The Newspaper Shop -- Wednesday edition

[walktalker]

Who goes there ?
Here's the latest P2P news:

SCO targets Linux customers over Unix
SCO Group, a financially struggling company that claims its Unix intellectual property has been illegally incorporated into Linux, has sent letters to about 1,500 of the world's largest corporations warning they could be liable for using Linux. The move, announced Wednesday, dramatically broadens the Lindon, Utah-based company's potential legal actions beyond its initial target, IBM. Big Blue, a SCO licensee, was sued in March for more than $1 billion on allegations that include inappropriately using Unix trade secrets to improve Linux. "We think it is appropriate that we warn commercial companies that there are intellectual property issues with Linux," Chris Sontag, head of the effort to derive more revenue from SCO's intellectual property, said in an interview. "We sent it to the Fortune 500 and effectively the global 2000. It ended up being about 1,500 top international companies."
http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-1001...g=fd_lede1_hed

Wi-Fi as weapon -- telcos vs. cable
Telecommunications companies are starting to use Wi-Fi as a weapon against the cable industry's ambitions to infiltrate the local telephone market. Verizon Communications, the largest U.S. telephone company, announced Tuesday that it had activated 150 of a planned 1,000 Wi-Fi hot spots at pay phones so that its DSL (digital subscriber line) subscribers can have roaming Internet service in parts of Manhattan -- specifically the Upper West Side to start, with other high-traffic areas to be added in the future. The service will be free. The move is meant to attract Verizon subscribers to as many services as possible, the idea being that the more that customers depend on a company, the less likely they'll be to leave it for a rival. The industry terms for these ideas are "reducing churn" and "bundling."
http://news.com.com/2100-1037_3-1001644.html?tag=fd_top

DVD-copying case heads to court
The latest major clash between technology and copyright owners heads to federal court Thursday, where software start-up 321 Studios hopes to win a reprieve from a legal attack by film companies on its DVD-copying software. The case, which will be heard in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, holds important consequences not only for software developers and for the motion picture industry but also for consumers, who face increasingly complex rules governing the uses of entertainment products. Seven major movie studios are seeking to stop St. Louis-based 321 from shipping its DVD X-Copy and DVD Copy Plus programs, claiming the software violates a controversial copyright law banning the sale of products that can crack copyright protection measures.
http://news.com.com/2100-1026_3-1001586.html?tag=fd_top

Fizzer virus pains IRC networks
The Fizzer computer virus is causing headaches for more than just its victims. The mass-mailing computer virus, which continued to spread on Wednesday, nearly overwhelmed several Internet relay chat (IRC) networks, prompting the operators of more than 50 networks to band together to stave off the digital infection. "It was almost to the point of taking down our network," said Tyrel "Nemo" Haveman, an administrator for the Mysteria IRC network. "We noticed it first around midday in the U.S. on Monday. Within a couple of hours, we had 500 connections." Mysteria normally has only 150 to 250 people online at any one time, he added.
http://news.com.com/2100-1002_3-1001601.html?tag=fd_top

Game maker plans layoffs, eyes sale
Computer-game publisher 3DO saw its shares fall dramatically Wednesday after it announced a spate of dire news. The troubled company, maker of the "Army Men" series of games, among others, warned late Tuesday night that revenue for its fiscal fourth quarter had come in at roughly half of its earlier forecasts, and that it is planning to cut more than a third of its workforce. 3DO is also considering a buyout as one strategic option to raise money, the company said. "Market conditions for us appeared to take a turn for the worse when the war with Iraq began," CEO Trip Hawkins said in a statement. "In recent weeks, sales of our products have not picked up as we had hoped, which is preventing us from being able to fully utilize our new credit facility."
http://news.com.com/2100-1043_3-1001565.html?tag=fd_top

The mood among campus file-swappers
The Recording Industry Association of America recently stepped up its effort to combat music sharing by suing four university students who used their college networks to run file-sharing services. But at Stanford University -- as well as at other colleges and universities around the country -- students are growing increasingly perturbed by what they see as an attempt by the record labels to infringe on their legitimate right to make copies of digital media. This is not a group to alienate. The RIAA's own statistics show that almost one-third of music purchases are by individuals younger than 24.
http://news.com.com/2010-1071_3-1001...ml?tag=fd_nc_1

'Matrix' sequel spotted on the Net
Underground Internet file-swapping circles were buzzing Wednesday with rumors that a copy of "The Matrix Reloaded" had been released online, a day before its theatrical opening date. Information posted on several widely read hacker sites described a two-CD release of the Warner Bros. film by a group that had earlier claimed to have posted the "X-Men" sequel, "X2." The news sparked a frenzy of activity in Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels and other forums dedicated to movie swapping. Some individuals claimed in chat sessions that they had seen copies of the movie, a sequel to the blockbuster "The Matrix," as early as Wednesday morning. CNET News.com could not confirm the complete accuracy of the information. However, still shots that appeared to be taken from the movie had been posted online.
http://news.com.com/2100-1026_3-1001562.html?tag=cd_mh

'Buffalo Spammer' nabbed in New York
New York state authorities have arrested the e-mail marketer "Buffalo Spammer," in the state's first criminal case against a junk mailer. On Wednesday, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said that his office brought four felony and two misdemeanor charges against Buffalo, N.Y., resident Howard Carmack for alleged identity theft and forgery that allowed him to send more than 825 million e-mail messages through the Internet service provider EarthLink. Carmack is alleged to have opened more than 340 accounts with EarthLink using stolen credit cards and other false documentation, causing the ISP to lose in excess of $1 million in network resources and bogus accounts. Spitzer said that a recently enacted identity theft statute, as well as the cooperation of the FBI's Buffalo Cyber Task Force, the New York State Police and EarthLink during a yearlong investigation of Carmack, led to the arrest this week.
http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-1001513.html?tag=cd_mh

Intuit to remove antipiracy mechanism
Intuit plans to strike antipiracy technology from future versions of TurboTax that had sparked a rash of consumer complaints and a lawsuit earlier this year. The Mountain View, Calif.-based software maker will discard its so-called product activation feature, the company announced Wednesday when it reported third-quarter earnings. "Intuit has a long heritage of doing right by customers, and some of our customers didn't have the great experience they expect from Intuit," Steve Bennett, chief executive of the company, said in a statement. "Therefore we've decided to discontinue product activation next season."
http://news.com.com/2100-1046_3-1001649.html?tag=cd_mh

Prof Plans Probe of Earth’s Core
While the lush New Zealand landscape provided nearly all the requisite scenery for the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, producers still had to rely on digital imaging to reproduce one key Middle Earth feature: the Crack of Doom. Now, a planetary scientist and New Zealand native at the California Institute of Technology proposes to remedy that shortcoming by blasting a fissure in the Earth's crust and driving a wedge right down to the planet's core. The precious object David J. Stevenson wants to toss into that rift isn't a magic ring, but a grapefruit-size probe he hopes will unravel some of the most vexing secrets of geology. Though mankind has spent more than $10 billion on missions to explore the solar system and beyond, mysteries lurk beneath our very feet.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,58824,00.html

Game Over for Mod Chips?
Not long ago, gamers could go to a Web site called isonews.com to discuss and order mod chips: hardware that, when soldered to a console's motherboard, let them play cool Japanese imports, bootlegs, and assorted software on the Xbox or PS2. Today the site bears a very different message: it's the property of the U.S. government. In February, the Feds seized the domain from David "krazy8" Rocci, a 22-year-old in Blacksburg, VA, who used the site to sell 450 Enigmah mod chips. After facing $500,000 in fines and five years in prison for allegedly violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Rocci was sentenced in April to spend five months in the slammer and pay $28,500 in fines. That's an unprecedented ruling in the brief history of the DMCA. And it shows how this quirky gray market hardware is leaving so many companies and federal agents running scared. Throughout digital culture, homebrew modifications have deep and important roots.
http://www.technologyreview.com/arti...hner051403.asp

Puzzles could block mass computer attacks
Setting computers a puzzle could thwart a type of mass computer attack increasingly being used to target websites, say US computer researchers. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks involve bombarding a web server with a flood of faked requests. This can prevent legitimate requests reaching a site and may crash the site's server. The attack is co-ordinated from thousands of previously hacked computers making very hard to identify and block the source of an assault. DDoS attacks have become a popular method of online protest. The Arabic news organisation Al Jazeera saw its web site brought down after it broadcast and posted online images of US prisoners of war during the conflict in Iraq.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993729

Neutrino beam could neutralise nuclear bombs
A super-powered neutrino generator could in theory be used to instantly destroy nuclear weapons anywhere on the planet, according to a team of Japanese scientists. If it was ever built, a state could use the device to obliterate the nuclear arsenal of its enemy by firing a beam of neutrinos straight through the Earth. But the generator would need to be more than a hundred times more powerful than any existing particle accelerator and over 1000 kilometres wide. "It is really quite futuristic," Alfons Weber, a neutrino scientist at Oxford University, UK, told New Scientist. "But the maths and physics seems to be right." John Cobb, another researcher at Oxford University, cautions: "It might be technically feasible, given massive investment, but there are still unsolved problems."
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993734

When copy protection backfires
EMI's copy-protection technology has resulted in a Melbourne resident doing exactly what the company is trying to prevent - copy a music disc in order to listen to it. Stephen Marovitch, creative director of the Simon Richards Group which is based in Port Melbourne, picked up the latest Norah Jones album on April 25, and took it to work. Once there, he tried to listen to his new acquisition, using his Titanium laptop which runs version 10.2 of Apple's operating system. There was no response, with the disc not being recognised. One can't blame Marovitch for not trying - he tried to listen to the disc on a workstation which runs Windows 2000 and then on one which runs Windows XP. In both cases, he got no joy. The disc was not picked up by the system.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/20...591771111.html

Saskatchewan, Canada wants own rocket man
A Canadian group of space enthusiasts claims to be leading the quest for the famous X Prize, a $10-million (U.S.) award for whoever can invent a better way of blasting off the planet. The team announced Tuesday that it plans to launch from a remote airstrip near Kindersley, Sask., and claimed to be the first private group anywhere in the world that has applied for permission to launch a human into space. “We’re very much leading the X Prize race,” said Brian Feeney, leader of the Da Vinci Project team, in an interview.
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/...BNStory/Front/

...hey !

[TankGirl]

Originally posted by walktalker
...hey !

Hey!

- tg