The Newspaper Shop -- Wednesday edition

[walktalker]

Linux community scoffs at SCO's evidence
As pictures of contested Linux code made their way around the Web, open-source enthusiasts scoffed at claims by The SCO Group that the code shows it has legal rights over parts of the popular operating system. On chat boards devoted to the OS, Linux supporters roundly condemned SCO, saying some of the code -- showed off by the company earlier this week at its SCO Forum conference and later posted to the Web by a German computer magazine -- actually dates from the 1970s and is covered under a BSD license that allows the sharing of the code. "Are these their best examples?" open-source leader and well-known Debian developer Bruce Perens asked during an interview with CNET News.com on Wednesday. "Their examples are bogus." Lindon, Utah-based SCO sued IBM in March, claiming Big Blue illegally inserted SCO's Unix code into Linux. In a move that further roiled the open-source community, SCO sent letters to hundreds of Linux users, warning them of potential copyright violations.
http://news.com.com/2100-1016-5066410.html?tag=nl

Microsoft warns of critical IE flaws
Microsoft alerted PC users to three critical security flaws in Internet Explorer and Windows on Wednesday, as the MSBlast worm and its variants used a previous vulnerability in Windows to spread across the Net for a second week. The software giant released a cumulative patch for Internet Explorer that fixes several vulnerabilities previously disclosed by the company, and it re-released an advisory for Microsoft's SQL Server software, warning that a flaw in that program actually affects most Windows users. Users who don't patch their systems could leave the computers open to attack through a fake Web page or an HTML e-mail that contains the specific exploit code, said Stephen Toulouse, security program manager for Microsoft's security response center.
http://news.com.com/2100-1002_3-5066511.html?tag=fd_top

Ashcroft stumps for Patriot Act
Attorney General John Ashcroft has embarked on an unusual nationwide tour to drum up support for the controversial USA Patriot Act. Enacted six weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, the law permits police to monitor e-mail and Web activity without a judge's approval in some circumstances, to obtain court orders in order to conduct secret searches of Americans' homes and offices and to browse medical and financial records without showing evidence of a crime. Ashcroft's USA Patriot Act tour began on Wednesday morning with a speech to police at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and a scheduled speech in Cleveland in the afternoon. On Thursday, he'll speak to police in Des Moines, Iowa, and Detroit.
http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-5066493.html?tag=fd_top

ISPs: Sobig's the biggest virus so far
The Sobig virus is aptly named. Recent data from e-mail service providers pegs the infection caused by the latest variant of the Sobig virus as the largest epidemic of a mass-mailing computer program to date. E-mail filtering company MessageLabs, for instance, said it intercepted more than a million messages that carry the virus on Tuesday, while rival Postini trapped 2.6 million in 24 hours. "This is the fastest (virus) that we have seen," said Scott Petry, vice president of products and engineering for Redwood city, Calif.-based Postini. He added that the company typically stops far fewer e-mail messages that carry viruses -- about 500,000 -- on an average day. The computer virus clogged corporate e-mail systems on Tuesday and Wednesday, as every message had to be digitally checked for the virus before being passed on to the recipient's computer
http://news.com.com/2100-1002_3-5066444.html?tag=fd_top

Opera gets in tune with Mac OS update
Opera Software is getting in step with Panther. On Tuesday, the independent browser company introduced Opera 6.03, which is tailored to the upcoming update of the Macintosh operating system, code-named Panther. It said the release was necessary "to make Opera compatible with the debuting operating system." Panther, previewed in June at Macworld Expo, is expected to make a debut later this year. Also known as Mac OS X 10.3, it is an upgrade to Mac OS X, the Unix-based software that replaced Apple Computer's long-standing operating system, after years in development. Like its immediate predecessor Jaguar, Panther is expected to come with its own browser, Safari. The January introduction of Safari threw the Mac browser market into disarray, and Opera threatened to withdraw altogether from building Mac versions of its software.
http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5066372.html?tag=fd_top

New ruling protects ISPs, Web operators
Internet service providers and Web site operators are breathing a collective sigh of relief following a court decision that preserves a key aspect of their immunity under the Communications Decency Act. The ruling, handed down Aug. 13 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, overturns a decision by the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. That ruling alarmed ISPs and Web site operators, because it delineated the first significant exceptions to the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which absolves those businesses from responsibility for their customers' actions. Section 230 of the CDA carved out significant immunity for "interactive computer services" for the behavior of their customers. But the district court ruled that dating site Matchmaker and its operator, Metrosplash -- acquired by Lycos in June 2000 -- could be held liable for information a user posted because of the interactive nature of the questionnaire that generated the posting. The court of appeals disagreed.
http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-5066455.html?tag=fd_top

Sponge bobs up in fiber-optics research
Bell Labs researchers believe a deep-sea sponge holds clues to building better fiber-optic cables. A Bell Labs team headed by Joanna Aizenberg has already transmitted light through the ultra-thin, glasslike fibers that grow inside the sponge, known as a "Venus flower basket," a representative said. Now the trick is to discover how the fibers grow at temperatures near freezing and are flexible enough to be tied into a knot, the representative said. Fiber-optic cables communications companies use are very brittle, because they are created using extremely high heat. "This is purely science right now," a Bell Labs representative said. "The hope is engineers will look at the sponge and draw inspiration."
http://news.com.com/2100-1033_3-5066452.html?tag=fd_top

Computer games: Facts and fiction
Nearly 5,000 people, most of them young men or teenaged males, spent last weekend in Dallas killing one another in the bloodiest fashion possible. Aside from the occasional caffeine overdose, however, every one of the participants walked away without a scratch. A few even returned home with tens of thousands of dollars in prize money. The event was QuakeCon, an annual gathering of computer gamers sponsored by id Software, the company behind "Doom," "Quake" and "Return to Castle Wolfenstein." And it also offered a fine example of why so much of the current fuss over video-game violence is just as wrongheaded as it was two decades back, when former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop began complaining about "Space Invaders" and "Missile Command." The trouble is that computer and video-game critics have never paid enough attention to gamers themselves.
http://news.com.com/2010-1071_3-5065...ml?tag=fd_nc_1

Want to be Bill or Gareth Gates?
Not so long ago, if you asked young people what they wanted to be when they grew up, most would have said a pop star or the Prime Minister. It now seems they want to be Bill Gates not Gareth Gates, according to a poll of 12 to 15 year olds. Nearly a quarter of teenagers in the poll want to "work with computers", and a third say it is for the excitement and the money. Only 15 per cent want to be a pop star and bottom of the list are bank managers and teachers. Peter Linas, development director at Parity who ran the poll, told BBC News Online he was surprised pop stars and doctors did not top teenagers' aspirations.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3164463.stm

Walmart.com to sell more Linux software
NeTraverse said Wednesday that its Win4Lin 5.0 software, which lets users run Microsoft Windows applications on Linux-based PCs, is now available from Walmart.com, the Web site of the massive retail chain. Austin, Texas-based NeTraverse becomes one of only three Linux software distributors marketing products on Walmart.com. The others are Lindows and Lycoris. The site also carries a line of Linux-based PCs built by Microtel Computer Systems. The Win4Lin 5.0 software lets users run their existing Windows applications on the Linux operating system, with the traditional Windows desktop environment accessible as an application, according to NeTraverse. It also lets Windows and Linux applications share the same file system and system resources.
http://news.com.com/2100-1012_3-5066148.html?tag=cd_mh

Trademarks cast shadow on paid search
etflix built its popular Internet DVD rental store on the backs of small online marketing partners. Now it's concerned that those same affiliates are infringing its trademark in the hottest marketing channel on the Web: keyword-search advertising. At the Search Engine Strategies conference here Tuesday, Netflix senior marketing manager Robert Hatta asked a panel of search engine marketing experts how to deal with the issue. The question: Should Netflix move to block third-party marketers from using its trademarks in advertisements on Google and Overture Services? Or should it allow affiliates to use its trademark freely to promote its service and bring in new customers? "Do we let the affiliates run it, or ban it like eBay did?" Hatta asked, referring to a recent move by the auction giant to request that Google bar companies from bidding on results keyed to its trademark.
http://news.com.com/2100-1024_3-5065901.html

Aussie Yahoo mulls downing Google
Internet portal giant Yahoo has given one of its strongest indications yet that it will soon end its reliance on Web search technology provider Google. Yahoo Australia search producer Peter Crowe revealed that the company had started testing Inktomi's search engine on projects at a number of the company's regional portals to see if it provides a viable alternative to Google's crawler-based search engine. Crowe indicated that if Inktomi could produce results relevant to each region's market, then the company would not hesitate to make the switch. The trial will involve measuring Inktomi against a number of search engines, including Google. "If the Inktomi results are better for Australian users, we'll switch to Inktomi...and if they end up being better for each region, it will be used there," said Crowe.
http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5065993.html?tag=cd_mh

Media groups appeal P2P ruling
Record labels and movie studios said Tuesday that they have appealed an April federal court ruling that held for the first time that some file-swapping software was legal. That ruling, made by a Los Angeles federal court judge, Stephen Wilson, came as a sharp blow to copyright holders' strategy of suing peer-to-peer network operators and software developers in order to curb the explosive growth of file trading. Beginning with a ruling against Napster, all court rulings had been in favor of the record companies and movie studios. "(Wilson's decision) was wrong," Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) President Cary Sherman said in a statement Tuesday. "These are businesses that were built for the exclusive reason of illegally exchanging copyrighted works, and they make money hand over fist from it. The Court of Appeals should hold them accountable."
http://news.com.com/2100-1026_3-5065729.html?tag=cd_mh

Vague Limits Vex Music Traders
Stephanie Craig was flabbergasted two weeks ago when she came home from school to discover that her father had emptied her hard drive of downloaded tunes. The 15-year-old sophomore at a Chicago-area high school considered herself a "light user" of the Kazaa music-file-swapping service. She felt that her father overreacted to news that nearby Loyola University was hit with a subpoena by the recording industry to divulge the names of students obtaining pirated music off the Internet. "I probably had over a thousand songs downloaded," Craig said. "I would consider myself a light user. I know people who have a way lot more music than I do. Like maybe 75,000." Eventually, she shared her father's concern and stopped downloading music. To this day, she remains ambivalent about doing so, even after the Recording Industry Association of America said on Monday it would go after "substantial" file sharers rather than "de minimis users" of music-file-sharing programs.
http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,60110,00.html

Geeks Grapple With Virus Invasion
Summer vacation, peer pressure, Swiss-cheese programming code and too-quick-to-click Internet users have combined to make the last two weeks a true adventure in computing. The recent deluge of worms and viruses, including Tuesday's bombardment by the latest variant of the Sobig virus, may be a result of last week's Blaster worm tweaking adolescent egos, according to security experts. The same experts also slammed Microsoft and end users for the parts each played in the latest dramas. Blaster's "success" probably encouraged other malicious coders to devote the weekend to working on their own evil little creations, said Chris Belthoff, senior security analyst antivirus firm Sophos.
http://www.wired.com/news/infostruct...,60109,00.html

Scooter Sting Segways to Arrest
An amateur detective identifying himself as Hercule Poirot last week wrapped up a two-month online sting by delivering a stolen Segway Human Transporter into the hands of Manhattan police. Poirot had arranged to meet the man in possession of the stolen machine on the promise of helping him hot-wire the transporter, which had been taken without any keys. But instead of hot-wiring the $5,000, self-balancing scooter, Poirot handed over the man and machine to a pair of burly Manhattan detectives. Police arrested Yili Wang, a 24-year-old student from Queens, in connection with the scooter's theft. According to the NYPD, Wang was arrested Aug. 12 at 4:15 p.m. outside a Queens Starbucks where he'd gone to meet Poirot.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,60106,00.html

Music Parody Site Pulls the Plug
Nothing can deflate a joke faster than the threat of a lawsuit. In the case of parody website DontBuyMusic.com, a cease-and-desist notice forced the site to go offline last Friday. The website, created by the online community Macteens, spoofed the BuyMusic.com website by using the same format as the original site but rewriting the text and redirecting all clicks to the Apple iTunes website. ITunes and BuyMusic.com are both online paid music services. DontBuyMusic.com last week brought attention to the marked similarities between TV commercials for iTunes and BuyMusic. Macteens server master Clark Mueller said Macteens did not receive any direct communication from BuyMusic's lawyers. Instead, the counsel for Direct Response Network and its affiliated companies, including BuyMusic.com and Buy.com, sent an e-mail that reached DontBuyMusic's host, datahive.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,60088,00.html

Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely
Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn't. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall. Yet slideware -- computer programs for presentations -- is everywhere: in corporate America, in government bureaucracies, even in our schools. Several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint are churning out trillions of slides each year. Slideware may help speakers outline their talks, but convenience for the speaker can be punishing to both content and audience. The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch. Of course, data-driven meetings are nothing new.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html

When Bad Breath Means Bad News
Simple breath tests taken during routine visits to doctors or dentists could one day provide early warning of a whole range of potentially devastating conditions from schizophrenia to diabetes. "My mother-in-law likes to say that no one gets out alive," said Dr. Brian Ross, research director at the pioneering Ness Foundation, located on the banks of Loch Ness near Inverness in the Scottish Highlands. "But I would rather stop horrible chronic degenerative diseases before they happen if at all possible." In fact, the foundation's mission is to improve the quality of life of people with neuro-developmental disorders and associated conditions by conducting research into safer, more effective diagnostic tests and treatments. It also works to break down the stigma surrounding debilitating conditions such as schizophrenia, a mental illness affecting an estimated one in 100 people.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,60046,00.html

Grokster defiant as music industry appeals
US music companies have gone back to court to appeal against a ruling which cleared peer-to-peer (P2P) sites Grokster and StreamCast of copyright infringement. In recent months the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has turned its attention to individual users, with hundreds of people expected to face lawsuits over the next few weeks. But yesterday the entertainment companies, including AOL Time Warner and Sony, plus some smaller independent labels, filed court papers with the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. They want the court to re-examine the arguments against the P2P sites and to make them accountable for infringement.
http://www.vnunet.com/News/1143122

EBay makes a bid for television
EBay Inc., the online auctioneer, wants to see if its popularity can translate to a bigger medium than the Internet: television. Sony Pictures Television last week taped a pilot for an EBay television show -- with sports personality Ahmad Rashad and former "Daily Show" contributor Molly Pesce -- that, if all goes well, could hit the airwaves in fall 2004. The show probably would not involve the actual sale of goods, but instead would package feature stories on items for sale on EBay with referrals to the Web site. EBay views the show as a way to extend its brand and drive traffic to its Web sites, rather than make money directly from the show. "We're more concerned about building EBay," EBay spokesman Kevin Pursglove said.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...#038;type=tech

Slammer worm crashed Ohio nuke plant net
The Slammer worm penetrated a private computer network at Ohio's Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in January and disabled a safety monitoring system for nearly five hours, despite a belief by plant personnel that the network was protected by a firewall, SecurityFocus has learned. The breach did not post a safety hazard. The troubled plant had been offline since February 2002, when workers discovered a 6 x 5in hole in the plant's reactor head. Moreover, the monitoring system, called a Safety Parameter Display System, had a redundant analog backup that was unaffected by the worm. But at least one expert says the case illustrates a growing cybersecurity problem in the nuclear power industry, where interconnection between plant and corporate networks is becoming more common, and is permitted by federal safety regulations.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/56/32425.html

Food label reader makes shopping easier for the elderly and blind
A scots inventor has found a state-of-the-art solution to a daily problem faced by thousands of blind and elderly shoppers. One in five Scots have trouble reading the small print on food labels and medicines which warn of potential allergic reactions. But a group of Glasgow-based engineers hope to bring an end to the problem by installing their futuristic invention in shops across the country. The Tele-Eye machine, currently operating on a trial basis in Scotland, reads out the list of ingredients to the customer and warns of food intolerances or allergies commonly connected with the goods. Dr David Carus, of the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow, led the team of engineers behind the technology. He said: "We designed the equipment for use by shoppers who may be elderly, have visual impairments or restricted mobility. "For many people, such as those with food allergies or intolerances, this is a very dangerous situation.
http://www.news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=915002003

Technology with Social Skills
For 30 years, civil war has raged on the island of Mindanao at the southern tip of the Philippines. Muslim separatists want an independent Islamic nation, while the Philippine government strives to preserve its nation's territorial integrity. Caught in the crossfire are Mindanao's 18 million people. Over the past three decades, more than 120,000 have lost their lives in sectarian raids, extrajudicial killings, and kidnappings. Witness to the terror are more than a dozen human-rights groups. But documenting the island's troubles -- and presenting damning evidence of systematic abuse to the global community -- has been a challenge. Handwritten reports can be stolen, lost, or damaged as they move from the groups' regional offices to the Philippine capital, Manila. And rebel groups -- or government-sponsored militias -- can take revenge on civilians who report human rights violations. Today, thanks to technology, Mindanao's troubles have a new witness: Martus, a software program that helps watchdog groups compile, analyze, and securely transmit data on human-rights abuses.
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...4587_tc126.htm

Scientists cope with historic blackout
When the lights went out across northeastern North America during the continent's biggest blackout in history, scientists in the New York area experienced minor inconveniences rather than major experimental setbacks. And some actually found innovative ways to enjoy a difficult situation that lasted as long as 29 hours in parts of the region. Spokespersons from Columbia and Rockefeller Universities reported no significant problems at their institutions thanks to properly functioning backup systems. Annie Bayne, Columbia's health sciences division director of public relations, told The Scientist that the university learned its lesson after a local blackout a few years ago. "Unfortunately, at that point our generators did not work, and we lost quite a lot of our research," she said. According to a Yale University spokesperson, Yale never lost power. However, Donald Wiggin, Yale's administrator for biology, said that a power surge did cause some temporary compressor problems that affected water temperature regulation.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20030820/04

Robot spy can survive battlefield damage
A military reconnaissance robot being developed at a British lab can keep moving even if it gets damaged on the battlefield. When any of the snake-like robot's "muscle" segments are damaged, clever software "evolves" a different way for it to wriggle across any terrain. The serpentine spy is a research project funded by aerospace company BAE Systems to make a low-cost military robot that can be dropped out of helicopters to carry out reconnaissance missions. Because it is not wheeled, the low-profile, ground-hugging snakebot should make a versatile battlefield spy. The team behind it has also developed a shape-changing antenna that broadcasts high-quality video and audio.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994075

Elvis lives -- on the Web
Digital music service MusicNow and music label BMG on Tuesday announced a digital music channel showcasing more than 2,000 Elvis Presley songs. Dubbed "Elvis 2nd to None," the channel features such songs as "Can't Help Falling In Love," "My Way" and "Suspicious Minds," as well as albums ranging from "Elvis is Back!" to the gospel collection "How Great Thou Art." The launch is coinciding with a new album, also called "Elvis 2nd to None," due to be released Oct. 7. The album will contain a recently discovered Presley track, "I'm a Roustabout." Other high-profile acts have recently begun to move more of their tunes online. On Monday, the music of the Rolling Stones debuted on RealNetworks' Rhapsody subscription service. MusicNow said subscribers will be able to stream, download and burn Elvis hits in the Windows Media 9 Series format.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5065574.html

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