The Newspaper Shop -- Thursday edition

[walktalker]

SCO profits to fuel Linux fires
SCO Group, the Unix company whose litigious streak has rocked the Linux world, reported a profit Thursday and said it has enough money to continue waging its intellectual property fight. The Lindon, Utah-based company said it earned $3.1 million, or 19 cents per share, during its fiscal third quarter, compared with a loss of $4.5 million, or 35 cents a share, in the year-ago quarter. The company said third-quarter revenue was $20.1 million, up from $15.4 million a year ago. The company said $7.3 million of its revenue for the quarter, which ended July 31, came from its SCOsource licensing division, which is charged with protecting SCO's Unix-related intellectual property. The company also said it expected fourth-quarter revenue to grow to between $22 million and $25 million due to expected growth of the SCOsource licensing plan.
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...read&forumid=2

Server breach raises Linux code worries
The GNU Project, which develops many of the components in the Linux operating system, said this week that the system housing its primary download servers has been compromised by an attacker. The project urged those who have downloaded software from the server since March to check that the source code has not been tampered with. Linux, an open-source operating system that dominates the Web server market, uses the compiler, libraries and other software that was originally developed by the GNU Project. The project warned that the attacker may have inserted malicious code into its software, although it said all the code checked so far appeared to be intact.
http://news.com.com/2100-1009-5063683.html?tag=nl

In refugee camp, a P2P outpost
Deep in the tense Jenin refugee camp in the Palestinian West Bank, a new file-swapping service is daring record labels and movie studios to turn their piracy-hunting into an international incident. Dubbed Earthstation 5, the new file-swapping network is openly flouting international copyright norms at a time when many older peer-to-peer companies are trying to establish themselves as legitimate technology companies. One of the brashest of a new generation of file-trading networks, it is serving as a new test case for the ability of high-tech security measures and international borders to preserve privacy on the Net. As the deadline looms this month for what will likely be thousands of copyright lawsuits filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against individual computer users, anxious file swappers are turning to this and other new services in hopes of avoiding legal consequences. In EarthStation 5's case, it is returning industry legal threats with bravado.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5063...g=fd_lede2_hed

Power outage hits East Coast
A power outage struck New York and other East Coast cities on Thursday, shutting down companies, hitting airports and clogging cell phone service in certain areas. The outage reportedly also affected the electric supply in neighboring New Jersey, as well as in Toronto and Ottawa, Canada, on Thursday afternoon local time. Other areas -- such as Cleveland and Toledo in Ohio, and Detroit -- also suffered a power blackout, according to television reports. News outlets reported that the outage was the result of a failure in the Niagara Mohawk power grid. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg told news outlets that the blackout could last into the evening. In a televised press conference, Bloomberg said there is "no evidence of any terrorism whatsoever." Internet performance tracker Keynote Systems said the outage has not slowed the Internet.
http://news.com.com/2100-1011_3-5063997.html?tag=fd_top

Gillette shrugs off RFID-tracking fears
Gillette has dismissed complaints by privacy groups that the company plans to use smart tags in its products to track and photograph shoppers. The Boston-based consumer products company is one of the first to trial the controversial radio frequency identification (RFID) tags in its Mach 3 razor blade packets. U.K. supermarket chain Tesco has been testing the tagged products in a Cambridge, England store. But privacy groups started protesting outside the Tesco store when it emerged that the supermarket was automatically taking photographs of shoppers when they picked the blades up off the shelf and when they left the shop with any tagged product. U.S.-based group Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (Caspian) is urging a worldwide boycott against Gillette over the tagging concerns.
http://news.com.com/2100-1039_3-5063990.html?tag=fd_top

Netflix's secret weapon
It's been a blockbuster summer for Netflix. While box-office bombs have been going off all season, Netflix reported a strong second quarter last month, with net income of 11 cents a share and 1.15 million subscribers. The company also unveiled a nifty patent that appeared, on its face, to claim exclusive rights to its "all you can eat" DVD-rental model. As a result, Netflix's stock has been cruising along north of $22 for most of the summer, even hitting a 52-week high of $28.60 last month. Like the eerie, lengthening shadow of Nosferatu, however, entrenched competitors are making some serious inroads in the space. To be sure, Netflix now claims more than 90 percent of the online DVD-rental market. But a similarly named company, Netscape, once owned that much of the browser space, and we all know what happened to it when large, monied competition decided it wanted in. So how can Netflix avoid that scenario? In a word: porn.
http://money.cnn.com/2003/08/13/tech...lweg/index.htm

Designer's dream desk for i-things
With the increasing popularity of digital cameras, scanners and MP3 players which plug into desktop computers, the problem of space on desks is getting messy. Tripping over tangled cables, finding homes for gadgets, and running out of ports to plug into can mean accommodating the hi-tech bits and bobs computer users want close at hand is a frustrating business. An enterprising product design graduate and avid Apple user thinks he has a stylish solution though. As part of his final year design project at Huddersfield University, John Treby created an innovative workstation which he hopes will mean users will not have to trip over themselves to reach their MP3s and cameras.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3141955.stm

Catch Me If You Can
Though Nelson never wielded a gun, Higgins started thinking of him as the John Dillinger of the Web -- someone who excelled at a particular kind of crime and was brilliant when it came to eluding capture. In contemporary terms, Nelson's case was the Internet version of Catch Me If You Can. Nelson is just one of the individuals who have decided to make a living by swindling bidders on eBay and Yahoo -- albeit one of the most successful. Auction fraud has been the biggest source of consumer complaint to the Internet Fraud Complaint Center, run by the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center, every year since the center was created in 2000. Fraud is also a sticky problem for eBay, the Web's biggest auction site. EBay's virtual auction house hosted nearly $15 billion in sales of merchandise last year, generating $1.2 billion in revenue for the company.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/73/kirsner.html

Personal beacons take the search out of search and rescue
Forget about leaving a trail of bread crumbs. Getting lost in the woods may become a thing of the past, thanks to a new high-tech panic button for outdoors lovers. In a move that could change society's relationship with wilderness, the federal government today will roll out a new electronic homing system that uses satellites to track "personal beacons'' carried by outdoors enthusiasts. The devices will allow rescuers to immediately locate people stranded miles from civilization and facing life-threatening injuries.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...al/6528763.htm

Microsoft, Your PC's Security Guard?
In January, 2002, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates declared security to be the new top priority at the world's biggest software maker. In a speech to employees and in a public statement, he declared war on bugs and vowed to shore up product security. Of course, the bugs keep popping up, and serious security vulnerabilities continue to be exploited in Microsoft's ubiquitous operating system and applications. Witness the horrific MSBlaster worm that crashed untold thousands of Windows 2000 and XP machines worldwide during the week of Aug. 11. So how's this for a delicious irony: Microsoft now appears to be targeting security software products as a new growth opportunity. That's an area where the Colossus of Redmond has previously shown only faint interest, but now savvy observers say the giant is locking in on it.
http://businessweek.com/technology/c...6379_tc047.htm

Australia to see Windows source code
The Australian government will gain access to the source code underlying Microsoft's Windows operating system after signing an agreement with the software heavyweight. The open-ended agreement, announced Thursday by the Redmond, Wash.-based company, is part of Microsoft's global Government Security Program, an initiative announced earlier this year to address government concerns about the transparency and security of the operating system. Under the program, governments are given controlled access to Windows source code and other technical information in a move the company says is designed to allow them "to be confident in the enhanced security features of the Windows platform."
http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-5063601.html?tag=cd_mh

Will browser verdict snare others?
A patent-infringement judgment against Microsoft and its Internet Explorer browser has raised speculation over which company in the Web browser market might be the next target of Microsoft's pursuer. Eolas Technologies, a University of California spin-off with one employee, no products, a handful of patents and 100 investors, on Monday prevailed in its $521 million patent-infringement suit against Microsoft. Eolas originally filed suit against Microsoft in 1999, alleging that the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant infringed on its patents when enabling the Internet Explorer Web browser to use plug-ins and applets. A federal court in Chicago found that IE violated Eolas' intellectual-property rights. Eolas has one formal employee, Mike Doyle, who is a former University of California researcher.
http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5063444.html

Studios help thwart DVD piracy ring
The Motion Picture Association and the Malaysian government raided operators of five Web sites suspected of selling illegal DVDs, in the film industry's latest attack on Internet piracy. The international trade group worked with Malaysia's Ministry of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs (MDTCA) to organize raids that led to the arrests of nine people, according to the MPA. The people arrested allegedly ran an illegal Web mail-order ring for pirated movies. One targeted site, DVDExpress2u, sold new-release DVD films such as "Confidence" or "2 Fast 2 Furious" for about $12. In connection with the arrests -- made in Penang, Malaysia, on Monday -- the MPA said it seized more than 30,000 optical discs, which were largely pirated copies of DVDs from member Hollywood film studios. That was the largest collection of illegal material confiscated by the group, said Ken Jacobsen, senior vice president and director of worldwide antipiracy for the MPA, who described it as a sign of a mounting problem.
http://news.com.com/2100-1026_3-5064197.html?tag=cd_mh

Virtual Soldiers? Dream on, Darpa
Heart, lungs, and liver, nerves, veins and bones -- the Pentagon wants to digitally recreate every element of a soldier's body, and embed it all on a chip in the soldier's dog tags. Officials at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, claim that sometime in the future this Virtual Soldier program could help battlefield medics make quicker, more accurate diagnoses of combat trauma. And that should help save soldiers' lives. The program's effects wouldn't be limited to those in uniform. Everyone, Darpa managers assert, could one day carry around an electronic copy of his or her anatomy -- maybe as soon as 10 years from now. "Every single person in the United States will have an electronic medical record," said Dr. Richard Satava, manager of the Virtual Soldier program and professor of surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,60016,00.html
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,60021,00.html

Power Failure Not Tied to Worm
Computer network and security experts said on Thursday there was no evidence the power outage in the northeastern United States and Canada was related to the Blaster computer worm that began spreading on Monday. Experts said Internet traffic appeared to be running smoothly as major websites, Internet backbone providers and Web hosting companies relied on backup power. "I have no thought that (the outage) is Blaster related," said Alan Paller, research director at the SANS Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. The worm targets Microsoft's Windows XP and Windows 2000 computers, infects and crashes them and spreads to other vulnerable machines. Paller said it is "highly unlikely" that the process (that) controls computers behind critical infrastructure like power in the United States would run on the Windows operating system.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,60041,00.html

Sour Note to Microsoft Deal
Microsoft has joined with a British digital music provider to launch the first pan-European service selling songs over the Internet on a pay-as-you-go basis. The move, made public Thursday, follows the success of Apple's iTunes Music Store and other services in the United States. London-based On Demand Distribution, or OD2, has the largest catalog of legal digital music in Europe, more than 200,000 tracks from 8,500 artists on all five major labels, plus a slew of independents. Europeans will be able to download songs starting at 99 cents each — without subscription fees — through the MSN Music Club or Tiscali Music Club using Microsoft's Windows Media Player 9 technology. While welcoming the increased choice for music lovers, European Union regulators said the news bolsters their antitrust case against the software giant. Just last week, the EU accused Microsoft of trying to squash competing audiovisual software by including its Media Player with the Windows desktop system.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,60028,00.html

New Fears Around Blaster Worm
From Korean housewives unable to order diapers online to government departments forced to shut down computers, Asia grappled on Thursday to contain spreading varieties of a computer worm that threatens to explode over the weekend. Authorities in Hong Kong, South Korea and Australia fear new strains of the Blaster worm are working their way through cyberspace, and could be more harmful than the original. Experts say other forms may lie dormant inside some computers, programmed to burst into life on Saturday. The worm, also called MSBlaster or LoveSan, infected office and home computers in the United States on Monday and quickly spread around the world, taking advantage of a security hole discovered last month in Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows NT and Windows Server 2003 operating systems. Patches for the hole, except for Windows NT 4.0, which Microsoft no longer supports, were put online.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,60029,00.html

It Takes Genes to Make Olympians
Athletes and coaches long have assumed that talented runners are gifted with exceptional genes. Now scientists have identified a specific gene that conceivably could push a runner over the line between good and great. Of course it takes more than genes to develop an elite athlete, but scientists are learning more just how much genes do contribute to superior athletic ability. Australian researchers studied athletes at Canberra's Australian Institute of Sport, a national Olympic athlete training center. The researchers found that a gene called alpha-actinin can make runners better at either sprinting or endurance, depending on which version of the gene they have. "There is increasing evidence for strong genetic influences on athletic performance and for an evolutionary 'trade-off' between performance traits for speed and endurance activities," the researchers reported in a paper published in the July 23 issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,59998,00.html

Recording industry issues warnings
The Canadian music industry will be sending warnings to users who are offering copyright music files on peer-to-peer programs. In what it calls "the second phase of our education program with Canadian users of file-sharing services," Canadian Recording Industry Association president Brian Robertson said CRIA will use the Instant Messaging function of the peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa to communicate its message to individuals who appear to be distributing copyrighted music without authorization from the rights owners. Unlike the Recording Industry Association of America, its U.S. counterpart, its U.S. counterpart, CRIA has not launched lawsuits against users of such networks as Kazaa, which share digitized versions of music CDs.
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...ry/Technology/

FBI Looks For Source Of Internet Infection
The FBI yesterday joined the hunt for the source of an Internet worm that was estimated to have infected more than 250,000 computers this week. As users patched the holes that made their computers vulnerable, it became clear that electronic attacks target both the humble to the mighty. Home users were believed to be most affected, but on Tuesday the "Blaster" worm reached into a dozen computers in the U.S. Senate and caused the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta to shut down most of its computer system. The worm interrupted work for two days at CBS in New York. Nearly half the 250,000 infected computers are in the United States, said Alfred Huger, senior director of engineering at Symantec Corp., a security software company.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Aug13.html

Record haul as China raids pirates
In a logistical feat worthy of any Hollywood blockbuster, a record 42 million smuggled and pirated DVDs and video and audio CDs have been destroyed across China. All of the discs destroyed had been confiscated during crackdowns on smuggling cases, starting in 2001. "It is the biggest of its kind in terms of the quantity destroyed in one place and the overall quantity destroyed across China," Gui Xiaofeng, deputy director of the General Administration of Press and Publication, was reported as saying Wednesday by the China Daily. Monday's mission was the latest in a series of public demonstrations of success in the fight against copyright breaches. It is part of a continuing anti-counterfeiting effort aimed at silencing critics overseas.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapc...ies/index.html

Viewer explodes virtual buildings
Fully immersive virtual reality programs are an impressive way to experience digital architectural models, but they don't always provide the best view, especially where action is involved. Researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Stanford University, Microsoft Corporation and the University of Virginia have devised a way to add expanded, or exploded, views to the three-dimensional architectural graphics used by real-time programs like computer games and training simulations. An exploded view renders components of multipart objects like buildings and machines separately, opening up a building, for example, to make it possible to see the interiors of all floors at once. The view preserves relative positioning among all the model's details, including vertical supports, doors, and furniture.
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2003/0...gs_081303.html

Online document search reveals secrets
Many documents published online may unintentionally reveal sensitive corporate or personal information, according to a US computer researcher. Simon Byers, at AT&T's research laboratory in the US, was able to unearth hidden information from many thousands of Microsoft Word documents posted online using a few freely available software tools and some basic programming techniques. Sophisticated editing programs will often store information in a document file that the end user will not see. Storing recently deleted text can, for example, make editing a more efficient process. But Byers says it could also expose unaware users to significant risks. In his report, Byers suggests that a crook could analyse electronic documents to gather information that could help them carry out corporate espionage or steal someone else's identity to commit fraud.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994057

Giant laser transmutes nuclear waste
A giant laser has cut the lifetime of a speck of radioactive waste from millions of years to just minutes. The feat raises hopes that a solution to nuclear power's biggest drawback - its waste - might one day be possible. "It is not going to solve the waste problem completely, but it reduces toxicity by a factor of 100. That's an attractive proposition," says Ken Ledingham, at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, who led the British and German research team. The transmutation was performed using the Vulcan laser, which is the size of a small hotel and housed at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire. About a million atoms of iodine-129 were transformed into iodine-128. The half-life of iodine-129 is 15.7 million years, meaning it remains radioactive for an extremely long time. In contrast, the half-life of iodine-128 is just 25 minutes.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994056

Hot bug extends temperature limit for life
The upper temperature limit at which life can exist has been extended to 121°C, 8°C higher than the previous record holder. The hardy organism, given the preliminary name Strain 121, was found at a "black smoker" hydrothermal vent on the floor of the northeast Pacific Ocean. Microbiologists Derek Lovley and Kazem Kashefi, at the University of Massachusetts say the discovery will help scientists determine where and when life might have evolved on Earth, and how deep life might exist below the surface. The pair first cultured a sample from the black smoker at 100°C, to mimic the hot environment of the hydrothermal vent. When they saw a bug continuing to grow at that temperature, they increased the heat to find its limit. "What surprised us was that we kept ratcheting up the temperature and the organism kept growing," Lovley told New Scientist.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994058

CNET Discovers ES5, But Is It What It Says It Is?
Deep in the tense Jenin refugee camp in the Palestinian West Bank, a new file-swapping service is daring record labels and movie studios to turn their piracy-hunting into an international incident. Dubbed Earthstation 5, the new file-swapping network is openly flouting international copyright norms at a time when many older peer-to-peer companies are trying to establish themselves as legitimate technology companies. One of the brashest of a new generation of file-trading networks, it is serving as a new test case for the ability of high-tech security measures and international borders to preserve privacy on the Net. As the deadline looms this month for what will likely be thousands of copyright lawsuits filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against individual computer users, anxious file swappers are turning to this and other new services in hopes of avoiding legal consequences. In EarthStation 5's case, it is returning industry legal threats with bravado.
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/article.../08142003c.php

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