The Newspaper Shop -- Wednesday edition

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Slapdash monster roams the Net
Call it the Frankenworm. "MSBlast," the latest threat to hit the Internet, is a piecemeal compilation of programs cobbled together to do a single job: spread across the Internet. The Frankenstein's monster of code stitches together a widely available file server, one of several public programs to exploit a widespread Windows flaw, and common techniques for compromising computers. The combination is unoriginal, but effective. The worm -- also known as W32/Lovsan.worm and W32.MSBlaster -- is successful not because its creator was knowledgeable about programming, but because a great many people whose computers are connected to the Internet are still ignorant of security. "I'm not going to give the guy who wrote it a lot of credit," said Vincent Gullotto, vice president of security firm Network Associates' antivirus emergency response team. "It was effective -- it did what it set out to do."
http://news.com.com/2100-1002-5062998.html?tag=nl

Microsoft prepares to be Blasted
Microsoft hopes to be ready when hundreds of thousands of computers infected with the MSBlast worm start pelting its Windows Update service with data requests on midnight Friday.
The company has taken steps to try and dodge the denial-of-service attack, but it's also begun educating Windows users about other ways to get updates and patches in the event that the update service is made unavailable. "We are preparing," said Stephen Toulouse, security program manager for Microsoft's security research center. "We are working diligently to make sure that our customers can get the patch." The primary payload of the MSBlast worm, which began infecting systems Monday, is a DoS attack against the service from which most Windows users get their updates. If successful, the maneuver would help frustrate efforts to patch the Windows vulnerability the worm exploits.
http://news.com.com/2100-1002_3-5063592.html?tag=nl

Users race against worm, variants
As the MSBlast worm continues its spread -- to approximately 2,500 new computers each hour -- antivirus firms said Wednesday that a new variant had been released. Security company Symantec, which directly measures the spread of the worm via sensors distributed throughout the Internet, said the number of computers compromised by MSBlast -- aka W32/Lovsan and W32.Blaster -- had reached 228,000 by midmorning Wednesday. Alfred Huger, senior director of engineering for the company's security response team, estimated that millions of computers may still be vulnerable to the flaw, leaving administrators scrambling to patch systems before they fall victim to the worm's relentless spread. "If people don't patch, there could be millions of infections," Huger said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1002_3-5063356.html?tag=nl

The other Linux
Richard Seibt once had the unenviable task of managing IBM's OS/2 business in an ultimately losing battle against Microsoft for the hearts and minds of computer users. Through one of history's quirks, Seibt again finds himself in a mano-a-mano struggle against Windows -- but this time he heads SuSE, a company whose operating system is causing major headaches for the folks up in Redmond. In late spring, SuSE was selected by the city of Munich in a much-publicized and rare defeat for Microsoft, which actually came in with a lower bid. Whether Munich was a harbinger or a one-off example of the vagaries of IT decision making, it was seized upon by open-source proponents as a big victory for their side.
http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-5063...g=fd_lede2_hed

SCO pulls second IBM Unix license
SCO Group on Wednesday said it terminated a second IBM Unix System V license, the one that covers the discontinued Dynix/ptx operating system IBM obtained through its acquisition of Sequent several years ago. SCO, owner of several key copyrights related to the Unix operating system, has been aggressively defending its intellectual property holdings connected to the software and filed a $3 billion lawsuit against IBM earlier this year. The suit claims that IBM has committed trade secret theft and breach of contract for allegedly copying proprietary Unix source code into its Linux-based products. The company reported that it terminated Sequent's Unix contract for improper transfer of source code and development methods into Linux. Based on the move, SCO claims that IBM no longer has the right to use or license Dynix/ptx and said that customers should not be able to acquire a license for the software.
http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-5063143.html?tag=fd_top

Love, hate and newspapers
Newspapers have had a love-hate relationship with the Internet since the birth of the Web. Savvy publishers long ago recognized that their old-style businesses would never be the same again, but how to go digital and survive? They're still grappling with the problem, reports Rafat Ali of Paidcontent.org, a London-based service reporting on the on-line content industry. He recently listed an interesting issue for the future of journalism in a digital world. CNN.com, for instance, offers visitors links to articles from the magazine Business 2.0. But on-line visitors trying the read those articles by going directly to Business 2.0's Web site won't be able to read them, unless they are subscribers. It turns out that this is intentional.
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...ry/Technology/

Europeans to get Windows music store
A new pay-by-the-song music service is launching in Western Europe, putting an iTunes-like digital download store inside Microsoft's Windows Media Player. Branded variously as the MSN Music Club and Tiscali Music Club, the service is actually run by online music company OD2, rather than by Microsoft itself. As with Apple Computer's iTunes, the stores will be accessible inside the music-playing software itself. In this case, each may be accessed by a tab in the Windows Media Player premium services section. The MSN-branded store will launch Thursday in the United Kingdom, providing access to more than 200,000 tracks, said OD2 and Microsoft in a joint press release. The Tiscali Club, which has access to the same music library will be available in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium beginning in September, they said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5063595.html?tag=cd_mh

Worm a Sign of Horrors to Come?
Technicians began repairing the damage Wednesday from a worm that disabled computers around the world and sent businesses scrambling to update their software to prevent new attacks. The virus-like worm, dubbed LovSan or MSBlaster, attacked Microsoft operating systems with an inundation of data packets early this week, triggering computers running Windows to shut down and restart. The attack forced Maryland's motor vehicle agency to close for the day and kicked Swedish Internet users offline as it spread. Security experts said the world was lucky this time because LovSan is comparatively mild and doesn't destroy files. They worry that a subsequent attack exploiting the same flaw -- one of the most severe to afflict Windows -- could be much more damaging.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,60019,00.html

Cranky Callers to Target Disney
Angry at Disney's plans to sell disposable DVD movies, environmentalists plan to dump their grievances on CEO Michael Eisner in a massive phone protest Wednesday. Hundreds of students from around the country will call Eisner to discourage the sale of these throwaway DVDs, and urge the company to abandon the product, according to the protest's organizers. Buena Vista Home Entertainment, a division of Disney, is set to market movies like The Hot Chick, Rabbit-Proof Fence and Signs on these special DVDs, called EZ-Ds, in four test markets in September. The DVDs are designed for those who find renting inconvenient. Sealed in an airtight package, the DVD is usable for two days once opened. A customer can watch the flick as often as they want during that time period. When the time expires, bonding resin on the DVD reacts with the air around it, making the DVD unreadable.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,59997,00.html

DOJ Pushes Stiffer Porn Law
The Bush administration has appealed to the Supreme Court to reinstate a law that punishes website operators who expose children to dirty pictures and other inappropriate material. The court already has sided with the government once this year in its war against online smut, ruling that Congress can require federally funded public libraries to equip computers with anti-pornography filters. In an appeal filed Monday, Solicitor General Theodore Olson said the filter technology alone is not enough. Children are "unprotected from the harmful effects of the enormous amount of pornography on the World Wide Web," he told justices. The broader Child Online Protection Act requires that operators of commercial Internet sites use credit cards or some form of adults-only screening system to ensure children cannot see material deemed harmful to them. Operators could face fines and jail time for not complying.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,60018,00.html

Are Windows and Linux Technology Equals?
Compared to the Windows operating system, Linux is an upstart. As the flagship product of Microsoft, Windows benefits from more than two decades of intense, heavily funded development work. To the general public, the term "Windows" is synonymous with "computer." Linux, although it has been in existence for years, has only begun its climb up the enterprise-computing chain in the last two to four years. It is little known by the general public. Yet the upstart Linux invokes comparisons to Windows because of its growth rate. Research firm IDC identifies the "Lintel" format, or Intel-based servers running Linux, as the faster-growing server segment. Sun has launched its Mad Hatter Linux desktop push, and Wal-Mart has begun selling ultra-cheap Linux-based PCs. Governments around the world -- including the U.S. -- have started to make Linux their OS of choice. Still, can this young operating system compete with Windows technologically? Is it ready to go head to head with Microsoft's well-developed OS?
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/22080.html

Smart chips making daily life easier
"Your medicine is out of date" is not what you would usually expect to hear from your bathroom cabinet, but it could be very soon. It is all thanks to what is being called "ubiquitous computing", which means sticking programmable microchip sensors onto everyday household objects to make them a little bit smarter. Martin Strohbach is a researcher with the Smart-Its Project, a group of European universities working on the sensors. He was sharing the group's vision at the recent computer graphics Siggraph exhibition in the US.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3144405.stm

Gamma-ray weapons could trigger next arms race
An exotic kind of nuclear explosive being developed by the US Department of Defense could blur the critical distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons. The work has also raised fears that weapons based on this technology could trigger the next arms race. The explosive works by stimulating the release of energy from the nuclei of certain elements but does not involve nuclear fission or fusion. The energy, emitted as gamma radiation, is thousands of times greater than that from conventional chemical explosives. The technology has already been included in the Department of Defense's Militarily Critical Technologies List, which says: "Such extraordinary energy density has the potential to revolutionise all aspects of warfare."
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994049

Electronic 'Etch A Sketch' may boost quantum design
An innovative system, which works rather like a child's Etch A Sketch toy, could significantly speed the design of quantum electronic devices. The intricate circuits needed can be "drawn" on a surface using tiny spots of charge, adjusted, and then scrubbed out with a flash of light. Rolf Crook and colleagues at Cambridge University, UK, who developed the technique, have already built minute electrical circuits that they are using to study quantum effects. These include nanowires, point contacts - narrow junctions between reservoirs of charge - and isolated islands of charge called quantum dots. "The beauty of this is they can draw a device, then modify it a bit, and then modify it a bit more and see how the characteristics change with the shape. That is very powerful," says Ray Ashoori, an expert in quantum effects in semiconductors at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994055

RIAA undeterred by subpoena setback
Despite a judge's decision last Friday that two universities did not have to comply with subpoenas asking them to hand over the names of students suspected of illegal file trading, the recording industry said this week that it will continue to file subpoenas in its campaign against piracy. "This is a minor procedural issue," a spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said Tuesday. U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Tauro declared Friday that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Boston College do not have to comply with the subpoenas because they were filed in Washington, D.C., and do not apply to the universities in Massachusetts.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/...setback_1.html

To Each, His Own: Sharing a Family PC
OR the family with just one, a computer can rival toothpaste-tube etiquette as a source of disagreement. I don't share my youngest son's view, for example, that a Web site about the arcane world of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards makes a useful browser home page. His older brother and I similarly disagree about what makes a pleasing computer desktop. And my wife, who works all day on a Windows-based computer, seems to approach the family Mac with despair after the rest of us have had our way with it. The easy way out, of course, is a computer for everyone. In the era of the $600 PC and relatively simple and inexpensive networking equipment, that has become the 21st-century version of a chicken in every pot for some people. But when multiplied by four or five family members, the cost adds up quickly.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/14/te...partner=GOOGLE

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