1002-5058535.html?tag=nl

Black Hat puts hacker on mock trial
--A raucous conference crowd heard real-life attorneys battle over a hacker's guilt in a mock trial held to illustrate how slippery electronic evidence can be in computer crime cases. The mock trial, staged Wednesday at the Black Hat Briefings security conference here, centered on whether a video game designer had violated federal criminal laws by helping someone to break into U.S. Air Force computers. In the government's evidence were purported e-mail messages without headers, and representations of Internet Relay Chat conversations -- both of which can be altered without leaving a trace.
http://news.com.com/2100-1002-5058276.html?tag=nl

Homeland Security courts Silicon Valley
The government has about $1 billion to spend next year on the development of new homeland security technologies and is looking toward Silicon Valley for ideas on how to spend it. That was the message from Jane Alexander, an official with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, to a group of about 200 technology executives who gathered Thursday at Veritas Software's headquarters here for tips on how to work with the new research and development arm of the department. Alexander is the deputy director of the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA), a recently formed group charged with funding development and research of technology that could help the government thwart and respond to terrorist attacks and other national disasters.
http://news.com.com/2100-1020_3-5058618.html?tag=fd_top

Lawmaker seeks info on RIAA dragnet
The recording industry's wave of subpoenas that target individual computer users has drawn the critical attention of at least one influential lawmaker on Capitol Hill. Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., who chairs the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, sent a letter to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on Thursday that criticized its recent spate of subpoenas and asked for detailed information on how the process is working. Coleman said the RIAA may be going too far. "The industry has legitimate concerns about copyright infringement," Coleman said in a statement. "Yet, the industry seems to have adopted a 'shotgun' approach that could potentially cause injury and harm to innocent people who may have simply been victims of circumstance, or possessing a lack of knowledge of the rules related to digital sharing of files."
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5058594.html?tag=fd_top

DVD burner sales on fire
Retail sales of laptop and desktop computers with DVD recorders jumped 550 percent in unit terms during the first half of this year, according to research from NPD Group. The number of laptops and desktops with internal DVD recorders sold by retailers in the first six months of the year hit 209,959, up from 32,297 in the first half of 2002, according to NPD. DVD burners in home decks -- devices that plug into TVs -- are also gaining in popularity. The number of home DVD recorder units sold in the first half of 2003 reached 58,000, up 316 percent from the first half of 2002, NPD said. The dramatic increase in sales of laptops and desktops with DVD recorders relates to computer makers bundling DVD burners into their higher-end products, NPD analyst Tom Edwards said. He expects the sales trend to continue as DVD recorder prices fall.
http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-5058614.html?tag=fd_top

Open-source luminaries spurn SCO
Two prominent figures in the open-source realm have rejected SCO Group's argument that Linux users should pay the company license fees for using the operating system. Objecting to SCO's demands are Linus Torvalds, who began the Linux project 12 years ago and who still leads its development, and Eben Moglen, the attorney for the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which created the legal and technological framework used by Linux. SCO, owner of Unix copyrights and the company that licensed the operating system to Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and others, argues that Unix intellectual property has tainted Linux in three ways. First, some proprietary Unix code has been copied line-by-line into Linux; second, Unix licensee IBM moved software developed for Unix to Linux against license provisions; and third, Unix "concepts and methods" are used in Linux. Some of these accusations figure in SCO's $3 billion lawsuit against IBM.
http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-5058297.html?tag=fd_top

A high-tech bridge to Middle East peace?
Shimon Peres is reputed to be an incurable optimist, and maybe that's the right state of mind for anyone who's attempting to solve the seemingly intractable conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Even after three years of conflict, he still sees a way out of the bloody stalemate. "Economics and politics are symbiotic," says the former prime minister of Israel and co-winner of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, who argues that the technological rejuvenation of the region will go a long way toward breaking the logjam. Peres played a central role in fostering the development of Israel's high-tech sector, which last year accounted for some $12 billion in exports compared with $3 billion in 1991. During that period, Israel earned a spot alongside the likes of India, China and Taiwan as an emerging tech hotbed.
http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-5057...ml?tag=fd_nc_1

The Age of Automation
The '60s and '70s were the decades of the mainframe. The '80s made up the decade of client-server computing. The '90s were the Internet years. Now we're entering the decade of the electronic butler. Instead of developing computers that we can use to solve complex problems, researchers are dedicating themselves to the task of inventing machines that will solve problems for us. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), for instance, is holding a contest called the DARPA Grand Challenge. For this contest, inventors will try to develop fully automated, off-road robot cars that can make it from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in 10 hours -- or about the same time it takes a Greyhound bus full of gambling senior citizens to make the trip. Instead of two rolls of nickels and a pass to a buffet, the winners will receive $1 million.
http://news.com.com/2010-1071_3-5058002.html

From concentrated skill to distributed ignorance?
No doubt about it, we seem to be moving from a world of concentrated skill and expertise to a world of distributed ignorance. Only 200 years ago it was possible to be a leading engineer and zoologist at the same time. Even 50 years ago it was possible to understand the fine grain detail of the telephone or television network but today no one knows everything about almost anything. No one human mind understands and contains the full design and operational detail of even the simplest of aircraft. The knowledge required to create materials, turn them into the component parts and mould them into a complete system is way beyond the capacity of any one human. Should we be shaking our heads in despair at the demise of the polymath? Perhaps but, then again, perhaps not! The upside to the technology that saw their demise has, in part, allowed us all to become more powerful.
http://www.silicon.com/opinion/164-500001/1/5397.html

Microsoft gives 12 governments a peek
Microsoft said Thursday it has now let a dozen national governments see its Windows source code in its battle to win lucrative public-sector contracts and to muffle mounting hype over rival operating system Linux. Earlier this year, Microsoft started a new initiative that involved opening up its Windows OS to governments interested in tailoring the software to fit, primarily, their security needs. Microsoft said 12 countries, including Austria, Russia, China and the United Kingdom, had entered into the new deals, with another 35 in negotiations, since the program started in January. The stakes are high. An increasing number of corporations and governments are turning to open-source Linux to run their desktop and network computer systems, posing the biggest threat yet to Microsoft's dominant market position in operating systems.
http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-5058120.html?tag=cd_mh
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,59847,00.html

Print a hologram? Almost, Xerox says
It's a little much to expect a hologram to come out of your office printer, but scientists at Xerox think they have the next best thing. On Thursday, the company is unveiling a new technology it calls "Glossmark," which can use ordinary office printers to superimpose a glossy image on an ordinary printed document in a way that can't be photocopied or otherwise easily reproduced. Taking advantage of eccentricities in laser printing processes, once viewed as flaws, the Xerox scientists think they've found a way to authenticate hard copies of printed documents in much the same way that holographic stickers prove the validity of credit cards and drivers licenses. "This does speak to something that is going to need to be addressed to ensure hard-copy security," said Dan Corsetti, an industry analyst with research firm IDC, who saw a demonstration several months ago.
http://news.com.com/2100-1008_3-5058052.html?tag=cd_mh

ISP sues record industry over subpoenas
The United States' largest supplier of ADSL (assymetric digital subscriber line) connections is challenging the recording industry's current campaign of targeting song swappers with a lawsuit filed late on Wednesday, charging that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is violating its customers' right to privacy. Pacific Bell Internet Services (PBIS), operated by telecommunications giant SBC Communications, challenged the subpoenas served against it by the RIAA on procedural grounds, arguing that hundreds of them were served improperly. However, the group made it clear that its action was taken in order to protect the privacy of its customers. The lawsuit charges that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which the RIAA says supports its current antipiracy actions, may violate the right to privacy enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5058107.html?tag=cd_mh
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,59844,00.html

Company patches flaws in 'Half-Life' game
A security research company has released its own patch for critical flaws in a popular computer game, saying it had waited months for the game's creator to do something. Earlier this week, Newport, Calif.-based PivX Solutions issued an advisory warning of three high-risk buffer-overflow vulnerabilities it discovered in "Half-Life," a popular first-person-shooter game. Although released several years ago, "Half-Life" has remained popular, due to variants based upon the game such as "Counter-Strike" and "Day of Defeat." It has more than 10 million players, according to online gaming sites. The company said in a statement that these flaws make players' computers and the 30,000 servers that run the game susceptible to a denial-of-service attack. In such attacks, servers can be taken over by hackers so that they constantly send requests to other servers, making the targets so busy that they can't respond to legitimate requests. The vulnerabilities also allow "limitless and complete code execution by an attacker," PivX added.
http://news.com.com/2100-1043_3-5058257.html?tag=cd_mh

Antispam Bills: Worse Than Spam?
While no one has sympathy for the devils that fill inboxes with promises of lower mortgages and larger members, not everyone is supporting the new movement to banish spammers from the Internet. Some online advocates worry that heavy-handed antispam measures, such as centralized blacklists and charging for delivery, will destroy e-mail. Electronic Frontier Foundation's head counsel Cindy Cohn, for instance, argues that antispam crusaders are forgetting the Internet's first principle -- information flows freely from end to end. Cohn fears that the Internet's openness will be collateral damage in the war against unwanted e-mail. Cohn says her organization's position on spam blocking can be boiled down to a simple proposition: "All nonspam e-mail should be delivered." It's an information age take on the Hippocratic oath, which requires doctors to first do no harm.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59840,00.html

AOL Tries to Stop the Bleeding
America Online released Thursday an overhaul of its software that relies on improved tools and content to keep current customers from defecting, even as the company's dialup business continues to shrivel. The company that came to dominate the dialup ISP business by giving neophytes an easy on ramp lately has been bleeding subscribers as more and more of its customers grow comfortable with technology and switch to other, often cheaper, alternatives, or to broadband. AOL faces competitive threats across the board, particularly from a resurgent Yahoo, which has signed up nearly 3 million subscribers to the DSL service it offers with SBC. Microsoft's MSN also is sensing blood in the water and is readying a premium package of tools and content for broadband users that undercuts AOL on price.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,59841,00.html

Air Security Is Anything But
The Homeland Security Department will begin testing a program to classify all airline passengers according to their security risk. Privacy advocates have criticized the passenger screening effort, fearing it could lead to unconstitutional invasion of privacy and database mix-ups that could brand innocent people as potential terrorists. Nuala O'Connor Kelly, Homeland Security's chief privacy officer, said the program has been reworked so less personal information will be checked. And people will be able to write or call to find out what's in the database about them, Kelly said. That was not the case under the original plan.
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,59845,00.html

Shooters Kill Troops' Off Hours
Just out of high school, thousands of miles from friends and parents, and isolated by language and culture from the people around them, young airmen stationed on a U.S. Air Force base in Europe can find life pretty lonely. But now the military's fresh faces can get a bit of the comforts of home -- by wasting their pals in an online shoot-'em-up game. U.S. Air Forces in Europe, or USAFE, is investing about $200,000 into networked gaming centers at 14 bases scattered across the continent. All told, more than 100 Microsoft Xbox game consoles will be purchased, giving thousands of airmen a familiar new option for their downtime.
http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,59801,00.html

Magic Touch for Electronic Music?
A pair of MIT graduate students has developed a futuristic tool for composing live electronic music that is unlike any traditional computer interface. The Audiopad, developed by James Patten and Ben Recht, is a colorful, dynamic, luminescent interface projected onto a table top. It is reminiscent of the futuristic haptic (touch) interfaces seen in Steven Spielberg's sci-fi movie Minority Report, in which Tom Cruise uses his hands to control his computers. "It's more expressive than a laptop interface (for creating electronic music)," said Patten, 26. "In terms of the style of play it encourages, it's easier to improvise a more expressive style of play. Because it's physical, there's also a dynamic that engages the audience. They can actually see what the performer is doing."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,59837,00.html

New Technique Confirms Hiroshima Radiation Levels
It's been nearly 58 years since an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima near the end of World War II. Now, on the eve of the blast's anniversary, the uncertainty surrounding radiation levels inflicted on survivors may finally be settled. A report published today in the journal Nature confirms earlier radiation results, thereby increasing confidence in estimates of cancer risk that are based on the data. Survivors of the Hiroshima bomb gave scientists a rare opportunity to study what effect extremely high doses of radiation can have on people. The information is used to set safe levels of exposure and calculate cancer risks for radiation in other areas, from medicinal X-rays to nuclear power plants. Consequently, if the radiation levels from the bombs were underestimated -- as some reports in the mid-1980s had suggested they were -- the effects would be far-reaching.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?art...#038;ref=sciam

Virtual reality conquers sense of taste
Food companies cooking up a novel product will soon be able to check how elderly people will fare when they try to chew on it, thanks to a device that mimics the taste and "mouthfeel" of food. Already, virtual reality devices have been built that try to simulate experiences for four of our five senses - vision, hearing, touch and smell. But the complexity of the sense of taste has made it difficult for computers to conquer. Taste combines the feel of food in the mouth with chemical and even auditory cues. Hiroo Iwata of the University of Tsukuba in Japan and colleagues call it the "last frontier of virtual reality". But it is a frontier they have now crossed. "The food simulator is the first media technology that is put into the mouth," says Iwata.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994006

Search for web's favourite colour
The identity of the internet's favourite colour may soon be revealed, thanks to a project by a British web designer. Anyone with access to e-mail or a picture messaging mobile phone can take part in the quest. The favcol.com site works out the average colour of all pictures sent to it and displays it as the background colour on the site's home page. Soon the service might even be able to tell us the most popular colour on the net per hour, month, or even per user. Site designer Matt Webb expects the top colour to come out as "some kind of beige", but says the types of pictures people send in will have a major influence on results.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3107455.stm

Circuit design evolving in distributed digital world
A digital simulation of natural selection, taking place in scores of internet-linked personal computers, is being used to evolve superior electronic circuits. The calculations used to improve circuit design would normally be performed on a single powerful computer or a large cluster of machines. But Miguel Garvie, a research student at the University of Sussex in the UK, has developed software that lets ordinary computer users contribute their spare processing power to create a virtual evolutionary environment for the project. Such "distributed computing" is already providing cheap but substantial computer power to the search for alien messages in radio signals from space and to the quest for the largest prime numbers.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994012

BuyMusic's downloads strike a sour note
Last week Buy.com tried to take a bite out of Apple's successful iTunes Music Store by rolling out a low-priced song-download service said to be simple and reliable. But in an example of the technological trickiness involved in offering users the freedom they desire while giving music labels the protections they demand, early customers have found they can't transfer the tunes they buy on BuyMusic.com to digital portables. The Mac-only iTunes has won raves for ease of use, both in burning CDs and transferring songs to Apple's iPod players. But BuyMusic's tracks have started out as unplayable, even on portables lent to the press in a promotional blitz. "We're working on this," says Buy.com's Scott Blum, who says the company will have the glitch fixed today and that customers who have bought tracks will receive an e-mail offering free re-downloads.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/20...buymusic_x.htm

Sweden to outlaw peer-to-peer file swapping
The implementation of EUCD will have staggering consequences to Swedish computer users. Not only will it limit the consumers' rights to make copies of CDs and DVDs for personal use, but it will also criminalize peer-to-peer file sharing. The Swedish government is proposing a law which would require the permission from the copyright owner before any music, video, photo or text material can be spread on the net. P2P software, such as Kazaa will be outright outlawed, as will software intended for bypassing copy protection on movies and audio CDs. Also the right to make personal copies will be further limited, but it will still be legal to make copies for personal use. According to the minister of justice Thomas Bodström the new legislation doesn't radically change the current attitude towards copyrights.
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/4345.cfm

Government issues second warning on Microsoft security flaw
The Department of Homeland Security has issued an unprecedented second warning to Internet users about a security flaw in Microsoft Corp. software that could leave about 75 percent of the country's computers vulnerable to hacker attacks. The latest warning comes two weeks after Microsoft issued a bulletin notifying computer users it had discovered a critical flaw in its most common Windows operating systems, including its newest versions, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. The flaw can let hackers use the Internet to seize control of users' machines to steal files, read e-mails and launch wide-scale computer virus and "worm'' attacks that could seriously damage the Internet.
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercuryne...ss/6429877.htm

Weighing Hubble's Future
The Hubble Space Telescope has produced phenomenal results since it first went into orbit in 1990. Using Hubble, astronomers determined the age of the universe and discovered that, contrary to theory, the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace. And, with periodic upgrades, Hubble has actually gotten better with age. It's still due to have one more upgrade a few years from now before heading for retirement in 2010. Originally, NASA had planned to bring Hubble back to Earth in a space shuttle so that the telescope could hang in the Smithsonian. But in the wake of the Columbia accident, nobody wants to risk lives for a museum piece. As NPR's Richard Harris reports, the question of what NASA should do with Hubble has now become a contentious matter.
http://www.npr.org/display_pages/fea...e_1381806.html

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good news thanks..