The Newspaper Shop -- Tuesday edition

[walktalker]

If you warp the time a little bit, that is

New hacking tool sees the light
A Princeton University student has shed light on security flaws in Java and .Net virtual machines using a lamp, some known properties of computer memory and a little luck. An attack requires physical access to the computer, so the technique poses little threat to virtual machines running on PCs and servers. But it could be used to steal data from smart cards, said Sudhakar Govindavajhala, a computer-science graduate student at Princeton who demonstrated the procedure Tuesday.
http://news.com.com/2100-1009_3-1001406.html?tag=fd_top

Microsoft tries flush away iLoo snafu
Is it a Web-surfing portable toilet or a public relations nightmare -- or both? Microsoft reversed its position for the second time in 24 hours Tuesday over whether it had ever planned to launch a portable toilet with a built-in Internet terminal in Britain this summer. On Monday, the world's largest software maker had said the "iLoo," which was described in minute detail in an April 30 press release by its British subsidiary, was a hoax and apologized for any "confusion or offense."
http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-1001405.html?tag=fd_top

MasterCard sued over Net billing methods
Internet payment firm Paycom Billing Services has filed a lawsuit against MasterCard, alleging the credit card issuer committed fraud when processing merchants' online transactions. Paycom, which filed its suit in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Monday, said MasterCard used its "monopolistic...power to illegally impose fines and penalties in the millions of dollars" when processing merchants' online sales. Paycom is seeking more than $23 million in damages. Paycom's lawsuit comes on the heels of a $1 billion settlement MasterCard reached earlier this month with Wal-Mart and Sears, Roebuck over allegations the credit card giant added excessive fees to debit card transactions.
http://news.com.com/2100-1019_3-1001393.html?tag=fd_top

On2 blows trumpet for new codec
On2 Technologies has introduced a video compression technology that it says outstrips rival industry standards and proprietary software in quality. The New York-based company Monday officially launched VP6, a software product that compresses large video files for transport and decoding to a wide range of electronics devices, including set-top boxes, PCs and handheld computers. VP6 joins On2's previous lineup of full-motion video compression and streaming technology, TrueMotion VP4 and VP5. The image quality and performance of the new compression technology, or codec, outperforms the industry standard codec, JVT/H.26L, according to On2.
http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-1001331.html?tag=fd_top

Nokia turns phones into credit cards
Nokia and MasterCard launched a trial of a new breed of mobile phone technology this month that lets people use their Nokia phones as credit cards, the companies said Tuesday. Nokia is distributing 500 new phones equipped with the special payment technology as well as 1,500 free phone covers that can snap onto current models in Irving, Texas, a suburb of Dallas and the home of Nokia's U.S. headquarters. The phones are equipped with MasterCard's new "PayPass" payment technology that lets consumers wave by or tap MasterCard credit card-connected devices on a reader to charge their accounts, rather than swiping cards through the retailer's magnetic stripe reader.
http://news.com.com/2100-1039_3-1001356.html?tag=fd_top

Sony to release handheld game player
After winning the battle for the living room, Sony now wants your pockets. The electronics giant, whose PlayStation 2 games console has outsold rivals from Microsoft and Nintendo 3-to-1, announced plans Tuesday for a handheld game player. The PSP, introduced during a press conference in advance of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) trade show here, would compete to some extent with Nintendo's Game Boy, which has all but owned the portable game market for more than a decade.
http://news.com.com/2100-1043_3-1001279.html?tag=fd_top

Hacking 2003: The new agenda
Bank robbers rarely choose a target at random when planning a heist. They usually have intimate knowledge of their target, scope it out and plan the attack. We see a similar approach now being used on the Internet. But the goal for hackers is changing. Five or six years ago, most were mere vandals, attacking vulnerable targets with an experimental, shotgun approach. Malicious hackers concentrated their efforts on destructive viruses and swiftly spreading worms that crawled haphazardly across the Internet, infecting individuals and corporations indiscriminately. The only real payoff these hackers received was a perverse pride -- bragging rights and the ability to regale others with the scope of their destruction.
http://news.com.com/2010-1071_3-1001...ml?tag=fd_nc_1

Computers That Speak Your Language
Don’t blame the voice. Even assuming the airline’s computers overcame the garbled words, background noise, and Boston accent to render the request into accurate text, no language-processing system has the computational firepower to make sense of your price and routing constraints, ignore irrelevancies like the fact that Saturday is your sister’s birthday, and understand that if the party starts at 3:00 p.m., you’re not interested in flights that arrive in Milwaukee at 4:00. If computers could understand and respond to such routine natural-language requests, the results would be win-win: airlines wouldn’t need to hire so many agents, and consumers wouldn’t have to struggle with the confusion of touch-tone interfaces that leave them furiously tapping the “0” button, vainly trying to reach a live operator.
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/roush0603.asp

The road to recovery
The crash was never meant to happen. The emergency plan was, but didn't. This is the morning after disaster, when unexpected events leave organisations desperately picking up the pieces, scrambling to rebuild systems and drag data back from the dead. Disaster recovery planning is expected to provide some protection but what happens when the best efforts are not enough? What if storage systems fail or the back-ups are outdated? The most recent data might still exist on a battered - even burnt - hard drive but it will take an expert to prise it free. When Canberra was besieged by bushfires, the flames claimed computer casualties too. One company turned to data recovery experts to retrieve as much as possible from melted desktops and servers. Nick Adamo, managing director of Sydney-based Forensic Data, still has the blackened remains of hardware to prove it.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/...591725425.html

Athlon: The beginning of the end
Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday will release the Athlon XP 3200+ for desktops, the last scheduled member of a chip family that helped turn the company's fortunes around. The 3200+ features a 400MHz bus, faster than the 333MHz and 266MHz buses found in earlier Athlon-based computers, and runs at a slightly faster clock speed than other high-end Athlon chips, said John Crank, senior branding associate for AMD. Graphics chip maker Nvidia, among others, is adjusting its chipsets to complement the faster bus found on the processor.
http://news.com.com/2100-1006_3-1001106.html

Taking aim at denial-of-service attacks
Graduate students from Carnegie Mellon University on Monday proposed two methods aimed at greatly reducing the effects of Internet attacks. In two papers presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy here, the graduate students suggested simple modifications to network software that could defeat denial-of-service attacks and that could be implemented in the current protocol used by the Internet. The symposium, sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, began Sunday and lasts through Wednesday. Steven Bellovin, a research fellow in network security at AT&T Labs, said both proposals are credible attempts at solving for network administrators the sticky problems of denial-of-service attacks.
http://news.com.com/2100-1009_3-1001200.html?tag=cd_mh

Agencies warn SARS spammers
Two federal agencies are targeting sites and spammers that promote SARS cures and prevention products, saying they must remove the misleading information or risk penalties. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are warning that people who hawk products related to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) could be subject to fines because their claims are not backed up by scientific evidence. The commission said it's found 48 sites touting merchandise that claim to protect people against the disease, by offering products such as oregano oil dietary supplements or SARS prevention kits that include things like disinfectant wipes, gloves and masks.
http://news.com.com/2100-1019_3-1000836.html?tag=cd_mh

Net publishers expand offline
Some Web publishers have traditional-media stars in their eyes as they venture into radio or television, in a new sign of the digital domain going mainstream. On Monday, online publication Slate said it would collaborate with National Public Radio News to produce a daily radio show, taking its political and social commentary to the airwaves in July. Celebrity crime Web site The Smoking Gun said it is creating two half-hour shows for broadcast on the cable channel Court TV, joining a genre of popular gotcha shows like "Cops" in August. Meanwhile, alma-mater Web site Classmates.com, in concert with Twentieth Television, is developing a reality TV show based on reuniting long-lost schoolmates. The show is set to air on select Fox stations June 30.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-1001398.html?tag=cd_mh

Microsoft turns on fee-based Net radio
Microsoft charged ahead with plans to turn MSN's free content services into fee-based subscription services, and pledged more of the same later this year. The launch Monday night of MSN's Radio Plus service, reported earlier, is hardly the first of MSN's paid services. The Web portal already charges for its MSN 8 online service, with or without Internet access included; for versions of its Hotmail Web-based e-mail service with extra storage; for its "The Zone" gaming site; for online bill payment; and for greeting cards. But Radio Plus marks a significant departure for MSN in that it is the first entertainment content to get a paid version. That's an indication of things to come, according to Microsoft.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-1001144.html?tag=cd_mh

Hackers: iTunes can be shared over Net
Apple Computer's iTunes software has apparently opened up a new way for Macintosh owners to share music collections across the Internet. The new music jukebox software, released two weeks ago as part of a set of high-profile Apple music announcements, contains features that allow Mac users to stream music to each other over a network. The songs are not downloaded permanently but do allow computer users to listen to any song on another network-connected Macintosh's hard drive. Several groups of online programmers say they have figured out ways to extend this feature from a local area network to the Net. A few Web sites and software applications are claiming to allow people to search other Net-connected Macintosh computers' hard drives in order to listen to songs online.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-1001121.html?tag=cd_mh

Toshiba, NEC see blue in DVD future
Toshiba and NEC are demonstrating a new DVD recording technology that promises a significantly higher storage capacity without a major investment in new production facilities. The Japanese companies will present details of their blue-laser format, called Advanced Optical Disc, this week at the Optical Data Storage 2003 conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. AOD is based on short-wavelength blue-violet lasers -- instead of the red lasers that are now in DVD drives -- to read data off of discs. Toshiba said in a release that it has stored up to 36GB on a single-sided disc and that the technology can be applied to consumer electronics and computer products. Current Digital Video Discs hold about 4.7 GB of data.
http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-1001033.html?tag=cd_mh

Is Palladium Getting a Bad Rap?
According to Microsoft, a flood of FUD -- spooky rumors intended to cause fear, uncertainty and doubt -- are swirling around its Next Generation Secure Computing Base. Also known as Palladium, NGSCB is comprised of new software and hardware that will work in tandem to protect users' data from malicious hackers, viruses and spyware. NGSCB software components debuted last week at the Windows Developers Conference and Microsoft plans to include the software in the next version of the Windows XP operating system, code-named Longhorn and slated for release in 2005. NGSCB-ready hardware should be available in the latter half of 2004.
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,58822,00.html

Nanotech Gets Down to Business
If the excitement at New York's NanoBusiness Conference is any guide, future historians will declare early 2003 to be nanotechnology's tipping point, the pivot on which the industry slid from "not quite ready" to "raring to go." In a little less than a year since the last conference, major corporations like General Electric and the various remains of Bell Labs have formed, increased funding for or spun off dedicated nanotech units. Though the venture capital community has shrunk back to mid-1990s levels of funding, the big venture-capital players like Venrock, Polaris and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers are all investing what money they have in nanotech.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,58823,00.html

Spammers Fight Back in Court
After spending years cracking down on spammers, two prominent organizations that list senders of junk e-mail are fending off an unorthodox legal challenge by e-mail marketers. In a case that's raising the hackles of antispam activists, a group of anonymous e-mail marketers are charging that two blacklisting sites, Spamhaus and SPEWS.org (Spam Prevention Early Warning System), have published false, misleading and libelous information about their business practices. The group, which goes by the name eMarketersAmerica.org is asking a court to declare the sites' use of suspected-spammer lists illegal.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,58812,00.html

Toys for Tots Get Ultratechie
Take a glance at toys slated to hit the market later this year and it immediately becomes evident how wired toddlers have become. From a walker that plays the piano to a teddy bear with voicemail, computer chips in toys have proliferated to the point that children today -- no matter how young they are -- expect their toys to talk and, literally, to play with them, one toy expert said. "These kids are being born into a world where everything they do has some technology in them," said Chris Byrne, an independent toy consultant who runs the Toy Guy website. "Sixty percent of preschool toys have some sort of chip in them, whether it's an Elmo that talks to you or Sparkling (infant toys) from Fisher-Price."
http://www.wired.com/news/gizmos/0,1452,58771,00.html

Can a wicked website stop youth crime?
Having been chucked out by her mum for smoking weed, Jodie winds up living in a squat and stealing to buy heroin. Jasper is in a hospital bed recovering from a stab wound inflicted, ironically, by an illegal knife he carried as protection against the estate hard men. Fortunately, Jodie and Jasper aren't contributing to the UK's youth crime problem. The pair are fictional characters whose cautionary tales feature on a £1.1m government website aimed at keeping real teenagers out of trouble. The site, Rizer, is billed as sign posting the way "out of the cycle of crime" for young offenders and showing other teens "how to avoid it in the first place".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3023199.stm

Digital prescription becoming standard
Twelve years ago, Dr. Everett Forman had developed a computer program that he thought his colleagues in the medical industry would line up to purchase. The program allowed doctors to write prescriptions and manage patient records electronically, saving valuable time and preventing potentially costly and dangerous errors. But Forman did not see his business take off. "It flopped," he said one recent morning, a few hours before patients would start trickling in to his suburban Albany practice. "Back then, nobody had computers in the office."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...#038;type=tech

Well, that's it right now

[walktalker]

Security research exemption to DMCA considered
Computer security researchers would be allowed to hack through copy protection schemes in order to look for security holes in the software being protected, under a proposed exception to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) being debated in official hearings this week. Enacted as an anti-piracy measure in 1998, after fierce lobbying from the motion picture and recording industries, the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision generally makes it unlawful for anyone to "circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access" to DVD movies, digital music, electronic books, computer programs, or any other copyrighted work. To do so for commercial advantage or personal profit is a felony carrying up to five years in prison.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/30692.html

[ab-NORM-al]

thank you, sir

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