The Newspaper Shop -- Monday edition

[walktalker]

Red Hat files suit against SCO
Red Hat escalated the legal war over Linux on Monday by announcing that it has filed a lawsuit against the SCO Group. The seven-count suit seeks, among other things, a declaratory judgment that Red Hat has not violated SCO's copyrights or trade secrets, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik said at a news conference here Monday. "We have asked the courts to declare, 'No violation of intellectual property and trade secrets have occurred,'" Szulik said. "We've been patient, we've listened, but when our customers and the whole open-source community are threatened with innuendo and rumor, it's time to act." SCO rebuffed Red Hat's assertions. "SCO's claims are true, and we look forward to proving them in court," the company said in a statement. "SCO has not been trying to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt to end-users. We have been educating end-users on the risks of running an operating system that is an unauthorized derivative of Unix. Linux includes source code that is a verbatim copy of Unix and carries with it no warranty or indemnification."
http://news.com.com/2100-7252-5059547.html?tag=nl

Linux moves on to next battles
Linux, having just won the fight for mainstream respectability, has moved to a challenge that's less glamorous but just as important: making itself attractive to the information technology industry. Past victories for the open-source operating system have included securing a place in product lines from every major server maker, coaxing business software companies such as Oracle and SAP to release Linux versions, winning the trust of major customers, and rising to become one of Microsoft's top threats. Now, to make Linux a more natural fit for customers, computing companies are extending the software to make Linux easier to manage and run. Several companies are set to display such wares this week at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco.
http://news.com.com/2100-7252-5059537.html?tag=nl

Study: Linux use undeterred by SCO suit
New research indicates that SCO Group's lawsuit over the use of Unix source code in the Linux operating system has not discouraged developers from implementing Linux-oriented software. A survey of roughly 400 software developers completed by researchers at Evans Data found that more than 70 percent of the IT professionals it polled do not believe that the SCO lawsuit will affect plans to deploy Linux-based technologies. An overwhelming majority of developers told Evans Data that the litigation would "probably not" or "absolutely not" deter their freedom to use Linux. Only 12 percent of those surveyed said the lawsuit would affect adoption plans, and 17 percent had no opinion. Published on the eve of the LinuxWorld conference, the industry's largest Linux-focused event, which kicks off Monday in San Francisco, the survey concluded that SCO's lawsuit has done little to deter users from deploying Linux.
http://news.com.com/2100-7252-5059414.html?tag=nl

Dispute exposes bitter power struggle behind Web logs
As commercial interests have increasingly dominated the Internet, Web logs have come to represent a bastion of individual expression and pure democracy for millions of bloggers. So it should come as little surprise that a technology behind blogs -- online chronicles of personal, creative and organizational life -- has manifested the kind of bitter fight for control that is inevitable in any truly democratic institution. The conflict centers on something called Really Simple Syndication (RSS), a technology widely used to syndicate blogs and other Web content. The dispute pits Harvard Law School fellow Dave Winer, the blogging pioneer who is the key gatekeeper of RSS, against advocates of a different format.
http://news.com.com/2009-1032_3-5059...g=fd_lede2_hed

Hacking contest promotes security
The U.S. government continues to talk tough on computer crime, but here in the desert, hackers -- including some from federal agencies -- are learning about defending networks by breaking into computers. The exercise is part of a Capture the Flag-like game that's known as Root Fu. The annual contest pits eight teams at the DefCon conference against each other in a test of network defense and hacking skills. Each team has to defend their own server and applications while trying to break into the servers of the seven other teams. "This sort of adversarial testing shows what is possible -- and not -- with security," said Crispin Cowan, chief scientist at Linux security seller Immunix and the leader of the Immunix team. "We value this competition, because we think it is a better evaluation of security than common criteria."
http://news.com.com/2100-1009_3-5059827.html?tag=fd_top

The future of a scare campaign
The Recording Industry Association of America's efforts to scare peer-to-peer users who violate copyright laws began with a promising start exactly one year ago. Last August, the RIAA asked a federal court in Washington, D.C., to force Verizon Communications to divulge the identity of a Kazaa user, kicking off a legal tussle that ended with the RIAA winning a stunning victory. At about the same time, key members of Congress wrote a letter that asked the U.S. Department of Justice to begin criminal prosecutions of P2P users who "allow mass copying," while an RIAA ally on Capitol Hill simultaneously introduced a bill to allow copyright holders to attack computers on P2P networks used for piratical purposes. A year later, however, there are some signs that the RIAA's antipiracy campaign is faltering.
http://news.com.com/2010-1026_3-5059...ml?tag=fd_nc_1

Testing the Tablet
Lining a wall in his small office at Bentley College are floor-to-ceiling bookshelves stocked with consumer products: cereal boxes, soda bottles, cartons of orange juice, tubes of toothpaste, packages of microwave popcorn, and peer-to-peer software. Marketing professor Philip M. ''Perry'' Lowe, 59, leans forward at his table and taps on the screen of a Toshiba Portege 3500 Tablet computer with a thick stylus. To most people, the Microsoft-powered Tablet is another high-tech gadget. To Lowe, it's a piece of marketing history. And he is working to make sure Bentley, and his students, are a part of it. ''Microsoft for the first time is letting consumers decide how to use this product,'' Lowe said approvingly. ''They can use whatever form factor they want -- slate or convertible. If they want to input with a keyboard, they can do it. If they want to input with a stylus, or if they want voice input, they can do that. Microsoft hasn't told them, `This is the way to do it.' '' Welcome to the classroom turned marketing lab.
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/21..._Tablet+.shtml

Bang goes the phone porn
There is going to be a lot of pornography on mobile phones in the next few years, at least if the latest research is to be believed. Industry analysts Visiongain are forecasting that by 2006 worldwide profits from adult content transmitted to mobile phones will account for $4bn in an industry making a total of $70bn. The improved connection speed of mobiles using GPRS and 3G, along with the vastly improved screen quality on the latest phones, might even mean that the experience is satisfactory for the viewer as well as profitable for the provider.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3116099.stm

The Best Anti-Money-Laundering Technology
The strict laws passed in the United States in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks were designed to crack down on funding international terrorism. But the impact of the USA Patriot Act also is being keenly felt by thousands of American financial services businesses. They must bulk up on anti-money-laundering software or face stiff penalties. This is no cheap deal. Companies will spend $630 million between now and 2006 on anti-money-laundering software, hardware and maintenance, according to Celent Communications, a Boston-based consulting firm that follows the anti-money-laundering software industry. It's no surprise that the huge honey pot has attracted dozens of software vendors. With the exception of Sybase, all the leading vendors are privately held. But their customers range from Citigroup to Merrill Lynch, Charles Schwaband Bank of America. A recent Celent survey ranked vendors of top anti-money-laundering solutions based on monitoring and analysis sophistication, ease of use, scalability and other criteria.
http://www.forbes.com/technology/200...artner=newscom

Robot 'guard dog' protects Wi-Fi setups
A strange two-wheeled creature was skimming through the halls of the Alexis Park Hotel on Sunday -- a robot that sniffs out network vulnerabilities. Created by two members of a loose association of security experts called the Shmoo Group, the robot is designed to wheel around on its own detecting and reporting the security problems of Wi-Fi wireless networks. "The point of the hacker robot is that it can become an autonomous hacker droid," said Paul Holman, the robot's co-designer, who demonstrated it for the first time at the DefCon hacker convention here. "It can get in close to the network. On the offensive side, it can be used for corporate or political espionage. On the defensive side, it can be used for network vulnerability assessment."
http://news.com.com/2100-1039_3-5059541.html?tag=cd_mh

Has 'haven' for questionable sites sunk?
A widely publicized project to transform a man-made platform in the English Channel into a "safe haven" for controversial Web businesses has failed due to political, technical and management problems, one of the company's founders said. Ryan Lackey, former chief technology officer of HavenCo, said on Sunday afternoon that he left the project because his business partners had become nervous about hosting objectionable material and were leading the company toward financial ruin, with only about six customers remaining. "The key lesson on this is if you're going to put a 'co-lo' facility somewhere, political and contract stability in that jurisdiction is very important," Lackey said, referring to co-location setups, or virtual site-hosting facilities. "Customers want stability. They don't want the network to be down for two months." The 24-year-old Lackey spoke to an audience of about 600 at the DefCon hacker convention here.
http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-5059676.html?tag=cd_mh

Korean firms launch coin-size MP3 player
Two Korean firms have unveiled a featherweight MP3 player that is so small it could easily be mistaken for a coin. Jointly developed by local gadget makers Station Z and EraTech, Emp-Z measures 42 millimeters in diameter and 10 millimeters in thickness, The Korea Herald reported. The companies claim the new device, which weighs 15 grams and comes with 128MB of non-expandable memory, is the smallest and lightest MP3 player in the world. Excluding the built-in rechargeable batteries, the Emp-Z is half the weight of the lightest models available in the market today, the companies said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-5059745.html?tag=cd_mh

Flash memory maker unveils monster card
Lexar Media announced the availability of a high-capacity removable flash memory card on Monday. As expected, the Fremont, Calif.-based maker of removable flash memory cards said it has begun selling a 4GB CompactFlash card for $1,499. The card is meant to give professional photographers the most storage available for recording high-quality digital images. A high-end 6-megapixel camera equipped with the card can store up to 600 images. As camera makers produce cameras that are capable of capturing images with higher and higher resolutions, and as the mainstream audience begins to move from low-resolution cameras to high-resolution cameras, the need for more storage is becoming ever greater. That's good news for flash memory companies such as Lexar and SanDisk, who have both seen their stocks skyrocket over the last few months.
http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-5059596.html?tag=cd_mh

Finding Bad Spam Delights Geeks
When freelance Web developer Joe Stump first installed the e-mail filtering program SpamAssassin, he and a friend started a competition. Each day, the two would look through their junk e-mail and try to find the missive that SpamAssassin had assigned the highest score. "It was always a little contest between the two of us," says Stump. "We were always trying to tweak and modify the settings to get it just right. I finally won the contest when I got a spam with a score of 43." The popularity of SpamAssassin for filtering out unwanted mail has given birth to a new pastime for many of its users -- poring over their deleted mail to find the most egregious spam, at least as ranked by the software.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,59859,00.html

Helping Find African Roots
Growing up, Jacqueline Pitts always felt a deep void in her knowledge of where her ancestors came from. As an African-American, she was frustrated that slave traders did not keep records to indicate where slaves were taken from or what tribes they belonged to. "Most of us were not as fortunate as Alex Haley was to be able to trace our roots," said Pitts, a retired corrections worker from Far Rockaway, New York. Until now. African Ancestry, a company based in Washington, D.C., has developed two DNA test kits for home use that can help African-Americans determine at least some of their genetic links to tribes in Africa. The company collects a user's DNA from a cheek swab, sequences a portion of the genetic material and then matches the sequence against a database that contains genetic information for about 90 African tribes living in West African countries such as Senegal, Mali and Nigeria.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,59850,00.html

FTC alert issued on file-sharing
Without taking a stand on the controversial issue of trading music and other files on the Internet, the Federal Trade Commission is advising people to step carefully if they dabble in file sharing. Even after the angry recording industry shut down the popular Napster file-sharing service, millions of people have continued to download similar free programs and swap music, movies and other material online. Now, as the Recording Industry Association of America is preparing lawsuits against individuals who use these services, the FTC has some advice for consumers. The agency doesn't tell people that they absolutely shouldn't download files with these programs, but it does point out the risks.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...#038;type=tech

Senator Wants to Limit Patriot Act
U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski introduced legislation Friday designed to rollback certain provisions of the Patriot Act, including requiring a court order for U.S. law enforcement agencies to conduct electronic surveillance. According to Murkowski, her bill would not repeal any portion of the Patriot Act, but would curb some the police powers granted under the legislation. The Patriot Act was passed in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. "We must strike a careful and constitutional balance between protecting the individual rights of Americans and giving our law enforcement and intelligence officials the tools they need to prevent future terrorist attacks," Murkowski said in a statement. "To date it appears portions of the Patriot Act may have moved the scales out of balance. My goal is simply to make sure that our laws are balanced."
http://dc.internet.com/news/article.php/2243881

Stopping the pop-swappers
The net has given rise to many novel ways of doing business but the methods of the Recording Industry Association of America has got every twisted e-commerce scheme beaten. Last month, the association began suing hundreds of its customers. For the RIAA - which represents the major US recording companies - this makes perfect sense. The people being sued are sharing music with millions of others via peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa, Grokster and Morpheus. This tidal wave of subpoenas is the latest in a series of steps the RIAA has taken to stop "file-sharing" which, it believes, is causing CD sales to fall through the floor. According to the RIAA, CD sales dropped by 10% in 2001 and a further 6.8% last year, largely because of file sharing. But the figures tell a different story. In America and the rest of the world the biggest culprit in falling music sales is large-scale CD piracy by organised crime.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/magazine/3117505.stm

Holographic data storage: light on the horizon
The notion of holographic memory dates back to 1963, when Pieter van Heerden, a researcher at Polaroid, first proposed using the method to store data in three dimensions. In theory, it is a great idea. Existing media store data in only two dimensions. Adding a third would make storage devices far more efficient. But despite massive spending over four decades, a complete, general-purpose system that could be sold commercially has eluded both industrial and academic researchers. It is still elusive. But it is getting closer. The first commercial holographic memory should be on the market next year, and more are expected to follow. When that happens, there may be a ballooning of computer storage capacity that will make existing disks look like leaflets compared with the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
http://www.economist.com/science/dis...ory_id=1956881

Animation lets murder victims have final say
Forensic reconstructions of dead people's faces from skeletal remains are about to become much faster and more lifelike. A novel 3D graphics program not only speeds up the laborious process of recreating a face from a skull, but also allows the dead to frown or smile realistically. Today, when the police find a skeleton or skull, they turn to forensic artists to build a model of what the dead person might have looked like. The artist makes a plaster cast of the skull and covers it with clay to mimic flesh. The thickness of the original flesh is estimated from standard tables called tissue depth charts. This data, collected over decades, describes the average thickness of flesh at different points on a skull, such as over the cheeks or the chin. The figures depend on ethnicity, sex, age and body type.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/new...id=ns99994005à

Enter the Metallica Web Hoax
When news of Metallica's latest lawsuit hit the web, music fans across the globe were outraged. Already notorious for their legal action against file-sharing network Napster, the rock band were seemingly trying to stop musicians from using the guitar chords E and F. Announcing the band's decision to sue the obscure Canadian outfit Unfaith, the drummer Lars Ulrich said: "We're not saying we own those two chords, individually - that would be ridiculous. We're just saying that in that specific order, people have grown to associate E, F with our music." It was a classic David and Goliath story - obscure, unsigned band picked on by rich rockers - and it was widely reported. As Unfaith singer/songwriter Erik Ashley explains: "Within minutes, literally hundreds of message boards lit up, including those of legitimate music news sources." But they missed one key detail: the story was a hoax.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/new...012053,00.html

Country-coded computer worms may be ahead
Future computer worms could be programmed to attack only within a particular country, according to a leading computer security expert. Jonathan Wignall, of the UK's Data and Network Security Research Council, a non-profit think tank, presented a review of the latest research on computer worms at the security conference Defcon 11 in Las Vegas on Sunday. He highlighted techniques that worm creators might use to make their code spread more effectively. One of these techniques could also limit a worm's geographic range, he suggests. Wignall says this would turn a computer worm into an effective weapon for information warfare. Instead of attacking internet-connected computers at random it could be used to attack a specific country, he says.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994016

You are what your mother ate, suggests study
What mothers eat during pregancy could have a fundamental and lifelong effect on the genes of their children, suggests an intriguing new study in mice. Researchers found they could change the coat colour of baby mice by feeding their mothers different levels of four common nutrients during pregnancy. These altered how the pups' cells read their genes. As a result the mice were also less prone to obesity and diabetes than genetically identical mice whose mothers received no supplement. The work establishes the tightest link yet between diet and a strange form of inheritance known as epigenetics. Unlike a mutation which changes the DNA sequence of genes, epigenetic factors can alter how a gene is used, while leaving the DNA sequence unchanged.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994017

Single slow user can throttle wi-fi network
A single user with a slow connection to a wireless network can significantly degrade the overall service to everyone using that wi-fi access station, new research shows. Researchers from the Institut d'Informatique et Mathématiques Appliquées de Grenoble, part of France's CNRS, studied the performance of networks using the popular wi-fi standard 802.11b. They found that if a single user's connection is slowed, perhaps because they are far from the access station, every user can suffer reduced data transfer speeds. "That computer may degrade the nominal bit rate," Duda told New Scientist. This is because of the way bandwidth is allocated to each user by the wi-fi standard's access protocol, called Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA). If just one person is unable to connect at the optimal speed, the CSMA/CA protocol throttles back the maximum connection speed for all. This guarantees that any user, no matter what their access speed, can get stable access to the network.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994018

Universal Music Defends DRM; P2P Litigation
Larry Kenswil, the president of Universal Music Group's (UMG) eLabs unit, is defending the recording industry's decision to use Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology alongside a litigation strategy to stamp out music piracy, arguing that the survival of the industry was dependent on copyright protection initiatives. In a lively keynote presentation at the Jupiter Plug.IN Conference & Expo here Tuesday, Kenswil slammed pundits who have been "trying to dictate how to reinvent the music business" by encouraging the theft of copyrighted works. "We are battling a nasty infection of image-itis. The tobacco company can kill us. The package food companies can clog our arteries. The oil companies can provoke wars. But, apparently, there's no industry more despicable than the music industry. We are hated just because we refuse to acknowledge the public's God-given rights to steal music," said Kenswil, referring to the piracy epidemic that online file-sharing represents to the music industry.
http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/2241771

US court okays malware in hunt for Web paedos
A US appeals court last week gave tacit approval to the use of Trojan horse viruses as a tool in investigating crimes on the Net. The federal appeals panel ruling stems from a case in which a hacker "uploaded a file to a child porn newsgroup that made it possible to track who downloaded files from the service", News.com reports. The uploaded file contained the SubSeven virus, which enabled the cyber vigilante to root around suspect computers. He then tipped off the police, who used this information in subsequent investigations. It's difficult to see how "evidence" obtained in this way could be seen as anything but hopelessly tainted. After all, if someone has gained control of a suspect's computer couldn't incriminated material be planted? Certainly any shrewd defence autorney would suggest so, injecting doubt into what could otherwise be a clear cut case.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/32151.html

Good students go on-line
Children who spend time on-line appear to perform better in school, according to a $1.5-million (U.S.) Michigan State University study. The three-year project — involving 90 families recruited through Dwight Rich Middle School and the Black Child and Family Institute in Lansing — researched the effects of home computer use on low-income families. More analysis of the data collected is needed before specifics of student improvement are known, said study leader Linda Jackson, a Michigan State psychologist. Early findings show that children introduced to the Internet at home improved their grades and performed better on standardized reading tests, she told the Lansing State Journal for a story Monday.
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/...ry/Technology/

More news later on