The Newspaper Shop -- Thursday edition

[walktalker]

SCO's big legal gun takes aim
Instead of talking up new products, SCO Group executives devoted the bulk of their presentations at this week's SCO Forum to the fight against Linux. And for good reason. The company sued IBM in March, saying it illegally contributed some of SCO's licensed Unix code to Linux. Since then, SCO has been making a major business out of intellectual property enforcement, which happens to be the company's fastest-growing revenue generator. SCO's lawsuit has excited no small degree of controversy. Critics say the company is trying to shake down Linux users and that it does not have any legal basis for its claims. So in a bid to clarify its case both to customers and detractors, the company showed the disputed code to some attendees at the SCO Forum, its annual user conference that took place this week in Las Vegas.
http://news.com.com/2008-1082-5066520.html?tag=nl

Worm double whammy still hitting hard
Nachi, the problematic fixer worm, and Sobig.F, the worst mass-mailing computer virus to date, continued to flood some corporate networks and e-mail servers on Thursday. Nachi -- also dubbed MSBlast.D and Welchia -- is a variant of the MSBlast worm that started spreading on Monday and swamped corporate networks with its attempts to compromise computers. The worm aimed to patch vulnerable computers before the original MSBlast infected them, but its aggressive scanning for systems disrupted corporate networks. The mass-mailing computer virus Sobig.F, which targets Windows computers, started multiplying on Tuesday morning, quickly adding to the network havoc. America Online said it scanned 40 million e-mail attachments on Wednesday -- about four times the average daily volume -- and found more than 23 million copies of the Sobig.F virus. In addition, the number of support calls from home users jumped significantly because of the reaction of other e-mail systems to the virus, said Nicholas Graham, a spokesperson for the Internet service giant.
http://news.com.com/2100-1002_3-5066875.html?tag=fd_top

File swapper fights RIAA subpoena
An anonymous California computer user went to court Thursday to challenge the recording industry's file-trading subpoenas, charging that they are unconstitutional and violate her right to privacy. The legal motion, filed in Washington, D.C., federal court by a "Jane Doe" Internet service subscriber, is the first from an individual whose personal information has been subpoenaed by the Recording Industry Association of America in recent months. The RIAA has used court orders to try to identify more than 1,000 computer users it alleges have been offering copyrighted songs on file-trading networks. It plans to use the information gained to file copyright lawsuits against the individuals. The motion was filed by a pair of Sacramento, Calif., attorneys who said the RIAA had gone too far in its effort to protect its online copyrights.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5066754.html?tag=fd_top

Microsoft tools its Web search
Microsoft is "investing heavily" in Web search as an important and potentially lucrative market, Christopher Payne, the company's executive in charge of search, said Thursday. "On the information side of the house, there's no question that search is the cornerstone of our strategy. We're investing heavily in this space," Payne, a vice president for Microsoft's MSN Internet unit, said at Jupitermedia's Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo. The conference was held this week in San Jose, Calif. He declined to say how much money or how many people Microsoft was investing in the project, however. MSN, the online unit of leading software maker Microsoft, earlier this year released its Web crawler, MSNBot, which collects the building blocks of information upon which Web search engines are built.
http://news.com.com/2100-1012_3-5066826.html?tag=fd_top

Tampa drops face-recognition system
The Tampa Police Department in Florida this week ditched a controversial facial-recognition system, saying it had not helped them catch even one criminal. The system, which scanned faces in a crowd and compared them to photographs of criminals in a database, had come under fire by privacy and civil liberties advocates since its installation two years ago. Critics feared the system would make false identifications or invade people's privacy. Capt. Bob Guidara, a spokesman for the Tampa Police Department, said the city scrapped the system because it didn't help fight crime, not because of privacy concerns. "We never identified, were alerted to, or caught any criminal," he said. "It didn't work."
http://news.com.com/2100-1029_3-5066795.html?tag=fd_top

Serious data loss from missing PDAs poses threat
The PDA Usage Survey for 2003, conducted for PointSec Mobile Technologies by ComputerWeekly and Reed Exhibitions, confirms that corporate employees frequently download all sorts of personal and business content onto personal digital assistants (PDAs) that lack password protection or encryption. This is problematic, given that the research group Gartner has concluded that PDAs are lost or stolen at an alarming rate. For example, in the U.S. in 2001, 350,000 laptops, 35,000 hand-held computer devices, and 232,000 mobile phones were lost or stolen. As a result of such disappearances, sensitive personal and business data often ends up in the wrong hands.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columni...1-sinrod_x.htm

Brutal reality hits home
The warning comes before the image. A two-paragraph disclaimer justifying some of the most gruesome images of war you are likely to see. The first image is of a boy with his legs blown off. Then there is another child - face in close-up - with streams of blood pouring down his young face. The next is the head of a horribly burned man swathed in white bandages. It is followed by the swollen neck of a peace protester, the victim of wood pellets fired from a gun in Oakland. The website adds that the suspects are policemen. These images - and some far, far worse - come courtesy of a New Zealand website that describes itself as a "fiercely independent internet news agency". For several months, Scoop Media has been publishing the kind of graphic images you rarely see in mass circulation newspapers or on western television. And, until now, rarely on the internet.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/sto...022663,00.html

Setting free the books
Have you found any good books in funny places around Wales lately? If so, you may have stumbled across a web phenomenon which is quietly spreading across the country - the BookCrossing.com experience. To take part, people register their books at a website then set them free "in the wild" for other people to read, review and release once again. Perhaps unsurprisingly, BookCrossing.com started in the US, but the idea has taken off internationally, with some members releasing literally hundreds of books for others to find. At the time of writing, there were 56 books released in Wales in the past 30 days that have not been found - and their locations are as diverse as their titles.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/3163755.stm

Windows patches may become automatic
In the aftermath of the MSBlast worm, Microsoft says it may be time to change the way Windows updates its security patches by making the process automatic by default. A Microsoft representative said the company is "giving strong consideration to enabling Auto Update by default in future versions of Windows," though the company has not yet committed to a time frame. If Microsoft decides to go ahead with the change, it could be implemented in "Longhorn," the code name for the next version of Windows expected to come out in late 2004. Automatic installation of security patches might have helped prevent the recent MSBlast worm, which successfully attacked hundreds of thousands of PCs that had not installed a month-old patch. Currently, automatic updates are available as an option. Microsoft executives said the company decided not to make the feature a Windows default with Windows XP after customer feedback that suggested people did not want Microsoft controlling their PCs.
http://news.com.com/2100-1009_3-5066612.html?tag=cd_mh

Boeing's antispam spinoff takes flight
Aerospace giant Boeing officially launched its antispam spinoff late Wednesday. Dubbed MessageGate, the company will offer a commercialized version of the software Boeing uses internally to fight unsolicited e-mail. The first product offered by the subsidiary, MessageGate Security Edition, aims to provide protection for corporate e-mail systems by filtering and securing inbound, outbound and internal messages. MessageGate claims that the application is capable of handling millions of e-mails per day and can be tailored to suit the needs of companies of varying sizes. MessageGate reported that it is also preparing the commercial launch of a Compliance Edition and has plans to deliver a range of additional e-mail management applications.
http://news.com.com/2100-1012_3-5066557.html?tag=cd_mh

Bystanders caught in spam cross fire
AOL Time Warner's Road Runner cable-modem service has implemented a new policy to block suspected spammers and purveyors of malicious e-mail code. But the campaign has run over some innocent victims along the way. Road Runner's new policy calls for the blocking of any incoming e-mails that contain contradictory domain-name routing information. That means Road Runner will block e-mails originating from people who have their own e-mail servers on top of an outside Internet service such as those offered by Verizon Communications, SBC Communications or Comcast. The move is an attempt to thwart one technique used by spammers, who piggyback their own mail servers on top of a commercial broadband service such as Comcast or Verizon to more efficiently send out e-mail in bulk. The problem is that many legitimate small businesses also run their own mail servers on broadband connections, and are sometimes caught in the crossfire.
http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5066903.html?tag=cd_mh

Net music pirate faces years in prison
The U.S. Department of Justice said Thursday that it accepted a guilty plea in a criminal copyright case involving the former leader of a Net music piracy group called the Apocalypse Crew. The defendant in the case, 21-year-old Mark Shumaker, faces a maximum prison sentence of five years and a maximum fine of $250,000. Shumaker helped coordinate the supply and release of albums online before they hit retail stores and ran the Apocalypse Crew's Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel, federal investigators charged. "This plea shows that those who steal copyrighted music from artists and believe they are doing so anonymously on the Internet are sadly mistaken," U.S. attorney Paul McNulty said in a statement. "We can find you, we will find you, and we will prosecute you."
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5066894.html?tag=cd_mh

Are swappers scared of the RIAA?
The recording industry's legal efforts may be putting a dent in file swapping, according to a new report from The NPD Group. The report, released Thursday, said online file swapping started dropping in May, shortly after the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) publicly hinted that it may go after individual file swappers. The number of households acquiring music fell from a high of 14.5 million in April to 12.7 million in May and 10.4 million in June, according to NPD. NPD defined music acquisition as obtaining songs through paid sites, ripping CDs, and file swapping sites. Of the three categories, file swapping accounted for about two-thirds of all music acquired during the three months. The company said it would break out more detailed statistics for the different categories in future studies.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5066632.html?tag=cd_mh

Child porn sites more than double
Web sites for child pornography have more than doubled worldwide in the past year and Internet pedophiles are devising more cunning ways to avoid detection, British police say. More than half of the child porn sites are hosted in the United States, the U.K.'s National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) said in its annual report released Thursday. And the number of sites based in Russia has doubled in the past year. The Internet has led to a huge growth in child sex offenses, with computer-based images of young children, even babies, now largely replacing printed material. The number of Web sites containing images of child abuse rose by 64 percent in 2002 from the previous year, NCIS said in its report based on intelligence from around the world.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5066553.html?tag=cd_mh

Feds Want to Track the Homeless
A mandate which will force local agencies that receive federal funds to register and track homeless people has been called too invasive by privacy and community activists. In an attempt to grasp the scope of the United States' homeless problem, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is requiring local government and nonprofit organizations receiving grants for homeless programs to keep detailed files on their clientele. Data to be tracked ranges from Social Security numbers to HIV statuses to mental health histories. Local agencies must have the so-called Homeless Management Information Systems, or HMIS, in place by 2004 or risk losing federal funds. Over the last 15 years, HUD has spent more than $11 billion on homeless assistance, yet the department knows little about the people it helps, including how many there are.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,60124,00.html

The Best Defense Is a Good Upgrade
When the Navy's new $4.5 billion aircraft carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan, sails off to duty later this year, it will be the world's biggest weapon: more than 100,000 tons, and roughly the size of the Empire State Building tipped on its side. But like any piece of high tech equipment, it will be outdated almost immediately. There's already something better in the works: a $10 billion ship called the CVN 21, scheduled for delivery in the middle of the next decade. The Reagan, however, is expected to patrol the seas until 2053, to pay off its break-the-bank price tag. The challenge, then, is to make a ship that defies buyer's remorse. The solution? Evolution. The 12 carriers currently in the fleet share what military hardware designers call a flexible platform - they can accommodate new technology.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/navy.html

Los Alamos Pays Up for Firing
Los Alamos National Laboratory: zero. Whistleblower: $1 million. That's the score after the University of California agreed wednesday to pay former lab investigator Glenn Walp nearly $1 million for being wrongfully fired last year. The school manages Los Alamos on behalf of the U.S. Energy Department. But the out-of-court settlement was more than a personal victory for Walp, a former Arizona state police chief hired to look into allegations of fraud, corruption and lax security at the world's most important nuclear facility. Government watchdogs say the settlement could encourage other potential whistleblowers to step forward and speak their minds. "For a whistleblower case with a contract with the government, it's an incredibly large settlement," said Louis Clark, executive director of the Government Accountability Project. "And it sets a very good precedent, too."
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,60122,00.html

Net Analysis Gets Turbo Boost
Last week's ugly little worm attack probably would have looked pretty if visualized through a new set of tools developed by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The team from Georgia Tech has created the fastest detailed simulations of computer networks ever constructed, capable of mimicking network traffic from over 1 million Web browsers in near real time. That's two to three orders of magnitude faster than the simulators commonly used by researchers. The images created by monitoring a million Internet users busily browsing look like a colorful mandala. But the point of this exercise is not to create digital art. Engineers and scientists routinely use such simulations to analyze and improve network performance and security, but those efforts have been hampered by the time and computing power required to perform large-scale simulations.
http://www.wired.com/news/infostruct...,60077,00.html

Pop-Ups Under Siege
When Google announced the official release of its revamped toolbar last week, the first enhancement the company highlighted was its ability to block pop-up and pop-under advertisements. The move puts the popular search engine squarely in the growing camp opposing the Internet's most unpopular ad format. The growing list of companies providing technologies to consumers fed up with pop-ups, combined with an online advertising recovery that's spurring new interest in different ad formats, could end the reign of pop-ups in the next year, according to Web ad industry executives and analysts. "I believe from the very bottom of my heart that pop-us, while a very wonderfully ingenious idea, are not the most effective way to reach consumers," said Paul Iaffaldano, Weather.com's chief revenue officer. "I think the industry will move beyond pop-ups in the next year or so." For now, though, Weather.com will continue to serve them, to the tune of about 10 million per week, according to Iaffaldano. In fact, pop-up advertisements seem more prevalent than ever.
http://www.internetnews.com/IAR/article.php/3066701

Plotting the War on Terror and Disease
Maps are mundane, that's for sure. And yet rebuilding Iraq without good ones has been a nightmare. During Saddam Hussein's reign, only high-level loyalists had access to maps that showed where roads, hospitals, and sewers were located. And those maps were 10 years out of date, says Shawn Messick, senior analyst for the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation's Information Management & Mine Action Programs (iMMAP) in Iraq. Each international aid organization used its own version of the inaccurate maps, which often resulted in duplication of effort. For instance, four humanitarian aid groups discovered that each had done damage assessments of the same hospitals, says Messick. And two other organizations repaired the same school building.
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...8703_tc126.htm

Digital TV a turn-off
Advertisers are losing interest in digital television as its low sales and lack of new content have created a "lame proposition", chief executive of media buying group Zenith Media, Anne Parsons, says. Parsons believes big changes are needed to fuel digital TV sales, and that the TV networks should be able to multi-channel, or offer extra channels on the free-to-air digital TV spectrum. She told the Network Insight conference last week the 2 per cent of homes expected to have digital TV by the end of the year was "not enough to matter" from an advertiser's perspective. "And that's a very different level from when digital was first mooted," she said. "Now the excitement and enthusiasm from an advertiser perspective has actually waned." Multi-channelling is now banned until a review before 2005, but Parsons thinks if the TV networks could multi-channel they could charge different advertising rates for providing niche as well as mass audiences. "The cocktail of mass and reach is the key to media futures," she said.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...E15306,00.html

Robot attends Czech state dinner
The prime ministers of Japan and the Czech Republic have had an unusual dinner companion as they met for a state dinner in Prague. A talking robot named Asimo walked into the dining room at the city's Hrzansky Palace and shook hands with the two leaders. The robot then said in Czech: "I have arrived in the Czech Republic, where the word robot was born, together with Prime Minister Koizumi as a Japanese envoy of goodwill." Asimo, the world's most advanced humanoid robot - can also speak Japanese as well as being able to walk upstairs and recognise voices. Japanese leader Junichiro Koizumi decided to bring the robot - made by the Japanese company Honda - as a tribute to the Czech writer Karel Capek. Capek invented the word "robot" in his 1921 play RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots), when he introduced the concept of human-like creations capable of doing dull repetitive tasks.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3170061.stm

Internet terms make entry in dictionary
Cyberslackers, egosurfing, data smog? All three terms have entered the English language, according to the compilers of the Oxford Dictionary of English, who have added 3,000 more words to the 350,000 words and phrases in modern usage. A substantial number of the new words have emerged from the internet, with the notion of the "cyberslacker" (who lazes at work using the net), "egosurfing" (looking for references to yourself online), "data smog" (the impenetrable amount of facts available online) and shovelware (low-priced games or other programs packaged into higher-priced collections). "Groom", the editors note, has meanwhile "taken on a more sinister meaning" - again through its online usage, referring to paedophiles' interaction with potential victims.
http://news.independent.co.uk/digita...p?story=435650

Humans trained to hunger like Pavlov's dogs
Humans can be trained to crave food in response to abstract prompts just like Pavlov's dogs, reveals new research. But whereas Pavlov's dogs were conditioned to drool at the sound of a bell, Jay Gottfried and colleagues at University College London, UK, trained humans to yearn for vanilla ice cream and peanut butter at the sight of fractal-based computer images. Importantly, the team also showed that the human brain can put a "brake" on the powerful desire for certain foods once the appetite has been sated. This system to turn the "delectable into the distasteful" may be crucial in regulating behaviour, they say. Detecting faults in this system might in future help shed light on compulsive eating disorders and substance addictions, speculates Gottfried, a neurologist.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994083

Pilotless plane to fly routinely in civilian airspace
The US Air Force's Global Hawk became the first pilotless aeroplane to be given permission to fly routinely in civilian airspace on Thursday. The US Federal Aviation Administration issued the USAF and Northrop Grumman, who make the jet plane, a certificate of authorisation (COA) allowing the RQ-4 Global Hawk to enter national airspace with almost as much ease as a piloted plane. Previously the USAF was required to file a detailed flight plan with the FAA at least 30 days in advance. Now the majority of the red tape has been cut making it possible for an unarmed Global Hawk to "file-and-fly" even on the same day. The first use of the new COA will be a flight to Germany in October.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994080

Protesters to march against EU software law
The battle against a change in EU law that would see software opened up to worldwide patent law is hotting up. The key decision in the European Parliament will take place on 1 September but those opposed to the change have arranged a protest demonstration to take place next Wednesday, 27 August in Brussels, outside the Parliament in Place du Luxembourg. The demonstration will then be followed by a small conference held within Parliament, organised by Belgian activists, Eurolinux and FFII in which they hope to persuade MEPs to vote against the measure the following Monday.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/32457.html

SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks
IBM Corp. has been quietly stage-managing the open source community's response to The SCO Group Inc.'s $3 billion lawsuit over Big Blue's contributions to the Linux source code, SCO's Chief Executive Officer Darl McBride said in an interview at his company's SCO Forum user conference in Las Vegas this week. "We have absolute direct knowledge of this. If you go behind the scenes, the attacks that we get that don't have IBM's name on them, underneath the covers, are sponsored by IBM," McBride said. Responding to criticism that his company is trying its case against IBM in the press, McBride said that SCO has simply been responding to attacks and standing up for its rights when attacked.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/...Nscoibm_1.html

If quasars could talk: a telescope to help tell their stories
After a four-month delay, the US is set to loft the last in a set of orbiting observatories that are revolutionizing humanity's understanding of the universe. If all goes as planned, Sunday morning, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will launch the one-ton Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF) from Florida's Kennedy Space Center. It's the final piece of NASA's Great Observatory series, which includes the Hubble Space Telescope, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Operating at infrared wavelengths, the $1.19-billion observatory is expected to lift the veil of dense dust and gas that obscures the earliest birth throes of stars and planets. In addition, researchers say they'll track the evolution of galaxies from the universe's earliest epochs; study cold, dark clouds of dust and gas that breed stars and solar systems; and uncover the nature of the debris that orbits the sun beyond Pluto and is thought to be detritus left over from the solar system's formation.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0822/p02s02-ussc.html

Unlocking secrets of China's malaria cure
Scientists believe they have unlocked the workings of a Chinese herbal remedy that is one of the brightest hopes in the war against malaria. It gives them hope for a new and cheaper generation of drugs that will be more effective against a scourge that kills about a million people a year and infects hundreds of millions more. The researchers believe they've found 'the missing piece in the anti-malarial jigsaw' and the solution to how a critical anti-malarial drug works. The study and commentary were published in Nature, the British science weekly. In 340 AD, in Zhou Hou Bei Ji Feng (Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergency Treatments), a Taoist scribe gave a recipe for using sweet wormwood or qing hao in an infusion for treating fever. More than 1,200 years later, it was included as a treatment for malaria symptoms in a landmark compendium in Chinese medical history.
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/tec...205965,00.html

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