The Newspaper Shop -- Friday edition

[walktalker]

Thanks God for summer time
Sayonara, Code Red, for now
System administrators have 10 days to fix nearly 300,000 Web servers infected by the Code Red worm before the malicious program halts its largely unsuccessful but ongoing attack on Whitehouse.gov and starts spreading again. New research has indicated that a variant of Code Red worm, released Thursday, likely saturated the Internet, infecting almost all the vulnerable servers before it redirected the approximately 300,000 infected computers to attack an Internet address used by the White House Web site. By the end of Thursday, any given numerical Internet address had been attacked on average more than 20 times, said Stuart Staniford, president of security consulting firm Silicon Defense, who did a statistical analysis of the worm's spread.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp01

Microsoft tries to block speedy appeal
Microsoft on Friday filed a motion opposing a government request to speed its antitrust appeal. The Justice Department and 18 states last week asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to forgo the normal waiting period before returning the case to a lower court. Otherwise, the government would have to wait 52 days from the appellate court's June 28 decision. The move was seen as possibly clearing the way for the government to seek injunctions that could delay the scheduled Oct. 25 release of Windows XP, the company's new operating system.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Hotmail's redesign spurs complaints
Hotmail came out with an upgraded service Thursday after it aborted attempts to launch it earlier this week. The Microsoft Network experienced glitches Tuesday after the company implemented the new upgrades. But by Thursday, Microsoft said that the issues had been resolved and the new version was available. The upgraded version of Hotmail has an interface similar to MSN Explorer, with new buttons, icons and tabs. The Web site also introduced a new junk mail filter and added two languages -- Dutch and Swedish. In addition, the service has a quick address-list function that provides Hotmail members with fast access to their five most frequently used contacts.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

SirCam virus hides in the trash
A new virus has been discovered that has the possibility to fill up users' hard drives, delete files, distribute private documents, hide itself from typical virus scanners, and propagate itself across the Internet using the Microsoft Outlook address book. The Symantec Anti-Virus Research Center (SARC) has ranked the threat of the virus, entitled SirCam, a four, with five being the most serious. The McAfee Anti-Virus Emergency Response Team (AVERT), as well as the Trend Micro Virus Information Center, ranks the virus as a medium threat. SirCam also joined Trend's Worldwide Virus Tracker Top 10 list at number 3. The virus usually comes as an e-mail attachment with the file name "SirCam32.exe." There are several payloads of the virus that randomly occur. One user could actually be a carrier of the virus but never be infected.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Information overload: The new Y2K bug
The new millennium "bug", according to industry players, is the mishandling of information within a company's storage systems, which can lead to hardware failure, staff inefficiencies and higher costs overall. Data is increasing at a phenomenal rate, according to US-based storage provider Brocade, which says is becoming a challenge for technology departments to keep up with no matter what size the business is. "It is said in the industry that it takes one IT person to manage about five terabytes of data, "Industry is predicting data will grow by several petabytes a year, one petabyte equating to 1000 terabytes of storage requirements," Brocade vice president James LaLonde said.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Linux, Microsoft struggle looms over .Net
A fledgling effort to replicate Microsoft's .Net architecture on Linux, called Mono, could quickly become mired in intellectual property difficulties. Tony Goodhew, a program manager in Microsoft's developer products group, has warned that licensing problems might result if open source code is mixed with Microsoft's .Net software. The Mono project founders plan to exploit key .Net technology specifications that Microsoft has submitted to standards body ECMA. However, Goodhew said ECMA allows technology submitters to license their intellectual property, to retain control over implementation. Goodhew said Microsoft will publish licence terms covering "all the intellectual property we believe will be required to implement [the core dot-Net] standard" prior to the ECMA general assembly in December.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Digital copyright tug o' war
The European Union wants desperately to transform its 15 member nations into an "information society" capable of not just competing in, but leading the world economy. But manufacturers of computers, cellular telephones and other electronic equipment say that goal will be impossible to achieve unless the EU's copyright laws are changed. At the core of the debate are "collection societies," powerful private-sector groups authorized by law in most European nations to impose levies on equipment that can be used to copy commercial products. The fees raised by the societies are disbursed among copyright holders as compensation for unauthorized copying of their works.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...784806,00.html

Napster loses fans
Napster usage worldwide has taken a nosedive as new file-sharing alternatives are climbing the charts, according to a new report that confirms what many former users of the beleaguered service realized long ago. In 14 leading wired countries, the total time spent using Napster plunged 65 percent among home consumers, from 6.3 billion minutes in February to 2.2 billion minutes in June, according to Jupiter Media Metrix. The New York City-based research firm added that the number of Napster users declined 31 percent, from 26.4 million to 18.3 million over the same period. While the popular file-sharing program is losing fans worldwide, the report found that several new alternatives are hitting the radar screen among music fans in the United States as Napster's legal battle with the record industry continues. Such alternatives include Bodetella, Audiogalaxy and iMesh.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Got bandwidth? A new program shares it
An all-volunteer effort is keeping graphics-intensive noncommercial sites alive by matching them up with Web hosts who truly provide unlimited bandwidth. As I reported last week, many Web hosting companies advertise offers to provide unlimited bandwidth to the sites they host even though their contracts actually impose strict caps. One host, for instance, changed its online contract to limit Web sites to as little as 2GB of throughput per month. It then billed one customer over $16,000 for a single month of "excess bandwidth" charges. That customer, Al Sacui, was able to get his bill cancelled. As an alternative, he now hosts Nosepilot -- the home of his animated, multi-megabyte mini-movies -- through an arrangement called the Spoke and Axle Project.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1278-210...html?tag=bt_pr

Revenge of the file-sharing masses!
It's now nearly three weeks that Napster has been out of commission. The music file-sharing service had already seen some drop-off in usage as it tried to tighten up controls on the trading of song files that record companies had specifically requested be barred. But at the beginning of July, Napster announced that it was going offline for some "technical upgrades." It remained out of commission as the judge presiding over the case brought against it by the RIAA, the recording industry trade association, decreed that it cannot open its doors until it has achieved 100 percent effectiveness at banning copyrighted files. Given the size of Napster, this may well constitute the largest service outage ever in online history. But those millions of Napster users aren't just sitting on their hands: They're spreading out across the Net. They're picking and choosing among the myriad new "peer-to-peer" file-trading offerings that have sprung up in Napster's wake. They may be excited by the new wrinkles the developers of these new services have devised; they may be frustrated by the limitations they encounter. Either way, they're still swapping files.
http://salon.com/tech/col/rose/2001/...ora/index.html

More news later on !!