The Newspaper Shop -- Tuesday edition

[walktalker]

Schools stay mum on file traders' names
Some universities are balking at stepped up demands from the recording industry to unmask alleged student file swappers, citing procedural uncertainties over an avalanche of subpoenas filed with the courts in recent weeks. Boston College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Tuesday said they are barred from immediately handing over the names of students to the recording industry by the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act, which requires institutions to notify students before releasing any personal data. Both schools said they were opposing the subpoenas on procedural grounds, rather than contesting the RIAA's right to the information. As a result, the refusals could further delay -- but are unlikely to derail -- the recording industry's efforts to unmask the identities of file swappers and ultimately file suit against them.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5052...g=fd_lede1_hed

Microsoft easing customers' legal stress
Microsoft has a new sales pitch for Linux users: Buy our software and stay out of court. The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant has expanded the indemnity provisions that go with its software licensing agreements to remove a perennial sticking point in sales negotiations: who picks up the tab if a Microsoft customer gets sued because of Microsoft's products. In older contracts, Microsoft agreed to pay all legal fees for volume license customers who got sued because of Microsoft, but only up to the value of the software they bought. Under the new provision, which took effect March 1, Microsoft removed the liability cap in intellectual property suits and altered other parts of the agreements that potentially expand its liability.
http://news.com.com/2100-1012_3-5050...g=fd_lede2_hed

Cracking Windows passwords in seconds
If your passwords consist of letters and numbers, beware. Swiss researchers released a paper on Tuesday outlining a way to speed the cracking of alphanumeric Windows passwords, reducing the time to break such codes to an average of 13.6 seconds from 1 minute 41 seconds. The method involves using large lookup tables to match encoded passwords to the original text entered by a user, thus speeding the calculations required to break the codes. Called a time-memory trade-off, the situation means that an attacker with an abundance of computer memory can reduce the time it takes to break a secret code.
http://news.com.com/2100-1009_3-5053063.html?tag=fd_top

The Internet gets social
Take the multimedia aspects of the Web, the personal connection of the blog, and the social dynamics of instant messaging. Add some art theory and business strategy, and mix well. Netomat, an Internet start-up that began as a modern art project, is hoping that's the recipe for an Internet revolution. The New York-based company on Tuesday began distributing a test version of its Internet software, which combines familiar Internet conventions and novel ideas with an eye toward changing the way people communicate and connect over the Web. The Internet "should be like every other social medium, where the individuals involved in the conversation direct it," said Netomat founder Maciej Wisniewski.
http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5053027.html?tag=fd_top

Red Hat opens Linux development process
Red Hat released a new test version of its Linux operating system on Monday along with a new development process that's designed to include outside programmers. The Raleigh, N.C.-based company has relabeled Red Hat Linux to reflect the new philosophy, now calling it a "project" instead of a "product." The move to let outsiders have a stronger role in the software's development was made possible by the split last year of the company's products into two versions: the fast-changing and more experimental Red Hat Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is less volatile, with guarantees for corporate customers. "Just as most of the software in Red Hat Linux is developed in an open fashion, so should Red Hat Linux itself -- driven by those who develop, test, document and translate," Red Hat programmer Bill Nottingham wrote in an e-mail announcement of the new version to developers. "To accomplish this, we're opening up our process."
http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-5052941.html?tag=fd_top

Open source or no: Let the market decide
The latest anti-Americanism to sweep Europe is a broad hostility toward computer software that's produced by proprietary companies, mostly American, and an enthusiasm for "open source" software -- programs written by networks of volunteers for which code is free, open to inspection and modifiable by any savvy user. International bodies, national governments and lesser political subdivisions are moving to legislate preferences for open-source over proprietary software. The proposals range in strength from mild boosts to complete mandates. At the moment, some 80 provisions are on the table in 40 different nations, including in the United States, where Oregon, Texas, and New York City are involved. Offhand, one might wonder why any legally mandated preference would be necessary. "Would you like to pay for this software, or would you rather get it free?" is a question that seems to have only one answer.
http://news.com.com/2010-1071_3-5050754.html

Digital Squared: Living in an iTunes World
The success of Apple Computer's iTunes venture is a harbinger of something big. In the first two weeks, Apple supplied nearly 2 million songs to be downloaded onto personal computers all over the world, at a cost of 99 cents per song. Assume for a moment that Apple continues to sell 1 million digital tracks per week for the next 12 months. By next year, the company will have collected nearly $52 million in revenue to divvy up between the partners in the enterprise. That is the beginning of a real business. Three years ago, it would have been difficult for Apple to start up iTunes, in large measure because so few homes were connected to the Internet at a speed greater than 56K. Today, roughly one-third of all U.S. residences with Internet access are connected at DSL speed or higher, and as the Wi-Fi revolution spreads, that figure is likely to spike again. By 2005, the number of U.S. households equipped with high-speed Internet access could increase to something like one-half.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/73/jellis.html

BayTSP tracks down IP addresses, IDs of music downloads
When Manni Nagi typed in the name "Eminem" on his computer screen, he came up with a list of 87,974 copies of songs by the rap star within minutes. With each song was a list of screen names and Internet Protocol, or IP, addresses of individuals who were offering it for file sharers around the world to download. Nagi wasn't looking for a free copy of "The Eminem Show" CD. Instead, the project manager for BayTSP Inc. of Campbell was demonstrating how his company uses its Internet sleuthing technology to help major record companies and movie studios hunt down copyright infringers. The information supplied by BayTSP is part of the arsenal that major record companies are using in their escalating war on Internet file sharing, which the recording industry blames for a three-year downturn in CD sales.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg....DTL&type=tech

France offers grants for games
If you come up with a good idea for a video game in France, you could get a helping hand from the state. The French Government is offering four million euros (£2.9m) to help aspiring game developers turn their ideas into reality. In a statement, the Ministry of Culture said the money was aimed at helping French firms weather rough times in the global market for games. "This is a sign from the government that they have realised there is a very strong potential for the games industry in France," said Frederic Diot, a games industry analyst based in Paris. France has several games publishers which can compete with American giants like Electronic Arts and Activision.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3084677.stm

Buy.com launches digital music service
Buy.com on Tuesday launched a new digital music download service, hoping to reprise Apple Computer's early success with its iTunes music store. The new site, BuyMusic.com, offers a catalog of more than 300,000 songs from the five major labels, including Warner Music and Universal Music Group, and from independent recording companies. Prices for the service start at 79 cents per downloaded song, which is one of the lowest rates for digital downloaded music, and $7.95 per album. The site caters only to people with computers running Microsoft Windows and the Windows Media Player 9 software. The launch marks the beginning of what will likely be the entry of large e-commerce companies into the digital music world. Much as iTunes helped drive sales of Apple's music players, Buy.com hopes to direct users of its service to its online stores.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5051609.html?tag=cd_mh
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5052388.html

MPAA warnings hit the big screen
Warnings about downloading movies are coming soon to a theater near you. In an unprecedented campaign urging people not to copy movies, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is launching a series of TV ads and movie trailers as well as a Web site warning of the dangers of violating copyright laws. The MPAA is increasingly worried that its movies will be swapped via the Internet among millions of people who haven't paid for copies, as software tools and faster broadband connections make it easier to do so. As a result, the industry is stepping up its efforts to warn and crack down on people who might be interested in swapping movies online. "It is incumbent upon our industry to teach people that copyright theft is not a victimless crime," Peter Chernin, chairman of MPAA member the Fox Group, said in a statement.
http://news.com.com/2100-1026_3-5051653.html?tag=cd_mh
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,59723,00.html

Google beefs up news searches
Google on Monday unveiled refinements to technology for searching daily news, its latest effort to become the Web's go-to hub for headlines. Google's new service, called Advanced News Search, allows visitors to scour headlines by date, location, exact phrases or publication. People can use it retrieve articles from more than 4,500 news outlets publishing on the Web. Advanced News Search adds to the company's ever-expanding set of Web navigation tools and improves on its specialty index, Google News, which was introduced last fall. For example, Google released a new browser toolbar last month that lets people block pop-up ads and easily update their blogs as they surf the Web. For its part, Google News has proved immensely popular, with roughly 2.5 million unique visitors in June, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.
http://news.com.com/2100-1024_3-5051022.html?tag=cd_mh

Tired of the Telly? Reprogram It
A Colorado startup, Interact-TV, has released a hacker-friendly digital entertainment center that plays, records and archives TV shows, DVDs, music and even digital photo albums. The Telly MC1000 Digital Entertainment Center, available now from the company's website for $900, can also surf the Web and act as a home media server. And -- if the company successfully courts the open-source programming community -- it may soon play computer games, turn the lights on and off, or automatically fetch music lyrics from the Net. Based on Linux, the Telly is a radical departure from other digital entertainment systems on the market. Unlike TiVo or ReplayTV, the Telly is designed to be easily upgraded and expanded by the consumer and third-party software developers.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,59690,00.html

Death Is a Sloppy Business
Martel Lewis knew her father was a special man, but she didn't realize how unique he was until two months after his death. hen Ricard Lewis' death certificate arrived, his daughter noticed that the 83-year-old had been pregnant at the time of his demise. Lewis evidently isn't the only Manhattan miracle male. Other family members have reported receiving death certificates containing mistaken and just plain oddball entries. Their complaints led to several audits of New York City's Health Department and its Bureau of Vital records. But New York isn't alone in its death documentation woes. Inaccurate death certificates are a nationwide problem that has lead to an effort, spearheaded by the Social Security Administration, to develop a nationwide electronic death registry, or EDR, system.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,59703,00.html

The Lost City of Venice
Venice is a cluster of 117 man-made islands at the center of a 200-square-mile lagoon on the northeastern Italian coast. In the heyday of the Venetian Republic, 600 years ago, the water served as a vast protective moat. Now the moat has become Venice's worst enemy. Thanks to a variety of influences, the average water level has climbed two-fifths of an inch every decade since 1950. At the same time, the swings in tidal levels have become more dramatic. St. Mark's Square begins flooding when the high tide reaches just over 2 feet. In the 1950s, high tides in Venice topped the 3-foot mark 30 times; in the 1990s, more than 100 times. When the acqua alta comes, it rises over the water-resistant masonry covering the city's foundations and into unprotected stones and mortar. When the water retreats, it takes bits of the buildings with it and leaves corrosive salts behind. Meanwhile, the population of Venice has fallen by more than 100,000 in recent decades, to 60,000. At this rate, the city will be virtually empty by 2030. So after three decades of talk, Venice is finally fighting back.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.08/venice.html

Phones Come Alive in Baghdad
Mobile phone roaming services were mysteriously available in Baghdad on Tuesday, bringing cellular service -- banned under Saddam Hussein -- to ordinary people in the Iraqi capital for the first time. Yet officially, a tender for three mobile phone licenses the U.S.-led administration plans to offer across Iraq has yet to take place. A U.S. military spokesman could not immediately say why the lines turned on or what that meant for the tender. Callers with foreign-registered GSM phones were able to make and receive calls and send text messages to countries as far away as the United States and South Africa. Few Iraqis have suitable phones for now. Foreigners working in Baghdad have widely relied on pricey satellite telephones to stay in touch.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,59716,00.html

Hackers Lose a Patron Saint
If there is a heaven, the angels are in for a hell of a time when Jude Milhon, the Internet's real and very earthy patron saint of hacking, shows up. Better known on the Internet by her nom de plume, St. Jude, Milhon died July 19 of cancer. Her age was an issue Milhon obviously decided not to address. Even her closest friends could only guess at it, and they admitted they could be off by as much as a decade. St. Jude wasn't your typical saint. She was a staunch advocate of the joys of hacking, geek sex and a woman's right to choose to use technology. She figured life was too short to waste worrying about what other people might think, and was also known for her very colorful way with the English language. Back when the Internet was populated primarily by men, she encouraged and helped other women to get online.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,59711,00.html

Online Voting Moves Closer To Reality
Americans living abroad, including thousands of military personnel, may get a chance to vote in the 2004 election from any Windows-based computer linked to the Internet. The Defense Department's Federal Voting Assistance Program, known as FVAP, is working with 10 states to develop the Web-based voting system called Serve -- Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment. County election officials in participating states will use Serve to receive voter-registration applications, provide ballots to voters, and accept ballots when they're completed. Existing election-administration systems will be used to process registration and ballots. In a statement issued by FVAP, director Polli Brunelli says security is everyone's first question about Internet voting, adding that the government made security the driving factor in Serve's system design.
http://www.informationweek.com/story...cleID=12802709

Ancient ancestor's legacy of life
The fundamental processes which keep humans and all animals alive evolved more than 600 million years ago in single-celled organisms, scientists say. The research, published in the journal Science, highlights the ancient genetic lineage we all carry in every cell of our bodies. The way our cells function, grow and interact with others uses molecules and methods that first appeared long ago, when the most advanced forms of life were microbes living in the sea. Studying an obscure microorganism with ancient roots led scientists to this far-reaching conclusion. It is one which sheds light on one of the most dramatic evolutionary leaps in life's history - the origin of animals.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3086681.stm

Michael Jackson slams piracy punishment
Pop superstar Michael Jackson has hit out at a proposed new US law that would make the musical piracy on the internet punishable by a possible jail sentence. The self-styled "King of Pop" feels that, while he would like to see the practice of stealing music off the internet stamped out, the legislation against the downloading of copyrighted material was too harsh. "I am speechless about the idea of putting music fans - mostly teenagers - in jail for downloading music," he said. "It is wrong to illegally download, but the answer cannot be jail. Here in America we create new opportunities out of adversity, not punitive laws, and we should look to new technologies . . . for solutions. "This way, innovation continues to be the hallmark of America. It is the fans that drive the success of the music business," Jackson said.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...nbv%5E,00.html

Big Bang afterglow reveals dark energy's repulsion
Observation of the cosmic radiation emitted just after the Big Bang has revealed further evidence for the Universe's mysterious and elusive dark energy. Astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University in the US studied the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, the faint but pervasive afterglow of our Universe's explosive beginnings. The team analysed changes in the energy of CMB photons caused by the gravity of massive concentrations of galaxies. As photons pass through these galactic masses, gravitational potential causes them to gain and then lose energy. Once the photon has passed through, the energy changes should have cancelled out.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993963

'100 day countdown' to China's first astronaut
China is on course to become only the third nation ever to place a human in space, following press reports that the first crewed flight will take place in 100 days. A government source told the state-controlled news service Wen Wei Po that the launch would take place within this timeframe. No official date for launch has been set. There has already been some speculation that China's National Space Administration may target 1 October, the date on which the People's Republic of China was founded. But independent space analyst James Oberg says this date is unlikely to be fixed. "They appear to be quite responsible in flying only when they are ready and it shows," he says.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993965

Linkin Park Explains Rejecting Download Of Single Tracks
Linkin Park, whose Meteora is one of the biggest selling rock albums of 2003, has joined the likes of Kid Rock, Metallica, and Green Day in nixing Internet sales and downloads of individual album tracks. The bands only want their full albums available for sale via Internet download. Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington told LAUNCH that the band still wants fans to get the music via the Internet, but he said it has to be done in a way that works for fans and the bands. "We're all going to have to adjust,” says Bennington. “You know what I'm saying? Eventually everything is going to be purchased online. It's just a matter of how you're going to do it. You know? Do you sell albums by track or do you sell albums to download for one cost when you go in to download the music? Who knows? It's not up to me, it's up to the people to figure out the way they want to do it, and to do it in a way that's not going to destroy the bands that they love."
http://launch.yahoo.com/read/news.asp?contentID=214122

Independent labels back file sharing
A body representing 175 artists worldwide has attacked the Recording Industry Association of America's latest attempt to shut down peer-to-peer music sharing networks. Dust Traxx manages 27 house and techno labels and claims to have been the largest producer, manufacturer and distributor of house music in the world during 2002. It's promotions director Chuck Paugh says the RIAA 'is deceptive in its claim to represent the recording industry' and in fact only represents a handful of large record companies. The RIAA recently announced plans to take legal action against individuals who make music files available for download. But Paugh says it does not have the right to take legal action against people trading music when copyright in the songs being swapped is not owned by its members.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/news_story.php?id=44999

RIAA, MPAA - Access Denied
Techfocus ran an interview with EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) spokesman Fred Von Lohmann, and it was good stuff - so good, in fact, that the RIAA decided to use parts of it to 'support' a few of their own contentions in a June 25 Washington Post story. The interview material was taken out of context. But if you're the RIAA, that's OK. "The RIAA today also released documents showing that its critics have expressed support for tracking down individual pirates," the story in question reads. "One document quoted Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) attorney Fred von Lohmann as saying: the Copyright Act, like most of our laws, has been built on the premise that you go after the guy who actually breaks the law.' "Von Lohmann said he stands by the quote, which came from an interview earlier this year with Techfocus.org, though he added that the RIAA's decision is misguided."
http://www.boycott-riaa.com/article/7203

Will Users Buy a License from SCO to Run Linux?
SCO Group (Quote, Company Info) has gone from making waves in the Linux community to becoming an out-and-out threat, armed with copyrights that it could conceivably turn on enterprise Linux users. But will it? "In the near and intermediate term, I don't think you're going to see SCO take that approach," Yankee Group Senior Analyst Laura Didio told internetnews.com. "At the end of the day, they want to turn them into a revenue stream." SCO, a founding member of the UnitedLinux group and until recently a Linux distributor, upset the Linux party in March when it turned its legal guns on IBM (Quote, Company Info) with a $1 billion lawsuit alleging breach of contract and the sharing of trade secrets. On March 6, the company sent a letter to IBM Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano, warning him that IBM had allegedly breached its contract with SCO by contributing portions of its Unix-based AIX code to the open source movement, and by introducing concepts from Project Monterey, a joint effort by SCO and IBM to develop a 64-bit Unix-based operating system for Intel-based processing platforms, into Linux. IBM scrapped Project Monterey in May 2001.
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news...le.php/2238711

70 sextillion stars in 'known universe'
Ever tried to count the number of stars on a clear night? According to a study by a team of stargazers based at the Australian National University, there are 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (70,000 million million million, or 70 sextillion) stars in the known universe. That is about 10 times more than the grains of sand on earth. At the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union meeting in Sydney, Dr Simon Driver, who headed the team, said the number was drawn up based on a survey of one strip of sky. Within the strip of sky some 10,000 galaxies were pinpointed and their brightness was measured to figure out how many stars they contained. That number was then multiplied by the number of similar sized strips needed to cover the entire sky, Dr Driver said, and then multiplied again out to the edge of the visible universe.
http://www.rediff.com/news/2003/jul/22stars.htm

More news later on