The Newspaper Shop -- Thursday edition

[walktalker]

You can't keep me from publishing for long dammit
Amazon, Yahoo take Red Cross donations
Web sites including Amazon.com and Yahoo.com are allowing people to make donations to the American Red Cross through their Web sites. Both online companies have placed links on their home pages allowing visitors to make direct payments to the Red Cross after Tuesday's attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. Amazon's Web site counter said 12,979 payments had been made so far, totaling $323,801.69. "All of us at Amazon.com are deeply saddened by the recent tragedies in New York City, Washington, D.C., and southwestern Pennsylvania, and we extend our sympathies and condolences to those affected," Amazon said in a notice on the site that has replaced its main home page.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

How terrorists attacked your privacy rights, too
Just before 9 a.m. ET on Tuesday, the debate over privacy took a dramatic turn. While it once pitted computer wonks and civil libertarians against law enforcement and the intelligence community, today it becomes, more than ever, a clear and present issue of personal and national security. Citizens will never know how many terrorist incidents have been prevented by intelligence work. But we are now all dramatically -- and, for some, personally -- aware of one that wasn't. In 1949, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson wrote that Constitutional logic must be tempered with practical wisdom in to avoid converting the Bill of Rights into a "suicide pact." At the same time, these freedoms are key in defining who we are as a nation and a people and to how citizens relate to their government. The question to be asked in coming days and weeks is a complex one: How do we balance personal privacy against the need for protection against our enemies? The answers won't come easily.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/co...812049,00.html

Gesture of help ripples out over the Web
It was a small, kind gesture on a big, horrific day. Bill Shunn, a freelance computer programmer and part-time science-fiction writer living in the Astoria section of Queens, N.Y., was sitting at home Tuesday morning with his wife when they heard the first reports on radio that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. He was watching television reports as another airplane commandeered by terrorists crashed into the second tower. Like most other New Yorkers, Shunn couldn't get a connection to phone friends and family. So he went to the Internet and relied on e-mail to communicate, asking about the well-being of different people. Other people had the same idea and began e-mailing him with questions about acquaintances. The widening circle of e-mails soon inundated Shunn, and he decided to create his own "New York City Bombing Check-in Registry."
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

FBI taps ISPs in hunt for attackers
The hunt for suspects in Tuesday's terrorist attacks has moved online. America Online has handed the FBI e-mail records for accounts belonging to the suspected hijackers, according to a report on CNN's Web site Thursday. AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein declined to comment on any matters involving the investigation. AOL Time Warner's online division stores logs of when instant messaging users are on the network; it also can access e-mail correspondence under certain situations. "We are cooperating with (the FBI) in this ongoing investigation," Nicholas Graham, spokesman for Dulles, Va.-based AOL, said Wednesday. Although Graham wouldn't provide details, he denied reports that the company had agreed to install a Carnivore surveillance system. The FBI developed Carnivore, now renamed DCS1000, to allow it to wiretap communications that go through Internet service providers.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...096919,00.html

Bush: 'It's a new kind of war'
With hundreds of people confirmed dead and almost 5,000 missing, President Bush said on Thursday the United States and its allies were determined to "do generations a favor by coming together and whipping terrorism." The president, facing the biggest challenge of his eight-month presidency, spoke as the probe into the shadowy Middle Eastern figures behind Tuesday's strikes against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon gathered pace. U.S. stock markets remained closed and New York's financial district lay stricken as Bush and his lieutenants continued efforts to mobilize a global coalition to take military action against those responsible for Tuesday's four deadly hijacks.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

EBay bans World Trade Center items
Online auctioneer eBay has banned the auction of any items relating to the World Trade Center or the Pentagon on its site. The company, responding to outrage across its notice boards on Wednesday afternoon, removed several hundred listings from its site that associated themselves with the destroyed buildings. At 6 PM PDT, eBay.com posted a statement on the community section of its site asking all customers to refrain from mentioning the World Trade Center, the Pentagon or the events of Sept. 11 in their listings.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...812193,00.html

Online crooks exploit WTC disaster
Grieving Americans are flooding the Internet for solace and solidarity after Tuesday's terrorist attacks, but consumer advocates warn they may also find scams and spam online. The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE) and the SpamCon Foundation warned Wednesday that con artists are concocting online fraud to profit from the gruesome attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, which may have killed thousands of people. The groups say that most online scams come in the form of unsolicited e-mail, or spam, and postings in community forums soliciting donations for victims and survivors of the attacks.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Judge extends Microsoft-DOJ deadline
A federal judge on Thursday extended the deadline for a joint status report that Microsoft and the government have been drafting for the next phase of the landmark antitrust trial. The software giant, Justice Department and 18 states had been expected to deliver the document on Friday, but U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly extended the deadline to 12 p.m. EDT Tuesday. The government and Microsoft requested the extension in a filing late Wednesday. Kollar-Kotelly extended the deadline "for good cause shown," according to her order. Microsoft spokesman Jim Desler did not disclose the reason the company and government requested the delay, but this week's terrorist attacks here and in New York may have been a factor.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

High-tech recovery put to the task
Businesses affected by the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center have been turning to disaster-recovery companies in an effort to get their operations back online. "The first call came in at 9:05 (a.m.) Eastern time," just a few minutes after the first plane struck the north tower of the 110-story World Trade Center on Tuesday, Comdisco spokesman Rich Maganini said Wednesday. "The calls came in almost one after the other right after that." "By midday, we had 25 disaster declarations. We are currently supporting 35 customers, many of which either had operations in the World Trade Center or in nearby buildings," Maganini said.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

'Mafiaboy' receives eight-month sentence
A Canadian teenage hacker nicknamed "Mafiaboy" has been sentenced to eight months in a youth detention centre, a move welcomed by prosecutors as a strong message against the world's hacking community. Judge Gilles Ouellet ruled on Wednesday that the 17-year-old Montreal teenager committed a criminal act when he crippled internet sites like Buy.com, eBay and Yahoo! last year, causing an estimated $1.7 billion in damages. The case underscored the Internet's vulnerability to cyber-attacks and fraud. "This was an attack that weakened a whole electronic communication system. This is a grave matter," Ouellet told the Quebec Youth Court.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

More than 5,000 people dead or missing
The number of dead and those reported missing in Tuesday's suicide attacks grew to more than 5,000 Thursday as authorities scrambled to unearth the dead and track down the living. Though untold bodies were still buried in the rubble of the World Trade Center, some rough counts had begun to emerge. Speaking on ABC's "Good Morning America," New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said Thursday morning that the confirmed death toll in the World Trade Center had grown to 94. He told reporters later that 4,763 people had been reported missing.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Anti-terrorist technology seeks funding
We already have technology that may have helped identify the terrorists who hijacked four planes Tuesday. But so far, airport and government authorities haven't expressed much interest in its use -- this week's events may change their minds. Two public companies and a slew of private companies have developed technology that can match pictures of people taken by security-checkpoint cameras with a database of known criminals. But we're a country vigilant in protecting civil liberties -- which means such cameras aren't used in the relatively light searches at airport security checkpoints. "There are 30 companies offering this technology,'' says Roger McCarthy, an engineer and chairman of Exponent, a failure-analysis company in Menlo Park. "And they all need money.''
http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/op...t/mm091301.htm

More news later on...