The Newspaper Shop -- Tuesday edition

[walktalker]

SuSE to sell Linux PCs online
SuSE Linux is expanding its efforts to attract consumer-desktop users through a distribution deal with low-cost PC maker Microtel Computer Systems and retail giant Wal-Mart Stores, which will see PCs preloaded with SuSE Linux 8.2 sold on Walmart.com. Although SuSE is a German company, the deal will be restricted to the United States, where Wal-Mart is based. Wal-Mart began shaking up the PC industry last year by offering a line of PCs assembled by Microtel without an operating system installed. The retailer subsequently began offering the same PCs configured with Lindows, a version of Linux tweaked to allow it to run common Windows applications. The move was seen as a milestone for public acceptance of Linux, which has been frequently criticized for being too complex for the average PC user. Wal-Mart later added a line of Mandrake Linux-based PCs.
http://news.com.com/2100-1016-1025780.html?tag=nl

AOL cuts Netscape staff
America Online on Tuesday said it has laid off 50 employees involved in Web browser development at its Netscape subsidiary amid a reorganization of its Mozilla open-source browser team.
The move affects less than 10 percent of Netscape employees, according to an AOL representative, who added that the company plans to continue to support current versions of the Netscape browser and the Netscape Web portal. "Netscape remains a key part of our multibrand strategy," AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein said. "We will continue to support the browser and the portal." The layoffs mark the latest setback for AOL subsidiary Netscape Communications, which has fought an increasingly lopsided battle with Microsoft for browser market share. Microsoft's Internet Explorer is currently used by more than 90 percent of Web surfers, according to site visitor statistics published by Google.
http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-1026078.html?tag=fd_top

DMCA gives blueprint for Chile deal
Congress is being asked to approve a trade agreement with Chile that would export a controversial U.S. law: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In a letter to Capitol Hill sent Tuesday, President George W. Bush said the bilateral pact was necessary to enhance the prosperity of both countries and to "increase competition and consumer choice." One chapter of the complex agreement, which closely mirrors the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), affirms both nations' commitment to punishing people who bypass copy-protection technologies -- such as those used in most DVDs, a relatively small percentage of CDs, many videogames and some computer software. In 1998, the U.S. Congress enacted the DMCA over the objections of some librarians and computer scientists who see it as a threat to security research and to legitimate uses of copyrighted materials.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-1026116.html?tag=fd_top

Grokster unleashes ad-free software
Grokster on Tuesday released Grokster Pro, the first version of its software that's free of pop-ups and adware. Consumers who want to use the software will have to fork over $19.99 for the ad-free experience. Popular peer-to-peer software services such as Grokster and Kazaa have attracted millions of people through free downloads, which let them offer and access songs and other MP3 files without paying. But users of the services have long griped about the annoying pop-ups that greet them when they search for music. Grokster said it was responding to some of those complaints. "We can offer the user a better experience at a reasonable price that still allows us to pay our bills," Grokster President Wayne Rosso said in a statement.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-1025994.html?tag=fd_top

Disney Japan pipes Pluto to the PC
Walt Disney Japan said Tuesday it will start offering exclusive Disney–branded games and entertainment through a Japanese broadband service. The programming, set to launch on July 22, will reach 3.5 million people who subscribe to Flet's, a broadband service operated by both NTT East and NTT West in Japan. The basic free programming will be offered exclusively to broadband subscribers, who will be able to use their PCs to play interactive games and watch entertainment based on classic and new Disney characters. Disney said the programming will include animated shorts, music, interviews and behind-the-scenes footage from Disney films. Consumers can also upgrade to premium content for a price that has not been released. Premium offerings will include Disney Wonderland, a learning service for children between the ages of 3 and 6.
http://news.com.com/2100-1026_3-1025919.html?tag=fd_top

Linux reaches Afghanistan
The United Nations is training civil servants in the intricacies of the software to help them get government computer systems up and running. The first civil servants to complete their training in Linux went back to work earlier this month. The UN hopes that training government workers to use Linux will help the country close the technology gap that separates it from many other countries. Working with Afghanistan's Ministry of Communications, the UN Development Program has been putting civil servants through classes that familiarise them with the open source Linux operating system.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3067871.stm

A Quantum Leap in Cryptography
In a dark, quiet room inside the Boston labs of BBN Corp. (VZ ), network engineer Chip Elliott is using the laws of physics to build what he hopes will be an unbreakable encryption machine. The system, which sits atop a pink heat-absorption table, is designed to harness subatomic particles to create a hacker-proof way to communicate over fiber-optic networks. To build his black box, Elliott has used off-the-shelf fiber-optic gear such as lasers and detectors, which he has tweaked to do unusual things. The goal is to reliably emit and detect single photons or tightly linked pairs of photons -- the key particles in light waves. It's all part of a leading edge information-security field known as quantum cryptography.
http://businessweek.com/technology/c...5818_tc047.htm

Teaching computers to work in unison
Computers do wondrous things, but computer science itself is largely a discipline of step-by-step progress as a steady stream of innovations in hardware, software and networking piles up. It is an engineering science whose frontiers are pushed ahead by people building new tools rendered in silicon and programming code rather than the breathtaking epiphanies and grand unifying theories of mathematics or physics. Yet computer science does have its revelatory moments, typically when several advances come together to create a new computing experience. One of those memorable episodes took place in December 1995 at a supercomputing conference in San Diego. For three days, a prototype project, called I-Way, linked more than a dozen big computer centers in the United States to work as if a single machine on computationally daunting simulations, like the collision of neutron stars and the movement of cloud patterns around the globe.
http://news.com.com/2100-1008_3-1025849.html?tag=cd_mh

Buy.com to open digital music mart
Buy.com plans to launch a digital music download site that would compete with Apple Computer's successful iTunes music store, according to music industry insiders. The move, first reported in the San Jose Mercury News on Tuesday, marks the start of what is likely to be several moves by large e-commerce companies into the digital music market. The service is being well-received by record industry insiders, who said Buy.com, a discount e-commerce Web site, is aiming to become "iTunes for Windows." A Buy.com spokeswoman declined to comment on the impending release, but she said the company was planning a major announcement on July 22. A flood of iTunes clones has been expected since April, when Apple Computer launched what was widely seen as the most attractive pay-per-song music download service yet to hit the Internet.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-1026067.html?tag=cd_mh

New OpenOffice on the threshold
The first major upgrade of OpenOffice moved a step closer with the introduction of a near-final version of the revamped open-source software. A "release candidate" version of OpenOffice 1.1 is available now through the Web site of the organization behind the productivity package. In commercial software, the release candidate is the interim step between beta testing and final distribution. OpenOffice developers will make a few final tweaks to 1.1 before declaring a final version next month, said Sam Hiser, co-leader of the marketing project for OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice is the free, open-source sibling of Sun Microsystems' StarOffice, a software package that includes a word processor, spreadsheet application and other software tools. The package competes with Microsoft's dominant Office product, but can open and save files in Office formats.
http://news.com.com/2100-1046_3-1025908.html

Commodore 64 gets new guardian angel
Ironstone Partners, which licensed the Commodore 64 brand from Tulip Computers, has confirmed that it is planning on charging a subscription fee for access to C64 resources, in a bid to help the company become "the guardian angel" of the brand. The C64, which according to "Guinness World Records" is still the best-selling computer ever, was launched in the early '80s alongside classic home computer systems such as the BBC Micro model B and the Sinclair Spectrum. Today the brand is kept alive by some 6 million enthusiasts in a vibrant online community. Then Tulip announced the license deal with Ironstone last week, user groups were up in arms, fearing that the new owners would threaten legal action and shut them down in an attempt to drive traffic and sales to "official" resources.
http://news.com.com/2100-1042_3-1025814.html?tag=cd_mh

Panasonic raises its DVR storage bar
Panasonic is bumping up the storage limit in its line of combination DVD-digital video recorders, a promise of longer recording times that could help the company hang onto its market lead. The consumer-electronics maker said Monday that its DMR-E100H device will feature a hard-drive capacity of 120GB, compared with a maximum of 80GB in earlier DVD-DVR hybrids. The device, set for release in August at a price of about $1,200, allows people to record live television shows to either the hard drive or to a DVD-RAM or DVD-R disc. Panasonic, a North American unit of Japanese giant Matsushita, was among the first consumer-electronics makers to develop a combination DVD and DVR recorder. Its early move allowed it to become the leading seller of DVD recorders in the consumer-electronics market.
http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-1025722.html?tag=cd_mh

Supreme Court vs. The Supremes
At the beginning of his oral argument before the Supreme Court in the historic 1971 Roe v. Wade case, Jay Floyd, representing the state of Texas, opens with a good ol' boy remark: "It's an old joke, but when a man argues against two beautiful ladies like this, they are going to have the last word," said Floyd, referring to Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, counsel for Jane Roe. Nobody laughed. Floyd's sexist stumble is one memorable moment preserved in the audio file of a case that eventually secured a woman's constitutional right to an abortion. The Oyez (pronounced o-yay) project has taken the original tapes of such historic cases and is now making them available in MP3 format for free. "Reading a transcript of a spoken event is not the same thing as listening to an event," said Jerry Goldman, professor of political science at Northwestern University, who runs the project. "The spoken word contains more than substance; it contains emotion." Anyone can download and share these files, provided they abide by the license from Creative Commons.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,59588,00.html

Game Makers Aren't Chasing Women
A visit this past Saturday afternoon to a busy video-game store in San Francisco was a snapshot of a gaming industry that continues to be run by post-adolescent males for post-adolescent males. Of the 25 or so people in Electronics Boutique, six were women. Three of them looked bored -- they were accompanying their gamer boyfriends. Two Korean-American girls were in the store on their own, but they were buying a copy of Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne for a male relative. And the last woman? She was working one of the cash registers. Meanwhile, a new Pew Project on the Internet and American Life report (PDF) indicates that as many college-age women as men are playing games. The contrast between the game-store scene and the report raises questions such as: What games are those women playing? Is the mainstream game industry serving them well?
http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,59620,00.html

The Robot Won't Bite You, Dear
Nicky Curso was happy that the robots didn't rip off his head. Spooked by a recent viewing of the blockbuster movie Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, 11-year old Curso was leery about attending ArtBots, billed as a talent show for robots, held in New York City this past weekend. "I thought even good robots could get really angry and bite people or even break people," Curso said. "So I didn't want to be in the same room with any robots." Fear and loathing of potentially rabid robots and other supposedly sentient technology is exactly what motivated ArtBots' organizers to host the show, which brought together 23 robots whose talents ranged from creating art to inspiring affection from passersby.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,59622,00.html

Superinfections Spawn Mutant HIV
Evidence is growing that "superinfection" with more than one strain of HIV may be more common than previously thought, which could complicate efforts to make a vaccine, experts said Monday at an international AIDS conference. Scientists reported three new cases of HIV-infected people who initially were doing well without drugs but became sick years later after contracting a second strain of the AIDS virus. "Superinfection is sobering," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the chief U.S. AIDS research agency. He was not involved in the studies. "That means that although you can mount an adequate response against one virus, the body still does not have the capability to protect you against new infection, which tells you that the development of a vaccine is going to be even more of a challenge."
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,59639,00.html

Roll-Your-Own Net TV Takes Off
Michael Weisman may not be a household name in his own hometown, but to people in the Netherlands, he is a TV star. A community media activist and law student at the University of Washington, Weisman hosts segments of a live show, which he sends over the Internet from Seattle to a public TV station in Amsterdam. He is one of a growing number of people creating their own programming and putting it on cable, satellite and the Web as live streaming video. Along with expanding the reach of their signals, using the Internet as a distribution channel has the advantage of giving viewers the option of seeing archived TV programs on demand.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,59623,00.html

World's poor to get own search engine
People in poor countries could soon have a new and cheap way to get hold of the wealth of information on the internet. The search engine is being developed at MIT labs in Boston
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are developing a search engine designed for people with a slow net connection. Someone using the software would e-mail a query to a central server in Boston. The program would search the net, choose the most suitable webpages, compress them and e-mail the results a day later.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3065063.stm

Pushing back the frontiers
Another day, another controversy. You want some matured eggs from an aborted foetus? There's an Israeli-Dutch team of scientists only too happy to consider it. You want a hybrid embryo? No problem, there's a private fertility clinic in the US that has created chimeras by merging male cells with female embryos. You want a perfect stem cell tissue match for your seriously ill child? Just stay Stateside for your IVF treatment. And remember to bring your chequebook. Just 10 years ago, these procedures were the stuff of science fiction and no one had given any serious consideration to their ethical implications. Now they are science fact, and the time for moral objections in effect has passed. There might be a few weeks of outrage in the media, but the science is a fait accompli . It's been done once and it can be done again. And if there's money or notoriety to be gained, then someone, somewhere will repeat it.
http://education.guardian.co.uk/high...998044,00.html

Digital Homes
Wipe your feet. You've just entered the digital home. This isn't the stuff of The Jetsons, or an episode of Star Trek. Wollack's condo is part of an Internet-driven technological wave that is rippling through houses in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Whether it's a deluxe design such as Wollack's or a bare-bones wireless network that a student can rig up for a few hundred bucks, today's digital home represents a commitment to tearing down walls. Occupants inhabit protean rooms where data move at lightning speed. Content is available anytime, anyplace, and on whatever device the owner desires. This is a world where the couch potato lounges in the living room, presses a button, and begins watching a show recorded on the TiVo in the kitchen or upstairs in the bedroom. It's a domain in which road warriors in motion snap open cell phones or tablet computers for access to music files stored at home on a PC.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...9/b3842088.htm

Dolly creators begin mass slaughter
The Scottish company involved in the creation of Dolly the sheep will today begin a mass slaughter of its flock in an effort to cut costs in the face of mounting financial problems. PPL Therapeutics, the Midlothian-based biotechnology company, is to destroy up to 3,000 transgenic sheep at two farms in East Lothian as it struggles to survive after Bayer, the German pharmaceutical giant, pulled the plug on joint drug trials. The genetically modified sheep - kept in farms near Wallyford and Ormiston - were being monitored under the trials involving AAT, a drug which could slow the progress of diseases such as hereditary emphysema and cystic fibrosis. The sheep produced milk containing AAT but the cost of the trials has proved prohibitive.
http://www.news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=768342003

Modified mice show super-healing powers
Mice with a remarkable ability to heal wounds have been genetically engineered by scientists. The research may lead to better future treatments for skin disorders. The researchers were analysing the role of a gene linked to blood vessel formation when they inadvertently created mice with significantly thickened skin, swollen ears, noses and eyelids. Tests showed these mice also had the ability to rapidly heal wounds - two millimetre-wide holes created in the mice's ears closed completely within 28 days. "This finding is very interesting and could lead to novel therapies for skin diseases such as psoriasis, allergies or wound healing," says Yuichi Oike, who led the research at Keio University in Tokyo.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993938

Polar observatory reveals first neutrino sky map
A unique astronomical observatory buried beneath 1500 metres of ice at the South Pole has produced its first survey of high-energy neutrinos. Researchers hope the data from the Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA II) will lead to new discoveries related to both cosmic phenomena in the distant Universe and fundamental particle physics. Neutrinos are one of the most pervasive yet elusive forms of matter in the Universe. Some of the tiny particles are thought to originate from very violent cosmic phenomenon such as tumultuous galactic cores, colliding black holes and perhaps gamma ray bursts. But as neutrinos pass through planets and stars virtually unhindered, they are extremely hard to detect.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993940

Kazaa Derivatives Offer RIAA-Blocking Features
Two derivatives of the popular Kazaa peer-to-peer filesharing service now actively attempt to block scans by the RIAA and other agencies, escalating the P2P war to a new level. Both Kazaa K++ and Kazaa Lite, two very similar modifications to the Kazaa file-sharing system by Sharman Networks, now contain hooks to the PeerGuardian database of IP addresses. Both updates were published to the Web at the end of last week. The two versions available for download are Kazaa Lite 2.4.0, and Kazaa K++ 2.4.0. Although the version numbers are the same, the Kazaa Lite download is 2.67 Mbytes, while the K++ version is 3.11 Mbytes; both are bundled with different features and apparently contain slightly different code bases. The two developers of the program once worked together, but have decided to release different versions, according to postings by the two authors. Neither are affiliated with Sharman Networks. Freenet, another network, was also designed to allow anonymous, encrypted sharing of files and other information.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1191088,00.asp

Student hackers: we didn't defeat campus debit card system
Two student hackers yesterday settled a lawsuit filed against them by campus debit card firm Blackboard with an admission that they never built a device to defeat the system. Georgia tech student Billy Hoffman (AKA Acidus) and University of Alabama student Virgil Griffith (Virgil) were to present a paper on security flaws involving Blackboard's popular university ID card system at the Interz0ne.com conference last April. Blackboard Inc. got wind of the talk on the supposed shortcomings of its Blackboard Transaction System and filed suit against the pair.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/31744.html

PCs hijacked to send spam, serve porn, steal credit cards
One thousand home computers hijacked and used to serve up pornography. Perhaps tens of thousands co-opted by the “SoBig” virus, many of them turned into spam machines. Hundreds of other home computers loaded with secret software used to process stolen credit cards. If your biggest computer crime fear was lost or stolen files, think again: Someone may be using your PC to commit crimes.
http://msnbc.com/news/939227.asp?0sl=-41

Mars, Earth move closer
Earth is speeding toward a rare astral rendezvous with Mars, placing the two as close to each other as possible and giving amateur astronomers an unparalleled view of the Red Planet. The two planets are racing toward each other at a rate of about 30 kilometres every five seconds, until they are as close as they ever can be on August 27. The slightly elliptical curve of their orbits causes this rare meeting, which occurs only once every 60 000 years - meaning Neanderthals were the last people to have such an up-close look at Mars. More distant, but still close encounters are slightly more common. The most recent of those were in the months of August in 1924, 1845 and 1766. At their closest, Earth is still 55.7 million kilometres away from Mars. It's a seemingly great distance, but is relatively small considering the vastness of the solar system.
http://www.news24.com/News24/Technol...387668,00.html

More news later on, so to speak