The Newspaper Shop -- Tuesday edition

[walktalker]

AOL to swap Real audio technology
America Online is expected to announce that it will replace RealNetworks with Dolby as the default audio streaming technology for its narrowband Net radio service, according to Dolby. AOL will swap RealNetworks' audio streaming technology with Dolby AAC in its narrowband Radio@AOL product. AOL also will incorporate Dolby's audio encoding files in its Broadband Radio@AOL service, which streams MP3 files to its high-speed Internet users. The companies will collaborate on future products such as a live encoder or audio-ripping software. The announcement is expected to occur within the next two weeks, according to a source familiar with the launch. Despite the change, AOL will still support RealNetworks in other areas on the AOL site. An AOL representative declined to comment.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-993928...g=fd_lede2_hed

Scanning the future of privacy
Engineers who design biometric technologies and Internet authentication mechanisms should take more aggressive steps to preserve privacy, a new government report says. The 177-page report released Tuesday afternoon by the National Research Council suggests specific guidelines for authentication technologies, such as passwords, identification cards and key cards, and the use of biometrics to verify physical characteristics like the shape of a retina or fingerprint. "The ability to remain anonymous and have a choice about when and to whom one's identity is disclosed is an essential aspect of a democracy," said Stephen Kent, chair of the committee that wrote the report and chief scientist for information security at BBN Technologies in Cambridge, Mass., which is owned by Verizon Communications.
http://news.com.com/2100-1029-994080.html?tag=fd_top

Red Hat liberates low-end Linux
Linux seller Red Hat has moved to a strategy that lets it adopt the latest technology more aggressively for its lower-end products, a strategy that will become visible March 31 with the release of Red Hat Linux 9, code-named Shrike. The Raleigh, N.C.-based company has just completed splitting its product line in two: the slow-changing premium Red Hat Enterprise Linux version for businesses and the free Red Hat Linux version for enthusiasts. Establishing the RHEL option for conservative customers freed up Red Hat to accept more flexibility with the RHL line, said Matt Wilson, manager of Red Hat's base operating system, in an interview Tuesday.
http://news.com.com/2100-1016-994074.html?tag=fd_top

Wi-Fi firewall gets U.S. approval
A start-up's wireless security product won approval from a federal standards organization, paving the way for resale by Hewlett-Packard to the U.S. government. Cranite Systems, a 3-year-old start-up based in San Jose, Calif., said its WirelessWall Software Suite, a firewall for wireless networks, had earned the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 certification from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a division of the U.S. Department of Commerce. The certification, granted March 21, makes Cranite eligible to sell its wares to the U.S. government. Computer giant Hewlett-Packard plans to resell Cranite's software to government agencies.
http://news.com.com/2100-1009-994038.html?tag=fd_top

How Google Grows...and Grows...and Grows
On Tuesday morning, January 21, the world awoke to nine new words on the home page of Google Inc., purveyor of the most popular search engine on the Web: "New! Take your search further. Take a Google Tour." The pitch, linked to a demo of the site's often overlooked tools and services, stayed up for 14 days and then disappeared. To most reasonable people, the fleeting house ad seemed inconsequential. But imagine that you're unreasonable. For a moment, try to think like a Google engineer -- which pretty much requires being both insanely passionate about delivering the best search results and obsessive about how you do that.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/69/google.html

College Media Group Cautions That 2 Copyright Laws Could Collide
A group representing college media centers is warning the U.S. Copyright Office about a possible conflict between two federal laws, one meant to limit electronic access to copyrighted material and the other designed to broaden access to the same material for online education. At issue are the Technology Education and Copyright Harmonization Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The first measure is known as the Teach Act and was signed into law in November. It amended copyright law to allow college instructors to use nondramatic works, such as news articles and novels, and portions of dramatic works, such as movies, in online courses without paying fees and without seeking the copyright holder's permission.
http://chronicle.com/free/2003/03/2003031801t.htm

Expert wary about information misuse
As the government gears up its domestic security program, the chief executive of a venture capital firm founded by the CIA warns of the danger of amassing a large, unified database that would be available to government investigators -- as some technology executives have advocated."I think it's very dangerous to give the government total access," said Gilman Louie, chief executive of In-Q-Tel, a venture fund established by the CIA in 1999. Besides, the real lesson learned from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Louie said, was that the intelligence failure was not so much that the government had too little information but that the information held by different government agencies was not linked, shared and analyzed.
http://news.com.com/2100-1009-994000.html?tag=cd_mh

Program exploits Windows 2000 flaw
A Venezuelan security consultant has released a small program designed to compromise Microsoft Internet Information Service servers that haven't had a recent security hole patched. Monday's public release of the program's source code -- known in security parlance as an exploit -- will allow less technically knowledgeable system administrators to test for the existence of the vulnerability or allow less skillful miscreants to attack servers. "I released (the code) to enlighten the public and to promote system security for administrators unfamiliar with these exploits," said Rafael Nunez, information security consultant for Scientech de Venezuela and a former hacker who used the handle "RaFa." The release of the code on two security lists -- BugTraq and VulnWatch -- is the latest twist in the story of the Windows 2000 flaw that Microsoft announced a week ago.
http://news.com.com/2100-1002-993946.html?tag=cd_mh

Microsoft takes code to the classroom
The University of Leeds in the United Kingdom has received partial funding from Microsoft to teach would-be developers to write secure code. The class will be available to 100 undergraduates at Leeds starting January 2004. Nick Efford, who is designing the syllabus, said it will differ from classes at other universities. "They have traditionally emphasized network security, cryptography and things like that," he said. "Our course is emphasizing secure coding and software security. We will still cover cryptography, but that will not be our focus." Efford said the course will cover areas such as vulnerabilities of software, design principles and coding techniques. "We will illustrate all of these with case studies, classic security problems that have emerged...for example, Melissa and Slammer...looking in each case at what gave rise to the problem in the first place and how it was dealt with."
http://news.com.com/2100-1009-993921.html?tag=cd_mh

Outages hit Arabic news site
Arabic news site Al-Jazeera and its English-language counterpart were only intermittently available for the second straight day due to an onslaught of network traffic, said Internet monitoring service Keynote Systems. From approximately 12:30 p.m. PST Tuesday, the English news portion of the Al-Jazeera Web site seemingly dropped off the Internet, said Roopak Patel, senior Internet analyst at Keynote's public services division, who stressed that the reason the site is inaccessible can't be determined. "There's a whole host of reasons that the site could not be accessible," he said. "The server could be not able to serve up data as fast...or it could be an attack. At this point, we are not able to correlate between the lack of access and the cause."
http://news.com.com/2100-1025-994087.html?tag=cd_mh

Madonna grooves with MP3 release
Monday marked the first time pop singer Madonna's music went out digitally to her legion of Net fans -- and with the move, the Material Girl broke a little new online ground for major artists. Madonna is selling her new antiwar single, "American Life" on her Web site, charging $1.49 for the download of a high-quality, wholly unrestricted MP3 file. Her publicists started taking preorders a week ago, and in a novel move for a high-profile recording artist, enlisted fans to help sell the single on their own Web sites. The so-called Madonna Project program -- drawn directly from Amazon.com's and other Web sites' affiliate strategies -- saw banners and advertisements for the single pop up on fan Web pages and blogs last week. Sites whose advertisements resulted in sales of the single would get credit toward Madonna prizes and merchandise.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025-993941.html?tag=cd_mh

Sony steadies two-legged robot
The SDR-4X II, a prototype walking robot introduced last year, has had its sensors and software upgraded to make it less likely to topple over, a common problem with bipedal robots. Simulating human movement has been one of the biggest hurdles for robot makers like Sony. And unlike their human counterparts, bipedal machines find it extremely difficult to get back on their feet after a fall. But now, when it senses that it's about to fall, the SDR-4X II will attempt to correct itself. Failing that, it will attempt to curl up so as to protect its more delicate components from damage, said the report.
http://news.com.com/2100-1041-994023.html?tag=cd_mh

Cell-Phone Fires: A Lot of Static
An Indonesian man suffered severe burns on his face when his cell phone ignited a fire at a gas station in 1999, according to an e-mail message circulating on the Web. That same year, the message claims, an Australian man exploded when his cell phone rang near the gas pump. In response to those incidents, the e-mail further alleges, Shell Oil recently issued a warning that when a mobile phone rings it can produce enough energy to trigger a small fire if the user is pumping gas while toting the phone. The message is nothing but an urban legend, say representatives from the wireless and petroleum industries. But it's clearly one with legs: It has made the rounds online for the past three years, according to Snopes.com, a website dedicated to debunking urban myths.
http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,58188,00.html

U.S. EBay Seller Refuses Canucks
On eBay, the highest bid wins -- unless the item on sale is a laser printer from CompAtlanta and the bidder happens to be Canadian. That's what a tax consultant discovered last week when he tried to buy a printer on eBay, but was refused by the vendor when it was discovered he lived in Vancouver. David Ingram received notification that his winning bid of $24.50 had been canceled, along with this message: "At the present time, we do not ship to, or accept bids from, Canada, Mexico, France, Germany or any other country that does not support the United States in our efforts to rid the world of Saddam Hussein. If you are not with us, you are against us." Ingram's .ca address sparked the notice from CompAtlanta, based in Lawrenceville, Georgia.
http://www.wired.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,58190,00.html

Tony Blair Tagged as Privacy Threat
London-based Privacy International announced Monday its 2003 U.K. Big Brother Awards, which the group presents annually to "the most persistent and egregious privacy invaders in Britain." Simon Davies, the director of the civil liberties group, said the pool of candidates for the unprestigious prize had greatly expanded since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "The judges were overwhelmed this year with a vast number of malodorous nominations," Davies said in a statement. "Many politicians and companies since the Sept. 11 attacks jumped onto the security bandwagon without any justification."
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,58189,00.html

Ultrawideband of Brothers
Forget Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 3G. There's already a form of wireless that offers blazing-fast data rates, supports high-definition TV feeds, and - if given the chance, say its most ardent supporters - could replace the billion-dollar networks used by Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon. It's the controversial, decades-old technology known as ultrawideband. Fourteen months ago, the FCC granted provisional approval for short-range UWB applications. Hardly a ringing endorsement, but enough to boost R&D at large companies like Motorola and Intel and well-heeled startups like Time Domain and XtremeSpectrum. But it's a tiny, unassuming firm in Nicasio, California, that could do for wireless what Cisco did for the Internet. The company is Aether Wire & Location, and its patented localizer is a pager-sized transceiver that in three years could be as small as a wedding ring and as ubiquitous as a barcode.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...tart.html?pg=4

Keeping the Edge on Technology's Sword
Just a few days ago, the vast technological superiority of the U.S. military looked set to overwhelm Saddam Hussein. Now a more realistic assessment is settling in. Iraqi willingness to confront U.S. troops spearheading the drive on Baghdad and ambushes of rear-guard units have underscored the limitations of the U.S. military's otherwise humbling technology. In short, technology is never fail-safe, as the U.S. Patriot missile battery that took out an advanced British Tornado fighter-bomber demonstrated in a tragic "friendly fire" episode. And it can fall into the wrong hands: The U.S. government has lodged protests with Moscow for failing to halt what the Bush Administration calls "illegal" sales of military equipment to Iraq, including antitank missiles and thousands of powerful night-vision scopes. Perhaps Uncle Sam won't rule the night after all -- at least not to the degree that the U.S. public had been led to believe.
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...8126_tc047.htm

Scientists urge rethink on war
They are members of the council of IUCN-The World Conservation Union, representing 70 governments. A statement by the Swiss-based IUCN urges all involved "to stand back" and see the wider picture. It says war "is always a tragic failure", leaving immense costs in its wake. IUCN says: "We find ourselves confronted with events whose impact could undermine sustainability long into the future. "IUCN has followed with increasing concern the armed conflict in Iraq," the statement says, and it wants to contribute to "averting the humanitarian and environmental tragedy that inevitably follows from war".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2844983.stm

Most distant galaxy detected
The Japanese Subaru Telescope has found a galaxy 12.8 billion light-years away, the most distant galaxy ever observed. This discovery is the first result from the Subaru Deep Field (SDF) project which has discovered about 70 distant galaxy candidates by using a special filter to locate galaxies around 13 billion light-years away. Researchers say the discovery raises hopes that they will be able to find a large number of distant galaxies that will help unravel the early history of the Universe in a statistically meaningful way. They hope to find out more about the period between the Big Bang and the formation of the first stars and galaxies, after the mysterious so-called "dark ages".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2884411.stm

Catastrophe looms as Basra remains without water
Over a million people in the embattled city of Basra in southern Iraq are facing a sixth day without access to clean water. Aid agencies are warning of a humanitarian catastrophe, with the malnourished population at risk of dehydration and disease, and United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan has appealed for water supplies to be restored. Workers from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) are now struggling with local water engineers to reinstate water supplies to Iraq's second largest city, following a total electricity blackout since Friday. The reported rupture of a major water main on Tuesday morning will only exacerbate the problem.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993545

Shuttle data tape in good condition, says NASA
The magnetic tape used in an experimental data recorder recovered from the debris of the space shuttle Columbia is in good condition, according to NASA. Investigators are hopeful that the 2850 metres of tape could hold vital new clues as to the cause of the disaster on 1 February, which killed all seven crew. "Right now, the potential for there to be data available to us looks promising," said NASA spokesman James Hartsfield on Monday. Only one short section is stretched and broken, he said. But Hartsfield warned that the true significance of the tape would not be known until it has been fully analysed: "I don't think we can say how valuable it's going to be until we see it."
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993544

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